Stefan Zweig : Heinrich von Kleist's likeness

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811)

by Anton Graff

Stefan Zweig

The Struggle with the Daemon

Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche

LIKENESS OF THE UNPORTRAYABLE

I know not what I am to say to you about myself who am indescribable.

From a letter

WE HAVE NO LIKENESSES worthy of the name. The clumsy miniature and the poorly executed portrait show a puerile face, although at the time they were taken Kleist was a man fully grown. He might be any German youth with a gloomy and questioning expression. There is no sign of a powerful imagination, or even of intellect; not a trait to arouse our curiosity or make us ask ourselves what spirit can have animated this cold brow. Having glanced at the depictions, we pass on our way unsatisfied, unsuspecting, uninterested. Kleist’s inner life lay deep. The secrets of his soul were not to be read in his countenance.

Nor have these secrets been disclosed to us by the verbal reports of his friends and contemporaries, which are scanty and convey little information. In one respect only they are unanimous, for all who knew him declared him to be inconspicuous, reserved, aloof and, on the whole, “ordinary” to outer seeming both in nature and in looks. His was not an aspect that would entice a painter to take up the brush, a writer the pen. He must have been so inscrutable as not even to arouse the challenging impression of inscrutability ! Friends and acquaintances met him year after year without being stimulated thereby to commit their thoughts of him to paper. We have not so many as a dozen anecdotal descriptions of him for all the thirty-four years of his life. If you would understand how vague, how shadow-like was the impression produced by Kleist on his generation, you will do well to recall, in contrast, Wieland’s account of Goethe’s arrival in Weimar, and to remember how the fiery radiations that emanated from Johann Wolfgang blinded even those who saw him only from afar. Think, too, of the witchery exercised by Byron and Shelley, by Jean Paul and Victor Hugo — a charm made manifest by innumerable letters, by thousands of references to them in prose and verse.

Hardly anyone has troubled to describe a meeting with Kleist. The three lines written by Clemens Brentano embody the most vivid pen-portrait that has come down to us, and even here the writer was more concerned with the character than with the aspect of the man: “a stocky fellow of thirty-two, with a bullet head and the signs of manifold experience in his face, variable in mood but with the goodness of a child, poor and staunch.” No one looked him in the eyes to read his nature. When he disclosed himself to anyone, it was from within. His shell was too hard — and this was the tragedy of his existence. He was reserved to excess, and kept everything locked up within himself. He did not express his passions either in looks or in spoken words. In fact he spoke little, partly because he had a slight stammer, of which he was ashamed, and partly because he kept his feelings under lock and key.

In one of his letters he made a distressing avowal of his incapacity for utterance, of the way in which his lips were sealed.

“There is a lack of means of communication. The only one we have, language, is inadequate; it cannot depict the soul, and conveys no more than fragments. That is why I always have a feeling of horror when I am called upon to disclose my innermost self in words.”

Thus he remained mute, not from dumbness or sloth, but from an overpowering chastity of feeling; and this silence, this dull, brutalising, oppressive silence, which he would maintain for hours when in company, was his most salient characteristic — that and absence of mind, a confusion which obscured his clarity of intellect. When talking he would suddenly break off and stare into vacancy (contemplating the depths within). Wieland tells us:

“At table he would often mutter to himself, with the air of a man who believed himself to be alone, or with that of one whose thoughts were far away.”

He could not converse unconstrainedly in an exchange of the small talk of ordinary life. Conventional and customary obligations were repugnant to him, so that many assumed there must be something “dour and sinister” in this unusual companion; while others were wounded by his harshness and cynicism and bluntness when, as happened now and then, pricked by his own silence, he threw off all restraints. There was never any gentleness in his

conversation, no sympathy in his looks or his words. Rahel von Ense, who came nearer than most to understanding him, said of him aptly: “The atmosphere round him was severe.” Even she, who in general gave such vivid descriptions of the persons she encountered, shows us only this unportrayable aura, and fails to present us with a likeness. Thus he remains, for all time, a man unseen and “indescribable”.

For the most part those who met him failed to pay any heed to him; others avoided close contact with him because he inspired dislike and even repulsion. Those who knew him loved him, loved him passionately, but even they, when in his company, were affected with a dread which annulled their power of expressing their affection. When his defences broke down, he disclosed his hidden depths, permitted glimpses of a formidable, a fathomless abyss. The result was that no one felt at ease in his presence, and yet he exerted a magical attraction; the pressure of his atmosphere, his intense passion, his exaggerated claims (it was usual with him to demand a joint suicide!) made him insufferable. Everyone was drawn to him, but everyone shrank from his daemon; everyone felt him to be alarmingly close to death and destruction. When Pfuel called at his rooms one evening in Paris and found that he was not at home, the terrified visitor rushed off to the morgue to look for Kleist’s body among the suicides. When Marie von Kleist had no heard from him for a week, she feared the worst and sent her son to see what had happened. Those who did not know him intimately believed him cold and indifferent. His intimates, on the other hand, were afraid of the fires that consumed him. That was why no one could get into close touch with him or give him a helping hand, since he was too hot for some and too icy for others. Only the daemon remained faithful to him.

He knew that he was a thorny subject and once said: “It is dangerous to have anything to do with me.” Consequently he made no complaint when people drew away from him, being aware that those who came near to him were singed by his flames. Through the extravagance of his mortal demands he troubled the youth of Wilhelmine von Zenge, his betrothed; squandered the property of Ulrike, his favourite sister; left Marie von Kleist, who was also dear to him, in loneliness and neglect; and dragged Henriette Vogel down with him to death. Becoming ever more keenly aware of the perilous effects of his inner life, of his daemon, upon others, he retired more and more into himself, growing more solitary even than nature had created him.

During his last years he would spend day after day in bed, smoking and writing. Rarely did he go out, and then only to coffee houses. As his aloofness increased, people almost forgot his existence, and when in 1809 he disappeared for a few months, his friends (with little concern) assumed that he must be dead. Nobody wanted him. So lost was he to the world that no one would have noticed his departure from it had he not died in so melodramatic a fashion. We have no likeness of him, neither of his bodily self, nor yet, except for his published works and his long letters, of the inner man. There was, indeed, an essay in self-portraiture which profoundly moved the few to whom he showed it. It was entitled History of My Mind, being a confession like that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The autobiography was penned not long before his death, but has not come down to us. Either he burned it, or else the uninterested guardians of his literary remains destroyed it, as they destroyed his novel and a good many of his other writings. Thus did his visage, throughout obscured by shadow, recede into utter darkness. We have no likeness of him, and know only his gloomy familiar, the daemon.

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