SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH, in a letter of August 1811, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) wrote to his cousin Marie von Kleist (1761–1831) of his struggle to delineate imagination and reality: “Wirklich, in einem so besondern Fall ist noch vielleicht kein Dichter gewesen” (Truly, perhaps no poet has ever been in such an unusual situation as I am). In the twentieth century, this assessment found increasing agreement, beginning with literary historian Adolf Bartels's 1902 declaration that Kleist was a “homo sui generis” (human being of his own species) and corroborated in Thomas Mann's (1875–1955) 1954 declaration that be it as dramatist, prose author, or personality, “er war einer der größten, kühnsten, höchstgreifenden Dichter deutscher Sprache, ein Dramatiker sondergleichen,— überhaupt sondergleichen, auch als Prosaist, als Erzähler,—völlig einmalig, aus aller Hergebrachtheit und Ordnung fallend, radikal in der Hingabe an seine exzentrischen Stoffe bis zur Tollheit, bis zur Hysterie.” His contemporaries, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) to Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), to some extent agreed with Kleist's self-assessment. According to Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854), Goethe found Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1805–10) as alienating as he had found his Penthesilea (1808): “Es gehöre ein großer Geist des Widerspruches dazu, um einen so einzelnen Fall mit so durchgeführter, gründlicher Hypochondrie im Wettlaufe geltend zu machen.” In his letter to the brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) of November 2, 1810, Brentano describes Kleist with an all but unprecedented combination of contradictory adjectives: “Der Phöbus Kleist, ein sehr kurioser, guter, grober, bornirter, dummer, eigensinniger, mit langsamem Konsequenztalent herrlich ausgerüsteter Mensch.” Kleist and his unusual works, like the metamorphic period he experienced, are, of course, not literally sui generis phenomena; on the contrary, as Heraclitus described it some 2,300 years before Kleist's birth, change is constancy, and, as Tim Mehigan wrote in 2000, Kleist's works demonstrate a “complex dialogue with the Enlightenment”; 200 years after Kleist's death, Christoph Zeller concluded that Kleist was very much a “child of his time.”

THE DEGREE TO WHICH the novellas of María de Zayas y Sotomayor (ca. 1590–1661) informed the style and content of the prose works of Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) has not been previously investigated. Although there is no direct indication in Kleist's letters that he was familiar with her works, due to the prominence of Zayas's translators Sophie Mereau (1770–1806) and Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) on the Berlin literary scene there can be little doubt that Kleist was aware of their German translations of Zayas's novellas, published in 1804 and 1806. As is demonstrated below, Kleist was not merely aware of the translations; in fact, his prose works draw heavily on the thematic and stylistic repertoires of the Mereau-Brentano translations of Zayas's novellas. The validity of studies on the metatextual presence of seventeenthcentury Spanish texts in Kleist's works, for example, those by Cervantes (1547–1616) and Calderón (1600–1681) as well as the presence of Rousseau (1712–1778), C. M. Wieland (1733–1813), and Schiller (1759–1805), among others, has long been recognized. A close reading of select Mereau-Brentano translations of Zayas's texts demonstrates a striking paradigmatic presence in a series of transtextual relationships to the works of Kleist. The following is intended as a comprehensive introduction to what is no doubt a more complicated topic.

Kleist, Translation-Adaptation, and María de Zayas

Kleist—for all his originality—was a serial adapter and recycler of phrases and motifs he stylized into what Thomas Mann (1875–1955) called “exzentrisch[e] Stoffe bis zur Tollheit, bis zur Hysterie” (eccentric plots bordering on madness and hysteria), leading Mann to declare Kleist and his works “überhaupt sondergleichen” (indeed without equal) and “völlig einmalig” (utterly unique). Distinctive plots in Kleist's prose works include, for example, tales of societal crisis, sexual violence, military occupation, usurpation, vengeance, deception, and ghost-hunting; often informed by episodic motives including incest, murder, disguise, mistaken identity, and cross-dressing; all of these punctuated by devices such as fainting, falling, and failure to comprehend or communicate. Important elements of Kleist's style include the employment of eccentric variations of punctuation and conjunction traditions, variations that he made iconic through repetition, as he did with radically hypotactic sentence structures and distinctive uses of words and phrases that to date ring unmistakably Kleistian.

