Heinrich von Kleist

Kleist left a Prussian military career for philosophy, then suffered what he called his 'Kant crisis' in 1801, a collapse of faith that truth could ever be known directly, that haunts every plot he afterward wrote, all turning on some catastrophic misreading of the world.

Michael Kohlhaas (1810), based on a real sixteenth-century case, follows an upright horse dealer cheated by a nobleman who cannot get the courts to hear him; his sense of justice, denied every legal channel, escalates into arson, private armies, and terror across Saxony: order collapsing from the inside out.

He wrote obsessively and unhappily for a decade, chronically broke and unrecognized, submitting plays to Goethe that Goethe found merely disturbing. In 1811, at thirty-four, he shot the terminally ill Henriette Vogel and then himself on the shore of the Wannsee, a suicide pact planned with the same meticulous intensity as his fiction.