Heinrich von Kleist

Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) was born into a Prussian officer's family in Frankfurt an der Oder. A soldier at fifteen, he resigned his commission in 1799 and began university studies, which he abandoned after the Kant crisis of 1801. Years of travel and failure followed: in Paris and Switzerland he worked on the tragedy Robert Guiskard, whose manuscript he burned in 1803. In 1808, with Adam Müller, he published the journal Phöbus in Dresden; in 1810/11, in Berlin, the Berliner Abendblätter, the city's first daily newspaper. His dramas – Der zerbrochne Krug, Penthesilea, Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg – and stories such as Michael Kohlhaas and Die Marquise von O… found little recognition in his lifetime. On 21 November 1811 Kleist took his own life at the Kleiner Wannsee near Berlin.

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