On This Occasion of the 200th anniversary of Kleist’s death, a look back at Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, written in the final years of his life, invites a consideration of the historical and political legacy of this work, whose modernity lies in its revolutionary impulse, both in the sense of promoting revolutionary upheaval and in that of introducing a new structure into the continuum of German political history. To assess this revolutionary character, it will be useful to consider some critical responses to Kleist’s play in times of revolution. Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s essay, published in 1968, locates the revolutionary potential of the play in the shift from an old order dominated by unbending rules dictated from above to a new unity of elector and people established by the prince’s sacrifice. Hohendahl attempts to establish the utopian potential of the play to map out a path from absolutist domination to a free community. His main argument is that the elector decides to pardon the prince upon reading the letter in which the prince affirms his own guilt. It is at this point that reasons of state and popular sentiment can come together in a unity based on the individual choice for sacrifice rather than on an execution carried out by absolutist power. Hohendahl describes a democratizing process that breaks down absolutist political structures in order to present a vision of freedom.

But while Hohendahl insists that the key moment is the sacrifice, he feels compelled to avoid any kind of concretization of the new ideal order. In spite of the focus on the sacrifice, the ideal community in Kleist’s play must remain abstract for Hohendahl, because a concretization of this ideal would undoubtedly have fateful consequences (174). Here, Hohendahl refers back to another revolutionary moment, one in which Gerhard Fricke’s openly National Socialist 1934 essay, “Schiller und Kleist als politische Dichter,” reads the unity of state and people as a unity of “Führer” and people. Fricke distinguishes between state and movement in his essay in order to argue that the state becomes increasingly bureaucratic while the movement maintains an organic tie to the nation and the community. But if Hohendahl criticizes Fricke for turning emancipation into a new “fatalistische Gebundenheit” (174), it also seems that Fricke in fact better captures the spirit of Kleist’s understanding of the freedom of the community.