Heinrich von kleist is one of the most challenging figures in German literary history. In a career lasting a little under a decade, from 1802 to his premature death in 1811, he produced a remarkable body of narrative and dramatic work that called into question the prevailing intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical orthodoxies of the age. At a time when Goethe and Schiller were embarking on a period of classicist writing promoting harmony of substance and form, Kleist's fictional worlds are, by contrast, full of chaos and conflict, dislocation and instability. His works raise fundamental questions concerning the possibilities of knowledge and limitations of language, and are filled with characters bereft of certainty and orientation. They mark the trauma of social and political upheaval, and plumb the depths of human psychology. Above all, they are characterized by scenes of brutality and eruptions of violence that in many ways anticipate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism, and that continue to shock and fascinate to the present day. To borrow a phrase from the organizers of a recent conference, this is an oeuvre that is both “scandalously profound” and “profoundly scandalous.”

It is little wonder, then, that Kleist has, from the beginning, posed such a problem for the literary world. While Christoph Martin Wieland may have been thrown into raptures upon hearing a reading from Robert Guiskard, Goethe, whose approval Kleist so desperately sought, was dismissive of Amphitryon and reacted with aversion to Penthesilea.