Countering Catastrophe: Goethe's Novelle in the Aftershock of Heinrich von Kleist

That the majority of scholarship on the Goethe-Kleist relationship proceeds from their dramatic work is understandable, since this was the subject of their limited correspondence and since Goethe was the powerful theater director whose approbation Kleist needed and famously did not receive.¹ The conclusion often reached is that theirs was a struggle between the establishment classicist and the young harbinger of the Romantic or modern, one neatly summarized by Goethe's characterization of Kleist's Amphitryon as "ein bedeutendes, aber unerfreuliches Meteor eines neuen Literatur-Himmels" (a significant but not encouraging meteor in a new literary sky).² But such consideration of their respective novellas is comparatively scarce, despite their instrumentality in establishing the German novella tradition as we know it today.

In a brief passage in his 2008 book about Kleist, Dirk Grathoff uncovers a revealing citation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). Examining the societal catastrophe in the relevant section of Wilhelm Meister (the robbery of the actors' troupe) alongside the natural catastrophe (the plague) in Kleist's Der Findling (The Foundling), Grathoff concludes that Kleist is pushing back against Goethe to create an anti-bildungsroman. While Grathoff's generalization that Kleist's work could only exist in relationship to Goethe's work is certainly accurate,³ this article will argue that the reverse is also true: Goethe's late prose exists in direct relationship to that of Kleist and contains citations of it, also with the awareness that the future of a genre is at stake. The 1828 Novelle in particular can be read principally as an intervention that sees Goethe pursuing two interrelated projects: to rescue the genre from pretenders or aspirants whose tales or stories were being misidentified as novellas; and to heal the Kleistian sickness he saw spreading in German literature. In reading Goethe's Novelle as a reclamatory and therapeutic engagement with Kleist, I will focus here on Das Erdbeben in Chile (The Earthquake in Chile), Kleist's first novella to appear in print.⁴ I will show that Goethe's text contains many echoes of the Erdbeben and invests significant energy to rework it, in ways that illuminate the contestation of the genre. In this reading Goethe's Novelle seeks—to use Fritz Breithaupt's formulation—"to reestablish a state of stability after the occurrence of an event-that-should-not-be."⁵

Goethe on Kleist and the Novella

In Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (1805; Winckelman and his Century), Goethe characterized modernism with the same trope he would later use to portray Kleist and his writing: a sickness resistant to cure. To this he opposed the health and vitality that enabled the ancients to recover quickly from illness, injury, misfortune, or disaster:

Noch fand sich das Gefühl, die Betrachtung nicht zerstückelt, noch war jene kaum heilbare Trennung in der gesunden Menschenkraft nicht vorgegangen.

Aber nicht allein das Glück zu genießen, sondern auch das Unglück zu ertragen, waren jene Naturen höchlich geschickt, denn wie die gesunde Faser dem Übel widerstrebt und bei jedem krankhaften Anfall sich eilig wiederherstellt, so vermag der jenen eigene gesunde Sinn sich gegen inneren und äußeren Unfall geschwind und leicht wiederherzustellen. Eine solche antike Natur war . . . in Winckelmann wiedererschienen.

[Feeling and reflection were not yet fragmented, that perhaps irreparable rift had not yet opened up within the healthy powers of man.

But such natures as these were eminently equipped not only to enjoy happiness, but also to endure misfortune: for just as healthy fibres resist disease and rapidly recover from every attack of illness, so also can that healthy sense which distinguished the ancients recover quickly and easily from internal or external accidents. An antique nature of this kind . . . appeared once more in Winckelmann.]⁶

Of course this critique of modernism, which Goethe identified primarily with Romanticism, predates his awareness of Kleist. The same is true of the origin of his Novelle, which he first attempted to execute as an epic poem called Die Jagd (The Hunt) in 1797, but left unfinished for decades.

In the interim came Kleist...