FOR GOETHE AND SCHILLER, pastoral seemed to promise a means of holding back, or at least mitigating, the onrush of a destabilizing modern world. While in texts such as Der Bürgergeneral and “Das Lied von der Glocke,” the contrast between the rural or small-town idyll and revolutionary disorder seemed absolute, in Herr mann und Dorothea, Goethe acknowledged the potentially oppressive aspects of the middle-class idyll and the need to open it towards the modern world. The topoi of pastoral take a central role in many of Heinrich von Kleist's plays and stories, partly because of his interest in picking apart the structural contrasts that writers such as Goethe and Schiller had tried to establish between the two worlds of pastoral and revolution.

Given how ubiquitous images of the idyll are in Kleist's oeuvre, it is surprising to find there are few dedicated studies of pastoral motifs in his work. Those who have studied these motifs generally take them to represent a utopian state destroyed by external forces. Thus Sabine Doering argues that Kleist's idylls are destroyed by a violent social order mediated through traditions and laws. By contrast, Nora Weinelt suggests that the idyll is an impossible state of affairs for Kleist, given that desire and morality are fundamentally incompatible.

Common to both these arguments is the belief that Kleist's idylls are destroyed from without, by moral codes or by violence. My own argument in this chapter is that Kleist uses the topoi of pastoral to signal his attachment to human emancipation and fulfilment, but also to examine the often unacknowledged ideologies and tensions that exist in the idyll itself. The idyll often represents the attempt to escape prevailing currents by a retreat to a space outside of society, which inevitably proves impossible. It can represent both an attempt to achieve liberation from the status quo, but it can also be enlisted in the service of regressive agendas as a means of masking social injustices and oppression. As we will see, Kleist's letters from 1800–1802 show that the idyll exerted a powerful spell upon him, as an alternative to the social malaise he so acutely felt. However, Kleist's fictions generally demonstrate the idyll to be precarious, not only because of external pressures, but also because of the structures and mindsets that human beings carry with them into the idyll.