Whoever comes across a Goethe-Kleist juxtaposition in a book title might expect to find a sequel to the biographical conflicts and intertextual relations disentangled by Helmut Sembdner or Katharina Mommsen a few decades ago. Instead, the volume published by the Meiji University Germanist Michael Mandelartz places the two authors on a hermeneutic stage with the aim of pointing to the “conceptual unity of their work” and contrasting their respective concepts of subjectivity. Goethe's “Auffassung des Subjekts als Produkt der Natur und der historischen Entwicklung,” seen as a continuation of Enlightenment philosophy, is posited against Kleist's “extreme Theorie des Subjekts,” placed in the context of Kant's and Fichte's transcendental philosophy of the subject (9–11).

Mandelartz illustrates his thesis with a collection of articles and book chapters that, with the exception of the Michael Kohlhaas and Penthesilea essays, have been previously published as stand-alone essays. His volume is organized in three sections, each devoted to one author, and each chapter is focused on a single work: Novalis's Klingsohrs Märchen; Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater, Der zerbrochne Krug, Michael Kohlhaas, Penthesilea, and Der Findling; and Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Zur Farbenlehre, Harzreise im Winter, Iphigenie auf Tauris, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Pandora, and Novelle. Despite the high scholarly quality of many of the individual essays, the heterogeneous origin of the parts results in a lack of conceptual coherence of the whole.

Framed as a response to postmodern subject theory, the author intends to show a conceptual unity between Goethe's literary and scientific production. Such a unity is most clearly demonstrated in the author's juxtaposition of Goethe's geological fragments Granit I/II and his interpretation of Harzreise im Winter, Pandora, and Novelle, where, in contrast to Kant's theory of the sublime as a strengthening of the self, mountaintop experiences lead to either the dissolution, the symbolic surrender, or the Steigerung of the self into nature. While only marginally related to the central thesis of the volume, Mandelartz's chapter on the scientific methodology of Goethe's color theory and his essay on architecture as art in Die Wahlverwandtschaften stand out as original additions to the voluminous scholarship on these works.

The Kleist essays trace how the reception of his works was influenced by Fichte's transcendental and moral philosophy as laid out in his Wissenschaftslehre, Grundlage des Naturrechts, Bestimmung des Menschen, and Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters.