WIT IN ‘DER WEINSCHWELG’ 7

On the latter point, sa: Ludwig Wolf, ‘Rcimwahl und Reinfolgc im Wcinschwelg’, Z j U . vol.
L m (1935). 2 b 2 8 1 .
Lines 170-171. 198-199 and 292-293, 220-2~1,262-263, and 281-284.
‘See ako the Weinahwelg, lines 101-108 (jagen), 156167 (trinken).223-227 (mphdh).and 324-345
(minnc). On annomincdio, see the h i o n by Edmond Faral in Lrs Arts Pohiques du XIle ct du XIUe
sikcle, Paris, 1924. pp. 9397, and the definition by Geofiey of Vinsauf in ‘De coloribuc rhetoricis‘,
ibid., p. 313.
See Ruth Mohl, 7 7 ~ n r~e e mates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, New York, 1933.
ci Andrear Copelluluc, De amore libri tres, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, Rome [1947], p. 272.
Hugo Kuhn in W. Stammler and K. Langosch, edc., Die dcutsrk Literdur des Mittclalters. Ver$sser-
Iexxilton, Berlin, 1933-55, vol. lV,col. 890: ‘(Abschnitt1 6 2 3 , V. 259-416): Die Wirkung da Wcins wird
richtbar . . .’.
For other examples, see the pvsages kom Morix von C r d n and Thomasids Wdahcr Gclsr cited by
Ruth Harvey, Moriz von Cradn and tk Chivalric World, Oxford, 1961, p. 87; ako Rudolf von Ems,
Dnguotc Ghhart. cd.John A. Asher, A.T.B. 56, Tlibingen, 196.1, lines 385-388.
9 See AfU, vol. XI11 (1887). 116, and Karl Lucae. Der Weiwhwelg ein altdcutKhcs Ccdichf aus der
Z w e i h Hdl& dcs 13,Juhrhrmdntz mil e i n n ubersctmng, Halle I 886.
lo Verfw/exibon,N, col. 891.
I1 T h e poems are conveniently found in F. J. E. &by. A History o/ Scnrlm &in Poetry in the Middle
Ages, 2nd ed.. vol. n, Oxford, 1957, pp. 321-322.
Text in M.G.H. Poctae ldini cvvi Cmolini. vol. IV,put 2, ed. Karl Strecker, Berlin, 1923. p. 591. Note
also the mot% of the drinker’s fame (Weinsrhwelg,lines 3 4 and tk irreparablelw to society which his
death will bring (Weinxhwelg. lina 156158).

OEDIPUS AND ADAM-

GREEK TRAGEDY AND CHRISTIAN COMEDY IN KLEIST’S
DER ZERBROCHENE KRUG
BY JOHN MILFULL
Es scheine, versetzte er, indem er eine Prise Tabak nahm, daB
ich das dritte Kapitel vom enten Buch Moses nicht mit Auf-
merksamkeit gelesen . . .
Kleist, Ober das Marionettmthcater
Tm legend of King Oedipus and the story of Adam and Eve, as we find it in
Genesis, have much in common. Both end with the driving-out of a patriar-
chal figure fiom his kingdom; in both, the cause of the expulsion is a strange
mixture of hybris, the desire to possess a knowledge equal to that of the gods,
and the breaking of a sexual taboo. In the Oedipus legend, this taboo is
directly expressed in the incestuous union of Oedi us and Jocasta; in the
Genesis story, it is only im licit, but the view that l e original sin of Adam
B
lay in &ct in his ‘knowle ge’ of Eve despite a divine prohibition is easily
supprted fiom the text, and has often been maintained.l Both narratives,
in act, show all the signs of a conflict between matriarchal and patriarchal
rule in an earlier stage of the society which formulated them; Jocasta bears
all the traits of the priestess-queen whose consort must expose himself yearly
to combat and finally be conquered by the young king, his metaphorical
8 OEDIPUS AND ADAM-KIEIST’S ‘DER ZERBROCHENE KRUG’

