Charlotte Von Kalb Loved Die Familie Schroffenstein for its buoyant beauty, recommending it to Jean Paul with the words “es schwebt frei wie eine Montgolfiere.” The image of a hot-air balloon soaring freely, while indeed descriptive of Jean Paul’s works, hardly seems apposite to a play that foregrounds such viciousness — in which adults thirst for the blood of children, swear on the communion host to snuff them out, mutilate their corpses to ward off the devil, and are capable of such cruelty that a woman can be suspected of crushing the skull of her stepsister’s newborn son. The title Kleist initially planned for his debut drama, Die Familie Thierrez, connotes bestial behavior: its metaphors slither with snakes, sting with scorpions, and slaver with wolves and bears. The title Kleist next gave the play, Die Familie Ghonorez, evokes a venereal disease. How can a work marked by such baseness be said to float freely aloft like a balloon?

Yet I believe Charlotte von Kalb got it right. There are sublimely airborne aspects of Die Familie Schroffenstein that pull upward against all the dismembering, beheading, symbolic castrating, and salaciousness of the body. In the opening scene Rupert enumerates the elements that give this play its upward lift, even as he renounces them:

This passage is often cited to support a Rousseauian reading of the milieu in which the plot unfolds: a postlapsarian world in which nature has been supplanted by the law of the “Erbvertrag.” However, what Rupert specifically rejects here under the term “Natur” is the realm of fantasy: fairytales, poets, the childlike ability to believe in and be nurtured by the products of imagination — in short, a capacity for enchantment that was also quite vital to Rousseau’s thought. Although these activities of Geist have been proscribed and must move undercover — sometimes literally behind the scenes — pure, ethereal flights of imagination continually strive upward against libidinal, earthbound bodies.