Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the third in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas and ancillary texts including the classic essay “On the Marionette Theater.” I explain the nihilism that befell Kleist after his reading of Kant, his anticipation of modernist irony in figures like Kafka, his Romantic conflict with Goethe’s classicism, and his troubled life. Then I show Michael Kohlhaas to concern the irony of a quest for justice that produces injustice and the consequence of a solipsistic post-Kantian interpretation of the Reformation as licensing absolute individuality. Along the way, I interpret later novels influenced by Michael Kohlhaas, like Doctorow’s Ragtime and Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, I analyze minute but consequential differences in two translations of the text, and more. I conclude with Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater and its suggestion that we will use art to reattain our prelapsarian innocence, having observed the vanity of thought disclosed by modern philosophy. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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