Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist
First published in 1810. At least seven English translations exist, including by John Oxenford (1844), Francis H. King (1914), Martin Greenberg (1960), David Luke and Nigel Reeves (1978), David Constantine (1997), and Michael Hoffmann (2020).
In September, we’ll be discussing one of the most exciting #WaferThinBooks ever written, Heinrich von Kleist’s story of injury and a quest for justice taken to the extreme, Michael Kohlhaas. Considered radical when first written, Michael Kohlhaas has gradually come to be recognized as an archetypal story, one that’s inspired numerous film adaptations, including as a Western (The Jack Bull (1999)) , Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas (2013), and even a short version performed by Playmobil figures (2016).
From reviews and commentaries:
• J. M. Coetzee, “Heinrich von Kleist: Two Stories,” in Late Essays, 2006-2017:
Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas, the son of a schoolmaster, one of the most fair-minded and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day…. The world…would have had every reason the bless his memory, if he had not carried one virtue to excess. But his sense of justice turned him into a brigand and a murderer.
Thus opens Heinrich von Kleist’s story Michael Kohlhaas. First drafted in 1804, it was given its final form in 1810; in one of many revisions Kleist changes the words describing Kohlhaas from “extraordinary and fearsome” (ausserordentlich, fürchterlich) to “Fair-minded [fair in his dealings] and at the same time terrible” (rechtschaffen, entsetzlich). And indeed, the whole story turns on this paradox. The inborn sense which tells Kohlhaas what is just and what is unjust at the same time fortifies him against self-doubt and thus makes him a ruthless avenger of the wrong that has been done to him.
• Franz Kafka, Letter to Felice Bauer, 9-10 February 1913:
I did not write to you last night, it got too late because of Michael Kohlhaas (have you read it? If not, don’t! I shall read it to you!); apart from a short section which I had read the day before, I read it in one sitting. Probably for the tenth time. This is a story I read with true piety; it carries me along on waves of wonder, and if it weren’t for the rather weak, in part carelessly written ending, it would be a thing of perfection, the kind of perfection I like to maintain does not exist. (For I believe that even the greatest works of literature have a little tail of human frailty which, if one is on the lookout for it, begins to wag slightly and disturbs the sublime, godlike quality of the whole.)
• Ratik Asokan, “Complex Messiah: A vigorous new translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s classic novella,” in Bookforum, Apr/May 2020:
Kleist’s two abiding concerns, politics and metaphysics, come together powerfully in Michael Kohlhaas, his longest and best-known narrative, which now appears in a lively new translation by Michael Hofmann. Largely unnoticed on its original publication in 1810 (like most everything Kleist wrote), the novella has since won the admiration of writers including Kafka, Thomas Mann, Susan Sontag, and J. M. Coetzee, who used it as a model for Life and Times of Michael K (1983). Set in the sixteenth century, it follows a fanatical terrorist who leads a band of vigilantes against the Prussian feudal order. Protestantism lies at the heart of the story—Martin Luther himself makes a brief, electrifying appearance—which raises profound questions about the individual’s relationship with the state and the law.
Like many of Kleist’s stories, Michael Kohlhaas begins with a crime (more precisely, a tort). The horse-dealer Michael Kohlhaas is on his way to the market at Dresden when he is stopped at a tollbooth and dispossessed of a pair of prize mares. Erected by the baron Junker Wenzel von Tronka, the booth was illegal, as Kohlhaas suspects. The rest of the story follows his attempts—first calm, courteous, and through the legal channels; then through violent vigilantism—to have justice served. “I am not minded to live in a land in which my rights are not protected,” he tells his wife. “Sooner to be a dog, if I am to be kicked, than a human being!”…
In a sense Kohlhaas’s predicament is Kleist’s own. Both are intense, high-strung men, at odds with society and compelled by urgent inner voices they cannot quite trust. Unlike his creator, the horse-dealer blindly follows his conscience, which brings about nothing but misery and destruction. When he seeks out Martin Luther, whose opinion he values above all others, Kohlhaas is finally made to see the error of his ways. “Wouldn’t you have done better to forgive the Junker?” the priest asks him. But by then Kohlhaas is sure it is too late for him to change course. “Because [the events] have now cost me so much,” he reflects, “the thing has its own momentum.” Yet it would be rash to read Michael Kohlhaas simply as a cautionary tale. While the mature Kleist might have grown distrustful of all systems, he never lost his youthful desire for reason, clarity, and order. This unresolved tension remains alive in the novella, which is pitched at a tenor—breathlessly urgent, absolutely bereft of irony—that seems to affirm Kohlhaas’s dignity, if not his tragic grandeur.
• John Self, “Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist: A Good Man Turned Murderer,” in The Observer, 5 September 2021:
The wonder of this story is its relentless, vertiginous escalation: soon, Kohlhaas has determined to “demolish” the Junker’s town “so that there be not two stones upon one another for him to hide behind”, and causes such chaos that Martin Luther gets involved as arbitrator.
Graham Greene in The Quiet American wrote of how “we all get involved in a moment of emotion, and then we cannot get out”. Kohlhaas is stuck, rather, in a moment of reason , believing that the world needs to be just, and he is prepared to die – but mainly to kill – to pursue his belief. In other words, Michael Kohlhaas is, as Roberto Bolaño (another fan) put it, “a story about bravery and its twin, stupidity”.
