Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (18 October 1777 – 21 November 1811) was a Prussian Romantic poet, dramatist, short story writer, and journalist whose best-known works include the plays The Broken Jug, Amphitryon, and The Prince of Homburg, and the short stories Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O.
He was born into a military family on 18 October 1777 in Frankfurt an der Oder in Prussia. After a very scanty education, he was enlisted into the Prussian army in 1792 and served in the Rhine campaign of 1796. He eventually became dissatisfied with his career and resigned from his commission after "the loss of seven valuable years" in April 1799. Wanting to shape his own life, he tried study—physics, law, mathematics—at the university of Frankfurt an der Oder, and he got engaged to Wilhelmine von Zenge the following year. On the other hand, when he read the works of the philosopher Immanuel Kant in March 1801, he lost faith in the value of knowledge and came to value emotion. He subsequently abandoned his studies.
Kleist went first to Paris and then to Switzerland. There, he wrote his first work, the tragedy The Schroffenstein Family (1803), a drama of error that explores the fallibility of human perception and the inability of the human intellect to apprehend truth, which would become a recurring theme in Kleist's works. He also broke his engagement with Wilhelmine a year prior after unsuccessfully attempting to convince her to move to Switzerland with him.
That same year, Kleist tried writing Robert Guiskard, an ambitious play in which he attempted to unite the Sophoclean tragedy and the Shakespearean drama of character, but it remained a fragment. He also went on a series of hectic journeys in eastern Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy, and Paris, where he burned his manuscript in despair and tried to join Napoleon's army; the French expelled him.By June 1804, he travelled to East Prussia to apply for a civil-service post in Königsberg, where he worked at his dramas; one of those was The Broken Jug (1806), a comedy in which a judge presides over a trial where he has to settle who broke a young woman's jug one night, all while acting suspicious before and throughout the trial. Kleist resigned during training and left for Dresden, where he hoped to continue writing, but he was captured by the French and imprisoned for six months as a spy. While in prison, Kleist continued writing, publishing his adaptation of Molière's Amphitryon in 1807 and finishing Penthesilia (1807), a tragedy about the passionate love of the queen of the Amazons for Achilles.
Kleist came home at the end of July and committed to literature, but he had to earn a living. Towards the end of 1808, Kleist, stirred by a threatened rising against Napoleon, wrote in an attempt to call all Germany to arms; one of those is a political and patriotic tragedy, Herman's Battle (written in 1809, published posthumously 1821).
Kleist also wrote eight novellas collected in Erzählungen (1810–11), with The Chilean Earthquake, Michael Kohlhaas, and The Marquise of O. being among his most well-known, portraying how men are driven to the limits of their endurance by the violence of other men or nature. His final drama, The Prince of Homburg (1809-11, published posthumously 1821) reflects Kleist's conflicts between heroism and cowardice, dreaming and action.
For six months, Kleist edited the newspaper Berliner Abendblätter, but it eventually ceased publication, cutting him off his means of livelihood. In 1809, he met Henriette Vogel, a manic and terminally ill woman who begged him to kill her. Kleist was already disappointed in life and embittered by the lack of recognition accorded to him by his contemporaries, particularly Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and meeting Vogel was the final incentive to end his life. On 21 November 1811, Kleist and Vogel travelled to Wannsee, where he shot her and then himself in a suicide pact.
