Heinrich von Kleist THE PRINCE OF HOMBURG
The Play's 'Dialectic' .
THESIS
The Prince as a thoughtless and impetuous hero
Subjective risking his and others' lives (and the control of
Heroism the whole battle plan) He is a ‘somnambulist'
unaware of what Objective reality requires.
His Subjective 'dream' of heroism and glory
with Natalia, when he thinks Elector is dead.
But he is as yet unfit for such a role. The
contrast is with Froben who is given full
military honors while the Prince is disgraced.
ANTITHESIS:
The Prince's terror at the sight of the grave after
Subjective thinking he has been unjustly condemned. The
Cowardice condemnation has demoralized him totally.
He loses faith in the Objective Order of the Elector
He now renounces all aspects of his dream of
subjective heroism [ including Natalia ] This
is the ‘devastation' of his false identity necessary for
his ‘rebirth'. Similar to Mary's situation in
Schiller's Mary Stuart - or Segismundo's in
Calderon's Life Is A Dream
SYNTHESIS:
Given freedom to decide on the justice of his
Objective punishment from the Elector's view the Prince
Heroism recognizes the superior claims of the
Objective Order and the need for his death.
His continuance disrupts the state's order, as
the army identifies with his earlier identity. But
this old identity has to be ‘slain' (mock execution)
He now can be compared to the Elector and one
day can take his place.
.
THE PRINCE OF HOMBURG
The two Frederick's
Prince Frederick ( cf. Carlos ) Elector Frederick( cf. King + Posa )
Heart (Emotion) Head (Reason)
Subjective realm Objective realm
Dream Reality
Individuality Communal identity
Imagined heroism Actual heroism (Froben)
Individual ambition Collective need
Schiller's Version of this dialectic
Naive /Sentimentalisch
Mary Stuart
Mary Elizabeth
Mortimer Leicester
Other Literary Versions
Extrovert Introvert
Marianne Sense and Sensibility Eleanor
Billy Budd Billy Budd Captain Vere
Dionysos The Birth of Tragedy Apollo
Shen Te Good Person of Szechwan Shui Ta
Estragon Waiting for Godot Vladimir
Peer Gynt Brand
(You will be able to come up with many others)
1. THE PRINCE OF HOMBURG.
1. KLEIST AND SCHILLER
Schiller's 'Objective' dialectical drama
Kleist's expressed great admiration for Schiller, and especially for the plays Don Carlos and Wallenstein. In Don Carlos, Schiller created a dramatic method where, through the actions of individuals in conflict, a whole world-historical conflict could be acted out. He did this by an external, objective pattern of parallels and contrasts that created a dialectical drama. (We remember how the play ranges itself into two groups: one (Phillip, Alba, Inquisitor) representing the old, oppressive Order repressing our full humanity; the other (Elizabeth-Carlos-Posa) representing Eros, liberty, freedom of thought. Schiller also created a totally new kind of dramatic action and dramatic hero, the 'alienated' individual (Posa) who wishes to give meaning and shape to his own destiny by linking it onto historical evolution. Out of this came a new form of hubris , of which Posa was guilty - of using others (Carlos, Phillip) as a means and not an end. Wallenstein is another such hero, trying to shape history through the shape he gives to his own life.
This hubris, also, is what Frederick, the prince of Homburg is at first guilty of: - of seeing the historical battle ( the same war as in Wallenstein) as the arena for his own personal destiny: even to the point, at one moment, of his claiming to replace the Elector. As in Don Carlos there is a conflict between youthful idealism versus the conventional, settled order: but, unlike Schiller, Kleist gives the advantage to the ruler (Elector) and all he stands for: the order and discipline he imposes on reality. As Kleist's own personality in his alienated and rebellious aspects resembled the Prince's this play seems a form of self-annihilation, a capitulation to the social order that, in fact, helped to destroy Kleist. The play sets itself against the whole tendency of Romanticism to favor youth and rebellion: to see a utopian future as a Concept a younger generation will achieve. Kleist never saw the play performed. It was found among his papers after his suicide. When it was published the play greatly offended the very military authorities whose ethos the play defended.
2. The Inner Dialectic of Kleist's Play
Schiller created a new dialectic for drama, a new dynamic of reality made up of forces in ideological opposition over a human reality yet to be realized. In his plays, characters associate themselves with universal forces and values. The foreground human conflict involves, also, a conflict in the theater of the world. By taking this dialectic further inward, Kleist made the conflict more emphatically an internal (psychological) as well as an external (ideological-moral) one. Two of the major characters in The Prince of Homburg, Prince Frederick and Natalia, go through total transformations of their identities. Dramatic character is depicted as radically unstable, capable of becoming its own opposite. (This will be a major feature of the Ibsen drama). The tremendous transformations the hero of the play goes through, from his false subjective identity of dashing hero, living a dream of heroism in battle, to his antithesis, the abject coward begging for his life and willing to give up his beloved Natalie and retire to humble life; then the synthesis, the truly objective hero, willing to be executed to serve his country, make up an extraordinary and shocking dialectical action. It proved so outrageous that the play was banned in Prussia for fear it would undermine military morale - though Kleist intended the very opposite, to write a patriotic play on behalf of his country.
3. The Story
There are two major sources, one historical and the other legendary.
(a) The Thirty Years War (the subject of Schiller's Wallenstein) Kleist said that Schiller's trilogy should not just be read but learned by heart by every German. Many details of Kleist's play draw upon Schiller's. This Schillerian source provides the 'patriotic context' of The Prince of Homburg . It sets out the 'world' to which the prince's aberrant spirit must re-align itself even at the greatest cost. In actual fact, the historical Elector would not have had the power to order the execution of the Prince.
(b) The power to execute the hero belonged to the other source of the play - far more remote than the Thirty Years War: an event 1800 years earlier recorded by the Roman historian, Livy: This tells how a young officer's disobedience resulted in his being sentenced to death by his commander even though that disobedience had resulted in victory. And how the Roman army revolted against its leader on the young man's behalf. That is, one disruption, the individual's inward revolt, leads to a larger, outer disruption, the army's mutiny.
By combining these two stories, the 'modern' German and the 'ancient' Roman, into a new plot Kleist repeats more emphatically Schiller's linkage of personal with universal historical circumstance. Kleist makes the linkage close: the 'internal' convulsion within the prince is followed by the mutiny in the army, endangering the state. The subjective instability in the psyche of the hero leads to an objective instability within the state (the army) which seems only tentatively resolved at the end of the play. What emerges is not just the mutability of individual psyches but the readiness to return to Chaos within the world itself. The army's readiness to revolt and its later return to order seems strangely dependent upon the internal shifts of feeling and resolution in the mind of the Prince. When he returns to conformity to the Elector's will, so does the army. And this theme of being an aberrant and disruptive agent in his own culture applied to Kleist's own situation.
3. Kleist's life and death
Kleist always had bad luck. Like Schiller he was enlisted into the army at the age of 14, fought against Napoleon's army at the age of sixteen, was arrested as a spy for Napoleon and almost executed; then later, as a spy against Napoleon, almost executed again. Not that this would have worried him overmuch. Since he was young, Kleist had the unnerving habit of urgently asking close friends to commit suicide with him. At last he met with success. After years of failure as a writer and dramatist, desperately unhappy in his personal life, and brought to a condition of near-despair through loss of faith (due to Kantian philosophy among other things) Kleist and a companion, Henriette Vogel, went to stay at an inn near Wannsee. Henriette had an incurable cancer. Kleist had talked her into a suicide pact with him. They spent a day happily laughing and making preparations. Kleist wrote a letter saying he and his companion were "like two happy balloonists" about to go on their voyage. They walked to the edge of the lake, sat down and picnicked. Soon after, Kleist shot Henriette through the heart then shot himself in the head. When their bodies were found, it is said they both had smiles on their faces. Kleist was 34 years old.
