Michael Kohlhaas

by Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Overview

An extraordinary masterpiece of German literature, now in a gripping new English translation  

Michael Kohlhaas has been wronged. First his finest horses were unfairly confiscated and mistreated. And things keep going worse—his servants have been beaten, his wife killed, and the lawsuits he pursues are stymied—but Kohlhaas, determined to find justice at all costs, tirelessly persists. Standing up against the bureaucratic machine of the empire, Kohlhaas becomes an indomitable figure that you can’t help rooting for from start to finish.

 

Knotty, darkly comical, magnificent in its weirdness, and one of the greatest and most influential tales in German literature, this short novel, first published in German in 1810, is now available in award-winning Michael Hofmann’s sparkling new English translation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228343
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, who committed double suicide with a terminally ill friend.

The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions. His translation of Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2024.

Editorial Reviews

"I did not write to you last night, it got too late because of Michael Kohlhaas (have you read it? If not, don’t! I shall read it to you!); apart from a short section which I had read the day before, I finished it in one sitting. Probably for the tenth time. This is a story I read with true piety; it carries me along waves of wonder."

Franz Kafka

"Kleist tells you what sort of people his characters are—often impetuous, wrongheaded, overly emotional, but essentially good at heart—and lets them run around the narrative at the speed of windup toys. He has no time for their motives, nor do they, as they struggle, like the reader, to keep up with the pace at which one surprise follows another."

Francine Prose

"Sometimes you find a brother, and you instantly know that you are no longer alone. I experienced this with Kleist."

Werner Herzog

"Perhaps the strongest of all German stories. Michael Kohlhaas seems to me to have a peculiar resonance to the present time, when apathy toward the law, callousness toward injustice, a limp acceptance of "the way things are" exercise a paralyzing influence all over the world. Kleist shows us, incidentally, with a superb, mordant humor, the predicament into which a society accustomed to constant abuse of the law is thrown by a man who refuses to put up with such abuse; how his associates gradually withdraw from the doltish robber baron who created the whole mess—with whom they would have continued to get along easily had it not been for the unpleasant consequences of his insolent act... We are filled with anxiety and terror, shudder in the face of mystery, doubt in the powers of reason, and, indeed, in the power of God himself—all our 'affects are confounded.' Kleist knows how to put us on the rack and—such is his triumph as an artist—succeeds in making us thank him for that torture."

Thomas Mann

"Michael Kohlhaas: a story about bravery and its twin, stupidity."

Roberto Bolaño

"His sentences are remarkable—great hatchet-blows of thought, an implacable narrative speed, a pulverizing sense of inevitability. No wonder Kafka liked him so much…"

Paul Auster

"Kleist is a great master. He wrote a kind of chronicle fiction which to this day dazzles me as no other."

E. L. Doctorow

"Kleist’s two abiding concerns, politics and metaphysics, come together powerfully in Michael Kohlhaas, his longest and best-known narrative, which now appears in a lively new translation by Michael Hofmann."

Bookforum - Ratik Asokan

"A masterwork—at once a savage indictment of a corrupt legal system and an object lesson in the ways that all-out combat can ignite from the most picayune personal slights. In Michael Hofmann, whose own writing style is frenetic and steeply erudite, the novella may have found the perfect translator. Absurdities compound with a devil’s logic that presages Kafka (who adored the book)."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"Heinrich von Kleist is one of the great neglected figures of European literature. His work is at once tragic, grotesque, hectic, tender, hilarious and heartbroken, a powerful current in that underground of European literature that includes Holderlin, Buchner, Diderot, Kafka, Rilke, Witold Gombrowiez, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, upon many of whom Kleist had a direct influence. His work is peculiarly apt for our fractured times, and speaks in a voice which, despite the occasional High Romantic inflection, sounds startlingly modern."

John Banville

"What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his works to the elder statesman ‘on the knees of his heart’—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom bore."

Susan Sontag

"Kleist is a giant, Cervantes's heir, and a one-man avant-garde of the modern German novel."

The Guardian

"Michael Kohlhaas could be called a pathology of obsession, or a juridical riddle, or even a kind of magnificent taunt, though none of these is right, or right enough. One must merely read it, and then read it again, staggered by its sheer acceleration, its furious savagery, its vertiginous authority, its exquisite prolongment of closure as event follows improbable event. Kohlhaas is one of literature’s eternal characters because he outpaces any interpretive framework. His indomitable reality exceeds our own."

“Michael Kohlhaas,” the Book That Made the Novel Modern - The New Yorker - Dustin Illingworth

"The most inscrutable of all Kleist's works, newly translated by the incomparable Michael Hofmann. Set in the sixteenth century, the book follows its namesake, a petty horse trader who grows enraged when a nobleman subjects him to a minor injustice. Kleist's sentences, hypnotic and exquisitely controlled, span entire pages, rippling into ever wider and ever dreamier rings."

The Baffler - Becca Rothfeld

"It is this critical combination of fiction and philosophy that accounts for Kleist’s enduring originality and Michael Kohlhaas’s appeal to writers like Walser and Kafka. Despite the novella being set amid the tumult of the German Reformation, Kleist’s portrait of a man ‘in the Hell of unsatisfied vengeance’, beset on all sides by bureaucratic obstacles and governmental corruption, possesses a stubborn timelessness."

Literary Review

"Our sort is nothing compared to Kleist."

Rainer Maria Rilke

2019-12-23
Foundational novella of the German romantic era, celebrating a folk hero of the 1530s.

First published in 1810, the year before von Kleist committed suicide at 34, this short, elegant novel is well known to students of German literature. It's easy to see why Franz Kafka should have esteemed it so much, drawing on it for books like The Castle and The Trial: The hero of the piece is a law-abiding man who confronts an obdurate bureaucracy and loses—though not without a fight, for, as von Kleist writes, "his sense of justice led him to robbery and murder." The eponymous horse trader travels a well-worn path to market only to find a new tollbooth blocking his way. It seems that Wenzel von Tronka, heir to the newly deceased lord of the territory, is exercising his royal privilege to issue visas to cross it for a fee, and although Kohlhaas protests that "he had passed this frontier seventeen times in the course of his life without any such document," he is forced to leave two horses from his string as security. Arriving in Dresden, the regional capital, Kohlhaas learns both that this demand for collateral was imposed arbitrarily and that his captive horses have been ill treated, though the lawsuit he files is eventually dismissed as a "baseless fuss" thanks to von Tronka's influence. That's reason enough for him to become a fierce avenger who sets out in fury to reclaim what's his—and, in the orderly realm of the Electorate of Saxony, such outlaw acts, no matter how well justified, are enough to earn a person a death penalty. Von Kleist complicates the story, which he relates as a matter-of-fact chronicle, with a few neat twists toward the end, quietly satirizing both the legal system and the imperial order of his day while suggesting that the quest for justice is more likely to backfire on the petitioner than be rewarded with anything other than "near-universal mourning."

A masterwork that, 220 years on, holds up well thanks to this fluent translation.

Kirkus Reviews

"In Kleist we find the root of the modern German art of language." —Franz Kafka

From the Publisher