son,2 and Eve even bears the title of the Goddess, ‘Mother of all living’,
which shows her to have been originally none other than the earth-mother,
the mate of the male God himself. Yet, in both legends, the normal process
of the succession of the young king, the ‘son’, to the ageing consort has been
disturbed by a strong patriarchal taboo; Oedipus is placed under a divine
curse for his parricide and incest, and Adam is driven out of Eden by an
angry Jehova when the eating of the apple has revealed Eve’s nakedness to
him. The attainment of consciousncss symbolized by the solving of the
riddle of the Sphinx and the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
has led them to violate the taboo of a jealous patriarchal god, who expels
them lest they should supplant him. The tree of life, guarded by its attendant
snake, which in earlier legend had been the legitimate goal of the cosmic
hero seeking immortality,3 has changed its character and brings about his
downfall.
Yet, in the Genesis story, a strange doubling process has taken place;
there are two trees in the Garden of Eden, and Jehova’s explicit reason for
expelling Adam is to prevent him from eating also of the Tree of Life and
becoming immortal, ‘like one of us’ (a curious remnant of polytheism).
Consequently, it is not surprising to find in Jewish tradition, especially in
the Cabbala, the view that Adam’s real sin lay in eating only the one fruit,
that he acquired thereby an imperfect knowledge which could only become
complete on his partaking also of the fruit of the Tree of Life; indeed, one
Cabbalist sees the two trees as having a common root, and Adam’s sin as one
of ‘di~ision’.~
It is, of course, highly unlikely that Kleist was familiar with this particular
teaching, but some such doctrine must lie behind the enigmatic lines at the
end of his essay Uber das Marionettentheater, where he speaks of a ‘zweites
Essen vom Baum der Erkenntnis’ as the end of man’s exile from Paradise.
The idea itself is scarcely new, it corresponds closely to Novalis’ view, for
instance, of the role of ‘Verstand’in history and its find apotheosis in the new
kingdom of God, but its form is exceedingly interesting. That Heist should
have chosen such an explicitly Chstian symbol for the final ‘Wiederkehr’
prompts one to re-examine his work in this light. It would, indeed, be
curious if he had managed to resist the seductions of that new brand of
syncretism propagated by the Alexandrians of Jena and Berlin. The attempt
to construct a new ‘Heilsgeschichte’ which assindates Grcck and Christian
elements into an overall view of the history of man, which is so typical of the
work of Novalis, Holderlin and even Goethe, has left its traces in Kleist’s
work also, if in a very idiosyncratic form. The two elements which he seeks
to synthesize are the tragic view of Sophocles and the conciliatory promise of
Chstian ‘Heilsgeschichte’, and it is a synthesis which he attains fully only in
his later works.
 OEDIPUS AND ADAM-KLEIST’S ‘DER ZERBROCHENE KRUG’ 9

Kleist’s obsession with Sophocles is attested, not only directly, by borrow-

ing slips from the Dresden library dating from the period of composition
of Robert Guiskard and Der zerbrochene Krug5 and by his friends Wieland and
Zschokke? but also by a wealth of allusion, especially in his earlier work.
Thus the motif of the plague, which first reveals to Oedipus that all is not
well in the state of Thebes, plays a central part in Robert Guiskard and Der
Findling, and there are echoes of it in Die Marquise von 0 . . .7 and Michael
K ~ h l h a a s In
. ~ the later suppressed ‘Vorrede’ to Der zerbrochene Kmgg Kleist
even draws an explicit parellel between Adam’s guilty conscience and the
predicament of Oedipus ‘als die Frage war, wer den Lajus erschlagen’. And,
of course, Adam’s ‘Klumpfd’ is only a Germanization of Oedipus’s name
‘der Schwellfd’.
It is perhaps idle to speculate on how Kleist resolved the plot of Guiskard,
though there seems little doubt that the conclusion was unambiguously tragic.
I should, however, like to examine briefly the significance of the Oedipus
legend in Der Findling, as it may be of considerable help to us in the course
of our discussion.
I am unable to accept Sembdner’s viewlo that Der Findling was, in fact,
composed only shortly before its publication in the second set ofErziihlirngen
-the stylistic parallel he adduces in relation to the supposedly contemporary
Zweikampfseems to me fhmsy in the extreme and, indeed, applies equally
well to Die Marquise von 0 . . . . Muller-Seidel’s argument” seem to me
entirely convincing; the story shows all the signs of having been written
beforehand, both in its philosophical bent and in its style, and we must assume
that, at the very least, it was conceived a great deal earlier.
The plague which, in Der Findling, robs Antonio Piachi of his true son
and substitutes Nicolo, the ‘Doppelganger’ of his young wife’s earlier
romantic rescuer, Colino, by an insidious brand of divine scrabble, reveals as
surely to the reader that all is not well in Piachi’s marriage as it had led
Sophocles’readers to doubt the validity of Oedipus’s kingship. Nor are the
overtones of incest far removed. Elvira is of an age to mistake her ageing
husband’s adopted son for her lover, and he to lust for her; her marriage to
Piachi cannot help her forget the noble Colino before whose picture she still
regularly prostrates herself in secret, and Nicolo’s attempted rape seems
merely the external consequence of her inner yearning for his double. This
incestuous act drives Piachi from his ‘kingdom’ and brings about the death
of his wife, but the legend has undergone a curious inversion; it is the son
who is lulled and the father who is sent into exde, an exile which takes
him to Hell to seek for revenge.
No story of Kleist’s ends more severely; like Oedipus, Piachi has no ‘way
out’, the apparent calm and prosperity of his marriage have been shattered,
and the church, which is in league with the forces of e d , offers him no
I0 OEDIPUS A N D ADAM-KLHST’S ‘DER ZBRBROCHENE KRUC’

