An extraordinary masterpiece of German literature, now in a gripping new English translation
Michael Kohlhaas has been wronged. First his finest horses were unfairly confiscated and mistreated. And things keep going worse―his servants have been beaten, his wife killed, and the lawsuits he pursues are stymied―but Kohlhaas, determined to find justice at all costs, tirelessly persists. Standing up against the bureaucratic machine of the empire, Kohlhaas becomes an indomitable figure that you can’t help rooting for from start to finish.
Knotty, darkly comical, magnificent in its weirdness, and one of the greatest and most influential tales in German literature, this short novel, first published in German in 1810, is now available in award-winning Michael Hofmann’s sparkling new English translation.
"Kleist is a giant, Cervantes's heir, and a one-man avant-garde of the modern German novel."
― The Guardian
"Heinrich von Kleist is one of the great neglected figures of European literature. His work is at once tragic, grotesque, hectic, tender, hilarious and heartbroken, a powerful current in that underground of European literature that includes Holderlin, Buchner, Diderot, Kafka, Rilke, Witold Gombrowiez, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, upon many of whom Kleist had a direct influence. His work is peculiarly apt for our fractured times, and speaks in a voice which, despite the occasional High Romantic inflection, sounds startlingly modern."
― John Banville, The Independent
"Michael Kohlhaas could be called a pathology of obsession, or a juridical riddle, or even a kind of magnificent taunt, though none of these is right, or right enough. One must merely read it, and then read it again, staggered by its sheer acceleration, its furious savagery, its vertiginous authority, its exquisite prolongment of closure as event follows improbable event. Kohlhaas is one of literature’s eternal characters because he outpaces any interpretive framework. His indomitable reality exceeds our own."
― Dustin Illingworth, The New Yorker
"A masterwork―at once a savage indictment of a corrupt legal system and an object lesson in the ways that all-out combat can ignite from the most picayune personal slights. In Michael Hofmann, whose own writing style is frenetic and steeply erudite, the novella may have found the perfect translator. Absurdities compound with a devil’s logic that presages Kafka (who adored the book)."
― Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"His sentences are remarkable―great hatchet-blows of thought, an implacable narrative speed, a pulverizing sense of inevitability. No wonder Kafka liked him so much…"
― Paul Auster
"Our sort is nothing compared to Kleist."
― Rainer Maria Rilke
"Michael Kohlhaas: a story about bravery and its twin, stupidity."
― Roberto Bolano
"What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his works to the elder statesman ‘on the knees of his heart’―the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined―is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom bore."
― Susan Sontag
"Perhaps the strongest of all German stories. Michael Kohlhaas seems to me to have a peculiar resonance to the present time, when apathy toward the law, callousness toward injustice, a limp acceptance of "the way things are" exercise a paralyzing influence all over the world. Kleist shows us, incidentally, with a superb, mordant humor, the predicament into which a society accustomed to constant abuse of the law is thrown by a man who refuses to put up with such abuse; how his associates gradually withdraw from the doltish robber baron who created the whole mess―with whom they would have continued to get along easily had it not been for the unpleasant consequences of his insolent act... We are filled with anxiety and terror, shudder in the face of mystery, doubt in the powers of reason, and, indeed, in the power of God himself―all our 'affects are confounded.' Kleist knows how to put us on the rack and―such is his triumph as an artist―succeeds in making us thank him for that torture."
― Thomas Mann
"Sometimes you find a brother, and you instantly know that you are no longer alone. I experienced this with Kleist."
― Werner Herzog
"I did not write to you last night, it got too late because of Michael Kohlhaas (have you read it? If not, don’t! I shall read it to you!); apart from a short section which I had read the day before, I finished it in one sitting. Probably for the tenth time. This is a story I read with true piety; it carries me along waves of wonder."
― Franz Kafka
