Wohin denn Kleist? Stilisierung, Chiffrierung und Wahrhaftigkeit eines Versuchs der Selbstbewahrung

Recent research, which is in itself rather polyphonic, generally tends towards the consensus that Kleist is an exceptional phenomenon in how he anticipates postmodern self-understanding, an author who radically breaks with all traditions of previous ways of thinking, world views and art. And indeed, in his restless search, Kleist appears as a figure emblematic for a time that has become as unstable as ours, a search that, as is well known, ended in suicide. The reconstruction of the stages of his biographical and artistic path outlined in this essay attempts to show that Kleist, despite all the radicalism of his approach, is in fact opposed to the concepts of autonomy and infinity of absolute idealism and all the aesthetics of Romantic universal poetry, moving nevertheless, and with tremendous consistency and unsparing realism, quite in the spirit of Kantian ethics and the Aristotelian aesthetics of effect and reacting with a counter-programme mainly based on a particular concept of trust, truthfulness and authenticity. Through the counterfactual design of interpersonal relationships and communication, Kleist thus designs existential and poetological strategies that, while ultimately remaining probably utopian in character, and perhaps even failing, are at least hypothetically capable of breaking through the paralyzing power of even the most disastrous events and coincidences in individual and global history.