Penthesilea (Kleist)

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Data
Title: Penthesilea
Genus: Tragedy
Original language: German
Author: Heinrich von Kleist
Publishing year: 1808
Premiere: April 25, 1876
Place of premiere: Schauspielhaus , Berlin
Place and time of the action: around Troy in mythological times
people
  • Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons
  • Prothoe, Meroe and Asteria, princesses of the Amazons
  • The chief priestesses of Diana
  • Achilles, Odysseus, Diomedes and Antilochus, kings of the Greek people
  • Greeks and Amazons

Penthesilea is a drama by Heinrich von Kleist from 1808. In it he addresses the conflict between a strongly feeling individual and a social order that contradicts his natural feelings in an unnatural way.

action

Penthesilea is the queen of the Amazons . This people, which, due to their cruel history, does not tolerate men among themselves, keeps itself alive through an unusual custom: The god Mars chooses a people for the Amazons, from which they should conquer men in battle, whom they help to procreate new warriors take. After the act of procreation has been completed, the men are released back into freedom. The male offspring resulting from this connection is killed. Only the girls stay alive and are trained to become new warriors.

Individual choice of partner is forbidden by the Amazon law, because Mars selects the partner for every Amazon that they have to defeat in battle. Penthesilea does not question this law, which comes far from the urn of all saints and whose origin remains unknown to the warrior and is mysteriously veiled in clouds . It is said that the first mothers word decided it.

But against the law, Kleist's Penthesilea made a choice: As her mother Otrere predicted on her deathbed, she fell in love with Achilles , who she met on the battlefield. Her invincible love for the great hero of the Greeks in the battle for Troy allows her to fight against him with ever new strength, because the law of mothers is sacred to her and she does not want to break it at any price.

Once, however, she was seriously injured by an arrow and passed out. Her confidante Prothoe then asks Achilles to pretend to be a loser in order to spare her the shame of defeat, which he also lets himself into. In another duel, he wants to be defeated by her, because every Amazon can only give her love to the man she has previously overcome in the fight. But Penthesilea, who doesn't see through the game, mortally wounds him. In animal wildness and frenzy, she finally tears up her lover together with her dogs.

After the fact, Penthesilea wakes up as if from a dream. At first she does not want to believe that she herself committed this atrocity. She says she wants to sacrifice her revenge on whoever did this to Achilles. When her friend Prothoe explains who killed her lover, Penthesilea refuses to believe it. But when she understood the truth, she gave the order to lay Achilles' body before the high priestess Diana , who made her morally responsible for the development of what happened. “I renounce the law of women,” she decides after realizing that she has followed a law contrary to her nature. "The ashes of Tanais, scatter them in the air" . This ashes of the ancient Amazon Tanais is synonymous with the iron law of the Amazon state.

Penthesilea realizes too late that over the years the law no longer fulfills its purpose. The Amazons hardly knew why it was created. The pain over the death of her beloved serves the Amazon queen as a weapon which she directs against herself in order to follow her beloved into death.

In response to the death of Penthesilea, the high priestess refers to human frailty. However, Prothoe, the closest and most loyal friend Penthesilea, replied: "It sank because they bloomed too proud and strong." The accusation of weakness keeps it countered that only the dead oak would stand the storm, the healthy but fall slightly, "because he could reach into her crown ” .

What is meant is that Penthesilea has shown strength precisely because of her liveliness of feeling, her ability to love and to follow the natural feeling. She had to die because her feelings were incompatible with the rigid letter of the law.

shape

The drama, in blank verse , is divided into 24 appearances, probably based on the 24 chants of the Iliad or based on the classic Aristotelian drama, which, according to Aristotle , should last a day.

Meaning of the main characters

The two protagonists are clearly conceived in parallel: In the hunting metaphor, both are alternately the hunter and the hunted, both are compared to wolves (v. 5, 163f.), Both are coveted game to the other (v. 220, 2572f.) Both have to be restrained by their relatives by force (vv. 212, 236, 298, 2549, 2551f.), since they get completely out of control in their lawn and madness (this leitmotif is used about fifty times). Further comparisons and metaphorical equations with the sun, stars and gods as well as gestural details such as losing or taking off the helmet and putting it back on (v. 451, 477, 562, stage directions according to v. 582) prove this structural equality. What both “parallel figures” have in common is that they have to work their way out of the hidden plot with great effort: through reports and a wall exhibition to create a scenic presence. And both do not have the first word in their appearances, but are only greeted by their own as victor and victor (v. 487, 626). On the verse level, too, the allotted rhyme Penthesilea approaches dir, Pelide (v. 616) aligns the figures.