hope of consolation. It is interesting to compare this depiction of the church

with its equally unfavourable representation in Das Erdbeben in Chili;
although it is the bigotry and hate of the church which leads finally to the
tragic end of Jeronimo and Josefc, there are unambiguously religious
overtones in the new value which is attached to Fernando’s actions, and in
thc guarded note of optimism on which the story ends. The salvation of
Jeronimo and Josefe’s child symbolizes a new be inning; it proves that a
B
divinc purpose does exist, even if it can never be ully understood by man.
This purpose is conspicuolfsly lacking in Der Findling; if Nicolo is, as he
claims, ‘Gottes S o h , he IS the son of an avenging God who punishes
without forgiveness, and who punishes to a degree which must seem unjust,
as Oedipus’s punishment seem unjust.
Kleist’s works abound in images of the ‘Fall’, which are characterized by a
perplexing moral ambiguity. Jeronimo and Josefe consummate their love
in the Paradise of a nunnery garden; they are rescued to another Paradise by
the earthquake, but lose it again, and their lives with it. The author’s sym-
pathy with the lovers is obvious, but he leads thcm nevertheless inexorably
towards their punishment, even if its agent, the shoemaker, ‘little Peter’,
vacillates in hs allegiance betwecn the devd and the Catholic Church.
Though the character of this unishment becomes increasingly symbolic in

r !
the later work-onl in Kohl a05 does it retain its full force-it cannot be
avoided; Graf F. is orced to submit to his father-in-law, who exhibits such
a curious intimacy with his daughter, for an extended period of probation
before he can be forgiven his assionate aberration; Prince Friedrich must
B
fust accept the sentence of eath which his pseudw‘father-in-law’, the
Elector, has pronounced on him, before he can be forgiven and admitted
to the ‘farmly’; Kohlhaas must pay the price of his crime before the just state
for which he had struggled re-establishes itself and rotects his posterity in
K
the form of his two sons. The factors which lead to t ese ‘falls’ are shown by
Kleist with a high d ree of determinism; his characters are forced by their
7
background, their up rin in , by the intervention of others, by their good
qualities as much as their%afi, to act as they do; like Oedipus, they are in a
real sense ‘guiltlessly guilty’. Where the tragedy is preserved, this deter-
minism is pursued to its bitter end; Gustav and Toni, like Achilles and
Penthesilea, are too much the products of their differing traditions and races
to avert the crisis successfully, and their fate has a Sophoclean ‘Unerbittlich-
keit’. Yet, increasingly, Kleist seems to soften this rigid concept of fate;
unlike Piachi and Elvira, his later heroes and heroines are all given a glimmer
of hope, and if they fail, it is because they are unable to escape from external
determinations, and trust, like Fernando, in their instinctive knowledge of
right. It is significant, too, that Kleist should so clearly have set out to balance
his two most severe tragedies, Cuiskard and Penthesilea, in the two corres-
 ~

