[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

book review:

Trials and Tribunals in the Dramas of Heinrich von Kleist

by Kim Fordham

reviewed by John T. Hamilton, Harvard University

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 John T. Hamilton and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

The English phrase “courtroom drama” immediately points to the close and more or less self-evident similarity between legal proceedings and theatrical performances. Accordingly, among literary scholars, the work of playwrights has often been likened to trials of all sorts, not simply to judicial procedures but also to varying species of public disputes, including the practice of dueling. The comparisons could be based on a host of factors, which may or may not be interrelated. To begin, the appeal to a higher authority—be it the judge’s sentence upon the accused or the divine decree that directs the result of a duel—finds a ready analogy in the audience members, who essentially decide on the play’s action. Consequently, the effect of the trial’s conclusion, the pleasure or displeasure in its final position, mirrors the audience’s feelings toward the outcome of the protagonists, either their relief that justice or truth has been served or their distraught sense that these ideals, however conceived, have failed to be realized. If we turn to anthropological fields, say to the area of comparative religion, we would discover that the ancient theater and the tribunal share the common trappings of and appear to have a common source in ritual and ceremony. So close is the relation between drama and trials that it could lead thinkers like Rousseau to despair. In his Letter to M. D’Alembert, following arguments that reach back to Tertullian and Augustine, Rousseau frets over the theater, which he regards as posing a grave threat to the functioning of the city—a dangerous supplement that stands to replace participation in public hearings with the distracting pleasure of a merely entertaining spectacle. Taken together, the correspondences between theatrical and courtroom drama exert a particularly strong— and, in Rousseau’s view, morally dubious—fascination upon members of communities throughout the history of the West.

Kim Fordham’s accomplished study on the dramas of Heinrich von Kleist is explicitly motivated by this fascination, by the cultural compulsion to watch, to see what happens. For Fordham, who does not cite Rousseau, this fascination is associated with a basic human need to satisfy one’s desire for truth and justice. Yet, as Fordham points out, this fascination is not simply for the revelation of truth but rather is attracted to sheer power; and it is this enthrallment to power that underlies Kleist’s engagement with judicial affairs. What Kleist’s dramas consistently demonstrate is that the pursuit of justice is grounded more in expediency than in morality: it betrays an inclination to employ the mechanism of justice “as an instrument of control and degradation” (22). A universal or absolute sense of what is just is thereby made relative, trumped by self-interest and manipulated by those who are in a position to produce verdicts. Although it is contestable whether all drama rests on this fascination with the powerful establishment of particular, subjective order implicit in every trial, Fordham’s main argument—that such a fascination lies at the root of Kleist’s works for theater—constitutes an utterly convincing case. Indeed, what Kleist’s dramas repeatedly display is that any search for a purely objective, non-relative sense of justice is condemned to fail.

Fordham’s book proceeds with brief chapters on each of Kleist’s major plays. Comprehensive interpretations are decidedly not the goal of these readings; rather the focus remains on key moments that may be described as judiciary. Great emphasis is placed throughout on the ancient Greek term for “justice,” dikê, which denotes the restoration of balance, order, or security. In this way, with crime taken as anything that disrupts order, Fordham is able to press the judicial analogy well beyond instances that deal with explicit trials or tribunals. For example, in the first chapter, on Die Familie Schroffenstein, Fordham notes that the play contains “no formal trial” but then goes on to assert that “the characters use typical courtroom tactics to achieve their goals” (25). Similarly, in her reading of Penthesilea, which also lacks what is commonly referred to as a trial, the high priestess’s accusation of the Amazon is understood as “a legal proceeding aimed at maintaining social stability” (87). One might well complain that by thus regarding all problems of guilt, transgression, and disruption as judicial, the stage-courtroom analogy becomes far too general to be of any hermeneutic worth. Yet, Fordham’s investigations of Kleist’s other plays—Der zerbrochne Krug, Amphitryon, Das Käthchen von Heibronn, Die Hermannsschlacht, and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, which all provide explicit representations of trials—persuasively show that problems of legality and justice stand very much at the fore of Kleist’s imagination.

The analyses are on the whole text-immanent, limiting themselves to the plays, with very rare allusion to Kleist’s own historical or biographical context. Instead, close attention is paid to issues of poetic language, that is, to conventional areas of literary interpretation: lexical choices, metaphors, figures of speech, rhetorical devices, and so on. Each chapter pursues these well-tested tracks of reading to illustrate how justice is conceived. The paths chosen are hardly surprising. For example, the chapter on Der zerbrochne Krug engages in a comparison with Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus—a move already suggested by Kleist himself in his Vorrede and subsequently examined by a number of scholars. Still, despite this absence of innovation (and despite the fact that Sophocles’ Greek is entirely neglected), Fordham manages to pronounce key insights, which attest to her perspicuity as a reader. For example, in this chapter, she offers the following observation: “Oedipus is intent on finding the truth and saving his people; Adam seeks to hide the truth and save himself” (41)—a conclusion whose simplicity in no way detracts from its brilliance. The book is replete with these kinds of terse statements, which, on the one hand, precisely locate the crux of Kleist’s theatrical work, but which, on the other hand—and in a less positive light—tend to present the tensions that animate the plays as misleadingly uncomplicated.

The stunning simplifications that punctuate Fordham’s book correspond to the unvarying focus of the analyses. The third chapter, on Amphitryon, continues to concentrate on the notion of “legal instrumentalism,” that is, the idea that trials operate more as vehicles of control than as channels for uncovering truth. Jupiter’s position in the play as both supreme judge and guilty party readily exemplifies this instrumental function. The readings are remarkably consistent, insofar as they repeatedly return to notions of restoration, expediency, and relativity. In general, these notions remain fixed and receive but little nuance. All the same, Fordham’s chapters, which exhibit a solid familiarity with the extensive secondary literature, hardly disappoint in providing fresh insights. Again in the Amphitryon chapter, in considering Merkur as a prosecutor (specifically in his interrogation of Sosias), Fordham discloses important elements of Kleist’s poetics. Elsewhere, in the discussion of Die Hermannsschlacht, which pits Germanic concepts of justice against Roman ideals, the issue of judicial relativity is greatly modified by being viewed from the perspective of international relations. To be sure, the philosophical problems that necessarily arise, when one moves into this broader context, could have been treated at greater length and with more attention to the intellectual and political issues of Kleist’s day. Sadly, corresponding themes in Kleist’s prose works, both the literary and the essayistic, are for the most part ignored. Nonetheless, the stringent focus that Fordham applies to her brief, straightforward study should in the end be applauded insofar as it leaves the reader with a good sense of a central aspect of Kleist’s dramatic work, namely “his subversive and deeply skeptical fascination with the workings of justice” (139). The readings of individual passages are lucid throughout and altogether compelling. In this regard, at the very least, Fordham’s book makes a decisive and welcomed contribution to the field.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | “Trials and Tribunals in the Dramas of Heinrich von Kleist.”

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