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Heinrich von Kleist, the Prussian, a cosmopolitan? His plays and novellas written with moral-worldly intent? He was indeed restless, lived briefly in Paris and Switzerland, created literature about the revolution in Haiti and the earthquake in Santiago de Chile (although he may really have been thinking of the Lisbon earthquake). And repeatedly, he placed the personae of his novellas in strong relationship to the wider world. [.] Scenes of shipwreck and threatened demise furnish the paradigm for an event-ethic: an ethic, taking narrative form, that Kleist articulated against the backdrop of a state intervention increasingly rendering impossible the cosmopolitanism of Kantian stamp. Instead of the universality of world-citizenship, Kleist presents us with the event's impersonality; instead of a logic of progress, of general moral self-formation, the event's insistent repetition. This is the context for Kleist's editorial reworking of Achim von Arnim's and Clemens Brentano's critique, written for the "Abendblätter", of Caspar David Friedrich's painting now known as "The Monk by the Sea" (1808–1810). Kleist here defines Friedrich's paintings as capturing a relationship to the world grounded in this different ethics; in his reworking, precisely at the point where Kleist decisively moves away from the version submitted by the two Romantic authors, he tellingly speaks of a "sad and uncomfortable position in the world."
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