Weeks pass, Kleist has destroyed one work, two, three works. He wants the highest mastery, good, good. What’s that? Not sure? Tear it up. Something new, wilder, more beautiful. He begins The Battle of Sempach, in the center of it the figure of Leopold of Austria, whose strange fate attracts him. Meanwhile, he remembers his Robert Guiscard. He wants him to be splendid. The good fortune to be a sensibly balanced man with simple feelings he sees burst into fragments, crash and rattle like boulders collapsing down the landslip of his life. He helps him nevertheless, now he is resolute. He wants to abandon himself to the entire catastrophe of being a poet: the best thing is for me to be destroyed as quickly as possible.
What he writes makes him grimace: his creations miscarry. Toward autumn he is taken ill. He is amazed at the gentleness which now comes over him. His sister travels to Thun to bring him home. There are deep furrows in his cheeks. His face has the expression and coloring of a man whose soul has been eaten away. His eyes are more lifeless than the eyebrows over them. His hair hangs clotted in thick pointed hanks over his temples, which are contorted by all the thoughts which he imagines have dragged him into filthy pits and into hells. The verses that resound in his brain seem to him like the croakings of ravens; he would like to eradicate his memory. He would like to shed his life; but first he wants to shatter the shells of life. His fury rages at the pitch of his agony, his scorn at the pitch of his misery. My dear, what is the matter, his sister embraces him. Nothing, nothing. That was the ultimate wrong, that he should have to say what was wrong with him. On the floor of his room lie his manuscripts, like children horribly forsaken by father and mother. He lays his hand in his sister’s, and is content to look at her, long, and in silence. Already it is the vacant gaze of a skull, and the girl shudders.
Then they leave. The country girl who has kept house for Kleist says goodbye. It is a bright autumn morning, the coach rolls over bridges, past people, through roughly plastered lanes, people look out of windows, overhead is the sky, under trees lies yellowish foliage, everything is clean, autumnal, what else? And the coachman has his pipe in his mouth. All is as ever it was. Kleist sits dejected in a corner of the coach. The towers of the castle of Thun vanish behind a hill. Later, far in the distance, Kleist’s sister can see once more the beautiful lake. It is already quite chilly. Country houses appear. Well, well, such grand estates in such mountainous country? On and on. Everything flies past as you look to the side and drops behind, everything dances, circles, vanishes. Much is already hidden under the autumn’s veil, and everything is a little golden in the little sunlight which pierces the clouds. Such gold, how it shimmers there, still to be found only in the dirt. Hills, scarps, valleys, churches, villages, people staring, children, trees, wind, clouds, stuff and nonsense — is all this anything special? Isn’t it all rubbish, quotidian stuff? Kleist sees nothing. He is dreaming of clouds and of images and slightly of kind, comforting, caressing human hands. How do you feel? asks his sister. Kleist’s mouth puckers, and he would like to give her a little smile. He succeeds, but with an effort. It is as if he has a block of stone to lift from his mouth before he can smile.
His sister cautiously plucks up the courage to speak of his taking on some practical activity soon. He nods, he is himself of the same opinion. Music and radiant shafts of light flicker about his senses. As a matter of fact, if he admits it quite frankly to himself, he feels quite well now; in pain, but well at the same time. Something hurts him, yes, really, quite correct, but not in the chest, not in the lungs either, or in the head, what? Nowhere at all? Well, not quite, a little, somewhere so that one cannot quite precisely tell where it is. Which means: it’s nothing to speak of. He says something, and then come moments when he is outright happy as a child, and then of course the girl makes a rather severe, punitive face, just to show him a little how very strangely he does fool around with his life. The girl is a Kleist and has enjoyed an education, exactly what her brother has wanted to throw overboard. At heart she is naturally glad that he is feeling better. On and on, well well, what a journey it is. But finally one has to let it go, this stagecoach, and last of all one can permit oneself the observation that on the front of the villa where Kleist lived there hangs a marble plaque which indicates who lived and worked there. Travelers who intend to tour the Alps can read it, the children of Thun read it and spell it out, letter by letter, and then look questioning into each other’s eyes. A Jew can read it, a Christian too, if he has the time and if his train is not leaving that very instant, a Turk, a swallow, insofar as she is interested, I also, I can read it again if I like. Thun stands at the entrance to the Bernese Oberland and is visited every year by thousands of foreigners. I know the region a little perhaps, because I worked as a clerk in a brewery there. The region is considerably more beautiful than I have been able to describe here, the lake is twice as blue, the sky three times as beautiful. Thun had a trade fair, I cannot say exactly but I think four years ago.
[1913]
The Job Application
ESTEEMED GENTLEMEN,
I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? — I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life’s boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am. — I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience,