High on the Chalk (Kleist, Goethe, and Friedrich) — Matthew Spencer

A soldier takes the border with him. It can be stowed, along with his rations and bedroll, in a rucksack, lightweight on the march. Refugees march also but carry no borders. Their baggage is checked for contraband. Specific dogs are bred to detect it. They suffer hip dysplasia and other heritable disorders. The stresses of the workplace transcend species. The pharmaceutical industry has taken notice. The number of pills and border guards increases yearly. Retirement is facilitated by various charitable foundations. Specific dogs are rehomed to specific households, who can accommodate their disorders. In a vast exurban backyard, planted with lavender and foxglove, a joyful medicated coda plays out, gentle resignation. The soil is amended with chalk, making it alkaline or “sweet” in the gardener’s jargon. From the calcareous remains of dead microorganisms, new life is enabled; old life is palliated.

A thin dark line overtops pale sediment. Various large tetrapods disappear from the fossil record. Chalk and clay indicate very different environments. A blotted sun favors endothermic metabolism and hairy integument, a generalized burrowing lifestyle. Different tetrapods arise. Other more recent discontinuities can be observed: In his newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter, Heinrich von Kleist, famous romanticist and suicide, tells an anecdote of an old retired army officer, who at a party tells three anecdotes himself, the last of which takes place at the Siege of Antwerp, in 1585, during the Dutch War of Independence, two and half centuries earlier. A general sets fireships against a bridgehead. A cadet stands, banner in hand, on the riverbank. A tremendous explosion occurs. Then, a moment later, the cadet stands “hide and hair, banner and pack” on the opposite riverbank “without the least thing happening on his trip.” This discontinuity amuses and baffles the audience. The credibility of the anecdote is questioned. The old retired officer takes his hat and cane and leaves. He utters some formulaic Latin by way of goodbye. The episode in question, another of the party remarks, is found in Schiller’s History of the Revolt of the Low Countries and is well attested. The historian can make use of facts that would embarrass the poet. 

An empty sea crashes against an empty shore. During certain geological periods, the number and variety of tetrapods diminishes. Narrative can be fabricated through any combination of human and natural figures, through any natural figures granted human salience. Caspar David Friedrich painted during the lifetime of Heinrich von Kleist. They had very little time, as contemporaries, to interact. A painting of Friedrich’s, Monk by the Sea, depicts a lone robed figure gazing out at a flat expanse of water. It was exhibited in Berlin, in 1810, and reviewed in Kleist’s newspaper. The initial draft was written by the poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. It was negative. The radical composition implied hostility toward the viewer. It lacked the verticals and framing devices conventionally found in landscapes of the time. Kleist rewrote the review, without consulting his fellow contributors, and made a virtue of its supposed hostility.

Different art thrives under different conditions. Short frequency light strikes directly at the pigment. Soot particulate spreads over canvas. Gloved hands swab the particulate away, millimeter by millimeter, with all the care due to patrimony. Virtues in one generation can be taken for lassitudes in another. They can be taken for excess. 

Brentano initially wrote:

It is magnificent to stand in infinite solitude on the seashore, beneath an overcast sky, and to look on an endless waste of water. Part of this feeling is the fact that one has made one’s way there and yet must go back, that one would like to cross over but cannot, that one sees nothing to support life and yet senses the voice of life in the sigh of waves, the murmur of air, the passing clouds and the lonely cry of birds. Part of this feeling is a claim made on the heart and a rejection, if I can call it that, on the part of nature. But this is impossible in front of the picture, and what I should have found in the picture itself, I only found between myself and the picture, namely a claim my heart made on the picture and the picture’s rejection of me.

Kleist wrote, or rather, he continued and rewrote:

And that which I should have found in the picture, I found instead between the picture and myself; namely, an appeal from my heart to the picture and a rejection by the picture: and so, I myself became the Capuchin—the picture became the dune, but that cross which I should have looked for with longing, the sea, was absent completely. Nothing could be sadder and more discomforting than just this position in the world: the single spark of life in vast realms of death, the lonely center in a lonely circle.

