From the mid-18th century until our own time, two distinct strands are discernible in German-language literature. On one side, there is the line from the poised neo-classicism of Goethe and Schiller to the self-consciously burgerlich solidity of Thomas Mann; on the other, the stream of frantic nightmare that runs, screaming, through Hoffmann and Buchner to Kafka and Thomas Bernhardt. The playwright, story-writer and essayist, Heinrich von Kleist, is firmly of the second order, and its greatest exemplar. If the mark of Goethe-Schiller-Mann is more or less acceptance of the world as it is found, that of Buchner-Kafka-Kleist is a sort of awestruck horror before the spectacle of reality. Kleist's own view of the splendour and ghastliness of being human is summed up in his description of man written in a letter in 1805: "Diese wunderbare Verknupfung eines Geistes mit einem Konvolut von Gedarmen und Eingeweiden" (This wonderful linking of mind to a convolution of intestines and entrails).
Kleist was born in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in 1777, the fifth child and eldest son of a family which had provided the Prussian army with a long line of generals. Young Heinrich was expected to follow family tradition and give himself to the military life; however, he had other ambitions. He entered a Guards regiment at Potsdam when he was 14, but resigned his commission eight years later to enter the university at Frankfurt. This led finally to a dreadful confrontation over his parents' dinner table on September 18th, 1811, when he was given to understand that he was now regarded as a worthless wet, unworthy of the aristocratic name of Kleist. That was probably the moment when he determined that he would commit suicide.
Two months later, in the garden of an inn overlooking the Wannsee near Potsdam, and in a state of high exaltation, in the company of Henriette Vogel, a married woman of his acquaintance who was suffering from cancer and was also keen to make an end of herself, he produced two pistols, first shot Henriette, and then himself.
When he died, he was barely 34, but in the decade or so of his creative life, he had produced seven plays, at least four of which are masterpieces, eight extraordinary stories - including "The Marquise of O", memorably filmed some years ago by Erich Rohmer - a number of mordantly witty anecdotes, which he published in the newspaper he had founded, the Berliner Abendblatter, some poetry, and a number of pieces on art, including the essay On the Puppet Theatre, which, though only a few pages long, is a profound and revolutionary meditation on aesthetics beside which, for instance, Schiller's On the Naive and Sentimental in Poetry seems hopelessly laboured.
In his works for the stage, Kleist's ambition was to meld classic Greek drama with the carnivalesque richness of Shakespeare to make a new kind of theatre, one that would express his dark and troubled conception of how the world really is. He set himself up to rival Goethe, the genius of the age, from whose brow, he swore, he would "rip the laurel wreath".
Goethe was somewhat unnerved by this solitary, excitable, fiercely ambitious young man, describing him as hysterical and "unnaturlich". Goethe produced Kleist's bitter, black comedy, The Broken Jug, in his theatre at Weimar, but the show was a disaster, something for which Kleist never forgave the great man. But then, Kleist's entire life was a series of disasters. The Oxford scholar Denys Dyer sums him up neatly:
"He was a mixture of the Prussian officer, with a keen sense of logic and order, and the non-conforming individualist, prepared to break with family and caste traditions; a Potsdam guard and a rootless genius; a Prussian civil servant and an erratic writer, now planning to till the soil as a small-holder in Switzerland, now seeking death in the English Channel as a member of Napoleon's invasion forces, hoping for the final overthrow of the French armies as he wandered over the battlefield of Aspern, and searching pathetically for paid employment in the Berlin ministries of the Prussian government in the final year of his existence."
There is also a touch of gruesome comedy to his misadventures. He was forever drawing up plans and schemes and programmes for himself; he had his "Lebensplan" and his "Ideenmagazin" the latter a card-index system of his ideas and inspirations. He fell in love and out again with tormented regularity. At one point he was arrested under suspicion of being a French spy. And then there was the mysterious, precipitate journey to Wurzburg that he undertook in 1800, telling his fiancee of the day, Wilhelmine von Zenge, that he was embarked on a course of action that would ensure her future happiness. There has been much speculation as to what he might have been up to; some scholars suggest he was suffering from phimosis, a hampering condition of the foreskin which would have required the surgeon's knife to put right. Poor Kleist!
It is hard to understand why Kleist's work is so little known, and so seldom performed, even in his native Germany. His plays are marvellously funny, wonderful, sparkling entertainments whose profundities are masked by Buster Keatonesque comic routines. In Amphitryon, perhaps his masterpiece, which I have adapted as God's Gift, the dialogue is by turns exalted, witty, broadly comic, scandalous, and heartbreaking. The play is at once a frantic comedy of errors, and an olympian meditation on identity, on authenticity and its opposite, on the baffling conundrums of "I and Thou". We laugh at the predicament of poor Percy Ashburningham, whose very self is usurped on the whim of a jaded deity, at the bafflement of his put-upon wife Minna, loved by a god, at the knockabout antics of the servant Souse and his faithful if shrewish Kitty - we laugh, but frequently our laughter ends in a gulp of compassion for these poor, deluded human beings and the failing gods who make them their playthings.
At the end, Kleist wrote to his beloved sister Ulrike declaring that all was up with him, that there was "no help for me on this earth", and that therefore he must leave it. The pistol shot that rang out over the Wannsee on that grey afternoon in November 1811 marked the extinction of one of the greatest artistic sensibilities Europe has produced.
God's Gift runs at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Great Denmark Street, October 12th-14th at 8 p.m.