Romantics had a tendency to die young, and Kleist is Germany's most Romantic writer. He is also a great writer, something that was never recognized in his lifetime. Goethe, who could have helped him, was repelled by his writings. He appalled the conservative establishment. Today, his short stories, plays and essays are considered among Germany's finest. The manuscript of The Prince of Homburg, his best play, survived by an accident, and it was through another Romantic writer, Ludwig Tieck, that Kleist gradually became recognized as a great writer. What is a distinguishing characteristic of Kleist is the strange intensity of his writing, and its preoccupation with morbid and extreme emotions. Only Kleist could have written Penthesilea in which the Amazon heroine kills and cannibalizes her lover, Achilles, in a fit of madness, and then simply dies of heartbreak.
Kleist's own chaotic personal disorder was played out against the background of a great national disorder for Germany; the Napoleonic occupation. Kleist felt both disorders equally keenly. He failed to establish himself as a poet-dramatist of his nation: and he could find no stability either in Germany at large or in his own identity. Kant's philosophy, denying our access to 'reality in itself' only increased Kleist's sense of despair.
The counterpoint of violent external and internal actions is typical of such Kleist plays as Amphitryon, Penthesilea and The Prince of Homburg, where the inward convulsions seem more alarming than the outer. This is part of a new movement in literature - in Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Camus - of a fracturing of reality in which the 'journey into the interior' is the more consequential one. It is the point at which Romanticism takes on the danger and fear of non-identity itself. - the theme of Peer Gynt.
Loss both of personal identity and of understanding the world (objective reality) is a theme that evolves through, e.g. Woyzeck, Peer Gynt and all the way to Kafka's 'K' (and Beckett's plays) Prince Frederick overcomes this de-vastation, by submitting to claims of the Elector's reality - but at the cost of slaying his former identity, which is even staged as a mock execution and a loss of consciousness (fainting).
The two disorders: Brandenburg's and in the hero's.
In The Prince of Homburg there are two disorders: one in Brandenburg, in the nation and its role in the world; the other in the hero's psyche: that is, the national instability triggers off a psychological instability: and vice-versa. Kleist virtually sacrifices the life of the prince in order to restore order to Germany (Brandenburg) and its military needs. What is moving about this play is that the hero, who could be Kleist, undergoes a suicide on behalf of his country. For Prince Frederick‘s situation resembles Kleist's: He is a dreamer, whose personal life and ambitions set him at odds with his culture. The prince has to be violently shaken out of this false, subjective identity, (where he re-arranges the world according to his own private dream world), into a sense of the world's reality and what it requires from him.
Many will be reminded of Calderon's Life is A Dream where the hero, Segismund, similarly has to learn to sacrifice his former self, which is violently antagonistic to the world; and to recognize the claims of objective reality (represented by his royal father,) which he had offended. Segismund accepts that his final situation, as new ruler, might only be a dream. And this is the idea on which Kleist's play ends. Kleist most likely knew Calderon's play, for the Spanish dramatists, along with Shakespeare, were popular among German Romantic intellectuals at the time, replacing the old French neo-classical models. At this time, Calderon is said to have been performed in Germany more than in Spain. The Prince of Homburg was written between 1809 and 1811, and we by this time the French neoclassical forms that had dominated Europe, including Germany, for over a hundred years, had been completely abandoned along with all the neoclassical ‘Rules'. Kleist's play reveals the new dynamics of Romantic drama. There are frequent changes of place and of time, creating the ‘organic fluidity' of its form; the rough rhythms of the speeches that recreates the characters uncontrolled feelings and thoughts; the movement and rhythm of the play that is not ‘realizing' a classical structure but is imitating the movement and flow of actual events and experiences even more than in Don Carlos. There are long, formal speeches, but these arise out of a context of often very short, confused, hurried, and broken-off speeches and rapid, to-and-fro action. This ‘realistic' breaking up of formal dramatic structure into a more natural sequence of events will be taken to an even greater extreme by Georg Büchner in Woyzeck where formalism dissolves completely into the fragmented and disordered psyche of Woyzeck himself.
