Heinrich von Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas” - Annotated Dual-Language Version with Commentary

What is it about?

Heinrich von Kleist’s first major story, published in full in 1810, is one that both in subject matter and length – at 34,000 words – stands on its own among the remainder of his prose works: the purported chronicle of Michael Kohlhaas, “one of the most upright and at the same time most dreadful people of his day”. At its heart a thought experiment of how far a person will go in righting an ultimately trivial wrong, the story not only traces the titular horse-dealer’s changing fortunes but also offers some of the most riveting accounts of small-scale warfare in all of German literature. From today’s perspective, “Michael Kohlhaas” evokes much of the same unsavoury politicking and nepotistic power-play that we have seen in the U.S. in recent years; the violent David-vs.-Goliath rebellion of Kohlhaas also speaks strongly to the emotionally-charged wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon and Sudan. Heinrich von Kleist led a short and frequently troubled life, a displaced aristocrat who at once longed for and resented the more personable trappings of the bourgeoisie. Outside of literature, where he turned to prose after his initial dramatic ambitions met with critical failure, he tried himself at law and later also at publishing, yet he was too restless and had too little business sense to pursue such ventures to lasting success. Kleist’s narrative style in “Michael Kohlhaas” is informed by the tensions of his changing life directions – the poetic eloquence carried over from his dramatic writing is offset by the persuasive, matter-of-fact descriptiveness of the legal style that he learnt during his law studies.

Featured Image

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Why is it important?

“Michael Kohlhaas” is one of the most important prose works within the canon of German literature, and Heinrich von Kleist one of the most widely read German writers of the long 19th century – yet among Anglophone readerships, his work remains largely unknown outside the confines of German studies. While the stories have been translated into English comparatively often, “Michael Kohlhaas” a total of 14 times, Kleist’s idiosyncratically nested syntax is usually made at least slightly more palatable to Anglophone tastes, and no critical translation edition for scholarly use has existed until now. In the two volumes of “The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist”, the stories are presented bilingually with copious amounts of annotation in aid of textual comprehension, drawing attention to lexical shifts in meaning, to intertextual references and parallels, to commonalities between the stories, and to translatological points of interest; individual story commentaries provide further historical context as well as basic interpretational angles, and detailed introductory chapters examine both the specifics of Kleist’s prose style as well as his Anglophone framing.

Perspectives