The Marquise of O and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

Saxony, which she writes on a piece of paper and gives to Kohlhaas as a kind of talisman which he can use to bargain for his life with the Saxon Elector. The latter learns at the time of the horse-dealer’s extradition to Brandenburg that it is he who is in possession of this fateful secret, and desperately tries every means to have him rescued or pardoned or somehow to retrieve from him the piece of paper which Kohlhaas carries with him everywhere; but Kohlhaas goes to his death rather than surrender it. TheElector, as he sees it, has cheated him by solemnly promising him an amnesty and then violating it in connection with the Nagelschmidt affair. Warned by the gypsy-woman, who also turns out inexplicably to be a kind of
Doppelgängerin
of his dead wife, that the Elector intends to recover the paper from his body after his execution and that for this purpose he will be standing incognito beside the scaffold, he removes it from around his neck just before putting his head on the block, tantalizingly reads it to himself in full view of the man whom he knows to be the Saxon Elector, and then swallows it so that it is lost for ever.
    There are several artistic objections to this digressive subplot. For one thing, Kohlhaas’s final action destroys the sense of reconciliation at the close. Despite having at last, on Luther’s authority, received absolution and taken the sacrament, he dies gratifying a thirst for revenge, like Piachi in
The Foundling
. Moreover, the fact that the old gypsy-woman has furnished him with this last and only weapon of vengeance against the Elector, and generally added fuel to his vindictiveness, makes nonsense of the supposed identification of her with his deceased wife who had died begging him to forgive his enemies. It might be argued that Kleist intends all along to stress the obsessive, irrational element in Kohlhaas’s nature and to suggest, especially in the final scene, a psychologically realistic obscurity in the distinction between justice and vengeance – an illustration in advance, as it were, of the truth of Nietzsche’s punning aphorism to the effect that
ich bin gerecht
(I am just) really means
ich bin gerächt
(I am avenged). On the other hand it seems that Kleist was certainly motivated by an artistically extraneous desire to discredit Saxony. As we have seen, he had at about the time of completing
Michael Kohlhaas
become a fervent spokesman of the patriotic campaign of hatred against Napoleon. A few years earlier Saxony had joined the Confederation of the Rhine, the group of German states allied to France and enjoying Napoleonic protection; this had beenin 1806, not long after the disastrous defeat of Prussia at Jena. Accordingly, in
The Battle with Hermann
, the King (as he now was) of Saxony had under a transparent allegorical disguise been represented as a traitor to the German cause. In 1810, filled with hopes of a Prussian resurgence, Kleist found it appropriate to invent in
Michael Kohlhaas
the notion of a prophecy foretelling the fall of Saxony and the future prosperity of Brandenburg–Prussia; he could thus underline the latter’s historic mission and greatness, which he was to celebrate again in
Prince Friedrich of Homburg
.
    His reasons for adding the gypsy episode may also have included a literary intention, misguided in this case, of deliberately creating mystery.
Michael Kohlhaas
has the dramatic urgency of the best of Kleist’s other stories, but none of their economy of means. Its ever increasing and ever more confusing complications suggest that the narrator wishes to lose both himself and the reader in an impenetrable world, in a maze of detail and coincidence. The mystifying affair of the old woman was to have been, perhaps, the culmination of this process, raising it to a supernatural level. Not only the Holy Roman Emperor, but God himself, or Fate, is brought into play. Whereas, for example,
The Earthquake in Chile
implicitly