Grave Love: A Story

On the afternoon of November 21, 1811, my brother was the victim of a suicide. I was, on that day, journeying to Gulben and had stopped, exhausted, at a hotel. Even with a pillow over my head I heard through the wall two murmurs full of anguish, one male and one female, difficult to distinguish from each other. Then I distinctly heard the name Kleist. At that I knocked next door and questioned the couple. The two voices, as it turned out, belonged to two young men. They told me that the writer Heinrich von Kleist and a lady whose identity was unknown to them were found lying in their own blood, shot to death, approximately one hundred paces from the main road, on the hill close by the so-called little Wannsee. According to the official report, they told me, "Both were in a small trench of approximately one foot in depth and three in diameter." The lady was lying on her back, and my brother was kneeling between her feet, his left hand lying limply over his left knee. Beside her hip, his head rested on his right hand, which still held the pistol barrel pointed toward his mouth. I fell into a faint.

Naturally, I hold Goethe responsible.

The next morning in Gulben I received my brother's letter of farewell and reconciliation dated "on the morning of my death." I went forthwith to Berlin to his room at 53 Mauerstrasse. He lived like a rank bohemian and couldn't support himself, even at that level.

The pillow on his bed, eternally unmade, still bears the smell of his hair and face. He lived in the bed: Smoking and writing. Writing and smoking. If he had ever set himself on fire, he probably would have emerged completely unscathed like his heroine Kaethchen with a cherub on his shoulder and surrounded by a blinding light. That was the effect he had on me since when he was little. I felt burnt clean by the light of his being, his insights, the intensity of his illnesses. Standing here amidst the rubble of his existence I still have that feeling.

He had one of those little writing desks you hold on your lap as you lie in bed, a kind of sick tray. Optimally designed for travelling. It has a top that opens up to reveal a drawer. I am surprised to find a bundle of papers. Surprised he hadn't burned it. I know it wasn't meant for me but I open it up anyway.

At the time of his death, unbeknownst to me, my brother was at work on a nucleus or first draft of a novel designed to let readers know and appreciate him to the full and pardon this, his last step. It was to be called The Story of My Soul. My brother will have his say:

*

The Art of Graving, and how closely it resembles the Art of Living

Dresden, 1807.

Why is it that I am continuously mistaken for a spy? Spying is a way of looking; writing is a kind of spying. When I finally emerged from my mountainous tomb where I had been falsely accused of spying against the French, I visited Caroline. Caroline, emotionally and economically incarcerated in her home, waiting to hear any word at all from Lohse, wandering up and down Italy.

Caroline von Schlieben was an engraver, demoniacally in love with my friend Lohse, the self-involved painter, who accused me of always wanting my own way. The three of us never lived together. I lived with him, he lived with her. Lohse and I were in love with the same woman, or I was in love with him via her. Lohse—pathologically impassive—brass, not copper. Brittle. Caroline—anxious, depressed, distracted. The two of them together equalled me. I couldn't love either one of them without the other. I couldn't love the way she...