Heinrich von Kleist spent his life on the road, and every piece of Land in Germany has left him a figure of a servant. There is no direction that this restless man has not set foot on, no city that this forever homeless man has not inhabited. For almost the duration of his life, his home was the carriage that traveled with him. Some people say that he was called by the mysterious mission of life, but this does not explain for him the eternal escape in life. All his journeys have no purpose, and this man, driven by unknown spiritual forces, has been longing for the healing of the heart and the peace of the heart all his life, but he is treated as a stone by fate and is ruthlessly thrown around in the world. His whole life was merely an escape from the abyss, a mere run toward the abyss, a desperate, painful, exhausting chase.
Kleist never had a life, and no one knew what kind of person he was deep down in his heart. In a letter he said: "I don't know how I can tell you about the portrait of the person who has not left a portrait, I am an unspeakable person."
We find almost no portrait of him, and even his contemporaries have an empty account of him. He was unremarkable, and in his time, it seemed that there was no such person. He seemed to be just a ghost in the crowd, and the people he talked to didn't know he was a writer. In his thirty-four years of life, the stories about him are almost minimal. Only Clemens Brentano has left us with a few descriptions: a solid thirty-two-year-old man with a weathered, round, dull head, complex eyes, childlike, shabby and determined.
He sealed everything in his heart and never revealed his heart to the outside world. He wrote, "I lack, a medium of expression. Even the only thing we have, language, cannot be expressed. It cannot depict the mind, it gives us only a few scattered fragments. So whenever I want to reveal my heart to others, I feel like fear. His silence is not a dullness of his character, but to maintain a certain spiritual chastity, which is a feeling that is difficult for us to understand by those who are constantly eroded by the world, and in the same way, he is not understood or even ignored by those around him.
Life will always meet new people, but he clearly understands that it is dangerous to get along with him. Therefore, he never complained about anyone who left him, and all those who were with him would be burned by the flames of his spirit. His wife was ruined by his tough morality; his sister was squandered by him; his confidant girlfriend, who was left by him to live a lonely and empty life; and his female sick friend, who was finally dragged to death by him. His body seemed to be full of curses, and the terrible power in his heart made him more and more like to curl up in his own world, and his loneliness was equally huge and searing.
During the months of his disappearance in 1809, his friends coldly recorded him as dead. No one will remember this humble man, and I don't think anyone will continue to pay attention to his existence if it were not for such a dramatic end to his life at the end of his life. To the world, he is nothing; to him, the world is not. After he had delivered the bullet into his head, his death report read: The late Kleist, a terminally ill bloodthirsty cholerae, died in a pathological state of affairs. But is he really like his death report? Is it a mentally ill person, or a morbidly depressed person? Kleist committed suicide, in good health and full of vitality, and Goethe, speaking of this man, merely said contemptuously: "This morbidly depressed man is terminally ill." We can draw on Theodore Korner's account of his death: "The overly nervous nature of the Prussians". It was this instinct that led him to commit suicide, not mental illness or madness. He had too much passion, Zweig said: he was too bloody but too sensible, too agitated but too cultured, too lustful but too ethical, too real in his spirit as too strong in emotion. It was the emotional beast within him that could not be tamed, which eventually tore him to shreds.
Born in 1777 into a traditional Prussian military family, Kleist, who had shown literary talent from an early age, followed the family tradition and joined the Guards corps as an officer in 1792. As a cadet at the time, he had done almost everything in a state of sexual awakening in adolescence, and this excessive stimulation was destined to run through his life from his youth, and the tragedy of fate seemed to have sprouted from that time on. Originally devoid of any female experience, he began to indulge endlessly in the pursuit of pleasure. He couldn't bear his weak consciousness, but he was obsessed with this feeling. This made him feel that his unstainable soul began to become stained, and endless self-moral condemnation was accompanied by an endless pursuit of pleasure. The emotional ordeal of adolescence may soon heal over time like a cut wound to other peers, but for him the resulting self-loathing and unconquerable desire gnawed away at his young soul. In this state, he became engaged to the daughter of a pure general, who thought he was sexually incompetent. He had confided in his inner madness and shame to his friends, who recommended him a doctor, and the curse of this imaginary sexual function was unraveled. But his lust did not become normal and restrained, not even purely directed at women, but he was not a homosexual.
