2 - The quest for ‘Glück’

Summary

Although Kleist was to meet with all manner of personal misfortune during his own lifetime, his writing consistently bears witness to his firm belief in the capacity of human beings for self-improvement and in the vital role of art and literature in assisting them towards this goal. He persistently sought to establish the conditions under which the individual might enjoy the greatest degree of personal autonomy, and both the exhilaration of this quest, and the realisation of the limited extent to which this goal could be achieved are clearly reflected in his personal correspondence and in his work as a whole. Whilst his writings can at times seem unremittingly gloomy, this is not because he despaired of his fellow human beings, but rather because he was so acutely aware of the nearly insuperable obstacles society placed in the way of individual self-fulfilment. The insistence with which he explores the tension between the aspirations of the individual and the demands of society shows how profoundly he was engaged in the philosophical and literary debates of his age, a fact further confirmed by the numerous allusions in his writing to the ideals and values of his eighteenth-century upbringing and, above all, to the works of Goethe and Schiller. Unwilling to accept the uncertainty that is an unavoidable part of everyday human existence, the young Kleist continually looked to the ideal models put forward in the works of his literary forebears in an attempt to shore up his own life against the caprices of fate and chance.