As a German, I consider Kleist one of my favorite authors. If Goethe’s writing represents the language at its most beautiful, Kleist’s German is a German that i

As a German, I consider Kleist one of my favorite authors. If Goethe’s writing represents the language at its most beautiful, Kleist’s German is a German that is allowed to follow its natural tendencies to the bitter end: as the article puts it, it is a “dispassionate accounting”, but it is extremely powerful. When I read the scene in which Michael Kohlhaas and his men storm the bad guy’s castle for the first time, I felt like I was in a Tarantino movie. I highly recommend watching his plays if you can, although I can’t judge any translations. I had the good fortune of seeing Johan Simons’ production of Penthesilea, which, being a two-person show, follows the play only loosely, but it was incredible. “Kleist’s voice is an absolute singularity. Historicizing it won’t do – even in his own time noone wrote like him.” —Thomas Mann