9. The movement of the play
One clear movement of the play is its circuitous journey, beginning and ending with the same scene. But though the last scene of the play is a repetition of the first, the hero of the scene is radically different. The Prince has undergone a devastating internal journey ('de-vastating' from vastation - emptying”) - a self-slaying. Prince Frederick is not the only character that undergoes radical change. Natalie goes in the opposite direction she starts out as a timid girl in need of protection and whom Prince Frederick in a fantasy, after thinking the Elector is dead, imagines marrying and protecting . When she sees the Prince's collapse into terror, she takes command of herself, of him and, finally, even of the regiment of which she is the nominal head. Her journey, then, also is one of self-discovery, parallel to but the opposite of the prince's. Furthermore, the army itself violently changes from loyalty to revolt. The effect of all these violent changes is to put into doubt the concept of both subjective and objective reality and 'identity'. If reality and identity can change so radically into their opposites, then where is the center of stability? Might not reality be subject ceaselessly to such violent changes?
In a play like Hamlet the disorder in the kingdom is an aberration and is overcome so that the kingdom settles back into the natural order that had been disturbed. The movement of The Prince of Homburg similarly returns to order, but the violent convulsion that overtakes the Prince, Natalie and the whole army is not an aberration, nor an‘evil' but the exploration of a dimension of radical instability already within the given order. The ending of the play is far more tentative than that of Hamlet - like a pulling back from an abyss that has, just the same, inexorably opened up. It would suggest that ‘stable' identity is an illusion, artificial, an evasion of one's actuality which is fluid, always changing. Prince Frederick is first smashed to pieces before the Elector helps him put himself together again. And this occurs only after the Elector's own control over his world almost is lost.
10. Subjective versus Objective Heroism
At the play begins, Prince Frederick resembles a typical Romantic: living a personal fantasy of his life, a dream state (we first see him sleepwalking) where he imagines himself the great hero of a battle, winning the Princess Natalie and stepping into the Elector's shoes. He is trapped within his own world, unable to appreciate the claims of outside reality, represented by the Elector. As the central actor in his own drama he re-arranges the other characters to fulfill his subjective fantasy. Both the opening and closing scenes of the play have a deliberately 'staged' quality: as if Kleist is first introducing us to the Prince's 'false' theatrics before developing a truer form of theater.
On the battlefield the Prince wins his battles through impetuous courage, though by disobeying the Elector's orders. The Prince totally disregards the larger drama which the Elector has to direct. What Prince Frederick needs is to be shocked out of this solipsist, self-regarding heroism, and it is the Elector who administers the shock by sentencing the Prince to death. For the first time the Prince is shaken into not understanding the world he lives in.
When he learns of the death sentence the Prince cannot bring himself to believe the Elector is not just putting on a show of discipline, to reprieve him later - for this is the kind of dramatic role the Prince himself might play. When he learns the Elector is serious his whole faith in the world and his place in it is destroyed. He can no longer be the hero of a world he does not know. It is this sense - that he no longer knows the world - that totally unnerves him and drives him into terror. He was not afraid of death on the battlefield; because that was part of the world he thought he understood - an arena for his personal heroism and ambitions. He cannot understand how the Elector does not also see the world in this way, which would make the disobeying of orders in order to dash bravely into battle perfectly understandable and forgivable.
When he sees his own grave, dug and waiting to receive him, he is driven into pleading for his life. The waiting grave is Death in all its banal negativity: not a glamorous battlefield death, but simple extinction and this, on top of all else, completely unnerves him. The grave demands that he exit a world he no longer can make heroic sense of. At this point he seems to turn into his total opposite: a groveling coward, begging two women to save his life, willing to give up Natalia, the woman for whom he had fantasized playing the heroic lover. It was this scene that appalled the Prussian authorities.
