"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era ... " runs the first line of Perfume in the translation of John E. Woods. These words immediately remind the literate German reader of the opening of another well-known tale: "Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, there lived . . . the son of a schoolmaster, one of the most upright and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day." This is the translation by Martin Greenberg of the first line of the novella Michael Kohlhaas, (1844; German, 1810) by Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), a work purporting similarly to deal with an historical personality, a lone figure larger than life who confounds the social order of his time. Very reminiscent of Kohlhaas, the avenger who refashions the world, is the scene of the God Grenouille creating his...