OEDIPUS AND ADAM-KLEIST’S ‘DER ZERBROCHENB KRUC’ I1

~ ~ ~ ~ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

onding ‘comedies’ Der zerbrochene Krug and Das Kathchen von Heilbronn ;
E s insistence on the relationship of the two later plays is no more remarkable
than the fact that the two earlier plays also occupied his mind simultaneously,
and that in each of them he turned his reading of Oedipus to good account.
The emergence of a ‘way out’ of the tragic predicament of Piachi and the
lovers of Die Fumilie SchroJenstein is marked by the arrival of a new type of
female character in Kleist’s work, who verges delicately on the border of
blasphemy. Josefe, Alcmene, the Marquise, to name only three, are all tinged
with a subtle Marianism which reminds one of the curious syncretic heroines
of Novalis. In the valley, Jeronimo, Josefe and Philipp become a new ‘holy
family’; the c u d , in whose origins religion and sin are so oddly mixed,
acquires an almost Messianic sigtllGcance in the last sentence. The birth of
Heracles is a prefiguration of the birth of Chrlst; the Marquise undergoes a
parody of virgin birth which becomes much more than a parody-the
origin of the child which she had conceived, like Mary, ‘in der groIjten
Unschuld und Reinheit’, seems more ‘divine’ than that of other human
beings.’* Indeed, all Kleist’s late heroines combine virtue and motherliness-
his fondness for widows is striking-in a way that reminds us irresistibly of
the Mother of God.
This strange mixture of Greek and Chnstian elements is perhaps nowhere
more startling than in Der zerbrochene Knr . The principal characters of this

b
play, which so clearly parodies the form o Oedipus T runnus, are Adam and
Eve, and the fust scenes are f d of allusions to a ‘Siin enfall’. Kleist criticism
has tended to regard these allusions as merely formal; I hope, however, to
demonstrate that the play is a deliberate attempt on Kleist’s part to re-write
the Greek tragedy of King Oedipus as a Chnstian comedy of Adam, and so
to reconcile the two poles of his literary existence.
The Oedipus parallels are almost too obvious to require repetition; Adam,
like Oedipus, is the guilty judge who seeks to convict others of the crime he
has committed himself; like Oedipus, he is driven out of hrs kingdom when
his guilt is discovered, and the ‘kingship’ is transferred to the fair-minded
LichtlCreon. The incest theme is not present explicitly, but it is echoed in
the attempted seduction of Evchen by a man old enough to be her father, the
same curious inversion of the Oedipus situation we have noted in Der
Finding. The evidence for Adam’s ‘Siindenfall’ is pieced together in an
analytic manner strikingly reminiscent of Sophocles.
Yet it is here that the similarities end. Adam’s ‘crime’ is unsuccessful; he
errs consciously, not unknowingly, and his exde is only temporary, although
his ‘kmgship’ is gone for ever.13 If his accounts are accurate-and Walter,
who should know, does not doubt that they will be-he will be pardoned.
The object of Adam’s incestuous desires is happily married to her lover
Ruprecht. Only one of Adam’s feet, not both, is swollen to Oedipal pro-
portions-the left one, of course.
I2 OEDIPUS AND ADAM-KLEIST’S ‘DER ZERBROCHENE KRUG’

