Heinrich Von Kleist (1777–1811) speaks to the present age like few other writers of his time. Although he was recognized for his immense gifts as a playwright by Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, two of the most important literary figures of Kleist’s day, only three of his seven plays were performed during his lifetime. Today Kleist’s plays are among the most popular on the German stage. Despite the evident quality of these plays, Kleist was better known to his contemporaries as a short-story writer: his eight stories appeared in two separate editions in 1810 and 1811 shortly before his death. Some had been published previously. Although Ludwig Tieck issued them again in 1826 in the first edition of Kleist’s collected works, the stories, like the plays, receded from view after the waning of Romanticism, a literary movement with which Kleist is often associated. New editions of Kleist’s works in 1885 and 1905 helped revive interest in Kleist as an author. On the occasion of the first centenary of Kleist’s death in 1911, a new level of interest in Kleist as an author could already be observed: Otto Brahm’s 1884 monograph on Kleist was reissued, and two other major studies appeared (by Wilhelm Herzog and Heinrich Meyer-Benfey ) to add to earlier work on Kleist by Georg Minde-Pouet (1897) and Reinhold Steig (1901). Although Kleist’s canonization as an author of great significance in German literature cannot be said with confidence to have occurred before the postwar era, Franz Kafka’s private declaration of affinity with Kleist in 1913 may be taken as a convenient date from which to mark his rising importance for the modern age. A further one hundred years later, at the second centenary of his death, Kleist’s reputation as one of Germany’s greatest dramatists and most original and influential short-story writers is assured.

There are several reasons why Kleist is important for us today. For one thing, there is the intrinsic importance of Kleist’s topics — topics such as gender, class, and ethnic wars, terrorism and sacrifice, to mention just a few.