Few Authors Have Written with more passionate intensity about a philosopher or a philosophy than Heinrich von Kleist. For the purposes of comparison, one might think of the indignant responses to the philosophy of Fichte that abound in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Thomas Mann’s Schopenhauer passages in Buddenbrooks, or Robert Musil’s open encounter with the thought of Nietzsche on the pages of his masterpiece Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Kleist’s reaction to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant amounts to far less than these considered responses, yet at the same time far more: his early letters reveal that his entire worldview was thrown over as a result of his encounter with Kant’s thinking; thereafter, direct references to Kant in the letters are sparse, and his responses to Kant in his plays, stories, and essays become the subject of conjecture. Without further testimony to the impact of Kant’s philosophy on Kleist’s thinking and outlook, it becomes possible to deny the relevance of Kant for Kleist’s work altogether. This approach to Kleist’s oeuvre has adherents, some of them eminent.

Instead of discounting influence, I have chosen the less certain, but potentially far more fruitful, approach of assuming a general level of influence of Kant’s philosophy on Heinrich von Kleist and attempting to demonstrate it in a variety of ways. This involves opening up Kleist’s fiction to a range of positions and problems discussed in the philosophy of the day. While this approach also has adherents, among them Ludwig Muth, Bernhard Greiner, and, most recently, James Phillips, there are signs of late that the question of Kant’s impact on Kleist’s worldview has stalled in Kleist scholarship, perhaps for want of any hard evidence that would continue to sustain it. My aim with this volume is to maintain interest in the question of Kleist’s Kant reception, and, just as important, draw attention to the complex dialogue between philosophy and literature of which Kleist’s encounter with Kant provides a conspicuous example.

The essays in this volume, with two exceptions (the introduction and the last chapter), have been drawn from previously published material. I have reworked this material to a considerable extent for present purposes, particularly in view of recent philosophical discussion, but I have not found cause to revise any of the substantive arguments.