Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist (18 page)

At nightfall, he stopped at an inn on the highway, where he had to rest for a day on account of the great fatigue of his horses, and recognizing that with a band of ten men (for such was now their number), he could not storm such a place as Wittenberg. And so he drafted a second mandate, wherein, following a brief account of what had befallen him, he called upon “every good Christian,” as he put it, in exchange for a modest payment and other spoils of war, “to take up his cause against the Junker von Tronka, as the common enemy of all good Christians.” In yet another mandate that followed soon thereafter, he called himself “a man free of worldly and imperial ties, beholden only to the Lord God,” a hot-headed and ill-conceived rallying cry that won him, as it were, along with the jingle of coins and the prospect of booty, the allegiance of a rabble that swelled in number after the peace treaty with Poland took the bread out of their mouths: such that he now counted thirty and some followers that gathered with him on the right bank of the Elbe preparing to burn Wittenberg to the ground. He camped with his horses and men under the roof of a broken-down old brick shed in the heart of a dark forest that surrounded the city at the time, and no sooner was he informed by Sternbald, whom he'd sent on ahead in disguise with the mandate in hand, that they were already familiar with it there, than on the holy eve of Whitsuntide, he and his band launched an attack, and while the townspeople lay fast asleep, they simultaneously set fire to several corners of the city. And while his men
plundered on the outskirts of town, he fixed a paper to the doorposts of a church wherein he declared: “I, Kohlhaas, set your city on fire, and if the Junker is not handed over to me, will burn it to the ground, so that,” as he put it, “I won't have to look behind any wall to find him.” The townspeople's horror at this outrage was indescribable; and hardly had the flames – which on this, fortunately, rather windless summer night, had only destroyed nineteen buildings, including a church – been smothered, when the old Lord Governor Otto von Gorgas sent out a battalion of some fifty guards to capture this barbarian. But the captain of the guards, a man named Gerstenberg, failed so miserably in this engagement that, instead of toppling Kohlhaas, it rather raised his fearsome reputation as an extremely dangerous combatant; for since the captain divided his men into several smaller squadrons to surround and subdue the enemy, Kohlhaas responded by holding his troops together and striking out and badly beating them back at several points, such that, by the evening of the following day, not a single member of the captain's battalion, in whom the locals placed their trust, was still standing. Kohlhaas, who lost a few men in these skirmishes, once again set fire to the city on the following morning, and his murderous efforts were so effective that, once again, a slew of houses as well as all the barns on the outskirts of town were burnt to the ground. While so engaged he tacked up another mandate, this time on the corners of the city hall, including word of the fate of Captain von Gerstenberg sent out by the Lord Governor and duly cut down. Whereupon the Lord Governor, infuriated by this defiance, himself took the lead of a company of some 150 men, including a number of knights. At the Junker Wenzel von Tronka's written request, he gave him an armed guard
to protect him from the anger of the townspeople, who were dead-set on chasing him out of town; and after having placed guard details in all the outlying villages and also stationed sentries round the city wall to protect against attack, the Lord Governor set out on St. Gervasius' Day to capture the dragon laying waste to his land. But the horse trader was smart enough to elude this army; and once, through shrewd strategy, he'd lured the Lord Governor five miles outside the city, and given him to believe by various maneuvers that, chastened by the superiority of the opposing force, he had fallen back to neighboring Brandenburg – he suddenly turned his men around at nightfall of the third day and once again attacked Wittenberg, a third time setting the city afire. Herse, who slipped into the city in disguise, brought off this terrible trick; and on account of a fiercely gusting north wind, the raging flames were so ruinous and all-consuming that in less than three hours forty-two houses, two churches, several cloisters and schools and the Governor's residence itself had been reduced to ruins. At daybreak, learning what had happened, the Lord Governor, who thought his opponent was in Brandenburg, staggered back, bewildered, to find the city in an uproar; the crowd gathered by the thousands in front of the Junker's house that was barricaded up with beams and stakes, and hollered and howled their demand that he be driven out of town. Two mayors named Jenkins and Otto who, dressed in their official robes, were present at the head of the entire town council, declared in vain that they were obliged to await the return of an express courier sent to the president of the state chancellery to request permission to be allowed to take the Junker to Dresden, where, for various unspecified reasons, he himself wished to go; the unruly crowd, armed with
