Und was, wenn Offenbarung uns nicht wird: Kleist's Kantkrise and Theatrical Revelation in Amphitryon.

Abstract

ONE OF the most persistent critical prejudices about Kleist is that he was the most philosophical of German philosophical dramatists: more a metaphysician who happened to write plays than a theatrical dramatist. Goethe credited Kleist with a dialectical rather than a specifically theatrical talent, charging him with writing plays for an invisible theatre, or one which was still to be invented.1 Hegel approved a contemporary critic's judgement that Kleist's drama sought to force its audience's attention beyond the stage and into the metaphysical domain with which, Hegel thought, Kleist's dramas are really concemed.2 Twentieth-century critics like Hans Heinz Ho1z3 and Max Kommerell4 have argued that Kleist's dramatic oeuvre is underscored by a persistent contradiction between what they take to be its central theme the inadequacy of language as a vehicle of human communication and its dramatic form, which is real only in and through spoken dialogue on the stage.