11. The Prince vs. Froben
Early in the play an example of the authentic hero is presented, not dreaming of his own glory, but willing to sacrifice himself for his nation. In Act II Scene ii, just after Prince Frederick has declared his love for Natalia and thinking the Elector has been killed Frederick offers to take the place of the Elector. The death of the Elector serves only to add to his subjective fantasies and ambitions. When he hears the Elector is alive his reaction, "Your words fall like gold heavy on my heart"
is phrased ambiguously. It was not the Elector who was killed in battle but his groom, Froben, who, seeing that the Elector on his conspicuous white horse was drawing enemy fire, pretended to take over the horse in order to discipline it. He was mistaken for the Emperor and immediately killed. Froben's taking the place of the Elector contrasts with the Prince's. This was a heroism without Romantic self-glamorization: just seeing a danger to his superior and dealing with it. Froben, that is, could see the needs of the larger objective reality of the battle and no just his own personal, subjective part in the action.
After the battle, Prince Frederick, in disgrace, is arrested while Froben is given full honors in a military funeral. The contrast between the two actions is neatly juxtaposed on the stage. The body of Froben is seen in the background given the highest honors as it lies within a brightly lit chapel. In the foreground is the ceremony of Homburg and his fellow officers carrying in the flags of the defeated Swedes. There follows the scene where the Prince is stripped of his saber and disgraced. All the time the honored body of Froben makes the strongest contrast with the prince's disgrace. Kleist's does not comment on the two different events: he lets the theatre audience or the reader see and contrast the two presented actions. The stage image alone carries the strongest meaning.
12 The Argument between Head and Heart
Kleist takes the play's argument deeper. We have the typically Romantic conflict between the 'head' and the 'head. The word 'heart' is repeated all through the play and is central theme to the play's' dialectic. An army or a nation requires discipline and obedience to rationally calculated actions; but it also depends on emotional loyalties. The old soldier, Kottwicz who leads the army's revolt against the Elector, makes this point (Act V. Sc.1.) If soldiers are to be willing to lay down their lives for their leaders, they will do this not out of rational calculation nor from a cool understanding of what the objective situation requires, but from the same area of deep emotions that prompted Prince Frederick to dash into battle prematurely rather than calculate his own safety. If the Elector cold-bloodedly executes the popular Prince Frederick in the name of the law he threatens the ties of love and loyalty from which his men fight for him and the cause.
The heart-head conflict creates a dilemma: to secure the good of the whole, military orders must be obeyed with possibly the penalty of death for disobedience - the calculation of the head. However, the obedience with which men are willing to die in battle should not come out of fear of the law but from attachment to the cause -the emotion of the heart. And this attachment to the cause is a subjective element, difficult for a leader to control, and might prompt one to act with ardent, miscalculating heroism, like Prince Frederick.
Bertolt Brecht wrote a lehrstuck, The Measures Taken, trying to deal with this problem, where the impetuous Young Comrade has to be executed by the communist collective for endangering their mission. The Young Comrade's problem is, precisely, that he acts from the heart, from sympathy with the victims of oppression. His too-evident responses to the victims of injustice threaten to betray and expose him and his comrades, endangering the covert mission they are on. Therefore, with his agreement, they decide to execute him, . Brecht justified the execution of the Young Comrade but the communist party's cultural watchdogs condemned the play!
Another story similar to Kleist's play is Herman Melville's, Billy Budd in which Captain Vere, to maintain discipline in the British Navy, feels compelled to hang Billy Budd for striking (and killing) the officer, Clegg, even though he was justified and even though Billy Budd is popular with his shipmates and whose hanging threatens mutiny. Billy dies blessing his executioner, exclaiming “God Bless Captain Vere” with his last words, just as prince Frederick acknowledges the justice of the Elector's sentence as he faces the firing squad.
Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus (renamed The Children of the Sea by its American publisher) and a number of other stories deal with the same theme. Kleist, Melville and Conrad from both 'left' and 'right' perspectives come to the same uncomfortable conclusion: that, ultimately, the individual must be sacrificed to the collective good. Ibsen will raise a counter-voice!
.Prince Frederick's acceptance of his death .
