Of All Kleist’S Stories, the functioning of the contract in form as well as substance is at its most conspicuous in “Michael Kohlhaas.” For one thing, the story takes the question of the individual’s relationship to his society for its subject matter. This relationship, conceived in legal terms, is encapsulated in an important passage from the famous Luther scene: “Verstoßen, antwortete Kohlhaas, indem er die Hand zusammendrückte, nenne ich den, dem der Schutz der Gesetze versagt ist!” (2:45) Legal protection, then, is what Kohlhaas receives in exchange for his oath of fealty to the state. His relationship to the state is therefore not conceived of in feudal terms, where a privileged aristocracy or princedom dictates rules and rights to a submissive subject, but in contractual terms, where, in the words of Rousseau, the “social treaty has the preservation of the contracting parties as its end” (SC, 64). The individual thus embraces a general covenant with a sovereign power, guaranteeing him goods and freedoms. His situation as a result of the social contract is preferable to that state of natural law that had prevailed before, as Rousseau goes on to point out:

The idea of the contract thus characterizes the protagonist’s understanding of his relationship with society. Beyond this, that “die Form des ‘Vertrags’ wird nicht zufällig im Michael Kohlhaas ständig thematisiert,” indicates that the reiteration of the theme of the contract — and here we again refer to Stephens’s catalog of ninety references to legal documents in this story alone — may in fact suggest that the contract has a role to play within the formal composition of the narrative as well. I have also argued that the contract possesses an aesthetic dimension, that is, it also stands as an aesthetic document and medium between poet and reader. The poet-reader relationship is consequently governed by contractual considerations related chiefly to the question of the credibility of the narrative.