Imagine a scene: two men, previously known to one another, meet by chance in a darkened park in the depths of the freezing Berlin winter. We are told of no light that would break through the darkness. Perhaps the scene is lit faintly by few muted rays from the moon, but what illumination is cast upon our two figures is unclear. Nothing stirs around them. It seems that it is only the two of them in the park. Each takes a seat on a bench. They hunch over to protect themselves from the cold, the cold and dark Berlin winter. There they sit, alone on a bench in a park in Berlin in the depths of winter in the dark of night.
Neither looks the other in the face. They direct their gaze downward. Looking intensely at their shoes. Towards themselves. Inward.
Now another. Scene two. This time the man recognises his companion across the stalls of a bustling theatre. The man is rapt, his attention caught entirely in the movements on stage. There, puppets whose movements are as delicate and gossamer as celestial beings dance for the entertainment of the crowd. The second gentleman is awestruck.
Scene Three. A public baths somewhere in Germany. We know the date – three years before the encounter in the park making it, probably, 1798. Or thereabouts. And, if our correspondent is the author himself, as we can imagine him being, as he claims to be, then he is twenty-one. He is there, at the public baths, nude as one tends to be at such establishments, with his companion, a man, a boy, of fifteen. The younger is stood before a mirror gazing at himself “the first traces of vanity” appearing on his youthful visage. We do not know their relation, but the intimacy of the scene, two nude and youthful boys coquettishly eyeing one another in a changing room before a mirror, is deepened by the knowledge that they have recently returned from their travels in France where our young companions saw a statue of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Two men, two boys, one twenty-one the other just fifteen, naked, posing. In his wistful reverie the first boy, the fifteen-year-old, naked as the day he was born, not, let’s remember, all that long ago, very recently in fact for this young boy of just fifteen, catches his reflection in the mirror as he dries his foot immediately casting him back to those joint travels through Paris, to that statue of that other young boy, the one with the thorn, and thus he is struck by the image of himself tenderly tending his foot and seeing reflected back a boy cast in marble pulling a thorn from his flesh. On he goes, attempting again the same movement but this time, and the next time, and the next time again, and every subsequent time, he fails. His knowledge has broken the spell. His light has dimmed. Experience has caught up with him, as it does, as it has to. “An invisible and incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures.” The boy, now a man, an adult, loses his charms, his attraction. His suitor exits stage left.
Scene four. Somewhere between Berlin and Russia at the estate of a Baltic noble. The noble has several sons. Some sons. More than one. The eldest of who knows how many is a passionate fencer. A real fencing nut. Our guest, man no.2, staying at the pleasure of the fencer’s father, is relaxing in his room when in charges the fencer, the fencer clutched tight to a rapier, bursting in sword in hand. By then rapiers had dropped from fashion; what our man with the swords is doing with such an old weapon we aren’t told. Why not a smaller modern fencing sword? A rapier, a foil, a sabre? Oh well. In bursts our dueller, our swashbuckling son of a Baltic noble, Son Number One of God knows how many such sword-wielding young lads, old fashioned rapier in hand and challenges man no.2, our dancer – the second man is a dancer, the man with the love of dancing puppets who is here en route to Russia is himself a dancer. Was a dancer? The duel begins and our dancer wins easily. The eager swordsman is no match for our nimble dancer. Then the unexpected: son no.1 brings forth a bear. A duelling bear. A bear who is a match for even the most nimble dancing fighter. The bear rises onto his hind legs and has for every thrust a parry. For every feint and trick the bear is a match. No, more than a match. Exhausted, man no.2 collapses. To the bear the spoils. Who could believe this tale? The man, man no.2, asks his companion man no.1 – still sat in the pitch dark, freezing cold Berlin night on that same park bench – whether he can believe such a tale: “"Absolutely", he says with joyful approval. "I'd believe it from a stranger, it's so probable. Why shouldn't I believe it from you?"
* * *
Who is our credulous hero? The author himself was also a fencer, although whether clashed with a bear is not recorded. His renown with the sword was well-known. At the age of 32 he was asked by a mutual friend whether he wouldn’t show a young lady the basics of the sport. It was in the military that our author, Heinrich von Kleist, learned to fence. He was just 14 when he entered the military, where he joined in the family tradition of seeing active service for the Royal Prussian Army, and later fighting against the Revolutionary French. His father, a Prussian Junker and just one of a long line of military officers, died early and had cast the family and young Heinrich into poverty. On joining up, Heinrich was just 14, a young boy with little education.
This young lad, soon to be a corporal of the Prussian Army, was by all accounts rather strange. He was sullen and melancholy in public, his speech effected by the impediment of a stutter, and he was given to fits of extreme embarrassment. It’s little wonder that he didn’t take to life in the forces. At the age of 21 after returning from the siege of Mayence to garrison life in Potsdam he asked for his release, promising never to ask for readmittance.
A couple of years later, in 1800, something strange occurs. After a few years of intense study in mathematics, science and philosophy, including a short period at a university, Kleist and a friend, as will become common for him over the next decade, decide to undertake a trip to Vienna. He was by then working for the Prussian civil service and had recently announced his apparently loveless engagement to Wilhelmine Zenge, the daughter of a neighbour and a young woman who he had been tutoring in German grammar. The circumstances of the trip are odd. He travelled under a pseudonym and with false papers, and a little before his trip he met with a Prussian minister. Once he and his companion set off, they quickly diverted from Vienna to the Bavarian city of Würzburg. What could have made them travel such? Much has been written about the reasons for the trip: all of which pure conjecture. Was he an industrial spy for the Prussian government? Perhaps he was gay and seeking some kind of cure? Others have thought that he underwent an operation for a sexual impediment of some kind – although what exactly remains a mystery. The latest in a long list of reasons is that he believed through his study in mathematics to have found a formula to break the Würzburg casinos and win his fortune.
What’s clear though is the picture we get of him through his many letters to his fiancé and his friends that he wrote along the way. He was, it is clear, a true believer in Enlightenment rationality. All that was to change after his “Kant crisis”.
* * *
Scene five. We’re back at the park. Two men, the same two men, still sat in the dark and the cold, gaze fixed to the floor.
"Now, my excellent friend," says chap no.2, "you are in possession of all you need to follow my argument.” What could draw together the grace of the dancing puppets, the naked boy in the public baths and a fencing bear? Here we reach the climax of this most extraordinary of essays.
“We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively.” The less thought; the closer to God. Must we then return to dumb nature, turn back the clock, to attain Godly grace once more? But history is a one-way street. There is no return for us, the fallen ones.
"Does that mean", says our friend in some bewilderment, "that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?"
"Of course", says his companion, "but that's the final chapter in the history of the world."
* * *
There’s a calm to this essay – almost preternaturally so. It’s odd then that just over a year later Kleist was to kill himself on the banks of the Kleiner Wannsee in Berlin. It was a death that mingled technology and human frailty, the most modern and that which forever stalks it.
At the age of 32 he was asked by a mutual friend whether he wouldn’t show a young lady the basics of the sport of fencing. That woman was Henriette Vogel, who over the next year Kleist was to become increasingly intimate with. So intimate in fact that, with cancer slowly engulfing Henriette, together they make a pact. Each wrote farewell letters and then travel from Berlin to Wannsee whereupon Kleist drew a pistol on Henriette shooting her dead before turning the gun on himself.
* * *
The text I have been quoting from his Kleist’s bizarre and wonderful “On the Marionette Theatre”, in a translation by the Welsh scholar of German literature Idris Parry. Few read Parry today, but his subtle and beautiful essays and translations deserve a wider readership. From 1963, Parry taught at the University of Manchester where one of his students was W.G. Sebald, who under his supervision wrote a dissertation on the expressionist dramatist Carl Sternheim. Sebald, nearly 40 years later, was to also meet his early death, again with that painful mixture of the mechanical and the medical, after he suffered a heart attack whilst driving.
In Parry’s words, Kleist, on reading Kant, “seems to have been inwardly overwhelmed”. What he was to learn from his Kant crisis was the ultimate unknowability of truth. We are, each of us, struggling against this unknowability. The world is riven by forces that we cannot control, that we may not even be able to understand. Kleist’s fiction, some of the strangest and most compelling of the Romantic era, is filled with natural disasters, ghostly presences, strange occurrences. Dancing puppets and fighting bears.
But there is no going back. The Garden is open only from the rear; the entrance is barred to us. How we get there we do not know but that's the final chapter in the history of the world.