The biblical comparison is even stranger. Here is an Adam who fails to

gct his Eve. Despite the episode of the stolen rib, it smkes us as most odd that ’
she should be so much younger than her fellow Genesian; and that she should
end up marrying not him, but Knecht Ruprecht, with all the connotations
of Christmas the name conjures up, seem a theological innovation of some
daring. Yet it is perhaps not quite as extraordinary as it at first seems.
One of the oldest interpretations of the New Tcstament story sees the
Virgin Mary as a second Eve who atones for the fault of her ancestress
through her purity and innocence and gives birth to a second Adam, Christ,
whose virtue relcases the ‘old Adam’-his name is a metaphor, in English
and German, for the sinful side of man’s nature, the left or devil’s foot-
from limbo. These relations are incestuous in the cxtreme. Mary, Eve’s
daughtcr, is brought to bcd by Eve’s divine father, and produccs a son who
is hcr ancestor-father Adam’s true heir. It would sceni that odd family
relationshps arc not a prerogative of Kleist‘s !
The name Evchen itself suggests such an interpretation; ‘little’ Eve rcsists
the blandishments of the old Adam and, as a reward, is given Ruprecht as a
Christmas prcsent by Walter, whose name docs not conceal his semi-divine
functions. A new era of ‘Licht‘ dawns, and even Adani may look forward to
being rescued from the limbo of his trans-paddock wanderings.
If Adam is of an age to be Evchen’s father, he also abuses the paternal
responsibility he should feel, as ‘Dorfrichter’, for his ‘son’ Ruprecht. This
situation, as wc have already seen, is not uncommon in Kleist’s works. A
‘Marian’ female character-and how virginal Evchen is, in contrast to the
Mother of All Living, by whose nefarious agency Adam fell-stands between
a father-figure and a son-figure as an intermediary, and intervenes to save the
‘son’ in an almost motherly way. The role of the Virgin in Catholic theology
is not dissimilar; daughter of Adam, she is at the same time the bride and the
Mother of God and intercedes with him for the Children of Adam. So also
Natalie (whose name, again, veils a reference to Christmas) intercedes for
Homburg with the Kurfurst, reducing his wife, who is, after all, Homburg’s
adoptive mother, to a very secondary status; so, too, Kohlhaas’s wife is
reincarnated in the ‘Zigeuncrfrau’ and returns to act as intermediary between
him and the father state, not to mention presenting his children with a
symbolic apple, a second eating from the Tree of Knowledgc. The Marquise,
too, stands between her decidedly Old Testament father and the rather green
Graf F.; here again, her unshakable purity not only conquers her father’s
severity, it finally forgives Graf F. for his original sin and welcomes him to
the fruitful couch of Christian marriage. Alcmene even survives the clash
of a divine father and mortal husband who make matters very tricky for her
by assuming the same appearance; yet, before her unshakeable belief, the
difference between Zeus’ son and Amphitryon’s son disappears, just as
 OEDIPUS AND ADAM-KLEIST’S
‘DER ZERBROCHENE KRUG’ 13

Josefe’s child, begotten in sin, is converted into a Messianic hope, and the
Marquise’s faith confers a semi-divine origin on the strangely-got fruit of
her womb. For Kleist, as for Goethe, Novalis, and Hoffmann, it is the Virgin
Mary in her many reflections who shows the way to Paradise; she leads her
poet-lover gently upward, out of the mire of sensuality and death. Like the
swan Tinka, she conquers all attempts to sully her purity.
Is one justified in assuming that these correspondences are more than
accidental, that they are the signs of a ‘new mythology’ as carefully worked
out as that of Novalis and Holderlin, which crosses Oedipus legend and
Genesis story and corrects them with the New Testament hope of salvation?
Such a mythology might read something like this:
In the Garden of Eden Adam transgressed the commandment of his divine
father Jehova, ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in an attempt to
become his equal and had sexual knowledge of his daughter-spouse Eve.
For this, like Oedipus, he was driven out of his kingdom and forced to
wander through theworld ‘aufunendlicheniWege’. But Eve’s daughter Mary,
in her purity and innocence, bridged the gap between the angry God and his
fallen son, and in bearing the God who was also Son of Man, like Heracles,
brought light to the world and offered Adam and his sons the hope of
salvation, if they were prepared once more to submit to the paternal will,
but to a paternal will now tempered by love, by an understanding of ‘die
gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt’ which lends a sympathetic ear to Mary’s
intercession. Thus, in Mary, the Genesis story and its inverted image, the
Oedipus legend, find their resolution.
There is, of course, no final answer to the problem, but one should point
out that it would be consistent with such an interpretation for Kleist to
conceal the evidence: the impression one has in so much of his work that
he is skating on very thin ice above sexual and religious taboos would
explain itself if such a controversial theology lay beneath. Jeronimo and
Josefe’s intercourse in the nunnery garden, the rape of the Marquise, the
attempted rape of Evchen-all are strong stuff, not easily assimilated to a
public taste trained on the heroine of the bourgeois traged
r’ One has
to visualize the effect of the substitution of a real rape o Evchen forOnly
attempted one, of a filling-out of the dash in Die Marquise von 0.’ to realize
the