When the action of the play breaks into open rebellion, anarchy, it is the Prince who saves the situation. The Elector is shocked and distressed to hear that the prince not only has broken down and become a coward pleading for his life but that he denies the justice of the sentence: for this makes the Elector doubt perhaps his own objective justice, seeing the Prince's breakdown is a way of protesting that justice. The Elector, in his own way, finds he does not know the world. The Prince's seeming denial of the justice of his action puts the military ethos in doubt. Therefore, when Natalia begs the Elector for a pardon, the Elector writes a letter cleverly designed to get the prince to declare either his justice (the military ethos) is right or that it is wrong.
IV. 3.
When the Prince reads the letter, he is forced to consider not himself and his desire to live but the world of ordered justice that the death-sentence represents. He is forced out from his narcissistic, self-centered view of the world and into the Elector's view. In front of our eyes we see him make this inward journey of the soul from Prince Frederick to Elector Frederick's potential; successor. And despite Natalia's frantic pleading, he writes to the Elector expressing his belief in the justice of the sentence and of his willingness to die. He achieves true heroism at the moment the law would destroy him.
More than Froben previously, the Prince now proves his heroism by willingly dying, not by returning to his former self and his former heroism on the battlefield: he renounces that false self altogether. When he enters to dissuade the soldiers from rebelling against the Elector he speaks as Elector himself would speak: in fact, he is the only person capable of being the Elector's heir. Now he is doing the right thing for the right reason, The Prince realizes his earlier willingness to risk his life came from a misunderstanding of the nature of reality.
The Mock Execution.
To demonstrate that the Prince has reached this authentic level of heroic martyrdom, Kleist stages one of the strangest scenes in drama: the repetition of Act One, Sc. i. but now as a mock execution in which, when he faints, losing consciousness, the prince visually and metaphorically 'dies' in his old identity, conceding the claims of the objective world represented by the Elector. A parallel is in Life Is A Dream where Segismund's returning, unconscious, to his prison, before he is later violently released . When Segismund wins his battle against his father and returns to the throne, he has learned to distrust his own idea of reality and to accept that all life might be a dream. Prince Frederick's final words in the play, What else, a dream?” would seem a direct allusion to Calderon's play.
A contrasts of this mock execution with the execution in Mary Stuart reveals the revolution Kleist has brought to drama. Mary's journey to her death is clear, rational, objective - the closing of a great historical argument as well as personal drama where all the motives and feelings are out in the open, accessible to the intellect, expressed in a clear, rational rhetoric. Even the passionate speeches, as in the confrontation of Mary and Elizabeth, are highly conscious, beautifully on the surface - without being superficial. But the great transitions, peripeties, in The Prince of Homburg are all subjective, inward movements without explanatory rhetoric:
(a) the prince's first sight of his open grave, after which he is an astonishingly different person,
(b) Natalia's sudden change at the sight of the prince from timid girl to heroic rebel;
(c) the inward movement whereby the prince, on reading the Elector's letter, loses fear of death and recognizes the Elector's justice and his
own duty.
We see these reverses happening, not all laid out rhetorically before us as in Schiller; or in soliloquy, as in Hamlet, but because we realize the characters change before our eyes in a new theatrical dynamics.
Kleist's Originality… the dynamics of the inward life.
Along with Don Carlos, Kleist's play shows affinities with and with Life Is A Dream. Hamlet's soliloquies, his ‘thinking aloud', are not stages of devastating inward revolution or self-annihilation. He emerges from each soliloquy essentially the same and his idea of his place in Denmark remains unchanged. His deepest reflection is the traditional memento mori. Segismund, in Life Is A Dream goes through violent changes of situation, but not of intrinsic identity. That is, his strange upbringing had hid from him the true 'princely virtues he actually possessed. He has learned, like Homburg, that reality itself might only be a dream, but this is from external pressures: his imprisonment, release, re-imprisonment, where he was drugged to believe his release was a fantasy. His acknowledgement that life might only be a dream is the result of external events making him distrust his senses. Hamlet and Life Is A Dream are dramas of Integrity rather than of Authenticity. The heroes, especially Segismund, see the world as confronting them with treacherous signs but they do not doubt that they possess self-identities to which they must be true.
