SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH, in a letter of August 1811, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) wrote to his cousin Marie von Kleist (1761–1831) of his struggle to delineate imagination and reality: “Wirklich, in einem so besondern Fall ist noch vielleicht kein Dichter gewesen” (Truly, perhaps no poet has ever been in such an unusual situation as I am). In the twentieth century, this assessment found increasing agreement, beginning with literary historian Adolf Bartels's 1902 declaration that Kleist was a “homo sui generis” (human being of his own species) and corroborated in Thomas Mann's (1875–1955) 1954 declaration that be it as dramatist, prose author, or personality, “er war einer der größten, kühnsten, höchstgreifenden Dichter deutscher Sprache, ein Dramatiker sondergleichen,— überhaupt sondergleichen, auch als Prosaist, als Erzähler,—völlig einmalig, aus aller Hergebrachtheit und Ordnung fallend, radikal in der Hingabe an seine exzentrischen Stoffe bis zur Tollheit, bis zur Hysterie.” His contemporaries, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) to Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), to some extent agreed with Kleist's self-assessment. According to Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854), Goethe found Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1805–10) as alienating as he had found his Penthesilea (1808): “Es gehöre ein großer Geist des Widerspruches dazu, um einen so einzelnen Fall mit so durchgeführter, gründlicher Hypochondrie im Wettlaufe geltend zu machen.” In his letter to the brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) of November 2, 1810, Brentano describes Kleist with an all but unprecedented combination of contradictory adjectives: “Der Phöbus Kleist, ein sehr kurioser, guter, grober, bornirter, dummer, eigensinniger, mit langsamem Konsequenztalent herrlich ausgerüsteter Mensch.” Kleist and his unusual works, like the metamorphic period he experienced, are, of course, not literally sui generis phenomena; on the contrary, as Heraclitus described it some 2,300 years before Kleist's birth, change is constancy, and, as Tim Mehigan wrote in 2000, Kleist's works demonstrate a “complex dialogue with the Enlightenment”; 200 years after Kleist's death, Christoph Zeller concluded that Kleist was very much a “child of his time.”

THE SCHOLARLY, ARTISTIC, and pop-journalistic tendency to treat Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) as a unicum of the “Sattelzeit” (bridge period) between Enlightenment and Modernity, and thus estrange him from his progressive artistic and philosophical contexts, has obscured his dialogic engagement with paradigmatic source texts that would otherwise warrant serious attention. A significant case in point is the relative scholarly silence regarding the description of the jug in Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug, 1802–1806/1811), which Kleist began writing less than two years after the publication of Friedrich Schiller's (1759–1805) Wallenstein (1799–1800) and less than two years after Kleist suggested in a letter to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge (1780–1852) of January 11 and 12, 1801 that Schiller's lengthy dramatrilogy should not merely be read but memorized. The fact that the striking metaphorical and functional parallels between the descriptions of Schiller's Bohemian cup in Wallenstein and Kleist's broken jug are not mentioned in any Kleist or Schiller edition is a symptom of a scholarly divide regarding the awareness of the aesthetic and political relationship between the two authors and the two plays that has significant consequences for the metaphorical integrity and political coherence of Kleist's dark comedy. This divide is perhaps foremost a function also of the lack of awareness of Kleist's admiration for Schiller, which—with some prominent exceptions, among them Claudia Benthien's recent essay—is evident in the paucity of scholarship on Kleist's relationship to Schiller in his letters and works, and in the self-evident parallels and only relatively recent divergence in their reception histories. For all of their biographical differences—Schiller grew up as a feudal subject and the poor child of an army captain, while Kleist's death ended a line of Prussian nobility marked by distinguished military service—and the differences in their literary careers—Schiller was a canonical author by his mid-twenties while Kleist only became one almost a century after his death—the similarities between their dramatic and prose works resulted in intersecting reception trends into the post-World War II era in Germany.