Like everything that goes beyond the ordinary limits of human experience, at first it rather strikes rather than attracts and conquers. It is only later that, after a man has been absorbed in the problems of his heroes, begins to understand the overwhelmingness of their emotional reactions, which are determined by the overwhelming nature of the conflict, the deep disturbance in the search for truth and the righteousness of feeling. The extravagance of the denomination can only be measured by the extravagance of the inner tragedy.
In the "The broken jar" comedy, Judge Adam attempts to conceal through all means of slipping out of language, the lack of his own dignity and the serious transgression that he has committed when he enters in secret at night in the the room of beautiful Eve. At the heart of the action is Judge Adam Adam, the perpetrator of the act, who, in his essence, a judge must lead the trial against himself, and though he knows very well who the culprit is, he is at all costs to blame Ruprecht, Eve's fiance. In his recklessness he goes so far as to be an antagonist in his isolated position ... To get out of the charge, he serves with a whole series of twists and lies, in which he is tired of losing control of his tongue, continuously makes gaffes and starts to get himself started. Gradually, Adam loses his nerves, contradicts, interrupts witnesses, or does not give them the opportunity to speak, so he becomes more and more a parody image. Only his cartoon person, who also has a similarity to the devil - he is lame, bald, with a broken head and a disfigured face, suffers from constant disorder due to his greed, lustful, lying, unclean in his thoughts, failing in his duties - the humorous development of the action .... Attached by the facts and testimony of the witnesses, Adam is entangled in the network of his own lies. One by one, the circumstances are thrown out of his power and, instead of playing with them, they begin to play with him. "
Kleist's next two dramas turn out to be a sort of opposition through the understanding of the characters and the presentation of the epochs in which the events included in them - "Penthesilea" and "Das Kathchen von Heilbronn" - were written in 1808. Queen of the Amazons Penthesilea falls in love with Achilles and is loved by a glorious Achaean hero. Defeated but spared by him at the end of their first game, she challenges him on a second game in which Achilles is left to be defeated because she knows she can only marry the one she has won. But Penthesilea, bloody intoxicated, is hurting his dogs against the "defeated" Achilles. They tear it, and she swallows it up. Based on an ancient Greek plot, this drama is a challenge to classical norms: in the development of the ancient legend, the author deliberately introduces barbaric motives, distorting the measure in the analysis of the mental anguish that is resolved by repulsive bloodshed. Goethe is outraged by the innocent innovations of the young, self-made dramatist in this work, which was enthusiastically received by Kleist's friends. The heroine is the center of action and the other actors have meaning and meaning. Penthesilea is extracted from her natural destiny as a woman with the right to privacy and wrongly denies the beginning that is its essence. The natural purpose of a woman must resist the law of the Amazon state, and he excludes love as a free spiritual manifestation. In this way, the Amazons do not live by themselves, but through the state and only through self-denial, they can sustain its being.
On the other hand, the law violates the holiness of the right to self-determination, and that is why the state of instability stems from it, because at the moment when it begins to act under the pressure of a personal feeling, the Amazon will fail to obey the objective state law. Every attempt to self-experience there leads to death. Thus the awakening of love and self-immolation in the highest degree threatens the living of the Amazon, because love is the most personal manifestation in the life of the individual, and hence the greatest enemy of a dormitory built on the deprivation of the soul life. Its powerlessness to fight the love of the state reveals itself in its inner system: in it love is not accessible ...