Friedrich’s exhibition in Berlin was a success, despite or regardless or because of what the critics had written, their effect being difficult to judge, even in times when criticism seemed important. Monk by the Sea and its companion piece, Abby in the Oak Wood, were purchased on behalf of the young Crown Prince of Prussia, the future King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, for the sum of 450 thalers, or about 18,000 euro as of this writing. Currencies appear and disappear; their values fluctuate, rising and falling, the imprint of commodities left in their wake. Artistic risk brought financial reward, at least early on, for Caspar David Friedrich. But Kleist’s revisions cost him his friendship with Clemens Brentano. The newspaper soon faced censorship, for separate reasons, lost its publisher, because of an article on state finance policy, which personally angered the Prime Minister, Karl von Hardenberg. The author of the editorial, Adam Müller, had been involved with Kleist in a previous venture, the journal Phöbus, based in Dresden. Editorial differences and financial difficulties had almost resulted in duel between the two men, a dynamic that would play out again, with variations, in Berlin. There, Kleist challenged a member of Hardenberg’s staff, over promised compensation for the censorship. He apologized and withdrew his challenge, once it became clear his opponent was serious. Restrictions were eventually lifted for the newspaper. Another publisher was found, but the subscriber base had collapsed. The Abendblätter folded after six months.

***

A few dozen million years ago, the sea level was high, with low continental relief; a dry climate lessened river discharge, which lessened erosive forces. It goes something like this: pelagic microorganisms, namely coccolithophores, unicellular algae, die and fall to the seabed, remaining undisturbed, and by dint of steady accumulation form deep layers of sediment. Their calcite shells, tiny interlocking spheres, not skeletons but analogous, compress and lithify, forming white porous sedimentary rock, found worldwide but abundantly in Europe, crucial to quicklime and brick manufacture, a common soil amendment, chalk. Neither animal nor vegetable, an alga becomes a mineral, its extraction leading various exceptional paleontological finds, recovered since the dawn of the science.  

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Goethe outlived Heinrich von Kleist but not Caspar David Friedrich. He mistrusted animals—they lacked the gradual and orderly development of plants. In Faust, Part One, the devil Mephistopheles takes the form of a black poodle, a very specific dog, not bred for the detection but rather the flushing and fetching of waterfowl. Faust, encountering the dog on the street, takes it to his study, where, on hearing words from Bible, it transforms, first into a monster, then into a traveling scholar, an improvement apparently. On witnessing this transformation, Faust exclaims, “Das also war des Pudels Kern!” So that was the core of the poodle: So that was the crux of the matter. Many translators omit the breed. Writerly embarrassment can take many forms. The poodle of today, groomed and pedigreed, might not fetch stray arrows from a marsh. It might not transform into a wandering scholar. There are limits to the applied science of breeding. Hip dysplasia and other heritable disorders arise from consanguineous arrangements. 

Kleist also wrote about specific dogs, about fowlers, in a short fable on the death of Haydn. Two spaniels “made sly by the school of hunger,” set upon a bird, its own species remaining unspecified. But pressing their attack too far, the spaniels drive the bird into the air. And there they stand, “eyes big as oysters, those heroes of the deep, tails jammed between their legs, gaping in astonishment.” The writer of this essay admits he can find no clear association between the fable and the composer to whom it was dedicated. “Float on the clouds, and the wise gasp aloud,” goes the moral. Haydn gained popularity and critical adulation during his lifetime. So did Goethe and Caspar David Friedrich, but not Kleist. A year or two more, a decade perhaps, and his reception might have been different. The human timescale provides scope enough to witness vast discontinuities. Journalism becomes history. Slang becomes philology. Flags are raised and lowered, then raised again. A cliffside falls away, after wind and water attack its base. But the spaniels of the fable would still be recognized, in all likelihood, as spaniels today, perhaps a little less to the standard. Breeds can change, take different uses. A contemporary poodle, groomed and pedigreed, might respond differently to words from the Bible. It might not fetch stray arrows. The bird remains underdefined compared to its attackers; but it can fly, an important characteristic, both for the fable and for the history of life in general.