the extraordinary liberties Kleist was taking, and the incestuous- overtones
of so much of his work go far beyond the polite convention of ‘meine
Schwester oder meine Frau’. But perhaps the surest evidence for such an
overriding idea in his work can be found where it is least fashionable to look,
in Heist’s life itself.
The great majority of Kafka critics now accept that the ‘mythology’ of
Kafka’s later novels and stories is in fact a generalization and extension of the
Oedipal situation which first found full expression in Das Urteil. The
14 OEDIPUS AND ADAM-KLEIST’S ‘DER ZERBROCHENE KRUG’

father-son relationship described there is repeated at a higher level in Josef

K.’s relationship to the ‘Gericht’ and K.’s ambivalent attitude to the ‘SchloB’.
It is interesting to note a simdar progression in Freud’s own work; his initial
preoccupation with the psychoanalysis of the individual patient gives way
increasingly to the attempt to understand broader historical, social and
cultural developments in the light of his discoveries. Psychoanalysis becomes
a tool of anthropology. The development of Kafka’s work is not dissimilar;
the insights he has gained into his own behaviour are transferred to a far
wider context, where they are used to interpret the most complex social and
religious problems. I should like to suggest that a related progression can be
seen in Kleist’s life and work. Kleist lost his parents at an early age and
became largely dependent on his half-sister Ulrike, of whom it may justly
be said that she was, at one and the same time, mother, sister and beloved to
him. Earlier critics, perhaps less inhibited by the dictates of ‘textimmanente
Kritik’, were not slow to see this situation mirrored in many of Kleist’s
works in the relationship of his young heroes to their motherly-sisterly
mistresses. Indeed, Kleist’s disastrous engagement to Wilhelmine seems to
prove conclusively enough, on a human level, that his concept of a future
wife was extraordinarily rigid, and embodied only one real premise; that
she should have all the accomplishments and qualities of his sister. His
letters to Ulrike, in their mixture of devotion, dependence and petulance,
are the record of a relationship so close that it was scarcely likely ever to be
supplanted.
At the same time, as he so often writes, Ulrike is his only intermediary
with the ‘family’ and all that it represents to him. For Kleist, the lost tie
with his father is replaced by an uneasy relationship with the family tradition
ofthe von Kleists and with the Prussian state, with which they were identified
in his mind to such a degree. His concepts of ‘duty’ and ‘honour’ are the
result of this strong super-ego influence which he is unable to satisfy in the
way expected of him; he is too ‘different’, it is Ulrike who must take over
the task of ‘translating’ his achievements into a form acccptable to ‘die
Kleisten’, she is the intermediary between his poetic genius and the family
ethic, which is for him in essence the Prussian ethic.
The Oedipal implications-this time in a Freudian sense-of this attitude
are obvious, and the fact that Kleist succeeded in monopolizing the affections
of IS sister-mother-substitute to such a degree only magnifies them, and
can be seen in the tendency already noted for mother and mistress figures in
his work to merge, or, as in the case of Natalie and the Kurfiirstin, for the
‘mistress’ figure to absorb the functions of the mother figure. In both D i e
Marquise von 0. . . . and P r i m Friedrich von Homburg, there are scenes in
which t h i s psychological content comes very near to the surface. Before
Graf F. can be forgiven for his act of passion and coupled happily to the
 OEDIPUS AND ADAM--I(LEIST’S ‘DER ZERBROCHENE KRUG’ IS