In summary it can be stated: "Achilles is a Penthesilea as a man, Penthesilea an Achilles as a woman". Ultimately, they are both “man and woman in one”. They are not “carriers of 'ideas'” or “psychologically differentiated beings” but are themselves “the let loose dogs”: “The elemental affects appear themselves.” With them, the “truth of the unconscious” gains a scenic presence. The figures are a mode of representing the "unconscious that Kleist discovered and produced", masks (personae) for that which "has no face". The “breaking through of individuation”, which Benno von Wiese speaks of in connection with the death of both protagonists, takes place in a much more radical way: “The unconscious, here still included in individuality, wants to break the fetters of its subjectivity.” The subject is not of integrity Unit more such as B. in Schiller's “character interaction drama”, not the originator of affects, not the autonomous producer of meaning, but the one haunted by the affects, “process” or effect of a “meaningful practice”, not “exciter” of feeling, “but only (medium ) of the already excited ”. Penthesilea's desire has its origin in the desire of the Amazon tribe for procreation, in obedience to the prophecy of their mother ( you will wreath the pains v. 2138) as well as in the heroic songs (v. 2119, 2181).

The “tendency towards disintegration” or the “tendency towards depersonalization” becomes apparent in the equation “Achilles is Penthesilea”.

“There can be no question of the individuality of the characters, which the Kleist criticism so emphatically asserts. Not only is individual meaningfulness not a principle of character design; the characters cease to be unmistakable sizes. "

The supposedly “modern individual”, which is invoked again and again in Kleist literature, is evidently already an old ponytail with Kleist and is just being adopted here. “The implicit theory of desire production, which understands feeling and the unconscious as social productions, is what constitutes Kleist's modernity.” The “failure of the subject is logically not countered by utopia, because that too - in the rose scene, for example - becomes a false appearance exposed ". “At the end of a Kleist tragedy, the world is what it is. The only thing missing is the one whose task it was to make this their being visible. "Neither the" extermination of humanity "nor the" extermination of subjectivity "are lamented, nor is the" dehumanizing "contrasted with a" humanity "that has not yet been achieved, as it is said in a more recent Kleist book, but these terms as such are put up for discussion and scrutinized as bourgeois ideologemes.

Levels of meaning of the tragedy

The dominant ambivalence between struggle and lust, Eros and Thanatos, can be examined on three levels of reflection. At the fable level, this antithetic primarily serves the organization of relationships: the relationships of the two protagonists to one another, of the two peoples, whose cultural and state constitution conflict with one another and who nevertheless both refuse the development of individual happiness, and consequently each one, are ambivalent of these 'constitutions' themselves, which is exemplified above all in the Amazon state: Penthesilea is on the one hand the executive organ of the Tanais Law, which is a "condition of their inner existence", on the other hand it is their task to understand the meaning of the law - autonomy, maturity, freedom - to implement against its wording, but that means to rebel against this institution and to abolish it. The fact that at the same time she dissolves women's society and that her solution consists in self-dissolution and that she ultimately opposes the arbitrariness of the law with her own arbitrariness, remains an unresolved contradiction. At most on this lowest level of reflection, remnants of classical oppositions of the genre tragedy such as 'duty versus inclination', 'state reason versus individual happiness', calculation versus heart are manifested.

The fact that this opposition is not resolved is at the same time its significance on the second level of reflection, that of the subject: In the antagonism between the individual and society, the first pole is already problematized: Instead of the autonomous individual, the individual appears here as the intersection of streams of affect, as a point in a space of desire outside of the same. The implicit author constructs it not as an entity but as an event, not as being but as an action. Kleist et al. Articulates such an idea. a. in his essay on finding the sure path to happiness ... :

“And all the youths we see around and next to us share this fate with us. All her steps and movements seem to be the effect of an imperceptible but tremendous thrust that irresistibly carries her away with it. They appear to me like comets that wander through space in random circles until they finally find a path and a law of motion. "

That is why on this semantic level what is presented in the fable as a legitimate claim to self-realization, to the fulfillment of individual love, appears to be criticized. The partial opposition and partial equality of struggle and pleasure also wants this: to dismantle the bourgeois concept of 'love', which established the “familialization of eroticism” around 1800. And when one describes Goethe's Werther as “one of the foundation documents of that power that we invoke and celebrate as sexuality”, it should not be overlooked that the beginnings of that concept were laid in the series of the bourgeois tragedy . The implicit theory of desire production, which understands feeling and the unconscious as social productions, also leads to a critique of the genre.