In the lifetime of Heinrich von Kleist, short though it was, conflict with France was the dominant political concern amongst the various German states. Kleist himself served as an officer cadet in the Prussian Army, from age fourteen to twenty-one, when he resigned his commission. He took more interest in playing the clarinet in the taverns of Potsdam and Berlin. He took more interest in becoming a writer. But he fought against the French Republic in the War of the First Coalition, though the degree to which he saw direct combat is unknown. He took part in the Rhine Campaign, was at the Siege of Mainz, in 1793, when that city, having established the first nominal democracy on German soil, with direction from its occupying power, was encircled and eventually reconquered. The Rhine Campaign also furnished the setting for the first of the anecdotes told by Kleist, the old retired officer, who on the march personally witnessed, so he claims, a man shot through the chest without serious injury. “That evening,” he relates, “after we had made camp, a surgeon found that the bullet, not having force enough to penetrate the breastbone, had rebounded off of it, slithered between the ribcage and skin, which gave way in an elastic manner, around the entire body, finally hitting the spinal column, where it resumed its original perpendicular course, and burst through the skin once more. This minor fleshwound, moreover, cause nothing more than a slight fever in the patient; and after a couple of days, he was back in the ranks.” Seventeen years elapsed between the incident and its retelling, half a life, as it would turn out, for Kleist, the officer himself being of indeterminate age. Meanwhile, France had changed its system of government, had changed its executive, defeated Prussia in the War of the Fourth Coalition, its troops having withdrawn from Berlin only a month prior to Kleist’s return, in late 1809, having spent much of that intervening time between various other European cities, experiencing various degrees of commercial and artistic failure in his writing career. There were other reasons for travel besides soldiering. 

Goethe participated in the Rhine Campaign, not as a cadet—he was then in his forties— but as an assistant to the Duke of Weimar, Karl August. The poet and dramatist was a kind of early celebrity, having avoided suicide, unlike the protagonist of his debut novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, a kind of early bestseller, which Kleist would later parody in his newspaper. Charles C., a shopkeeper’s apprentice, serves as the doomed youth. He falls in love with the wife of his employer. When the couple leave to visit a friend, he sneaks into their bed, falls asleep, and is discovered when they return home early. Humiliated at his exposure—“tired of life,” as Kleist describes him—Charles runs off to his own room, grabs a pistol, and shoots himself in the chest. “The story of his life appears to have ended; and yet (strangely enough) it has only just begun. For instead of killing Charles, as the shot was intended, it caused the old gentleman, who was in the next room, to suffer a stroke.” Five days later, the surviving apprentice wakes up in the arms of his beloved.

Goethe made a habit of supporting fellow artists, despite private reservations. Kleist brought him unstageable conundrums, “invisible theater” as he remarked to Adam Müller. Nevertheless, Goethe directed The Broken Jug, at Weimar, in 1808, the comedy offered to the elder poet “on the knees my heart,” this perhaps meant ironically, since Kleist wrote the phrase in quotation marks in the accompanying letter. The single performance was a failure. The Jug was second in a double feature, to use a somewhat anachronistic term. Its action was broken up by three long interludes. The audience grew restless, hissing and shouting at the actors, “genuine pandemonium” eyewitnesses reported. Kleist, blamed for incident, then attacked Goethe in print, satirizing him in the Abendblätter but also in his earlier journal, Phöbus, but he never, in all likelihood, challenged him to a duel, as later stories would claim. Goethe’s interactions with Friedrich were less dramatic, less conclusive. He visited him at his studio in Dresden, in 1810, offering vague compliments about his “wonderful landscapes.” He was less complimentary, at least in private, after Monk by the Sea was shown in Berlin, remarking to a friend that it could be viewed just as well upside down, though he continued referring art students to the painter, knowing there was something Friedrich could still offer them. 