Marquise, a passionate reconciliation between hther and daughter must take

place, which renders the frnal wedded bliss almost anti-climactic. Nowhere
could it be clearer that the ‘mistress’ really belongs to the father, and that she
can only be transferred to the erring son after an act of complete submission.
Before he can be given the Marquise as wife, he must first accept the authority
of the Oberst as father and head of the family.
An almost identical situation is to be found in Prinz Friedrich von Homburg;
before Homburg can be given the hand of the ‘niece’ of h adoptive father
in marriage, he must first submit totally to the authority of the father and of
the Prussian state which he symbolizes, even to the extent of accepting
sentence of death from his hands. After the process of atonement, and on1
then, can he be readmitted to the ‘family’ as son and son-in-law combined:
There is, however, a single scene in Kleist’s last play which, in its ex-
traordinary anticipation of Freud’s theories, seems almost anachronistic. In
Act Two, Scene Six, Homburg seems at first to have attained all his goals
at once; the Kurfurst is reported dead, and he immediately assumes the role
of head of the family, protector of the Kurfiirstin and bridegroom of Natalie.
Yet, alas, the report proves false and Homburg is once more thrown back
into the ‘Nichts’, as he had been in the first scene; his dream is not to be
transferred so simply into reality. This fictional death of the Kurfiirst,
however, we might nowadays see as none otlier than a projection of the
father-son rivalry which forms the basis of the play; Homburg’s h r s t for
glory and happiness contains at first an element of Freudian hybris, it implies
the removal of his father-figure. One is struck less by the relationship to a
possible source, Prince Hal’s too hasty anticipation of his father’s death, than
by the extraordinary parallel with Kafka’s short story Das Ehepaar, where, in
a similar way, a son-figure appears at first to bring about the death of a
father-figure and usurp his position as protector of mother and famdy, only
to be confronted with the sudden return to life of the father and be driven
out to continue his lonely wanderings. The extraordinary change in Natalie’s
attitude to Homburg after the report of the Elector’s death has been proven
false seems to admit of little other explanation; we almost expect her to ask,
like Frau N.: ‘Und das Aussehen meines Mannes?’
These observations are perhaps less interesting in themselves than for the
light they throw on the Kleistian mythology I have attem ted to construct
in the earlier part of this article. It is clear how simply &s psychological
content can be transferred into mythological terms; the severe, unapproach-
able father is God himself, Ulrike becomes the mediating second Eve,
whose tabooed love can only be won by atonement and submission, yet
who, at the same time, by virtue of her purity and steadfastness of character,
is able to intercede for her brother-lover and replace Old Testament severity
by New Testament charity. Under the law-and one might almost write
16 OEDIPUS AND ADAM-KLEIST’S ‘DER ZERBROCHENE KRUC’

