Title: Michael Kohlhaas

Author: Heinrich von Kleist

First published: 1810

Page count: 133

First line: Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas, the son of a schoolmaster, one of the most upright and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day.

After the debacle, last week, of Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes, how good to be back on solid ground! And what greater security could there be than that offered by that opening line. Here is a writer who has a story to tell. He tells us when it happened. He tells us where it happened. He tells us who it happened to. We are children, sat cross-legged on the carpet, contentedly gawping.

This is my second Kleist in the Melville House novella series, following The Duel; the two stories being originally published together in book form, so far as I can tell. The Duel is shorter, and tricksier – a brilliantly compressed and internally convoluted detective story that, like a diamond, makes you want to look and look at it from every angle, but which surely has no final secret heart to give up or out.

Michael Kohlhaas is, by contrast, straightforward and linear, a tale told with little mystery or ornamentation, that draws its power from the person and behaviour of its central character, but that travels far and wide across the states of sixteenth century Germany. Michael Kohlhaas is epic, though it’s not an epic. It is widescreen. It is a movie. More specifically, Michael Kohlhaas is a Russell Crowe movie.

This is not meant as an evaluative statement, but a descriptive one. I can’t stand Russell Crowe, not so much as an actor, as for the kinds of films he chooses to act in. But I love reading a 200-year-old story that lays out so clearly and admirably the template for those films – Gladiator, Robin Hood, Noah… I don’t know, I haven’t seen them, I’m flying blind here, help me out. But you know what I mean, right?

Michael Kohlhaas, horse dealer, is an upright and prosperous man, an employer as well as a husband and a father, but still a working man, rather than a member of the bourgeoisie. His troubles begin when he sets off from home with a batch (a “string”) of horses to sell, but comes across a toll booth newly built on a road he’d used many times before, put there by a young noble, the Junker Wenzel von Tronka, who has just inherited the castle on the hill. Kohlhaas grumbling pays the toll, but then is told he also needs a permit to bring the horses into this territory, and without it can go no further.

Kohlhaas is no egotist or megalomaniac, but he will not let himself be walked over. Thirty pages on from this minor piece of bureaucratic chicanery Kohlhaas is storming the castle with a handful of men:

In the meantime dense clouds of smoke were billowing skywards from the barracks, and , while Stembald and three other men were busy heaping up everything that was not nailed down tight and heaving it out among the horses for plunder, the corpses of the castellan and the steward, with those of their wives and children, came hurtling out of the open windows of the castle keep accompanied be Herse’s exultant shouts.

How in hell did we get here? Well, back at the castle, Kohlhaas had reasoned with the Junker, saying he was happy enough to get hold of the permit, so long as he could carry on with his journey. The Junker, after admiring his horses, and poking fun at him with his knight friends, was on the point of letting him through, when the castellan (the Junker’s chief officer) suggested holding onto a couple of the horses as collateral.

Kohlhaas is not an unreasonable man, and reluctantly agrees to this imposition, but when he comes back, a few weeks later, having discovered that the supposedly necessary permit is a complete fabrication after all, he finds that the two black horses he left behind have been worked almost to death, and the groom he left to look after them has been beaten, mistreated and driven from the castle.

Kohlhaas is fuming, but he is not a rash man. He seeks restitution for the damage done to his property through the appropriate legal avenues – only of course the courts are full of the Junker’s mates. Kohlhaas’s wife offers to take a petition to the Elector, but comes back fatally wounded after rough treatment from the soldiery.

Kohlhaas, in other words, is upright, reasonable and patient, but faced with structural inequality at every level of the system he cracks, and goes postal. It’s not just the Junker that he’s up against, acting the seigneur, safe in the knowledge that his friends in high places will back him up, but the behaviour of those under him, who are given licence to perpetrate their own minor-league iniquities by the culture of corruption trickling down from above.

By the time the Junker notices the chaos he’s created by making an enemy out of Kohlhaas, and tries to rectify the situation, it’s too late. Kohlhaas wants revenge – no one can give him back his wife, but he can have his two black horses returned to him, fit and hale as they were when he left them in the stables of the Tronka castle, and why shouldn’t the Junker himself feed them back to fitness? And why shouldn’t he slaughter men, women and children and burn down cities to achieve this! Soon he is at the head of a makeshift army, taking on Dresden, Wittenberg, Leipzig, “an avenging angel, [chastising] the oppressors of the people with fire and sword”.