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Dust rises along the highway at noon. A column of soldiers meets a column of refugees. Traffic halts under a thickening pall, traffic on foot and traffic by conveyance (horsecarts, mulecarts, oxcarts). The various draft animals lay their stool on the roadway. A path is found through the jam. The soldiers march on. Flags change. The refugees march on. They carry no borders with them. Their dust falls back to earth. A few stars glimmer in the darkening sky. Goethe witnessed these things at the Siege of Mainz, as an assistant to the Duke of Weimar, Karl August, and wrote a journal documenting his experiences. The Rhineland also furnished the setting for an idyll in hexameter, Hermann and Dorothea, about a young bourgeois man, son of an innkeeper, who meets a refugee girl while distributing aid. He falls in love with her. He wants marriage, admiring her compassion and inner resolve. His father objects to the union. A bride dispossessed is beneath his son’s station. The mother is more understanding. The conflict is resolved discursively. All violence is told in retrospect. The question of honor arises. A magistrate, leader among the refugees, recalls how the girl, Dorothea, had defended a farmhouse against robbers, had defended herself and others against rape.

But she had snatched in an instant the sword of one from its scabbard,

Felled him with might to the ground, and stretched him bleeding before her.

Then with vigorous strokes she bravely delivered the maidens, 

Smiting yet four of the robbers; who saved themselves only by flying.

Then she bolted the gates, and armed, awaited assistance.

Success in defending herself proves Dorothea’s honor, demonstrating her courage and initiative, her physical maidenhood. Certain counterfactuals are not entertained. A single evening proves sufficient to resolve all misgivings and she is accepted into the family. The union takes place, with an exchange of rings, but is strangely inconclusive. Hermann vows, having a reason in Dorothea, to go and fight against the French. Goethe avoided definite endings following The Sorrows of Young Werther, just as he avoided suicide, and died of heart failure at home in Weimar, in 1832, his last words faithfully recorded, a version of them at least: “More light!” Kleist shot a friend, Henriette Vogel, suffering from terminal uterine cancer, and then himself, succeeding where his mock Werther had failed, in 1811, on shores of the Kleiner Wannsee, a lake in the forested outskirts of Berlin. Before killing himself, he wrote a series of letters to friends and family. In one addressed to Sophie Müller, wife of Adam Müller, he claimed he and Vogel were not sorrowful at the prospect of death, but were ascending “like two joyous aeronauts.” He was thirty-four, she thirty-five—short lives, even by the standard of the time. 

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Nature proceeds, for the most part, as the work of small and steady changes: gradualism. Nature proceeds, sometimes, as the work of violent discontinuities: catastrophism. It goes something like this: a few dozen million years ago the earth contained some different varieties of tetrapod. A mosasaur, being a tetrapod, had four legs, or rather its ancestors had four legs, but lost them in the transition to an aquatic lifestyle, being a marine reptile. Certain pelagic microorganisms, coccolithophores, related to the algae that causes algal blooms, died and fell to the seafloor, largely undisturbed by erosive forces, and by dint of steady accumulation their remains formed deep layers of sediment. Then a meteorite strikes the earth. A dark band of clay appears in the geologic record. Certain tetrapods disappear. Others radiate and diversify, generalists, with endothermic metabolism and hairy integument. But those who perished might, through natural science, have their lives reconstructed, their anatomy and habitat, the manner of their death, their remains becoming, in certain instances, subject to repatriation debates lasting centuries. The deep past can also be reconstructed through nondescript materials. White porous sedimentary rock, viewed under sufficient magnification, will reveal tiny interlocking calcite structures, fossilized remnants of pelagic microorganisms, not skeletons but analogous, found in the trillions in deposits worldwide, though abundantly in Europe.