the word with a capital letter, ci lujuive-Kleist’s heroes have sinned and must
pay the death penalty, yet their female intercessors always procure them a
remission, even if it only applies, as in the case of Kohlhaas, to their children.
There is, I think, little need to point out how closely this view conforms to
traditional Christian doctrine, especially of the Pauline variety. Under the
Old Testament law, man is guilty by definition, guilty of original sin, for
which the penalty is death. But ‘as in Adam all die, even so shall all in Christ
be made alive’. The birth of Christ as Son of Man is a sign that God, too,
now recognizing ‘die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt‘, has realized that
man cannot hope to be saved by his own efforts, and it is through the agency
of the Virgin that hc brings about this salvation. The development of the
Virgin’s role as interccssor in later teaching is only a logical development
of this line of thought; she tends more and more to supplant her son as the
human agency through which divine grace became accessible to man.
What better symbol for ‘die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt‘, a phrase
whose exact recurrence in Kleist’s works proves its importance to him, could
be found than ‘la crQchecasske’ which provided the initial stimulus for his
most profound attempt to expound a new ‘Heilsgeschichte’?With the Fall
of Man, the divine order too was ‘zerbrochen’, and man was flung into a
hostile world where appearance and reality contradict one another, where
good produces evil and evil good. Like Graf F., he is angel and devil at oncc,
unable to resist wholly the paths on which his left foot leads him, even when
his purpose is good. The return to Eden, when the imperfect knowledge he
had gained by eating of the forbidden tree will be transformed into an
‘unendliches Bewdtsein’, is perhaps only ‘das letzte Kapitel der Geschichte
der Menschheit’, but the curse of Adam and Oedipus no longer persists in
its full force; Sister Mary intervenes.
Frau Marthe’s pitcher, with its images of a ‘heile Gesellschaft’, is broken
for ever, and the court at Utrecht wdl be able to do little about it; the divine
order will only be re-constituted with the return to Eden. Yet Kleist’s
Adam, unlike his brother Oedipus, is not to be condemned for ever, his
incestuous desires, which succeed only in fracturing the symbol, the pitcher,
and not the signified, Eve’s virginity, are forgiven, along with the hybris
of a village tyrunnus, by a God who himself knows ‘die gebrechliche Einrich-
tung der Welt’ and the inevitability of sin. The promise which lay dormant
in the Oedipus legend, in Antigone’s unswerving devotion to her father-
brother and in his final mysterious translation, is made manifest in the
forgiveness of Adam and the marriage of Evchen and Knecht Ruprecht,
which usher in a new era of salvation. Out of his tabooed love for his own
Antigone, Ulrike, and his tortured relationship to family and state, Kleist
built a new mythology which, in Der zerbrochme Kmg, reconciles Oedipus
and Adam, Greek tragedy and Christian comedy, in the happiest possible way.
 Cf. Heinrich uon Kleists Lebmsspuren, ed. H. Sembdner, Bremcn 1957,p. 96.
Op. cit., p. 76, p. 183, p. 254. The most complete treatment of Heist’s relationshi to Sophoclcs
remains Margrit Schoch von Wodemswil, Kleist utid Odipus, Diss. Ziirich 1952.The & r d parallels
between Odipus and Krug are discussed by Wolfgang Schadewalt in Hellas und Hcspnim, ZUrich 1960,
pp. 843-50.Cf.also W. von Gordon, Die dramatische Handlung in Sophokles’ ‘Konig Odipus’ und Kleicls
‘Der zerbrochmc Krug’, reprinted Wiabaden 1970.
’ Heinrich uon Klcist, S&ntliche Wnke und Bride, ed. H. Sembdner, Munich 1g65, vol. 2, p. 141:
. . . gehn Sie! gehn Sic! gchn Sic! rief sie, indcm sic aufstand; auf einen hterhaftcn war ich gefiBt,
aber auf keinen-Teufel! o&ete, indem sic ihm dabei, gkich cincm Pesivngijietm, auswich, die
Tilr des Zimmen, und sagte: ruft den Obristen! (my emphasis).
* Cf. vol . 2 , p. 45 :
. . . I Luther schon: weiche fern hinweg! ausrief, und indem er, vom Pult mtehend, nach einer
Klingel eilte, hinzusetzte: dein Odem ist Pest und deii Nihe Verderben! (my emphasis).
Vol. I,p. 176.
.
10 Vol. 2 , p. 907. Cf.Die Marquise yon 0. . ., p. 104:
Him hatte sie die nichsten Jahre mit Kunst, LektUre, rnit Eniehung, und h e r Eltern Ptlege
beschiftigt, in her gr6Btcn Eingezogenheit zugebracht . . .
The Marquise, too, lost her husband ‘auf einer Reid.
l 1 Walter MUer-Seidel, Ver4m und E r h m , Koln 1967, p. 69.
lZ Vol 2, p. 126.
l 3 This might, however, be seen as a typical ‘internalizing’ or ‘psychologizing’ of the crude situation of
the primitive myth.

GEORG BUCHNER’S LAST WORDS

BY GERDAE. BELL
THEauthenticity of famous last words is notoriously suspect. There is no
reason to believe that Georg Buchner’s alleged utterances on his deathbed
are more genuine than others.
Nevertheless nearly all of his numerous biographers and critics have taken
it for granted that the dying young rebel said: ‘Wir haben der Schmerzen
nicht zu viel, wir haben ihrer zu wenig, denn durch den Schmerz gehen wir
zu Gott ein’ and ‘Wir sind Tod, Staub, Asche, wie diihen wir klagen2’1
This pronouncement, at least its first part, has always caused some embar-
rassment to Buchner commentators, because it is, or seems to be, a complete
refutation of what the writer had to say on the significance of suffering, a
kind of ‘Zuriicknahme’, to use Thomas Mann’s term in ‘Doktor Faustus’.
The second half of the passage bears the authentic Buchnerian stamp. One is
reminded of Dantons Tod: ‘Da ist keine Hoffnung im Tod2. . . es ist so elend
sterben mussen . . .’ and ‘Esist mir als roch ich schon3 . . . Morgen bist du
eine zerbrochene Fiedel: die Melodie ist ausge~pielt.’~ However, the last
sentence, ‘wie duden wir klagen?’ rings false. Buchner did complain loudly
B GLL