When we consider Kleist's play, we see how revolutionary it is. The theater audience first sees the hero in a somnambulist state, so that he is inaccessible to us or to others on the stage. At the play's close, we see him again recovering from unconsciousness, from a faint. This is not the fainting of conventional drama, a tragic 'swoon' - but a real de-vastation, an emptying of old identity.
When Chimene faints in Corneille's The Cid she recovers to resume the same identity. Her lover Rodrigo will never have any doubts about his own heroism - he is splendidly the same at the end of the play as at the beginning. The Prince's transition, however, comes from a violent, interior convulsion: when his earlier, romantic fantasies of dying heroically on the battlefield are suddenly replaced by an image of the terrifying banality of his death - the sight of the open grave waiting for him. The shock smashes to pieces his sense of heroic identity and his understanding of his world. His internal revolution is an irrevocable devastation. The Elector's letter, that gets him to renounce his subjectivity, is an internally generated action allowing him to choose in freedom.
In Kleist's dramas, at least from Amphytrion on, the intense disorder recorded by the plays is dual: a shattering of both the idea of the self and the idea of the world the self has to exist in. This will not just be the drama of the hero or heroine, but of the audience, too. The audiences of (pre-Kleist) would not have been able to comprehend what he was doing, for that required the Romantic exploration of the inner life, a violent dynamism of the inward life, of a self-shattering that also dissolves the objective world.
17. The ambiguity of the ending: dream or reality?
Though the prince accepts the objective justice of the Elector's sentence, and recognizes the needs of the state over his own romantic identity, this can be seen as only at the price of a form of self-annihilation that really leaves him with no self-identity to build upon. One could see him as re-created as a robot of the state. It is not Kleist's intention, but it is a possible meaning and seems to have been the point of Peter Stein's 1972 production in Berlin where "the Prince who was carried off shoulder-high by the officers was only a dummy, and the real Prince (played by Bruno Ganz) was left on stage in a trance as in the opening scene: we were back, it seemed, exactly where we had started.” (Lamport: German Classical Drama )
The last scene brings the play full circle where the opening 'game' of giving the Prince honors he had not yet deserved now is 'replayed' where he is granted the ‘real' honors he has earned. But these rewards, and the world that offers them, can never be what they were at the beginning. The romantic self the prince once was could invest the laurel wreath, the hand of Natalie, the Elector's golden chain, with all the symbolic values that only the romantic imagination could respond to. But in this last scene this is a new prince who cannot possibly revert to his old, romantic character. That has been 'killed' and the new identity might become an obedient servant of the state or a practitioner of realpolitikk .
Because at the end of the play the prince, after the mock-execution, has no idea of himself or of the world. His last words are, "No, tell me, is it a dream?" Not only does he not know whether he is living a reality or not, he needs others to assure him - his own experience cannot be trusted. A negative reading of the play would be that it is the Elector's brainwashing of the turbulent individual, the prince. This is not what Kleist intended: but what Kleist did intend, I think, is not so far from this. . It is a suicide of individuality. It is possible that a new 'synthesis' will emerge from the collision of the Thesis (Subjective Hero) Antithesis (Subjective Coward) into the synthesis, (Objective Hero), but the ending of the play really gives us no idea what this will resemble.
18.Kleist, Schiller and the later drama
Kleist is not a greater dramatist than Schiller, but he added to the development of a major modern drama something indispensable. We can trace this evolution back to Lessing's Nathan the Wise, in that final scene of dissolving identities, relationships, and religions, between Nathan, his 'daughter', the Templar, Saladin and Sittah. In that last scene, the reality that all the characters had accepted until then, was seen to have been a fiction they all were living and that "reality in itself" still needed to be recreated out of the destruction of their illusory identities By including Schiller's dynamics to Lessing's Enlightenment ideological drama, and further intensifying those dynamics by adding an inner dynamism to the external one, Kleist decisively furthered the possibility of a modern drama that Ibsen, who admired both Kleist and Schiller, was to bring into being. The two Fredericks, the Prince and the Elector, represent the poles of the dialectical journey of the play. This is a dramatic ‘move' closely similar to Ibsen' dialectical dramas of self-discovery. Karsten Bernick in Pillars of Society , Nora in A Doll House, Helen Alving in Ghosts , Rosmer and Rebekka in Rosmersholm and other Ibsen characters., are precipitated upon such paths of self-discovery all through the Realist Cycle.
