Böcker av Matthias Goertz

The proverbial "red thread" that runs through Goethe's oeuvre comprises his personal relationships-with men and boys. They provide the impetus and energy, the fabric and pattern for each and every one of his major works. His writing entails a continuous process of re-iterating, re-living, re-evaluating, re-contextualising his personal experiences, thereby eternalising it-and with it, himself. Goethe is the monument of a universal force he chiselled into words.

This treatise offers a novel and comprehensive approach to re-reading Heinrich von Kleist's works, with an in-depth focus on the eight dramas. It unravels his texts' overt textual fabric and isolates and de-codifies the covert thematic strands of which they are shown to be systematically composed. It demonstrates that these individual textual strands express and embody their author's main political and personal life pursuits and that his works function as his vehicles and mechanisms for the active pursuit of his agendas, thereby establishing them as being not only auto-biographical but indeed eminently auto-, as well as hetero-, poÏetical. This treatise demonstrates that it is always possible in principle, and usually in practice, to eliminate those ambivalences, dissonances and incommensurabilities that apparently mar Kleist's texts and that have long preoccupied and puzzled the Kleist-Forschung, showing them to comprise mere textual surface phenomena brought about by his intricate interweaving, within a single textual fabric, of multiple heterogenous thematic threads. In rigorously unravelling these threads and thus decrypting the texts, this book demystifies Kleist and confirms him to have been among that exceedingly rare breed of writers of whom he himself once wrote that they master both metaphor and formula in equal measure.

In The Emigrant the author offers a re-reading of Heinrich von Kleist's eight novellas, written between late 1805 and mid 1811, in which he unravels two covert threads of meaning woven, consistently across all eight texts, into the fabric of each of their overt stories: a political thread, termed "the satirical," which entails Kleist's critique of, and advise to, the key German political leaders of his day, in particular the Prussian King, regarding how to confront Napoleon's expansionism, and a sensual one, termed "the satyrical," in which Kleist traces what are likely his own, autobiographical, sexual experiences. Not the overt stories, artful and entertaining as they may be, contain Kleist's real concerns and messages to his audiences, but these covert threads he encoded into them do. The stories as they first present themselves to the reader merely comprise the transport vehicle and camouflage for the explosive material they contain (both the political and the sensual content would have been absolutely unpalatable to the authorities and the general public if expressed overtly; Kleist's political statements, once decoded, have lèse-majesté written all over them, punishable by death). This re-reading demonstrates that Kleist's texts cannot be properly understood in isolation, for only by uncovering Kleistian techniques and patterns in any one text and applying these findings to the others can the scope and consistency of these threads be established. Some of Kleist's works (not primarily the novellas) have been termed "political," and some of their passages "sensual," but this re-reading shows that Kleist is a political writer par excellence, and a sensual writer tout court, every one of whose works (at least in so far as his novellas are concerned) is eminently political and sensual.