Heinrich von Kleist: Geschlecht, Erkenntnis, Wirklichkeit by Erika Berroth

Abstract

884 Reviews mere assassin, a compliant pawn in a plot masterminded by Octavio Piccolomini. To correct this misconception, Krobb reassesses Buttler's importance within the drama, traces the story of the historical Butler, one of several Irish 'Wild Geese' who fought for Catholic monarchs abroad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and considers the significance of a figure such as But(t)ler in the political and social flux of Schiller's time. Finally he draws attention to the resemblance of Buttler-not only in name, but more significantly in social standing and function-to Otto Bitter, alias the Jew Gawriel Siiss, who fights inMansfeld's army in Salomon Kohn's story Gawriel (I853). Buttler, inKrobb's analysis, is an example par excellence of one of Schiller's central themes. He has risen from the ranks to lead his own regiment, thus uniting the soldiers of the Lager, towhom the army offers similar prospects, with Wallenstein, himself a social climber. Buttler, unlike Octavio, who has inherited his standing, embodies the meritocracy on which Wallenstein's army, and his challenge to the existing order, is based. Significantly, the historical Butler was considerably richer than the play suggests; his invented, detailed biography as a footloose homo novus in Schiller thus directly addressed the upheavals in late eighteenth-century politics and society. Krobb occasionally departs from his tight focus on But(t)ler to dwell on other themes, but the diverse perspectives from which he considers his subject are convincingly and interestingly intertwined in a thought-provoking and valuable study, both of But(t)ler and of Wallenstein as awhole. THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD STEFFAN DAVIES Heinrich von Kleist: Geschlecht- Erkenntnis- Wirklichkeit. By ERIKA BERROTH. (Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature, 58) New York and Bern: Peter Lang. 2003. I54 pp. $53.95. ISBN o-8204-4958-x. Erika Berroth's study aims at the point of intersection between an area on which Kleist scholarship has long been focused-the problem of Erkenntnis-and one in which interest has arisen relatively more recently, but remains unbroken-Kleist's representation and construction of gender. The author's starting-point, with refer ence to late eighteenth-century changes in paradigms of gender difference and to Lorraine Code's interpretation of Kant in the light of Kleist's Kantkrise, is that both gender difference and apparently objective knowledge are essentially recognized by Kleist as 'Konstrukt[e]', the latter explicitly, the former by clear, although implicit, contrast with Kleist's positions on gender in his early letters. The 'Gleichzeitigkeit von Realitaten' (p. iI) experienced by Kleist's characters, which generates tragic en ergy through the characters' lack of awareness of the 'subjective Beschrinktheit ihrer Realitatsversion' (ibid.), is further linked by Berroth to the intrusion, after Julia Kris teva, of the semiotic into the symbolic. Die Marquise von 0... serves as the principal testing ground of Berroth's hypotheses and the centrepiece of the study. The analysis of Die Marquise ismarked by a series of interesting word associa tions and interpretations, notably on the notorious Gedankenstrich: 'Ein Strich durch die Gedanken, ein Strich durch die Ordnung, etwas, das die Frau unter den Strich fallen lal3tund auf den Strich schickt, gleichzeitig aber der Verband, der dieWunde deckt, die im RiB durch die Gedanken aufklafft' (p. 36). The Gedankenstrich appears, observes Berroth, wherever the 'master discourse' is interrupted (p. 67). Berroth re lates the ambiguity and simultaneity of the Gedankenstrich to the experience of the woman whose rape it represents and censors, positing that the Marquise embodies 'den Zustand gleichzeitigen Wissens und Nicht-Wissens' (p. 62) and so experiences the fragility of the symbolic order, its vulnerability to the semiotic, am eigenen Leib. MLR, 101.3, 2006 885 The author's analysis of theMarquise's 'Momente des Wiedererkennens, die nicht in den binaren Bezugsrahmen integriert werden konnen' (p. 51) is related aptly to pregnancy as 'the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject', as Berroth quotes from Kristeva (p. 34), but we miss a precise definition of how much, and inwhat way, Berroth supposes theMarquise to have 'known'. This omission potentially opens the door for the type of aspersions on theMarquise's desire for the Graf which...