Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (German: [ˈhaɪnʁɪç fɔn ˈklaɪst]; 18 October 1777 – 21 November 1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, short story writer and journalist. His best known works are the theatre plays The Prince of Homburg, Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, The Broken Jug, Amphitryon, and Penthesilea, and the novellas Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O. Kleist ended his life in a suicide pact by shooting himself together with a close female friend who was terminally ill.
The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him, as was the Kleist Theater in his birthplace Frankfurt an der Oder.
Life
Kleist was born into the von Kleist family in Frankfurt an der Oder in the Margraviate of Brandenburg, a province of the Kingdom of Prussia. After a scanty education, he entered the Prussian Army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796, and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant. He studied law, philosophy, natural sciences and Latin at the Viadrina University, and in 1800, he obtained a subordinate post in the Ministry of Finance at Berlin.
In the following year, Kleist's roving restless spirit got the better of him, and procuring a lengthened leave of absence, he visited Paris, then settled in Switzerland. There, he found congenial friends in Heinrich Zschokke and Ludwig Wieland (1777–1819), son of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland; and to them, he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family (1803).
