Hitler: A Biography

Abstract

its advantages, though in the case of Heinrich von Kleist: The Biography, two features will likely lead to widespread resonance: the pattern of delivering the sparse biographical documents in all of their ambivalence before linking them to Kleist’s literary and essayistic works, and the fact that it is the only comprehensive Kleist biography currently available in English. Based on the sources alone, Kleist’s biography is one of the more fascinating in literary history, and Blamberger’s presentation is thorough, informed, enlightening, and expertly constructed. Embracing, rather than reducing, Kleist’s ambiguity from the outset, Blamberger mirrors how Kleist blurs the line between poetry and truth (22), and revisits the phenomenon throughout, describing Kleist’s fusion of autobiography and works of fiction as a tendency not only to “fictionalize his life” (98), but to infuse his works with (near-death) experiences illustrative of how contingency and chance inform life and death, be they evidently real (a hair-raising carriage flip caused by a braying donkey in Butzbach in 1801 (1, 125–26, 156–57), or be they most certainly embellished or further imagined (the near capsize of his boat from Koblenz to Cologne in a storm, 125–26). Through his leitmotivistic invocations of terms such as the “project-maker” (43–45, 47–49, 65, 132, 135, 142, 357) and “an economy of sacrifice” (91, 392, 394, 406, 407) as emblematic of Kleist’s life and creativity, Blamberger embeds Kleist’s artistic works and equally creatively staged death in a “kaleidoscopic” (65, 246, 427) life-narrative held together by a succession of productive distractions— the tumultuous legacy of an artist whose experiments set the tone for artistic projects of the future and sealed his fate as a “model for posterity” (5, 44). The repetition of full names, locations, institutions, concepts, and even citations throughout serves to ensure that the individual chapters function both as stand-alone resources and as coherent parts of a whole. Finally, the foremost accomplishment of the translators lies in the fact that the volume almost never reads like a translation.