Moral und Motivation im Werk Heinrich von Kleists

The study demonstrates how Heinrich von Kleist´s work can be understood as a literary translation of an engagement with the problems of moral philosophy from the Enlightenment. Received wisdom has it that with his life´s crisis in 1801 Kleist turned his back on the philosophy of the Enlightenment and became a poet of the irrational and abyssal; in opposition to this, the present study shows that it is above all a philosophical problem to which Kleist turns in his writings until the abrupt end of his creative work - the question of whether man can be motivated to action by moral principles.