Schriften zur Ästhetik

Kleist never wrote a poetics. What he thought about art is found in letters, newspaper articles, anecdotes and epigrams: in texts written in passing – for the Berliner Abendblätter, for Phöbus, for his sister, his fiancée and his friends. Together they amount to an aesthetics without equal. It deals with speech that first produces thought, with the grace of the marionette that has no consciousness, with a painting before which one stands as if one's eyelids had been cut away, and with a language that cannot »die Seele nicht malen«.

This volume collects 93 texts from the years 1800 to 1811, arranged by theme: thinking and writing, education and consciousness, history and painting, narration and probability, theatre, literature and music, the two journals, epigrams. Alongside the famous essays »Über das Marionettentheater« and »Über die allmählige Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden« stand the theatre polemics against Iffland, the correspondence with Goethe, the announcements and declarations of Kleist the newspaperman, and the letters in which he renders account of his own failure. A prelude in letters leads into the years of the Kant crisis, when Kleist gave up science and resolved to become a writer.