Kleist

Kleist, HEINRICH VON, German dramatist and poet, was born at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, on 18th October 1777. At first he followed the family profession and entered the army; but left it in 1799 to study, yet science he soon abandoned for literature. As a writer his aims and desires outran his ability to execute, and his works are marred by want of clearness and artistic completeness; in fact, he has some of the worst faults of the Romantic school, to which he belongs. Nevertheless, his best plays, such as Der Prinz von Homburg, Das Kütchen von Heilbronn, Hermannsschlacht, and Der zerbrochene Krug, possess sufficient vigour and fidelity to life to make them popular even at the present day. The best of his tales is Michael Kohlhaas, a story of Brandenburg in the middle ages. The morbid tendencies in his character made him quail before the adversities against which he had to battle, and at last brought him to a suicide's grave. He shot himself, after first shooting a woman whom he loved, and who like him was weary of life, on the bank of Lake Wan near Potsdam, 21st November 1811. His works did not gain recognition until after his death; they were first made known by Tieck, who in 1826 published Kleist's Gesammelte Schriften (3 vols.; new ed. 1874). See Life by Braham (1884).