Kleist was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, short story writer and journalist. His best known works are the theatre plays Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, The Broken Jug, Amphitryon and Penthesilea, and the novellas Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O. Kleist died by suicide 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.

 

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 and philosophy at the Viadrina University, and in 1800, received 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 [de] (1777–1819), son of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland; and to them, he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family [de] (1803).

 

In the autumn of 1802, Kleist returned to Germany; he visited Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland in Weimar, stayed for a while in Leipzig and Dresden, returned to Paris. Returning in 1804 to his post in Berlin, he transferred to the Domänenkammer (department for the administration of crown lands) at Königsberg. On a journey to Dresden in 1807, Kleist was arrested by the French as a spy; he remained a close prisoner of France in the Fort de Joux. On regaining his liberty, he proceeded to Dresden, where, in conjunction with Adam Heinrich Müller (1779–1829), he published the journal Phöbus in 1808.