Heinrich von Kleist’s Novelle Die Verlobung in St. Domingo. Literatur und Politik im globalen Kontext um 1800 ed. by Reinhard Blänker (review)

Because of its portrayal of the Haitian Revolution and the associated controversy concerning Kleist’s political views on it, Die Verlobung in St. Domingo has lately gained a lot of attention. While in earlier scholarship the novella appeared as a precursor of postcolonial and deconstructive readings, it has nowadays become questionable whether it can be read in that way. Recent publications like Adam Soboczynski’s Versuch über Kleist (2007) or the essays in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity (2011) have offered a more differentiated view on the ambiguous political assumptions that had an important impact on the author’s work. The eleven essays of the volume (revised and extended conference papers originally presented in Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany in 2011) give numerous examples of critical readings focusing on those political ambiguities in the Verlobung.

The essays in this volume offer comparative and comprehensive readings of Kleist’s last novella and how political contexts and historical events did have a major impact on its main themes. All of the contributors make the impression to understand the novella’s views of revolution, race, and gender as ambiguous—yet their judgments regarding these topics appear to be quite different from each other. The first two essays of the volume give a vivid impression of the controversy about whether Kleist was a modern cosmopolitan writer free from the thought control imposed by political romanticism or if he was as hidebound as many intellectuals in Germany at that time. At the beginning of the collection Reinhard Blänker gives a compact summary of the prehistory of the Haitian Revolution and in doing so shapes the main thesis of the volume: Haiti and the whole Caribbean played a major role in the global political world around 1800. To Blänker, who refers to Hall’s concept of postcolonialism, Kleist was a “Denker an der Grenze” (17). Subsequently he claims that Kleist might have been well informed about the political and military events on Haiti. While Blänker alleges that Kleist has a critical perspective on the Haitian Revolution understood in a modern way, the second essay of the volume by David P. Geggus comes to the contrary conclusion and shows that the author of the Verlobung was not at all aware of the political realities. In comparison to other literary works on the Haitian Revolution such as Wordsworth’s To Toussaint Louverture or Hugo’s Bug Jargal, Kleist’s Verlobung appears stereotypical to Geggus and should be best compared with German copper engravings of the revolution in Haiti showing the spectators “rasende dunkelhäutige Rebellen und unschuldige weiße Opfer” (34).

The following three essays by Klaus Weber, Barbara Gribnitz, and Birgit Mara Kaiser provide readings that correspond to the controversy on the two different Kleists who are presented in the first essays. Klaus Weber reconstructs Alejo Carpentier’s perspective on the revolution in Haiti by summarizing a reading of the novel El siglo de las luces. Although his discussion of the concepts of magical realism, surrealism, and the “real maravilloso” (43) is informative for an understanding of Carpentier’s work, it does not add a new insight into Kleist’s. Gribnitz’s essay then compares the novella with black and white love stories, which were popular around 1800. To her, the hierarchy between superior white and inferior black bodies in the novella is generated by the characterization of the black body as a denaturalized and thereby female body. Kleist’s Verlobung, Gribnitz argues, combines different narratives of white (female) victims and black (female) traitors and brings them to mind in the ambiguous character of Toni. While Gribnitz’s solid approach to the novella is anything but new, Birgit Mara Kaiser’s essay focuses on Gustav von der Ried’s mental and perceptive structures by comparing the...