The third level of reflection makes it possible to grasp the autoreflectivity of the tragedy. From this perspective, the dominant opposition pair 'fight versus lust' depicts the opposition of plot (fable) and subject as an implicit place of literary production. Metaphorical speaking proves to be the 'third place' where the opposites are canceled out, i.e. H. but first and foremost, be thematized and played out. It is on this metaphorical level that the tragedy enters the << Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes >>. According to Homann, the play is divided into the stations 1. Fight, 2. Rose scene, 3. Achilles' murder and 4. Penthesilea's suicide. Then she correlates the second station with the Greco-Roman natural poetry, the third with the classical Greek tragedy and the fourth with the medieval passion play. In this context, the ambivalence of struggle and pleasure means, on the one hand, the opposition between Homeric poetry and post-Homeric reception and, on the other hand, the abolition (representation and overcoming) of this opposition in the “aesthetic tragedy”. Penthesilea's failure as a result of a fundamental misunderstanding (of herself and of the other) reconstructs the wrong reception of antiquity and the wrong self-understanding of the classical tragedy or the bourgeois tragedy. In this reconstruction of one's own history, the “aesthetic tragedy” comes to itself; it recognizes its essence in the reconstruction. That is, the ambivalence of war and love, of attraction and repulsion, the unity and contrast of ancient poetry and modern reception, is the constituent of poetry that has become conscious of itself. Last but not least, the “staging of literally taken language images” proves what the new self-confidence consists of: It is articulated in addition to the knowledge of one's own existence, one's own historicity, the knowledge of the original constitution, i. i. the knowledge that literary production is primarily not about reality or the depiction of reality, but about playing with linguistic possibilities, about playing out linguistic oppositions.

It is precisely in this playful moment that the "aesthetic tragedy" of Homeric poetry is more closely related than the classical Greek and later French and German drama: poetry as a game (Achilles) dies through a 'dogged' reception and incorporation (Penthesilea), but in the representation of their attraction and destruction can both be preserved and made visible as historical stages of development.

reception

A preprint or “organic fragment” of the piece appeared in advance in the journal Phöbus published by Kleist .

The suitability of the piece for the stage was often discussed. The piece was abruptly rejected by Goethe , to whom Kleist gave his work to read “on the knees of one heart”. (At that time, Goethe was Kleist's harshest critic.) The many messenger reports and pond scans (wall shows) also led many to conclude that the play was not suitable for the stage. The cruel tearing of Achilles frightened off those contemporaries of Kleist who orientated themselves on a Winckelmannian classicism of "noble simplicity and quiet greatness". For these reasons, the play was premiered 65 years after Kleist's death on April 25, 1876 (in the three-act version) at the Königliches Schauspielhaus Berlin .

swell

Kleist oriented himself more towards the Greek tragedy. Numerous parallels can be drawn to the dramas of Euripides . In Medea one finds the confrontation of two irreconcilable worlds through the love of Medea and Jason for one another. The wreathed Hippolytus is characterized entirely by the hunt. The worshiped goddess is Artemis (= Diana). In the Bacchae , Agaue finally tears up Pentheus, her son, in Dionysian intoxication.

In the Greek tragedy, cruel representations were quite possible. Only 400 years later, Horace stipulates the "unpresentable". The Amazon myth has been handed down in many forms. An important source for the plot of the play was the Thorough Lexicon Mythologicum (1724) by Benjamin Hederich . The actual existence of the people has not yet been proven.

Radio play adaptations

  • 1986: Canzone Penthesilea. Live performance - adaptation (word) and direction: Carlo Quartucci (WDR - 59'16 minutes)
    • Speaker / singer: Carla Tató

Musical arrangements

Text basis

  • Heinrich von Kleist, Complete Works and Letters , edited by Helmut Sembdner, seventh, expanded and revised edition, Darmstadt 1983
  • Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea. In Complete Works »Brandenburger Edition« , ed. v. Roland Reuß in collaboration with Peter Staengle, Vol. I / 5, Basel / Frankfurt a. M. 1992.