THE SCHOLARLY, ARTISTIC, and pop-journalistic tendency to treat Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) as a unicum of the “Sattelzeit” (bridge period) between Enlightenment and Modernity, and thus estrange him from his progressive artistic and philosophical contexts, has obscured his dialogic engagement with paradigmatic source texts that would otherwise warrant serious attention. A significant case in point is the relative scholarly silence regarding the description of the jug in Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug, 1802–1806/1811), which Kleist began writing less than two years after the publication of Friedrich Schiller's (1759–1805) Wallenstein (1799–1800) and less than two years after Kleist suggested in a letter to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge (1780–1852) of January 11 and 12, 1801 that Schiller's lengthy dramatrilogy should not merely be read but memorized. The fact that the striking metaphorical and functional parallels between the descriptions of Schiller's Bohemian cup in Wallenstein and Kleist's broken jug are not mentioned in any Kleist or Schiller edition is a symptom of a scholarly divide regarding the awareness of the aesthetic and political relationship between the two authors and the two plays that has significant consequences for the metaphorical integrity and political coherence of Kleist's dark comedy. This divide is perhaps foremost a function also of the lack of awareness of Kleist's admiration for Schiller, which—with some prominent exceptions, among them Claudia Benthien's recent essay—is evident in the paucity of scholarship on Kleist's relationship to Schiller in his letters and works, and in the self-evident parallels and only relatively recent divergence in their reception histories. For all of their biographical differences—Schiller grew up as a feudal subject and the poor child of an army captain, while Kleist's death ended a line of Prussian nobility marked by distinguished military service—and the differences in their literary careers—Schiller was a canonical author by his mid-twenties while Kleist only became one almost a century after his death—the similarities between their dramatic and prose works resulted in intersecting reception trends into the post-World War II era in Germany.

The Enlightenment took enormous interest in a wide variety of religious topics: the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of revelation, ecclesiastical authority, the status of scripture, religious tolerance, and immortality. This last issue is particularly important as one of the essential components, along with the existence of a moral God, of a “natural” theology that could be fully derived or endorsed by reason. Furthermore, reflection on immortality plays directly into the urgent discussions in the eighteenth century about autonomy, freedom, and progress; the way one envisions a hereafter profoundly reflects and legitimates the way one envisions life in the present. This fluidity between an understanding of the here and the hereafter is perfectly captured in Johann Joachim Spalding's extremely influential Bestimmung des Menschen (1748; The Vocation of Man), which envisions immortality as a process of ever increasing rational pleasure and self-perfection—goals not at all unfamiliar to the mortals of the Enlightenment.

Johann Gottfried Herder is a central and in some ways transitional voice in this public discussion of man's immortal Bestimmung. In the early 1769 letters to Mendelssohn he espoused a model of nonprogressive palingenesis, in which the soul is endlessly reborn within the same class of being without undergoing any overarching development. There is, in short, no personal, angelic afterlife. Compared to the essentially Christian afterlife of the rationalist Popularphilosophen of Herder's day, this position was quite austere.

“Classicism” and “secular humanism” seems an obvious combination: Goethe, the great pagan, substituted a generalized ethic of humanity (taken in its broadest possible religio-ethical and aesthetic sense) as the social glue that replaced the function of sectarian religion in post-Enlightenment secularized Europe. He offered a heightened version of Enlightenment culture and reason that obviated the need for religion. Through World War I his name alone evoked an entire system of ethics, aesthetics, and even epistemology among writers as disparate as Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, Hugo von Hofmannsthal; and scholars such as the psychoanalytic generation, Hannah Arendt, Norbert Elias, Oswald Spengler; and philosophers such as Benedetto Croce and José Ortega y Gasset. My subtitle reveals the underlying schism— “sanctification” is a religious term; Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), a hangover of the particularly secular and disrespectful Enlightenment associated with the French Revolution; and the “Novelle,” a charming, respectable, Biedermeier idyll. The Goethe cult that substituted German classicism for religion was, for better or worse, not interested in the Goethe of the 1820s, except for his conversations with Eckermann; “the late Goethe,” or, as I would have it, “the Biedermeier Goethe,” offers, however, a more mature, richer classicism, indeed a sanctified classicism.

