Horses at the Frontier in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas

Even before we are told the name of the main character, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810) informs us of the protagonist’s profession: “An den Ufern der Havel lebte, um die Mitte des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, ein Roßhändler, namens Michael Kohlhaas” (3; emphasis added). The text repeats Kohlhaas’s occupation as either Roßhändler or Roßkamm almost obsessively – eighty-five times to be exact – an insistence that alerts the reader to the position of horses in Kleist’s novella. As a horse dealer, Kohlhaas is on one side of a professional transaction, while the buyer is on the other; what is between, the frontier connecting and separating the parties, is Pferde. Furthermore, by constantly reiterating his profession the text reminds the reader of what intervenes between Kohlhaas and the authorities in whose custody he spends a large portion of the text. The material and symbolic divider and connector that is at the origin of the conflict and that signals, among other things, its resolution is Pferde. Certainly, the importance of horses in Kohlhaas vastly transcends their instrumental function as Kohlhaas’s means to make an honest living. As we shall see, the position of horses at the frontier decisively contributes to a deeper understanding of Kleist’s text. In turn, horses become truly meaningful when one approaches Kohlhaas as an “experience of the frontier,” that is, an experience of “life on the edge” (Bennington 3) that affects both the hero and the novella itself – a text of diverse and significant frontiers.

When analyzing Kohlhaas, concepts like boundaries, borders, and limits are almost unavoidable, and several critics have used them. Linda Dietrick has spoken about “borders, gates, and other thresholds” in connection with how Kohlhaas’s petition of redress is blocked (110–11); she has also associated the issue of political borders – Grenzen – with “division and continuity” in the novella’s fictional world (110). Carol Jacobs repeatedly mentions how decisive scenes of the novella happen at the borders between Saxony and Brandenburg, and she notes the importance of the boundaries between knowledge and life (158) and power and the law (158). J. Hillis Miller points out the boundaries between history and literature (102) and doing and knowing (103); Clayton Koelb discusses the crossing of the borders between life and death (113) and transcendence and emptiness (124), and Andreas Gailus has written about the “substitution of borders for frames” as a sign of Kleist’s refashioning of the genre – with respect to Goethe’s novella, demarcating “narration from history” (107–08). The present article uses the notion of “frontier,” as understood by Martin Heidegger, instead of other terms because of its philosophical rigour and analytical power. Thus although contributions to the notion of “frontier” by Rousseau, Kant, Derrida, Turner, and Bennington will be incorporated into this argument, this article’s general approach to the concept of the frontier originates in Heidegger’s understanding of “Unter-Schied” as a simultaneous convergence and divergence, a union and separation of entities that constitutes the structure of reality (71). “Unter-Schied,” used as an interpretive prism, implies both that the idea of the frontier is at the heart of what the novella is about as a text and that such an idea becomes the ultimate referent and source of all the concrete frontiers – also simultaneous situations of convergence and divergence, of union and separation – found in the text. Approaching Kohlhaas as an “experience of the frontier” results in the integration of the different frontiers present in the novella into the wider textual reality from which they originate.

Concerning horses, the only specific study on them in Kleist’s œuvre so far is that by Hans Jürgen Scheuer, who studies the link between the colour of horses and the epic dimension in Prinz von Homburg. Regarding Kohlhaas, there are noteworthy analyses of the role of the Rappen by Helga Gallas, who sees them as metaphorical representations for the unifying concept of the phallus (73–75). Dietrick approaches them as “symbols of unredeemed life” (132) and as fundamental in the narrative: “without them, there would be no vehicle for...