Kohlhaas’s violence of baroque intensity brings him a following by tapping into people’s sense of injustice, but he learns that stoked-up followers are hard to control: a lesson whose relevance today needs no highlighting.
• Caroline Smallwood, “Through Clenched Teeth,” in Harper’s, April 2020:
Kleist’s prose is nested with clauses that move swiftly from action to action, simultaneously suggesting logic and a lack of reason; time and situations are condensed; coincidences proliferate, and events pile up like accidents. He almost never wastes time with description of a landscape or a face. There are no metaphors in the first paragraph of Michael Kohlhaas, no figures of speech-just the dispassionate accounting of existential suspense.
Kleist, a Prussian-born figure of nineteenth-century tragedy who died in a murdersuicide pact at the age of thirty-four, was the author of five feverish plays (and one fragment), a handful of essays, and eight prose stories that paired analytic rigor and restraint with plots that were shocking or even lurid. I have heard the good advice that if you dress in boring clothes, you can get away with bad behavior. But it is not correct to say that Kleist’s prose style is merely plain or reportorial, that it measures the distance between wild interior life and repressive social forms; rather, it takes the reportorial to the extreme, showing it as a form of grotesquerie. In the words of Stefan Zweig, Kleist “pushes sobriety to excess and talks to the reader through clenched teeth.” This combination of passion and soldierly reserve horrified his contemporaries. In his own lifetime he was appreciated by few, and he managed to alienate, through deed or art, those who tried to support him. In a time of rational humanism and Enlightenment optimism, he laid down in polished rows a vision of life that was chaotic and inscrutably tragic. “With the best will in the world toward this poet, I have always been moved to horror and disgust by something in his works,” wrote Goethe, “as though here were a body well-planned by nature, tainted with an incurable disease”….
No translation could ruin Michael Kohlhaas, whose interest is so much in the dramatic piling on of ever more outrageous events. But Hofmann makes many choices that, in the aggregate, give us a sharper and more stylish book. His improvements begin with the first sentence. Where previous translators of Kleist have rendered the original rechtschaffen as “upright,” “fair-minded,” or “honorable,” Hofmann gives us “righteous,” emphasizing not any particular virtue, but the idea that Kohlhaas is inherently just. More significantly, where previous translators give entsetzlich as “terrible,” Hofmann chooses “appalling.” He foregrounds the public’s reaction to Kohlhaas, and the reader’s to Kleist, rather than the character’s internal contradictions. The meaning of the story is thus clarified: not to pass a judgment on the rightness or wrongness of the actions, but to be provoked by them, to feel awe, dread, dismay, and wonder at the transformation of respectable virtue into terrorism.
• Dylan Brown, “Inching Toward His Due: On Two New Translations of Kleist,” in LA Review of Books, December 14, 2021:
Another reason for its relevance lies in the fact that it’s hard to read Kohlhaas without being reminded of a prototypical mass shooter. Kohlhaas is a middle-class merchant on his way to Saxony, who, when wronged by a castellan of a castle while en route, retaliates disproportionately and attributes the sins of the individual to the general populace. Critics such as Helga Gallas have argued that Kohlhaas’s loss of his horses and papers is a metaphoric castration, which, combined with the death of his wife by the butt of a guard’s lance, turns him into a cuckolded incel. In pleading his case before Martin Luther, Kohlhaas describes himself as an “outcast” because the community’s laws have offered him no protection. He goes on to say, “And whosoever would deny me such classes with the savages of the wild; he gives me, and how can you argue with this, the cudgel with which I protect myself into my hand.” Luther, rightly so, is mostly unimpressed by Kohlhaas’s justifications and asks him, “[W]ouldn’t you have done better to forgive […] ?” Of course, Kohlhaas cannot forgive, in the same way that Kohlhaas also cannot have justice: he exists outside of those constructs. Like most of the young white men who go on to commit mass murder, he is not suffering from a mental illness, he feels he has been wronged to such a degree, deprived of what he thinks is rightfully his, that war is the only means he has at his disposal to regain his masculinity and be heard.
His banishment from the community doesn’t start with the damage to his property though; it begins when the castellan tells Kohlhaas that he needs special papers in order to pass with his horses. The papers, however, aren’t actually required, they are instead a cruel joke played by the castellan who is abusing his power. It’s easy to see, only a few pages into the novella, why Kafka had a habit of reciting Michael Kohlhaas to his friends: stories such as “In the Penal Colony,” “A Message from the Emperor,” and The Metamorphosis all contain shades of Kleist’s novella, whether it’s the confusion and frustration, labyrinthine (and ultimately uncontestable) bureaucracy, or a state of otherness carried to an extreme conclusion.
Note: Dylan Brown’s review covers both the Michael Hoffmann translation of Michael Kohlhaas and Matthew Spencer’s translation of von Kleist’s Anecdotes (2021), available from Asterism Books. Matthew Spencer will be joining our discussion to talk about Heinrich von Kleist’s life and work.
We will be talking about Michael Kohlhaas on:
US: Monday, 30 September
8-9PM Eastern
7-8PM Central
6-7PM Mountain
5-6PM Pacific
Australia: Tuesday, 1 October
10-11AM Australian Eastern
9:30-10:30AM Australian Central
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