That Franz Kafka And Heinrich Von Kleist are linked by manifold stylistic and thematic concerns is uncontentious: Kafka himself acknowledged Kleist as a “blood relative”; his enthusiasm for Kleist’s works, particularly Kleist’s story “Michael Kohlhaas,” is well known. Several authoritative critical voices, among them Wilhelm Emrich, have found the connections between Kafka and Kleist to be compelling. It cannot therefore be the aim of any new addition to this scholarship to amplify what is already self-evident. My aim is rather to come at the question of influence and aesthetic inheritance from a new angle. As this aim requires me to make certain assumptions about Kleist and Kafka — assumptions that might not be immediately underwritten by others — I state them at the outset. These statements also serve as points of orientation for the analysis that is developed in the rest of this chapter. First, Kleist abandoned the aesthetic and cultural projects followed by fellow writers in his own day: the Romantics on the one hand, the Weimar classicists Goethe and Schiller on the other. This abandonment was a consequence of an intellectual crisis Kleist experienced after encountering the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Second, the intellectual crisis brought on by Kant’s philosophy had two basic effects: it led Kleist into literary isolation; it also led him to make procedures of inductive inference central to his literary project (I define what I mean by inductive inference below). Kleist’s works, particularly the stories, initiate open processes of enquiry about the world in response to the breakdown of received inferential contexts. Third, Kafka’s emergence as a writer is closely linked to his identification of the role played by inductive inference in the work of Kleist. Building from this insight, Kafka’s own oeuvre is notable for its radicalization of the consequences resulting from the breakdown of received inferential contexts. Kafka dramatizes the dimension of loss attaching to Kleist’s Kant crisis, without compensating for this loss in ways that can occasionally be found in Kleist’s multi-layered response to Kant’s philosophy. Kafka’s failure to temper the loss of received inferential contexts by developing workable replacement contexts can be seen as one of the main results arising from his reading of Kleist.