
Through Clenched Teeth: The cold, frenzied genius of Kleist - lermontov
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/04/through-clenched-teeth-michael-kohlhaas-heinrich-von-kleist
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einpoklum
The clenched teeth metaphor is apt. Michael Kohlhaas is a character I found
myself personally identifying with - in a mixture of envy, doom and fear. And
von Kleist is able to make compelling arguments, at the same time and in the
same prose, for him being both painfully right and painfully wrong in his
choices.

But read the actual story before reading this piece, IMHO.

Also note that the full text of a different (older?) translation is available
online, e.g. here:

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Michael_Kohlhaas](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Michael_Kohlhaas)

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pwdisswordfish2
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

