Heinrich von Kleist und die Aufklärung (review)

Abstract

440 Book Reviews mic, literary, and philosophical texts) indicate that it may be part of a larger study. If that is indeed the case, than I particularly look forward to Breithaupt's further discussion of the philosophical differences between money and property as modes of exchange. It is rare for an edited volume to contain so many essays of such high caliber. Heifer is to be praised for bringing together such interesting and probing selections . University of Illinois-Chicago Astrida O. Tantillo Tim Mehigan, ed., Heinrich von Kleist und die Aufklärung. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 246 pp. The essays collected in this volume arise from a conference devoted to the work of Heinrich von Kleist, held at the University of Melbourne in the spring of 1998. Although the conference participants were not bound by any particular theme, the revised papers have been grouped together under the general rubric "Kleist and the Enlightenment," the editor having detected in the various contributions this common thread. Both the opening summary (which advertises in English the contents of a volume otherwise written entirely in German) and the introduction by the editor, Tim Mehigan, promise a critical re-examination of Kleist's famous "Kant crisis" of 1801: a turning point in the author's life and thought, which marked his beginnings as a writer of imaginative fiction and profoundly influenced the creative output of his decade-long career. The remarkable modernity of Kleist's plays and stories, with their riddling ironies and their subversive effects, has long been regarded as a product of the author's passionate engagement with Enlightenment thought. Indeed, this connection between the writer's cunency today and his unique philosophical investments at the tum of the eighteenth century—the collection's editorial focus—has become commonplace in Kleist scholarship. Nevertheless, the topic is far from exhausted, and its familiarity does nothing to diminish its potential as a subject of scholarly inquiry. Hopes of finding in this volume a sustained examination of Kleist's "complex dialogue with the Enlightenment" (i), however, are largely frustrated; a number of the essays prove to have little more to do with the declared theme than one would find in many, if not most, critical treatments of Kleist's work. Fortunately, the individual papers are sufficiently stimulating to hold one's interest and amply reward the reader's careful attention, even if expectations raised by the title of the book remain unfulfilled. Divided into two sections, the volume consists of contributions from twelve scholars: four from Australia CFim Mehigan, with two essays in the first section in addition to the introduction; David Roberts; Anthony Stephens; Yixu Lu), six from Germany (Hans-Jochen Marquardt; Sabine Doering; Christian Moser; Gerhard Neumann; Gabriele Brandstetter; Ingeborg Harms), and one each from the U.K. (Hilda M. Brown) and the U.S.A. (Bianca Theisen). The preface by Gerhard Schulz draws attention to the pioneering work of Richard Samuel, to whose memory the collection is dedicated, and it alerts readers in particular to the quite remarkable fact that the Melbourne scholar's 1938 Cambridge dissertation on Kleist was Goethe Yearbook 441 translated into German as recently as 1995. Rehearsing well-known aspects of the reception of Kleist's work, Schulz cites Goethe's disparagement of his contemporary , but also Wieland's encouragement of the young author, and he refers to both the enigmatic nature of Kleist's writings and the difficulty in classifying them according to traditional period concepts. Not only, Schulz reminds us, did it take more than a century even in the German-speaking world for Kleist's work to become recognized "in seiner ganzen Kraft und Größe" (xi), but his stories and plays still have not taken their rightful place on the international stage, alongside the works of authors such as Shakespeare and Molière. Kleist scholars, however, remain undaunted, and Schulz suggests that such critical energies might successfully pave the way for a greater public and international appreciation of the vital contributions to Weltliteratur associated with this difficult, but unusually appealing writer. Taken as a whole, the collection indeed provides abundant evidence that Kleist criticism is cunently thriving. The division of the volume into two...