This is Russell Crowe – or a Russell Crowe movie – all over. (While we’re at it, let’s cast Tim Roth as the effete, self-satisfied, no doubt English-accented Junker von Tronka.) He’s the small man pushed one time too many, who steps up to strike a blow for justice, but then goes on striking, even when he oversteps the bounds of reason. This overstepping – this excess – leads him into the realm of tragedy, which means a) the narrative gets as much blood, guts and battle as the reader can want and b) we can kill off the hero in the end, restoring the world more or less to the inequitable status quo it began with. Horse dealers will like it, because Kohlhaas fights the power. Junkers and Electors will like it, because he gets what’s coming to him, and nothing really changes.

I said the book was linear and straightforward – it’s this aspect of it that makes it such a shoo-in for cinematic treatment (and in fact there have been at least two films based on it) – but there are other, weirder – Kleistian? – elements. It wasn’t until I got to the scene in the book when Protestant reformer Martin Luther writes a letter condemning Kohlhaas’s rampage across the land, and Kohlhaas storms into the priest’s room, dagger in hand, that I checked, and found that the novella was based on a true story. There was a Michael Kohlhase, and some of these things did happen to him. But seeing a real person in a story like this feels utterly… modern. By which I merely mean, perhaps, unexpected, or unassimilable to our usual ways of reading.

And there is a strange gipsy woman with second sight, and a prophecy regarding the Elector of Saxony, that she gives to Kohlhaas to keep in a locket around his neck… that Kleist doesn’t mention until far later in the story than he should have.

And then of course there’s the whole question of Electors and Junkers and the Kaiser, and the different Germanic states incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire – all of which I completely ignorant about, and all of which Kleist surely took as general knowledge among his readers. There is, it must be said, rather a lot of to-ing and fro-ing among courts legal and noble in the latter part of the book that goes straight over my head, though equally this helps keep the novella aloft in its particular zone of the uncanny, caught between alien and familiar, ancient and modern.

As I said with The Duel, and has been said by others, Kleist seems to have written with half an eye on the idiosyncracies of the modern worldview, even as he was looking centuries into his own past for his source material – making him part and parcel of what Simon Winder in his book Germania, calls the “mad German enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, with brave knights, mighty banners, a Schloss [and] a rainbow”. Janus-faced, Kleist is looking in two directions at once; he seems to see us, looking back at him, and he smiles at our wonder and confusion.

A final thought on the novella and cinema – and this is crystallising something I’ve been working towards throughout this project: the idea that what we now call the novella is a description not just of length, but of narrative strategy. (And, as I mentioned in a much earlier post, there is a strong argument against this, backed up by some heavyweight theory, that I haven’t really dealt with yet.)

The novel tries to fit everything in; it is encyclopaedic; it embraces life; it is a house of many rooms and non-existent building regulations. The short story, especially in its post-Joycean form, offers a glimpse; it is paradigmatic; the slice of life it shows stands for the whole cake; is the view through a window – looking either into or out of that house. But the novella, growing out of the tale, the récit, is primarily concerned with telling, rather than showing. It is economical, where the novel is wasteful; and it is explicit, where the short story depends on symbolism and poetry for its multiple dimensions.

The novel is narrative plus the world. The short story is the world minus narrative. The novella is narrative, pure and simple. (These are exaggerations, but exaggerations of a possible position.)

That is why the novella is so filmic. Because cinema loves narrative more than anything. Or rather – it depends on it. Point a motion picture camera at something or someone and you have a movie – you just need something to happen, unless you’re Andy Warhol or Andrei Tarkovsky. Novellas are things happening.

We all have favourite novels we’ve seen butchered on screen; likewise,  there are great films grown out of short stories – but these are not necessarily great short stories, or what we now think of as great short stories. But novellas – these novellas – look like movies in the making, or perhaps just maps or templates for what cinema so loves to do. The Beach of Falésa (Bond). Parnassus on Wheels (road movie/odd couple rom com). A Sleep and a Forgetting (psychological drama). The Horla. (Very close to the paranormal horror genre in its recent state). Freya of the Seven Seas (torrid romance). Alexander’s Bridge (A different kind of Russell Crowe movie, his stab at another Oscar). The Dead (The Dead). The business of Michael Kohlhaas – its content – is stuck back in the Middle Ages, but its approach, its narrative strategy, is situated slap bang in the middle of Hollywood. Members of the Academy, I recommend it to you!