The Prince is trained to become the Elector.
In the strange dialectic of the play, Prince Frederick is painfully trained, through devastation, to become the only character worthy to be his opposite, the Elector. Earlier, when learning of the death of the Elector, he had rashly offered to take his place when he was totally unfit to do so. But when, towards the end, the army revolts against the Elector, the prince steps forward and presents the Elector's case. He is the only one to do so because he has become a young version of the Elector, (as his possessing the name, Frederick, implies) as his romantic subjectivity renounces itself for the Elector's objective reality. Though the prince accepts the objective justice of the Elector's sentence, and recognizes the needs of the state over his own romantic ambitions, this is only at the price of a form of self-annihilation that really leaves him with no self-identity to build upon. At the end of the play the prince, after the mock-execution, has no idea of himself or of the world. His last words are, "No, tell me, is it a dream?" Not only does he not know whether he is living a reality or not, he needs others to assure him - his own experience cannot be trusted. A negative reading of the play would be that it is the State's brainwashing of the turbulent individual. This is not what Kleist intended: but what Kleist did intend, I think, is not so far from this: the aberrant, subjective imagination, 'slaying itself' and joining the needs of the objective and authoritarian community. It is a form of a suicide of the individuality. It is possible that a new 'synthesis' will emerge from the collision of the Thesis (Subjective Hero) Antithesis (Subjective Coward) into the synthesis, Objective Hero, but the ending of the play really gives us no idea what this will resemble.
Schiller + Kleist = Ibsen
In The Prince of Homburg Kleist pushes the argument about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group as far as it could go - to the point of self-annihilation. The prince does not die, in actual fact; his old individual Self has been ‘slain In Peer Gynt , the Button Molder will tell Peer, "To be yourself is to slay yourself." Brand is a succession of such dialectical self-slayings. Nora in A Doll House is shocked and jolted from being the mini-Nora of the first Act to a potentially super-Nora of the last: the old character dies before our eyes and a new one is born. In all his plays Ibsen draws an opposite conclusion to Kleist. The individual does not renounce herself to serve society, but renounces her conventional, false self to attempt to find her true individuality. In other words, Ibsen seems to reverse the conclusion of The Prince of Homburg while using the same method of dialectical inversion or overthrow of given reality. In Kleist, it was the given ‘reality' of the Prince's subjectivity: In Ibsen, this will be accompanied by an utter demolition of objective reality's claim to truth or allegiance,returning to Schiller's dialectic that emphasized the instability of objective reality in a world of conflicting ideologies. : Kleist had added the instability of the subjective self. Thus the ground was laid for Ibsen to combine and refine the two into a powerful new synthesis; at the same time bringing the drama of kings and princes down to the world of bourgeois reality and into the minds and hearts of everyday women and men.
Locating ideological drama within Everyman
In Mary Stuart Catholicism and Protestantism battle each other through the royal pair, Mary and Elizabeth and their international allies. In Ibsen's plays, this demolition work takes place within the psyches of individual men and women in middle class drawing rooms. Brand and Peer Gynt are world-historical dramas like Mary Stuart on an even greater ideological scale: Brand battles to authenticate a new religion for the modern world, to discover whether or not God is dead: but he fights this monumental battle in a remote north Norwegian fishing village. Peer Gynt is a play that explores the wasteland of our entire modern civilization: yet its hero is a peasant boy who grows into an entrepreneur - a Norwegian Citizen Kane. Hedda Gabler is a world historical drama, yet takes place in a bourgeois living room Each one of us is a potentially tragic character and can be elevated by tragic conflict by the intellectual/spiritual adequacy of the issues we dare to confront. Tragedy, to be authentically modern, had to lose the glamour of historical and princely eminence. While Schiller and Kleist set up the dynamics for a future modern tragic drama: Ibsen created it, by making it the drama of all of us.