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The Biography. Translated from German by Sebastian Goth and Kelly Kawar
Kleist has fascinated readers like no other German writer. How did a one-time soldier with an unremarkable literary education become one of the greatest innovators of German literature? What allows for the tragedy of his life? In what ways does his work speak to us today?
In his great biography Günter Blamberger gives us a new Kleist: Unlike conventional approaches, he does not try to understand Kleist's life from the perspective of its end—from the perspective of his suicide as the final catastrophe of a life in permanent crisis. Rather, he remains at eye-level with Kleist’s present, narrating from the perspective of Kleist’s experience—in the moment with him—capturing the unsettling or the astonishing in each phase of his life, the explosive nature of each one of his risky experiments in living and writing. The result is an indispensable work of German literary history—a vivid, captivating biography of one of the greatest literary geniuses of all time.
In his great biography Günter Blamberger gives us a new Kleist: Unlike conventional approaches, he does not try to understand Kleist's life from the perspective of its end—from the perspective of his suicide as the final catastrophe of a life in permanent crisis. Rather, he remains at eye-level with Kleist’s present, narrating from the perspective of Kleist’s experience—in the moment with him—capturing the unsettling or the astonishing in each phase of his life, the explosive nature of each one of his risky experiments in living and writing. The result is an indispensable work of German literary history—a vivid, captivating biography of one of the greatest literary geniuses of all time.
Figures of Excess in Seventeenth-Century European Art and German Literature
What is the Baroque? Where did it come from and where did it go? Why do we have to ask these questions? Because art historians seem largely satisfied with their answers and most scholars of German literature are not satisfied, yet have stopped asking.
This book discerns in the Baroque an aesthetic phenomenon that crosses both media and national boundaries in its celebration of excess and its disintegration of system, unity, and identity. The compositional principles and theoretical implications of the Baroque, as it first arose in Italian art, find expression in German poetics, drama, poetry, and narrative—expression accessible only through resolute close reading. Readings of Bernini, Borromini, Velázquez, Rubens, Fracanzano, and de Hooch precipitate readings of Opitz, Gryphius, Fleming, Zesen, Hoffmannswaldau, and Grimmelshausen, demonstrating that seventeenth-century German literature both is Baroque and confirms what the Baroque is.
This book discerns in the Baroque an aesthetic phenomenon that crosses both media and national boundaries in its celebration of excess and its disintegration of system, unity, and identity. The compositional principles and theoretical implications of the Baroque, as it first arose in Italian art, find expression in German poetics, drama, poetry, and narrative—expression accessible only through resolute close reading. Readings of Bernini, Borromini, Velázquez, Rubens, Fracanzano, and de Hooch precipitate readings of Opitz, Gryphius, Fleming, Zesen, Hoffmannswaldau, and Grimmelshausen, demonstrating that seventeenth-century German literature both is Baroque and confirms what the Baroque is.