Caspar David Friedrich visited the island of Rügen at various times in his career. He grew up in the region, was born in the small city of Greifswald, which was then territory of Sweden. Early on, as a student, he painted scenes atypical of the island, avoiding its chalk cliffs, and favored the undulating downlands of the interior. Rügen, certain historians of art speculate, might have also furnished the setting for Monk by the Sea, though, notably, there are no prominent landmarks in the painting, only sand and sea. It was only until after Friedrich visited in 1818, with his wife Caroline, the trip being their honeymoon, that he began painting his famous painting of the famous chalk cliffs of Rügen, composed sometime between 1818 and 1822. It shows three figures, a woman and two men, high on that chalk, close to the edge, each gazing, in their own particular way, at a gray almost empty sea. The woman, leftmost, sits precariously, in a long red gown, her left hand gripping a low shrub, presumably a beech—the forests bounding the cliffs being a natural monoculture, relicts of vaster forests that stretched unbroken across the continent. She is thought to represent the wife of the painter, her red gown symbolizing love. The man rightmost, dressed in traditional German costume, leans against the trunk of a mature tree, presumably another beech, gazing direct and nonchalant at the horizon. He is thought to represent the painter’s younger brother Christian, his green costume symbolizing hope. The man centermost, his top hat fallen, crouches at the edge, peering straight downward. He is thought to represent Friedrich himself, his blue coat symbolizing faith. The posture of the centermost figure, often speculated to have lost something over the edge, might have also been adopted because of a guidebook, current at the time of Friedrich’s trip, which advocated that visitors to the cliffs enjoy them crouching or prone, thereby gaining a better view. These various interpretations, based on well attested biographical evidence, nevertheless remain inconclusive. We have no statements by Friedrich supporting or contradicting any of their arguments. He was fond of letting the work speak for itself. The art historian can make use of facts that would embarrass the artist. 

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Kleist resigned his commission in 1799. He returned to his hometown, Frankfurt an der Oder, and briefly studied at the university there. He became engaged to a young woman, Wilhelmine von Zenge, the daughter of a Prussian general. He described his time in Frankfurt—back amongst his family and the family that he would, supposedly, marry into—as being the happiest in his life. Then he broke off his studies, and his engagement, or at least postponed it, so he said, to embark on a trip, along with a friend, Ludwig Brockes—where to, he would not say, only that it was a secret, a matter of utmost urgency, he would explain everything later. The pair adopted false identities. Brockes went under the name Bernhoff. Kleist went under the name Klingstedt, his alias hailing from Rügen, the son of an invalid Swedish captain. Kleist might have come by the idea on a trip to the island, with Brockes and his sister Ulrike, made earlier that year, in 1800. He might have gazed out, prone or standing, high on the chalk, the ancient seabed, and seen its present surface, empty and gray, save for a few lone sails, white as the cliffs, drifting toward, below the horizon, just as Friedrich might have done later, in 1818, with his wife Caroline and his brother Christian. The dates and names and places are well attested. The artwork and correspondence left behind still exists. All else remains speculation. The critic can make use of facts that would embarrass the biographer. 

Kleist observed discontinuities in history and nature. He observed them in himself. He wrote of being “unähnlich” or dissimilar to others in human society, though he had, all told, four limbs, a head of hair, typical digits in their typical quantities. He and Brockes, as Klingstedt and Bernhoff, matriculated at the University of Leipzig. They were read the academic statutes and interviewed by the rector, who gave the new students a number of wise admonitions. “We went home,” Kleist reported to Ulrike, “wrapped our shoes in the academic statutes and carefully preserved our registration cards.” In the city of Dresden, using those false credentials, they obtained passports through the British consulate, good for travel throughout the various disparate German states, disunified in a time of war. They explored the banks of the Havel and Elbe, which would later furnish Kleist with yet more settings, for his anecdotes, novellas, and stories. He and Brockes eventually made it to the city of Würzburg, where they rented a room above the market square. Kleist received medical treatment, for what he would not say—everything will be explained eventually. Meanwhile, he wrote vivid fanciful letters. He encountered a mansion late at night, its spectral lights shining through a hundred windows. He visited a compulsive masturbator at an insane asylum. He reported to his fiancée, so called, on the desirability of his traveling companion, whom every woman adores—she would understand were she there. 

