[1913]
Kleist in Thun
KLEIST found board and lodging in a villa near Thun, on an island in the river Aare. It can be said today, after more than a hundred years, with no certainty of course, but I think he must have walked across a tiny bridge, ten meters in length, and have pulled a bell rope. Thereupon somebody must have come sliding lizardlike down the stairs inside, to see who was there. “Have you a room to let?” Briefly then Kleist made himself comfortable in the three rooms which, at an astonishingly low price, were assigned to him. “A charming local Bernese girl keeps house for me.” A beautiful poem, a child, a heroic deed; these three things occupy his mind. Moreover, he is somewhat unwell. “Lord knows what is wrong. What is the matter with me? It is so beautiful here.”
He writes, of course. From time to time he takes the coach to Berne, meets literary friends, and reads to them whatever he has written. Naturally they praise him to the skies, yet find his whole person rather peculiar. He writes The Broken Jug. But why all the fuss? Spring has come. Around Thun the fields are thick with flowers, fragrance everywhere, hum of bees, work, sounds fall, one idles about; in the heat of the sun you could go mad. It is as if radiant red stupefying waves rise up in his head whenever he sits at his table and tries to write. He curses his craft. He had intended to become a farmer when he came to Switzerland. Nice idea, that. Easy to think up, in Potsdam. Poets anyway think up such things easily enough. Often he sits at the window.
Possibly about ten o’clock in the morning. He is so much alone. He wishes there was a voice beside him; what sort of voice? A hand; well, and? A body? But what for? Out there lies the lake, veiled and lost in white fragrance, framed by the bewitching unnatural mountains. How it all dazzles and disturbs. The whole countryside down to the water is sheer garden, it seems to seethe and sag in the bluish air with bridges full of flowers and terraces full of fragrance. Birds sing so faintly under all the sun, all the light. They are blissful, and full of sleep. His elbow on the windowsill, Kleist props his head on his hand, stares and stares and wants to forget himself. The image of his distant northern home enters his mind, his mother’s face he can see clearly, old voices, damn it all — he has leapt up and run out into the garden. There he gets into a skiff and rows out over the clear morning lake. The kiss of the sun is indivisible, unabating. Not a breath. Hardly a stir. The mountains are the artifice of a clever scene painter, or look like it; it is as if the whole region were an album, the mountains drawn on a blank page by an adroit dilettante for the lady who owns the album, as a souvenir, with a line of verse. The album has pale green covers. Which is appropriate. The foothills at the lake’s edge are so half-and-half green, so high, so fragrant. La la la! He has undressed and plunges into the water. How inexpressibly lovely this is to him. He swims and hears the laughter of women on the shore. The boat shifts sluggishly on the greenish, bluish water. The world around is like one vast embrace. What rapture this is, but what an agony it can also be.
Sometimes, especially on fine evenings, he feels that this place is the end of the world. The Alps seem to him to be the unattainable gates to a paradise high up on the ridges. He walks on his little island, pacing slow, up and down. The girl hangs out washing among the bushes, in which a light gleams, melodious, yellow, morbidly beautiful. The faces of the snow-crested mountains are so wan; dominant in all things is a final, intangible beauty. Swans swimming to and fro among the rushes seem caught in the spell of beauty and of the light of dusk. The air is sickly. Kleist wants a brutal war, to fight in battle; to himself he seems a miserable and superfluous sort of person.