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 DEGREE TO WHICH the novellas of María de Zayas y Sotomayor (ca. 1590–1661) informed the style and content of the prose works of Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) has not been previously investigated. Although there is no direct indication in Kleist's letters that he was familiar with her works, due to the prominence of Zayas's translators Sophie Mereau (1770–1806) and Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) on the Berlin literary scene there can be little doubt that Kleist was aware of their German translations of Zayas's novellas, published in 1804 and 1806. As is demonstrated below, Kleist was not merely aware of the translations; in fact, his prose works draw heavily on the thematic and stylistic repertoires of the Mereau-Brentano translations of Zayas's novellas.The validity of studies on the metatextual presence of seventeenthcentury Spanish texts in Kleist's works, for example, those by Cervantes (1547–1616) and Calderón (1600–1681) as well as the presence of Rousseau (1712–1778), C. M. Wieland (1733–1813), and Schiller (1759–1805), among others, has long been recognized. A close reading of select Mereau-Brentano translations of Zayas's texts demonstrates a striking paradigmatic presence in a series of transtextual relationships to the works of Kleist. The following is intended as a comprehensive introduction to what is no doubt a more complicated topic.

Kleist, Translation-Adaptation, and María de Zayas

Kleist—for all his originality—was a serial adapter and recycler of phrases and motifs he stylized into what Thomas Mann (1875–1955) called “exzentrisch[e] Stoffe bis zur Tollheit, bis zur Hysterie” (eccentric plots bordering on madness and hysteria), leading Mann to declare Kleist and his works “überhaupt sondergleichen” (indeed without equal) and “völlig einmalig” (utterly unique). Distinctive plots in Kleist's prose works include, for example, tales of societal crisis, sexual violence, military occupation, usurpation, vengeance, deception, and ghost-hunting; often informed by episodic motives including incest, murder, disguise, mistaken identity, and cross-dressing; all of these punctuated by devices such as fainting, falling, and failure to comprehend or communicate. Important elements of Kleist's style include the employment of eccentric variations of punctuation and conjunction traditions, variations that he made iconic through repetition, as he did with radically hypotactic sentence structures and distinctive uses of words and phrases that to date ring unmistakably Kleistian.

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.

All the indications in Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) distinctively rebellious oeuvre (1776–1804) suggest that he was the most likely German thinker to both despise Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) and still find hope in his historical function. Yet, curiously, Schiller never once mentions the French conqueror by name in any of his extant writings. Peter-André Alt describes Schiller’s avoidance of Bonaparte as an expression of his “innere Distanz” (inward distance) toward the conqueror, and Walter Müller-Seidel attributes Schiller’s “Schweigen über Napoleon” (silence regarding Napoleon) to his adherence to the “Zeitstil der Napoleongegner” (period practice of Napoleon dissidents); neither assessment should come as a surprise. As remarks in his letters indicate, Schiller was a cautious letter writer who was keenly aware of his audiences and had discovered at a young age that it was wiser to publish political and religious criticism in the allegorical register of poetry or in dramas and essays à clef—which privilege the more universal over the specific—than to trust the confidentiality of correspondence. Avoiding being arrested in Bonaparte’s police state—as were anti-Napoleonic Austrian author Heinrich Joseph von Collin (1771/72–1811) and Prussian author Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), or arrested and executed without a trial, as was Austrian publisher Johann Philipp Palm (1768–1806)—is self-evidently a compelling motivation to leave politics out of letters, as was the case with publishing anonymously among Napoleon dissidents. As a result, the scholar needs to look beyond Schiller’s correspondence for indications of his attitude toward Bonaparte, as Müller-Seidel did in his 2009 book Friedrich Schiller und die Politik (Schiller and Politics). Whereas Müller-Seidel’s compelling register of circumstantial evidence for Schiller’s negative attitude toward Bonaparte logically focuses on the period from the beginning of Bonaparte’s rule to Schiller’s death (1799–1805), the present essay focuses first on Schiller’s decades-long pre-Napoleonic history of published expressions of hostility toward historical conquerors before dealing with Schiller’s attitude toward Bonaparte.

Two hundred years after his death, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) remains a fascinating, ambivalent, and polarizing figure. From the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, responses of authors, artists, and thinkers ranged from celebrations of a dawning age of liberation to prophesies of anarchic violence. Initial reactions to Napoleon’s early rise to power were, to a large extent, conditioned by German views of the French Revolution. Like many of his contemporaries, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) had already expressed his enthusiasm for the ideals underpinning the Revolution, as for example in his essay of 1788, “Das Geheimniß des Kosmopoliten-Ordens” (The Secret of the Cosmopolitan Order). Indeed, the very title of the first essay Wieland published in his literary journal Der Teutsche Merkur after the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789—“Eine Unterredung über die Rechtmäßigkeit des Gebrauchs, den die französische Nation dermahlen von ihrer Aufklärung und Stärke macht” (Debate about the Legitimacy of the French Nation’s Current Use of Its Enlightenment and Power)—left contemporary readers in little doubt as to where his sympathies lay. But Wieland was by no means a lone figure in his enthusiasm for what he hoped would be the prelude to the replacement of the feudal structures of the ancien régime with a modern constitutional monarchy. Other notable writers and intellectuals who, by and large, remained supportive of the French Revolution included Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Jean Paul (1763–1825), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Georg Forster (1754–94), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). By contrast, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), profoundly committed to the republican ideals he saw enshrined in the American War of Independence (1774–83), appears to have taken a much more skeptical view of the French Revolution’s capacity to bring about progressive political change following the rise of the Jacobin faction and the Terror. For those Germans tempted to imagine Bonaparte as the leader who would “complete” the Revolution, his coronation as Emperor on December 2, 1804, and the defeat of Prussia two years later at the battle of Jena and Auerstedt on October 14, 1806, proved to be decisive moments in both hardening attitudes against Napoleonic France and encouraging aspirations of German nationhood through wars of liberation, and (in some cases highly chauvinistic) fantasies of German nationalism.