Later, at work on the Abendblätter, in Berlin, in 1810, Kleist would draw from natural science as well from personal experience, fabricating disparate narratives from disparate materials. He was aided by Rudolf Werckmeister’s Reader’s Institute, a kind of early public library, which shared offices with the newspaper at Jägerstaße 25. The institute offered dozens of periodicals, maps and books, a wealth of information to elaborate on, especially considering the era. He might have drawn from the natural and applied sciences, or he might have drawn from personal experience, when he wrote the second of the three anecdotes told by the old retired officer. He and a friend once travelled along the Elbe, he relates, just as Kleist and Brockes once did in life, under the names Klingstedt and Bernhoff, wishing to see the mountainous terrain of the area, what Kleist would later call “a moving sea of earth”.  The pair, the old retired officer and his friend, visit the town of Königstein, where a large quarry is found. They wish to see the quarrymen drop an enormous stone onto the riverbank, because of the “weird thunderous reverberations that echo throughout the mountains, along with other unpredictable phenomena resulting from tremors underground.” The old retired officer and his friend miss the spectacle itself but witness its spectacular aftermath. “The block did not fall directly in the Elbe,” he relates, “but landed instead on the sandy surface of the bank. A barge gentlemen—such was the effect of the falling block and the extraordinary air pressure it created—was thrown onto dry land—a barge, about 60 feet long and 30 feet wide, heavily freighted with lumber, lay on the opposite bank of the Elbe—these two eyes of mine saw laborers still hard at work the following day, with levers and rollers, trying to float the barge again.” The old retired officer tells his anecdotes without the hope of being believed, so he says. When encounters disbelief, he takes his hat and coat and leaves, utters some formulaic Latin by way of goodbye. 

***

Kleist received very little praise during his lifetime. Goethe was among the most popular writers of his age. Caspar David Friedrich, successful in his early career, eventually relied on the charity of friends. Tastes change. Flags change—this or that tricolor. Soldiers march with their borders. The number and variety of pills multiplies. Refugees flee. Carrying no borders; their baggage is checked for contraband. In a vast exurban backyard, a specific dog, bred for detection, drags its crippled hind legs across the grass. It lies prone between lavender and foxglove, calcareous remains of dead microorganisms spread across the earth. A dark line overtops pale sediment, the breadth of a finger, between the annihilation of a world and the birth of another. A path from the interior leads to the sea. Kleist and Brockes, or Klingstedt and Bernhoff, stand with Ulrike at the edge of a cliff, in the year 1800. Friedrich and his wife Caroline, his brother Christian, or three anonymous figures, stand at edge of a cliff, in the year 1818. The paths they take are different paths, none still possible, all gone from all living memory, so much time has passed.

This essay quotes my original translations of Kleist’s anecdotes (Sublunary Editions, 2021). I am also heavily indebted to a previous translator, Philip B. Miller, whose translations of Kleist’s essays and correspondence can be found in An Abyss Deep Enough: The Letters of Heinrich von Kleist (Dutton, 1982). It is from Miller that I quote Kleist’s review of Monk by the Sea. Brentano’s draft appears in Johannes Grave’s Caspar David Friedrich (Prestel, 2012) translated by Fionna Elliot. The passage from Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea is taken from a late 19th century translation by Ellen Frothingham. 

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Matthew Spencer lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest Region of the United States of America.