SOURCE: "Incorporating the Text: Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas" in PMLA, Vol. 105, No. 5, October, 1990, pp. 1098-107.

In the following essay, Koelb provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Michael Kohlhaas.

It is a paradox of German literary history that Heinrich von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas is perennially among both the most esteemed and the most frequently censured works in the modern canon. There is nearly universal admiration for the story of Kohlhaas's attempt to obtain redress for an injustice done to him by the Tronka family and of the final righting of his grievance only after he is condemned for taking the law into his own hands. But this simple, powerful tale is complicated by what many critics refer to as a "subplot," in which Kohlhaas receives from a gypsy woman a prophecy regarding the elector of Saxony and, by destroying the paper on which it is written, revenges himself...