The Marquise of O and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

suggesting that he should resume command of the band, and offering to engineer his escape. Unknown to Kohlhaas, this letter has been intercepted and read by the authorities. Since he now despairs of the amnesty and the whole affair, and intends to abandon his claims and emigrate, he writes back accepting Nagelschmidt’s offer andthus falls into the trap which the Tronka party have persuaded the Elector to lay for him. His letter to Nagelschmidt is published in order to discredit him, he is put on trial for conspiracy, makes no defence and is condemned to death by burning and quartering. He has, however, a friend at the Electoral court in Berlin, who has now at last succeeded in bringing the whole inside story of the affair to the notice of the Elector of Brandenburg. The latter intervenes; he dismisses the corrupt official who, as a relative of the Tronka family, had prevented Kohlhaas’s previous submissions from reaching him, and motivated partly by a desire to show his political strength as a potential ally of Poland, which is threatening Saxony with war, he makes the following demands: Kohlhaas, as a Brandenburg citizen, is to be transferred immediately to Berlin, where a Saxon attorney may present the case against him for his acts of violence in Saxony on which he will be tried according to Brandenburg law; and a Brandenburg attorney is to be allowed to come to Dresden to ensure that the Saxon court deals properly with Kohlhaas’s own case against Wenzel von Tronka. The Saxon Elector reluctantly agrees to the extradition of the horse-dealer but decides to appeal to the Holy Roman Emperor, who is not bound by any Saxon amnesty whether broken or unbroken; the Emperor is petitioned to send a representative to Berlin who will prosecute Kohlhaas for breach of the Imperial peace. All this is done, and the Berlin court duly pronounces sentence of death by beheading on Kohlhaas. He accepts this with equanimity on hearing that his claims against Tronka are also to be met in full. At the place of execution he finds the Elector of Brandenburg waiting, together with the Imperial prosecutor and other officials; his two fine black horses, the mistreatment of which set the whole terrible train of events in motion and which run through the tale as a sort of
leitmotiv
, are presented to him fully restored to health; the Junker, he is informed, has been sentenced in Dresden totwo years’ imprisonment. He declares himself fully satisfied and ready in his turn to make reparation to the Emperor for having taken the law into his own hands. Thereupon he is beheaded; both sides have made their point.
    This, at least, is the story as Kleist might have completed it: the story of an individual grievance developing, with fascinating and dreadful realism, through ever-increasing complexities until it becomes a major affair of state and is then brought to a paradoxical but impressively logical resolution. It is thought that the Kohlhaas chronicle was originally suggested to Kleist as the theme for a drama; it has obvious theatrical potential, and this was in fact well exploited recently by James Saunders in his brilliant stage adaptation of the story under the title
Hans Kohlhaas
, which was produced at the Questors Theatre in London in 1972 and also broadcast as a radio play (it has also been produced in Germany). Mr Saunders used the sequence of events outlined above, with no essential alteration, merely filling out some of the details and accommodating the present-day taste for Brechtian distancing effects. The result had great force and unity. Unfortunately, however, Kleist was not content to finish
Michael Kohlhaas
on those lines, but introduced a bizarre and fantastic sub-plot which seriously damages the artistic structure of an already long and complex narrative. This added material, which Mr Saunders wisely omitted, contains the episode of the gypsy-woman and her mysterious prophecy about the fate of the ruling dynasty of