WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT AND HEINRICH VON KLEIST: IMAGINING THE STATE IN THE WAKE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Abstract

Scholarship has paid scant attention to affinities between the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt and that of Heinrich von Kleist. Both were, at different times, fascinated by the aftermath of the French Revolution and its influence on the shape of contemporary Europe. Humboldt's essays of the 1790s plead the cause of individual ‘Bildung’ against the hegemony of an interventionist state. His verdict on the new French constitution is ultimately pessimistic as he denies that history permits successful and sudden reversals of political structures. Kleist sees the Revolution as betrayed by Napoleon's ascendancy. His first work on his tragedy Penthesilea is dated between 1805 and 1806 in Königsberg, where he would have had ready access to Humboldt's publications. The calamitous defeat of Prussia in October 1806 overshadowed the play's completion in 1807. It is in this climate of the disintegration of a traditional order that Kleist invents the Amazon state as the tragic sequel to a revolution. Suppressing all individual freedom, it is the opposite of what Humboldt imagined a state should be, thus suggesting we may find in Humboldt's political thought a hitherto neglected source for Penthesilea.