literature

  • Dieter Heimböckel : Penthesilea. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.): Kindlers Literatur Lexikon 3rd, completely revised edition. 18 volumes. Volume 9, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-04000-8 , pp. 139-140.
  • Gerhard Fricke : Kleist. Penthesilea. In: Benno von Wiese (Ed.): The German Drama. From the baroque to the present. Interpretations I. Düsseldorf 1958, pp. 367-389.
  • Mathieu Carrière : For a literature of war, Kleist. Basel / Frankfurt am Main 1984.
  • Wolfgang von Einsiedel: The dramatic character design in Heinrich von Kleist, especially in his 'Penthesilea'. Berlin 1931.
  • Günther Emig : Franz von Holbein's Amazon drama "Mirina". An emphatic pointer. In: Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter 15. (Possible suggestion for Kleist)
  • Ulrich Fülleborn: 'The course of time from the beginning'. Women's rule as a literary myth in Kleist, Brentano and Grillparzer. In: Kleist-Jahrbuch 1986. pp. 63-80.
  • Helga Gallas : Reception of antiquity in Goethe and Kleist: Penthesilea - an anti-Iphigenia? In: Thomas Metscher (ed.): Cultural heritage between tradition and avant-garde . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-412-06590-0 .
  • Friedrich Gundolf: Heinrich von Kleist. Berlin 1924.
  • Reinhard Heinritz: Kleist's narrative texts. Interpretations according to formalistic theoretical approaches. (= Erlanger studies. Volume 42 ). Erlangen 1983.
  • Renate Homann: Self-reflection of literature. Studies on dramas by GE Lessing and H. von Kleist. Munich 1986.
  • Lutz R. Ketscher : Penthesilea. After Kleist's tragedy. Comic . (= Kleist in the fine arts. 2). Kleist Archive Sembdner, Heilbronn 2008, ISBN 978-3-940494-04-7 .
  • Friedrich A. Kittler: Authorship and Love. In the S. (Ed.): Expulsion of the spirit from the humanities. Post-structuralism programs. Paderborn / Munich / Vienna / Zurich 1980, pp. 142–173.
  • Herbert Kraft : Kleist. Life and work. Münster 2007, ISBN 978-3-402-00448-7 .
  • Julia Kristeva: The Revolution of Poetic Language. From the French. trans. and provided with an inlet v. Reinold Werner. Frankfurt am Main 1978.
  • Jürgen Link : From 'Cabal and Love' to 'Love Story' - On the evolutionary law of a bourgeois type of story. In: Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Hrsg.): Literarischer Kitsch. Tuebingen 1979.
  • Anett Lütteken : 'Penthesilea' 1870/1876 - a noble gesture by the Knight Mosenthal. In: Heilbronner Kleist sheets . 17. (at the world premiere, with ill.)
  • Anett Lütteken: Vienna or Berlin? A piece seeks its stage. In: Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter 18. (Addendum, with ill.)
  • Hinrich C. Seeba: Structure and content (the 'Penthesilea'). In: Ilse-Marie Barth, Hinrich C. Seeba et al. (Ed.): Heinrich von Kleist. Dramas 1808-1811. [...]. Frankfurt am Main 1988, pp. 749-776.
  • Gert Ueding: Classical and Romantic. German literature in the age of the French Revolution 1789–1825. (= Hanser's social history of German literature from the 16th century to the present. Volume 4). Munich / Vienna 1988.
  • Benno von Wiese: The German tragedy from Lessing to Hebbel. 6th edition. Hamburg 1964.
  • Wolf Nikolaus Wingenfeld: Kleist: Love is a syntactic operation - Penthesilea: I would like to operate on you syntactically. The tragedy on the horizon of the Rousseau reception. In: kultuRRevolution. journal for applied discourse theory. 26: 64-76 (1991).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang von Einsiedel, p. 87.
  2. ^ Friedrich Gundolf, p. 97.
  3. ^ Gundolf, p. 96.
  4. ^ Benno von Wiese, p. 312.
  5. ↑ Gert Ueding, p. 167.
  6. ↑ von Wiese, pp. 287, 336.
  7. ^ Mathieu Carrière, p. 21.
  8. ^ Carriere, p. 21.
  9. ^ Benno von Wiese, p. 320.
  10. ^ Mathieu Carrière, p. 22.
  11. ↑ Jürgen Link: From 'Kabale und Liebe' to the 'Love Story'.
  12. ↑ Julia Kristeva, p. 210.
  13. ^ Friedrich Gundolf, p. 23f.
  14. ↑ So with regard to Kleist's prose figures in Reinhard Heinritz, p. 62.
  15. ↑ Heinritz, p. 62.
  16. ↑ Ulrich Fülleborn, p. 76.
  17. ↑ Wolf Nikolaus Wingenfeld, p. 67.
  18. ↑ Wingenfeld, p. 67.
  19. ↑ Wolfgang Binder, p. 49.
  20. ↑ Herbert Kraft, pp. 117f.
  21. ↑ Gerhard Fricke, p. 382.
  22. ↑ Complete Works , Volume II, p. 309.
  23. ↑ Friedrich Kittler (1980), p. 146.
  24. ^ Kittler, p. 147.
  25. ↑ Cf. Renate Homann: “poetic speech is the third compared to all opposites built up in drama” (p. 324, note 21). - Furthermore: "Literature is the construction and reflection of a third party - precisely the metaphorical aspect of speech." (P. 325)
  26. ↑ Homann, pp. 306f.
  27. ↑ Hinrich C. Seeba, p. 649, calls the “staging of literally taken language images as realistic events” a characteristic of Kleist's dramaturgy.