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blood drinkers Kleist

If this year across the 200 Anniversary of the death of Henry is thought by Kleist , then probably because of his plays and prose than for his poems. Even Kleist journalistic work has more eternal value than his poetry.

the poems are interesting only as historical documents, and because they allow time to raise a shudder look into the unstable mind of a great poet. By chance I once encountered "Germania to their children," a poem in which Kleist his countrymen to embracing people's war against the then dominant French calls across Europe. It states:

All pastures, all sites
Colors white with their bones;
What Rab and fox disdained
prayer award him the fish;
insulates the Rhine with their corpses;
Let, gestäuft foaming from her leg,
the Palatinate soft it
and it will be the limit.


a pleasure hunt, as if sitting Protect
the wolf on the trail!
Beat him to death! The world court
you ask not for the reasons!

I was always reminded of the poem that Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in January 2001 to have the wedding of one of his sons presented . In it he celebrated in October 2000 successful suicide attack on the U.S. destroyer "Cole" in the port of Aden (Yemen) to refuel, as his side an explosives-filled boat showed up - and the bombers blew themselves up in the air. It intoxicated the terror chief among others.

The body parts of the infidels
flew about like dust grains
we had seen it with my own eyes
our hearts were filled with joy.

Both texts have a few unpleasant things in common. Both Osama bin Laden and Heinrich von Kleist celebrate the resistance by all means in their time against the seemingly invincible, the world's dominant, technologically and culturally powerful superpower. And both auction itself into a sort of violent pornography - otherwise I could easily this horny self-wallowing not mention the sight of battered bodies.

One must not interpret the parallels, but the "Germania" poem is still a rather gloomy view of the pathological side of the man who committed suicide a few years later. His bloodthirsty distraction revealed so in comparison to the ideal of moderation and humanity, which was then used to the authors of the Weimar Classics and propagated. Goethe would have never carried away by such brutality. Kleist, however, has lived out these fantasies offensive force in his more important works - such as when he Penthesilea the loved-hated Achilles leaves together with their dogs tear . On the other hand, makes this unbalanced in some cases also Kleist modernity - it makes him not look like marble, and raised some of his contemporaries.