Insite

Homburg dramaturg Neil Baldwin chronicles his inquiry into the life and writings of Heinrich von Kleist, in this second installment of excerpts from Neil’s production journal. 

Nov. 13:  Jorge [director Jorge Cacheiro] asked me to find “texts” from the Kleist play [The Prince of Homburg] and from his letters, as well as from Christa Wolf’s novel No Place on Earth. We spent a hurried fifteen minutes in my office talking about Kafka (The Trial), Kant (dialectic), Wagner (bombastic music), and other German cultural matters of mutual interest. 

Nov. 15:  Woke up today thinking about the endless “journeying” of  Kleist—his peripatetic, obligatory, Romantic wanderjahr throughout continental Europe, all while resolving to be a writer; yet, when you get down to it, his productive period really only spans five years. Everywhere he went, Kleist found it difficult to remain focused, and there is still debate to this day about what he actually did do in some of the places he went (i.e., was he a spy…or some such). 

Nov. 16:  E-mail to Jorge: “just so we are on the same page—I am referencing the Kleist Selected Writings, superbly edited by David Constantine. I also ordered another book of letters and essays (edited by Philip B. Miller) called An Abyss Deep Enough—will send the particulars soon. The Constantine preface is brilliant & I urge you to read it & his translation of the play is gorgeous. 

The letters here are so aphoristic as to defy excerpting—you cannot go wrong with any of them on pp. 416–427—they are all about the tensions between controlling oneself from within and existing as if a marionette worked by fate; the indecisiveness of hovering between truth and falsity and not being able to discern which is which; the infinite number of ways that doubt invades our every thought. Talk of death is constant. I read someplace—perhaps you have heard this—that for the last decade of his life Kleist asked several people to commit suicide with him.” 

Heinrich von Kleist

Nov. 20:  Act I—Homburg as Hamlet? The dilatory, preoccupied, abstracted, “dreaming” Prince, alone…observed from a distance by concerned friends who speculate about his “condition”… who seems “ill” and needs a doctor…yet how much of his behavior is feigned and how much “real?”…Is he a “madman” as Hohenzollern says?  Emotionally confused about a young woman, Natalie (who, by the way, was an ahistorical construct of the author)…as she runs away from him even as she appreciates his attentions…. 

Nov. 22:  Beginning with the earliest teenage and early 20s letters in An Abyss Deep Enough, you can see from the outset the fissures in Kleist’s “life plan”—the resolution (in writing) to make something of himself and the reality that he does not know what to make of life, let alone of himself. He is constantly, poignantly taking a firm stand in the obligatory situations of his life and then in the next breath existentially questioning these positions. This omnipresent tug of war between his assurances and resolutions and the simultaneous questioning of the resolutions…it will be interesting to see how that is conveyed theatrically. 

Nov. 23:  Another theme that moves to the surface as I go through the early letters, especially to Kleist’s beloved but distanced Wilhelmine, worshipped more often than not from afar, is this recurrent promise to “one day explain why”…. It’s as if he holds her, and the world, at arm’s length in order to achieve experience….  Nature was—is, in Kleist’s descriptions—”out there” for the sole purpose of putting him into a position to rhapsodize about it. 

Wilhelmine von Zenge

Nov. 24:  I have finished the letters up to the time Kleist goes to Paris and the imminent “break” with Wilhelmine. I put that word in quotes because the relationship is so epistolary as to be verging on the abstract…. He persists in describing an ideal domestic situation “with” Wilhelmine, in a house with a family, and yet he is compelled to keep on the undefined path of his personal bildung, to her exclusion, until he has “found” whatever it is he is looking for so that he will be “ready” for her. What I would give to see her side of the correspondence, where I am sure I would find repressed suffering and a desire to please that eventually would have to become worn out. 

Nov. 29:  Act II—Homburg is hardly ever “in the moment.” He may be onstage, but he is either distracted, thinking, writing, dreaming (as the stage directions make clear), or talking (as he does to Natalie) about what he will do and how he will act. In Kleist’s letters to Wilhelmine he speaks similarly to her about the generalized hypothesis of their future imagined life together. So often in the play I feel as if the human present is a pretense, a cover for what is going on within Homburg’s psyche. In dramatic terms, how will this illusion be conveyed? 

Nov. 30/Dec. 1:  Act III—The impassioned speech revealing Homburg’s idealization of the family and panicked aversion to death harbors added irony when you realize it was written in the months leading up to Kleist’s suicide…. It’s weird to be reading (and re-reading) the text right now in a conventional and close manner with the front of my mind and then, at the same time, when I take a pause, to think about how this very same elegant text is going to be truncated, cut, manipulated, rearranged. Am I more conservative in my regard for the (sacred) text than I thought? 

Dec. 7:  From the “Suicide Letters” [in An Abyss Deep Enough]: 

p. 204—the entire letter to Henriette Vogel, his designated suicide companion…. What is this theme of being compelled to have someone commit suicide with him?  Suicide as a social/joint action. This is fascinating. 

p. 206—“Do you not recall…Adieu.” It is interesting that, in the autopsy report, they refer to the “not-quite fully loaded pistol,” which resulted in the bullet lodging in Kleist’s brain and not emerging out the back of the skull. Ambivalence? Yet the bodies were found facing each other in a sitting position in a declivity in the earth with several guns, which implies enhanced preparation in the event one of them did not fire effectively. Even in death, Kleist mystifies me… 

Dec. 20/21:  The denouement of The Prince of Homburg is a constantly vacillating meditation on life, love, and death. We are accustomed to having faith that love conquers all, but Kleist subverts this expectation by, at the very conclusion, placing the suspicion into our minds that none of the action really “happened” in the first place. I see now what Jorge meant by telling us that “the play runs away from him [Kleist].” 

Dec. 24:  E-mail from Jorge: “…indeed we are going toward a work that is not just about the fascinating content that is Prince of Homburg—but is also about art and the artist making it.” 

Neil Baldwin, Ph.D., cultural historian and author, is Distinguished Visiting Professor in MSU’s Department of Theatre and Dance. His Web site is neilbaldwinbooks.com.