pikes and crowbars, put no store in these words, and roughing up a few officials who had called for emergency measures, was in the process of storming the Junker's house, just when the Lord Governor Otto von Gorgas came riding up with his army of knights. As some consolation, as it were, for the failed mission from which he returned, this worthy gentleman, who, by his mere presence, was accustomed to instilling respect and obedience in the people, succeeded in capturing two routed members of the deadly firebrand's band directly in front of the gates of the city; and leading these louts in chains before the crowd, while offering assurances in a well-crafted speech to the members of the town council that, hot as he was on the bandit's trail, he would soon bring back Kohlhaas himself in shackles – he managed, by the strength of all these mollifying circumstances, to defuse the fear of the gathered throng and to somewhat assuage their fury, convincing them to wait for the return of the express courier from Dresden. Surrounded by several knights, he dismounted, and after clearing away the barricade of beams and stakes, entered the house, where he found the Junker in the hands of two physicians doing their best with essences and irritants to rouse him back to life from a faint into which he had fallen; and Sir Otto von Gorgas felt indeed that this was not the right moment to bring up the question of his well-deserved expulsion from the city; so, with a look of quiet contempt, he merely told him to get dressed and to follow him to the prison for his own protection. As soon as they had dressed the Junker in a doublet and put a helmet on his head, and because he was still gasping for air, left his shirt half open, in which condition he appeared on the street, held under one arm by the Lord Governor and under the other by his brother-in-law, Count von
Gerschau, a flurry of obscene and frightful curses rang out from every throat. Held back with great difficulty by armed troopers, the crowd called him a contemptible bloodsucker, a pestilent plague on the land and blight on humanity, the lowdown bane of the city of Wittenberg and the undoing of Saxony; and following a miserable march through the ruins of the city, several times during which he lost his helmet, without missing it, and a knight placed it back on his head, they finally reached the prison, where he was whisked into a tower and held there under the protection of an armed guard. In the meantime, the return of the express courier with the Elector's reply gave the city new cause for concern. For the state government, which shortly before had received a pressing petition from the citizens of Dresden, declined the Junker's request for sanctuary until the bloody villain Kohlhaas had been caught, but ordered the Lord Governor to hold and protect him with the force at his disposal wherever he was, since he had to be somewhere; the good city of Wittenberg was, however, informed, to dispel any lingering concern, that an army of some five hundred men under the leadership of Prince Friedrich von Meissen was on its way to protect them from any further attacks. But the Lord Governor knew full well that a resolution of this sort would by no means calm the people's fears; for not only had the horse trader gained the upper hand in many small ways, but dire rumors also spread of his growing strength; the war he waged with disguised henchmen in the dark of night, with pitch and straw and flammable gunpowder, inconceivable and unprecedented as it was, could well overpower a far bigger army than the one with which the Prince of Meissen was drawing near. So, after brief consideration, the Lord Governor decided to suppress the gist of
the resolution he'd received. He merely posted at the edge of town the letter which the Prince of Meissen had sent announcing his imminent arrival; a covered wagon that rumbled out of the courtyard of the Herrenzwinger Castle at dawn the next day, accompanied by six heavily armed men on horseback, was bound for Leipzig, though the mounted guards dropped hints along the way that they were bound for Pleissenburg; and since the people were so relieved to be rid of the wretched Junker, whom they associated with fire and sword, the Lord Governor himself subsequently set out with an army of three hundred men to join forces with Prince Friedrich of Meissen. In the meantime, given the reputation that Kohlhaas had acquired for himself, his forces grew to 109; and since he also managed to gather a stock of weapons in Jassen and therewith armed his troops to the teeth, informed of the two storm fronts blowing his way, he decided to ride like the wind and head off the threat before it fell upon him. So, the very next day, he lead an attack by night on the Prince of Meissen's force stationed at Mühlenberg; in which skirmish, to his deep regret, he lost Herse, the first man to fall at his side; but embittered by this loss, in the course of the three-hour-long battle that ensued, Kohlhaas fought so fiercely with the Prince that the latter, caught unawares, having suffered several heavy wounds and given the disarray of his army, was compelled to beat a retreat to Dresden. Emboldened by this victory, before the Lord Governor could possibly have been informed of what had transpired, Kohlhaas turned his force around and led an attack on this second front in broad daylight in an open field in the village of Damerow, and although suffering heavy losses, fought on till nightfall, here too gaining the upper hand. Indeed, he would surely have
