In Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1967), Barrington Moore concluded that democratic attitudes in pre-democratic states result in two broad reactions, “denial and outrage,” a description that applies to Kleist’s generation, for which the Age of Enlightenment was a promise denied. The frame-novella tradition itself — “a genre of crisis” from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten — comprises an experiment in denial, in which fictitious narrators seek distractions in fiction from an external “existential threat,” from the actual plague in Florence in 1348 to the metaphorical political plague of French occupation in Mainz in 1792–93. With the publication of Erzählungen von Heinrich von Kleist in two volumes in 1810 and 1811, the German novella of modernity achieved its signature “crisis” voice regarding thematic psychological, political-critical, and anti-metaphysical fields; register of dramatic, rhetorical, and narrative gesture; and an establishment of the unifying form and content model of enduring canonical prominence. The distinct resultant silhouette expresses the modern response of outrage to unrelenting epistemological crisis, simultaneous to the conscious portrayal of subconscious denial that informs the German “death” novella. The title, “Crisis, Denial, and Outrage: Kleist (Schiller, Kant) and the Path to the German Novella(s) of Modernity,” invokes both Andreas Gailus’s crisis theory (situation) and Moore’s diagnosis of the pitfalls of self-awareness (response) in five overlapping synchronous developments in the evolution of content and form conventions in Western short prose: (1) the European novella, (2) the German Enlightenment novella, (3) modernity as implicit in Kant’s anthropological epistemology, (4) Schiller’s nascent eighteenth-century German novellas of modernity, and (5) generation Kleist and the German novella of modernity. In this article I seek to establish how the evolution and migration history of novella conventions make Kleist’s novellas a watershed moment in the development from the premodern novella to the novella of modernity by tracing the five considerations, beginning with the relevant history of the novella.

In his introduction to Die Novelle, Frank Ryder dedicates his first paragraph on novella content to concepts of modernity: