The German Genius

of earth?
The walls persist
     
    He influenced a raft of mainly German writers from Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse to Theodor Adorno, and his works were set to music by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Paul Hindemith, and Benjamin Britten.
    “N EITHER A NIMALS NOR G ODS”
     
    If Hölderlin was a “melancholy Schiller,” Heinrich von Kleist supplanted him as the model for all dramatists. Born in Frankfurt an der Oder, he was a restless wanderer who lived in Paris, Switzerland, and Prague before finally settling in Berlin in 1810 as editor of the Berliner Abendblätter . There he had a short, tragic love affair with Henriette Vogel, an unstable Bohemian would-be artist, who persuaded him to join her in a bizarre suicide pact. He shot her first, then turned the gun on himself, on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee near Potsdam. He was just thirty-four. 6
    Despite this, he has come to be regarded as the most important north German dramatist of the Romantic movement. His best work is probably the play Prinz Friedrich von Homburg , followed closely by the novella Michael Kohlhaas , set in Luther’s day, in which the main character is a horse dealer. 7 Kleist’s plays are above all psychological dramas, the denouement often less important than the exactitude of the language, which explores the psychology so explicitly that the audience cannot avoid the pain or embarrassment or shame which is the playwright’s subject. Kleist is more popular than ever these days, looked upon by scholars as a postmodern author, though others choose to see him as a precursor of Henrik Ibsen—even, in some quarters, as a proto-Nazi because of his “rampant” nationalism. A good example here is Die Hermannsschlacht ( The Battle of Teutoburg Forest ), where the interests of the individual protagonist are subordinated to the service of the Volk . Kleist is even better known for Der zerbrochene Krug ( The Broken Jug ), a comedy in which a judge “gradually and inadvertently” reveals that he has committed the crime under investigation (though when Der zerbrochene Krug was staged in Weimar, directed by Goethe, it was a disaster). Kleist was very modern, tackling such subjects as race relations in the colonial era. But his dramas are chiefly known now for their depiction of unfulfillable longing, the barbarity of the Junkers, in particular “the wretchedness of German backwardness.” He is also seen as a precursor of Richard Wagner.
    Like Kleist, Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) varied between “inner stories” and political dramas, and this produced its own problems when he released two historical tragedies that presented German-speaking monarchs in a less than favorable light, concentrating on the dilemmas that can face a prince when his duty conflicts with self-interest—both plays fell foul of the censor. 8 Born in Vienna, the son of a lawyer, he became famous after publication of his tragedy Die Ahnfrau ( The Ancestress , 1817), which features brother-sister incest and parricide. This was followed by Sappho (1818), in which he tells the story of a poet’s renunciation of earthly happiness in pursuit of her higher mission. 9
    Grillparzer suffered setbacks in his personal life too, for at much the same time he met Katharina Fröhlich, with whom he fell in love. She entirely reciprocated his feelings, and they became engaged, but Grillparzer’s complicated psychology meant he could never bring himself to marry, a predicament that plunged him into despair. This so obsessed him that he poured his feelings into a diary, later composing an impressive cycle of poems, Tristia ex Ponto (1835), and two of his greatest dramas, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen ( The Waves of Sea and Love ; 1831) and Der Traum, ein Leben ( The Dream, a Life ; 1834). In The Dream , a Life , Grillparzer is at his best. 10 The hunter Rustan is no longer content with a quiet life with his wife and daughter and is incited to the vita activa by the black slave Zanga. 11 However, his dream (which takes up most of the play) is so terrifying that in the morning Rustan wants only to go back and find happiness in the quiet life.
    For in greatness there is danger
And renown’s an empty game
Bringing with it idle shadows,
Far too high the price of fame.
     
    Toward the end of his life, honors were heaped on Grillparzer, and his eightieth birthday was declared a national holiday (his own comment was: “Far too late”). At his death three completed