Jonathan EmmesediI've just finished "Michael Kohlhaas", the 1810 novella by Heinrich von Kleist.
I think I'm right in saying that this work is well known throughout the German speaking world but is of much lesser renown amongst English speakers, even though allusions such as that in E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" show that it is not completely obscure.
For those unfamiliar with the novella, Wikipedia summarizes the plot as showing
>>the wrongs done to horse trader Michael Kohlhaas by a minor aristocrat. His attempts to obtain redress through the legal system are thwarted by the aristocrat's connections. Kohlhaas gathers sympathisers to capture the miscreant, which escalates into a violent campaign against towns that take in the fleeing noble. Kohlhaas is captured and sentenced to death. Just before being executed Kohlhaas achieves some revenge by swallowing a written prophecy of great personal concern to the regional ruler. <<
Going beyond the plot summary to the actual work will afford the reader the sense of being lost in a set of arcane legal processes that defy not only justice but intelligibility as well.
That juridical labyrinth is no doubt what appealed to Kafka, prompting him to give a public reading of the novella in Prague.
Martin Greenberg, the translator of the edition I read, was drawn to Kleist by his previous work on Kafka. Greenberg notes how "Michael Kohlhaas" presages "The Castle" but also writes testily of how the "realism" of the novella is disrupted by the "shadowy Gothic fantasticness" of the conclusion, which he deems "unsatisfactory".
Greenberg was writing in 1960, when a critical climate of modernism was less sympathetic to the introduction of a disguised gypsy prophetess as plot device than was the romantic era in which saw the publication of"Michael Kohlhaas".
More than half a century after Greenberg, in a post-postmodernist age, readers might be more receptive to von Kleist's melange of the legalistic, the traditional, and the fantastic. I found Kohlhaas's determination for his claim on two horses to be vindicated, leading from serving legal writs to proclaiming himself the viceroy of the archangel Michael as his followers set cities aflame, and culminating in his acceptance of the death penalty with his refusal to disclose a prophecy of a dynasty's doom -- I found all this absorbing and provocative!
#Books #HeinrichVonKleist #MichaelKohlhaas #GermanLiterature #Novellas #NineteethCenturyLiterature
#RomanticLiterature
Image -- On the Gallows, from Woodcuts for Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas -- 1953 -- Jacob Pins: Jerusalem Print Workshop -- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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