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 LAST THREE YEARS of Heinrich von Kleist's (1777–1811) life are characterized, in part, by his commitment to the publication and dissemination of anti-occupation/pro-liberation literature, including three poems that he sent on April 20, 1809 to Austrian dramatist and poet, and high-ranking finance officer at the imperial court, Heinrich Joseph von Collin (1771/1772–1811). These three poems were “Germania an ihre Kinder, eine Ode” (Germania to Her Children, An Ode), “An Franz den Ersten, Kaiser von Österreich” (To Franz I, Emperor of Austria), and “Kriegslied der Deutschen” (War Song of the Germans). Collin garnered a reputation as a patriotic dramatist after his quick rise to literary stardom with the publication of his first major hit, entitled Regulus, which staged the threat of Carthaginian domination of Rome in the third century BCE, in 1801, just two years after Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) became First Consul of the French Republic. Collin followed Regulus with many dramatic projects that likewise feature the threat of occupation, if not full wars of occupation or annihilation. Ironically, Collin, who during his lifetime was much more widely known and more positively received among the reading public than Kleist was, is today almost entirely forgotten in German literary studies, except when he makes the occasional appearance as a footnote to the biography of Kleist or of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). A handful of negative comments and reviews of Collin’s works from the likes of Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) notwithstanding, Collin's political writings of 1809 seem to have been much more popular and more practically influential than those of Kleist in the literary resistance movement against Napoleonic occupation in the early nineteenth century. Collin was granted the knight's cross of the Austrian Imperial Order of Leopold by Emperor Francis I in 1809 in recognition of his support of the Austrian cause during Napoleonic occupation. According to Veronica C. Richel, a Collin play was given in at least one major German or Austrian theater almost every year from 1802 until 1821.

The 150th issue of the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Newspaper for The Elegant World) of the year 1801 featured a poem dedicated to Berlin actress Henriette Meyer that was contributed by a fan writing under the name Henriette F. … The poem’s first-person speaker, inspired by reports of Meyer’s famous portrayal of the French liberation hero Johanna D’Arc in Schiller’s new drama, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801) at the Französisches Schauspielhaus (French Playhouse) in Berlin, yearns to see her heroine in person. The poem portrays a character whose domestic life is no comfort to her—it is rather the barrier that keeps her under house arrest: “Ach ich seh’ den Wallern nach und weine, / Daß mich hindern Häuslichkeit und Pflicht / Dich zu schaun, Du hohe Götterreine, / Schön umstrahlt von der Verklärung Licht!” (Oh, I gaze at the pilgrims and cry, / for domesticity and duty prevent me / from seeing you, you elevated one, pure as the gods, / beautifully illuminated by the light of transfiguration; Henriette, 1212). As the despairing poetic speaker, presumably the author herself, wallowed inside her domestic dungeon, the actress Henriette Meyer, clad in armor and sword in hand, marched onto the German stage as Schiller’s Johanna d’Arc—after opening the drama with defiance in response to her father’s wish for her to marry—to lead men in a war for personal and national autonomy. Just seven months before the Leipzig premiere of Die Jungfrau von Orleans (September 11, 1801) and nine months before its Berlin premiere (November 23, 1801), Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844) and Austrian foreign minister, Johann Ludwig Joseph, Count of Cobenzl (1753–1809) signed the Treaty of Lunéville (February 9, 1801), reaffirming the Holy Roman Empire’s cession of the left bank of the Rhine to France. Austria would not take up arms against Bonaparte again until 1805.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, few late Enlightenment writers explicitly challenged the hypocrisy of those who did not have women in mind when they argued for the protection of individual human rights.