The Revolutionary Rhizome

All eyes, it would seem, are on Spinoza at the moment. Much of the credit for this remarkable renaissance is due to Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two books on Spinoza, and then went even further in his best-selling manifesto What Is Philosophy?, anointing Spinoza both the “prince” and the “Christ” of philosophy. And Deleuze is hardly alone in his attentions. Spinoza now looms large in our understanding of the entire Age of Goethe. The controversy over Spinoza still figures as a minor flap in Lewis White Beck's classic history, Early German Philosophy; but it has become the defining intellectual controversy of the whole age since the publication of Frederick Beiser's influential study The Fate of Reason in 1987. Further, over the past decade, the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel has published three massive tomes asserting that, basically, every significant thinker of the Enlightenment was a closet Spinozist. Skepticism may be in order: on Wall Street, this latest development would be read as a “contrary indicator,” signaling a market top. But the centrality of the Spinozastreit (Spinoza controversy) clearly means that we have to understand both the extent and the import of Spinoza's influence on the Age of Goethe. And the centrality of Spinoza to contemporary discourse is beyond doubt; somehow, he figures in everyone's equations.

When it comes to religion, Goethe's reputation is anything but spotless. Heinrich Heine famously referred to Goethe as “der große Heide” (the great heathen). August Wilhelm Schlegel took this one step further when he called Goethe “einen zum Islam bekehrten Heiden” (a heathen who converted to Islam). Wolfgang Frühwald points out that in an altar painting by Konrad Eberhard for the St. Clara Hospital in Basel, Goethe is grouped with the heathens who cannot be converted by St. Paul. Similarly, Prince Metternich opposed the creation of a Goethe monument because of Goethe's spotty record on religion, declaring that we should not “dem Andenken eines Mannes zu große Ehre … erweisen, der ersichtlich seines religiösen Bekenntnisses nicht ohne Anstoß gewesen sei” (pay too much tribute to the memory of a man whose religious creed was not inoffensive). Finally, Romano Guardini, in a letter to Ernst Beutler, summed it up when he declared that Goethe had done more harm to Christianity than even Nietzsche (Perels 28).

Though these claims are surely inflated, they are not wholly unfounded. In the following, I will provide a brief overview over Goethe's stance on religion. I then contrast Goethe's views with those introduced in Kant's “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft” (1793; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). Here, I pay particular attention to the role both thinkers assign to the concepts of sensuality and the body.

By 1788, Friedrich schiller (1759-1805) could look back on nearly a decade of blasphemous production regarding prophets, priests, and organized religion. In 1789, after several years of assaulting the negative social and political functions of Jesus Christ and Christianity, Schiller, then a professor of history, turned his attention to the Hebrew prophet Moses in the lecture “Die Sendung Moses” (The Mission of Moses or The Legation of Moses), delivered at the University of Jena in the summer of 1789 and published in Schiller's journal Thalia in 1790. In light of recent charges of blasphemy (and—in an insightless or disingenuous smear attempt—polytheism) inspired by his poem “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (The Gods of Ancient Greece) in 1788, Schiller's Moses essay comprises both a response to the charges and an articulation of his earlier criticisms of religion. In the Moses essay, Schiller moves beyond the concerns of the political misuses of and intellectual detours posed by Christianity in contemporary European states to an explanation of the original paradigmatic political purposes of religion and the initial civilizing effect of monotheism as a step toward a constitution based on reason for all humankind.

In chapter 10 of The Romantic Imperative, “Religion and Politics in Frühromantik,” Frederick Beiser argues for the significance of Herder in the crucial process of reinterpreting Spinoza at the end of the eighteenth century in Germany. Specifically, Herder's 1787 Gott: Einige Gespräche (God: Some Dialogues) introduced a “vitalistic” reading of Spinoza and “self-consciously fuse[d] him with his great metaphysical contemporary: Leibniz.” However, besides another brief mention of Herder's belief in “combining Spinoza's monism and naturalism with Leibniz's vitalism” (182), Leibniz falls out of Beiser's story. In Beiser's earlier Fate of Reason Leibniz suffers the same fate, disappearing in the excellent and gripping tale of the so-called Pantheism controversy around Spinoza. Given the weight of Beiser's account, this essay undertakes what many a novel has done with, say, Jane Austen or Gone with the Wind, namely, a shift in focus onto a minor or at least somewhat neglected character in order to let Leibniz emerge from the immense shadow cast by Spinoza.