The Marquise of O and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

memory of having once as a child, on a perverse impulse, hurled mud at a beautiful white swan, an act of ‘defilement’ which he unconsciously identifies with his violation of the chaste Giulietta. Emotionally disturbed as he was, Kleist clearly had some strangely modern insights into erotic psychology; in the final scene of
Penthesilea
he had even unwittingly anticipated, by a certain choice of metaphor, Freud’s theory that slips of the tongue can express repudiated unconscious drives. Needless to say,
The Marquise of O
— was no less incomprehensible than
Penthesilea
to his contemporaries, who found both works deeply shocking and offensive to good taste, or at best ludicrous.
    Michael Kohlhaas
is not only by far the longest story in the collection but also probably the best known or at least the most discussed. As already mentioned, about one quarter of it was first published in November 1808 in
Phoebus;
it is not clear when that fragment was written. The story in its general outline was founded on fact: Kleist’s chief source seems to have been an excerpt from an earlier chronicle published in 1731 which tells how in the middle of the sixteenth century a horse-dealer named Hans (not Michael) Kohlhaas from Kohlhaasenbrück, a village near Berlin and just on the Brandenburg side of the frontier with Saxony, had two of his horses wrongfully detained and ill-treated while travelling to Dresden; how his legal action for damages failed owing to corrupt intervention; how he then took the law into his own hands, hired an armed band and, bent on vengeance, pursued the Junker von Tronka, burning down his castle and also part of Wittenberg; and how this private war grew in scale despite an attempt by Martin Luther to reason with Kohlhaas and persuade him to desist. The chronicle also mentions
inter alia
the political complications, the involvement of the Elector of Brandenburg andthe eventual execution of Kohlhaas in Berlin on the Monday after Palm Sunday. The main events of the
Phoebus
fragment may be summarized as follows: Michael Kohlhaas is a prosperous and honourable man with a strongly developed sense of justice and fair dealing. It is this very passion for justice that will turn him (Kleist states this characteristic central paradox in his first paragraph) ‘into a robber and a murderer’, and make him ‘one of the most honourable as well as one of the most terrible men of his age’. Kleist keeps to the outline of his source, but makes Kohlhaas’s grievance the more poignant by having his wife, Lisbeth, die from an injury sustained when she is warded off by a bodyguard as she vainly tries to present to the Elector personally her husband’s petition, hitherto suppressed by corrupt courtiers. Lisbeth’s intervention is Kohlhaas’s last step within the bounds of legality; he has already mortgaged his property to raise money for his resort to violence. Immediately after he has buried his wife, he assembles the first of his followers and rides off to attack Tronka Castle. The
Phoebus
fragment of 1808 breaks off at this point (page 138 of our text). The remainder was not written, or at least not finished, until the summer of 1810. In these further seventy-five pages Kleist greatly complicates the material. If he had followed the story’s natural line of development and adhered more closely to his main source, he would have narrated only the following events: Kohlhaas and his men storm Tronka Castle and destroy it, but the Junker Wenzel himself manages to escape to Wittenberg. Kohlhaas now begins to issue proclamations of an increasingly paranoid character, declaring himself to be the representative of the Archangel Michael and to have formed a new ‘world government’, calling upon all good Christians to support his just cause against Tronka, and demanding that the latter be handed over to him for chastisement. The pay he offers, together with the prospect of further