Kleist's relationship with any woman, with any man, is not clear, simple, has never been love, has always been only a chaotic, exaggerated and excessive emotion, always a mixture of excess and lack, and it is this state that constitutes the basic face of his sexual life, and he is always—as Goethe's wonderful, point-point evaluation says—"toward confused feelings."
No one is like Kleist, who is always chased by passion, who covets pleasure but never gets a moment of pleasure satisfaction. He is even less like those who are driven by desire, he has his own will. In all his works, he expresses his demonic passion and his own demonic will. His desire to rebel against himself is as great as his desire for desire, and the powerful contradictory force in his heart causes him to fight like a fighter in his spiritual world forever. He is not pulled into the abyss of desire without will, arrogantly transforming this intense passion into self-preservation and self-improvement in the midst of self-destructive desire. There is no doubt that this inner passion ultimately goes far beyond the limits of what the individual spirit can bear.
In 1799, Kleist faded his military uniform, which he considered to be a burden on him. From then on, Kleist began to study and read a great deal, immersing himself like a madman in his education. But in the end, he did not understand life itself through knowledge, nor did it erase the strong passion in his heart, but this excessive way of learning developed the crazy nature of his heart. Eventually, the learning goals he had set for himself were shattered, and he cried out in a letter: "My only and highest goal has sunk, and now I have no more goals." Trying to use learning to get rid of his Kleist, and inevitably facing the inner self, the one who has become more crazy. Like a desperate man, he desperately smashes his life force and spiritual world on the wall of destiny, destroying it in exchange for freedom. In his letter, he wrote: Oh, awakening the ambition in our hearts is irresponsible — we are thus thrown to the predatory goddess of vengeance.
Kleist threw all his passion into his literary works in the last painful spasms, yet the devil in his heart was still chasing him all the time, and he tossed himself fiercely, from one place to another. He pulled out his heart, as if he wanted to pull out the devil in his heart. At this time, for him, it was either destruction or immortality. The irrepressible descent into nothingness, after a journey to Paris, was in a sense a spiritual ego for him, and he burned the Gikas and other manuscripts he was working on. He said in his letter: Drama forced me to create because I could not throw it away.
The limits of what human power can do, I have done—even the impossible. I made a desperate bet. The dice that decided everything stopped, it stopped. I had to understand – I failed. - "Penticellia"
Kleist, knowing that his presence in the world was a failure, gave up his official position and banned his newspaper; his idea of pulling Prussia to Austria was frustrated, and his nemesis Napoleon held Europe in his hands like a trophy; his plays were either shelved or ridiculed on stage; his most loyal sister left him, and he could not find even a minimum occupation. A few months after that disappearance, he returned home with only sarcasm and arrogance, and was eventually expelled from his home. At this moment, all the passion has come to an end, and all hopes have been dashed.
His cry hit every ear weakly,
When he saw the flag of time
Being thrust into one gate after another,
He stopped singing; he wanted to end with it,
And tearfully put down the piano in his hand.
He dreams of death as a mysterious martyrdom, as the destruction of double happiness. This lonely man has to shoulder his own loneliness in the eternity of death. For him, there had never been a woman on earth who could satisfy his excessive passion, and no woman could keep up with his fanaticism. In his childhood he was extremely eager to advise everyone he loved to die with him, but only death itself could satisfy Kleist's needs. And only his play Penticia could meet his needs, and he wrote in his last words: "Her grave is more lovely than the bed of all the queens of the world.".
Kleist's best blessing for life is: "May the death given to you by God have half the joy of my death and the unspeakable happiness of my death: this is the most sincere and sincere wish I can give you." At the end of his life, he burned his own manuscripts, and for him at that time, the reputation behind him and the literary life of his life were insignificant compared to his own eternity. It is here that we have a clear insight into the duality that emerges deep within himself, the infinity of control and passion, and the life he gives himself as great as the hero in his tragedy.
At the end of 1811, Kleist and his female companions, like newlyweds, rode in a small boat on the road of Wansee. At the appointed moment, Kleist accurately shot a shot at the heart of the female companion, followed by a shot accurately shot at his own heart. His hands did not tremble, and he knew how to die better than how to live. Because he once wrote to himself in a poem: "A good death is often the best life".
Kleist, the tragic creator, used his own death to truly interpret it for us, vividly erecting his own pain into an immortal tombstone of death. Zweig concludes by saying that only a completely broken person understands the desire for perfection, and only the chased man can reach eternity.
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