resumed the attack with the rest of his men the following day, had not the Lord Governor, who had holed up in the churchyard at Damerow, received word of the defeat of the Prince at Mühlberg, and so deemed it wiser to wait for a more auspicious moment and returned post haste to Wittenberg. Five days after the defeat of these two armies, Kohlhaas stood before the gates of Leipzig and set the city on fire on three sides. In a mandate that he distributed on that occasion, he called himself “an emissary of the Archangel Michael come to punish all those with sword and fire who sided with the Junker in this dispute, and thereby to cleanse the world of the sorry state it had fallen into.” Meanwhile, from the Lützen Castle, which he had taken by surprise and where he and his men held up, he called out to the people to join him in his fight for a better world order; and concluded the mandate, with a hint of megalomania, as “proclaimed at the site of our provisional world government, the arrant castle at Lützen.” As luck would have it for the citizens of Leipzig, a persistent downpour kept the fire from spreading, so that, thanks to the rapidity of the local fire brigades, only a few shops around the Pleissenburg went up in flames. Nevertheless, the city's dismay was unspeakable in the face of the raging incendiary and his fury at the fact that the Junker was in Leipzig; and since a force of a hundred and eighty stalwarts sent out to fight had returned defeated, not wanting to jeopardize the city's fortune, the local magistrate had no other recourse but to lock the city gates and have its citizens keep watch night and day outside the walls. To no avail did the magistrate have placards put up in villages in the outlying district assuring the population that the Junker was not in the Pleissenburg; the horse trader insisted in similar placards that he was in the Pleissenburg,
and gave his own assurance that, even if the Junker were not there, he, Kohlhaas, would respond as if he were, and act accordingly, until he was furnished with the name of the place where he was being held. Informed by an express messenger of the danger faced by the city of Leipzig, the Prince Elector declared that he would presently assemble an army of two thousand men with himself in the lead to capture Kohlhaas. He issued a sharp rebuke to Sir Otto von Gorgas, chiding him for the duplicitous and injudicious cunning he applied to lure the murderer away from the environs of Wittenberg; and no one can describe the outrage that took hold of all of Saxony, and especially of the capital city, when word spread there that in the villages around Leipzig a declaration had been put up, it was not known by whom, addressed to Kohlhaas, the contents of which read: “Junker Wenzel is with his cousins Hinz and Kunz in Dresden.”

Under these circumstances, Dr. Martin Luther, given the respect in which he was held by all, took it upon himself to press Kohlhaas with mollifying words back into the social order; appealing to a soundness he sensed in the incendiary's heart, he had a placard with the following contents posted in all cities and far-flung corners of Saxony:

Kohlhaas, you who pretend to have been sent by Him on high to wield the sword of justice, by what right do you, in your audacity and the madness of blind fury, dare disseminate the very injustice you claim to oppose, but which you yourself embody from head to toe? Simply because the Prince Elector, to whom you are subservient, denied your appeal in a dispute concerning a paltry possession, you rise up, desperate
man, with sword and fire, and like a wolf in the desert, attack the peaceful community he is sworn to protect. You, who with your crafty and fraudulent declaration lead the people astray: misguided sinner, do you really think that you will get away with it before God on that fateful day we all dread in our hearts? How can you maintain that you were denied your right, you, who, after your first frivolous attempts to seek redress came to naught, just dropped everything and, egged on in your seething breast, gave yourself over heart and soul to the base urge for revenge? Do you bow to the authority of a docket full of court clerks and constables who intercept a letter of appeal or withhold a verdict in a case brought before them? And must I tell you, ungodly man, that your true liege lord knows nothing of your case! Nay, man, that the Elector against whom you have taken up arms has no idea who you are, so that, on the day when you step before God's throne intending to plead your case against him, he will reply with a puzzled expression: To that man, Lord, I did no wrong, for he is a total stranger to me! Know ye that the sword you wield is the sword of plunder and bloodthirstiness! You're a rebel and no warrior of God! Your earthly destination is the rack and the gallows and eternal damnation in the great beyond for your godless misdeeds.