Ewald Christian von Kleist

Both boys attended the Jesuit school in Deutsch Krone (now Wałcz, Poland) and subsequently, in 1729, the Danzig Gymnasium; in 1731 Ewald von Kleist advanced to the University of Königsberg, where he studied law and mathematics.

[1] In 1738 he was sent to Gdańsk to visit his father and sister, as well as to his good friend Battrow (north-east of Flatow), a distant relative, the widowed chief of Goltz, whose daughter Wilhelmine made an impression on him; he became betrothed to her, but they were separated by his military service and she married another man.

[1] Recalled to Prussia by King Frederick II in 1740, he was appointed lieutenant in a newly formed regiment stationed at Potsdam, where he became acquainted with J. W. L. Gleim, who interested him in poetry.

[3][1] Quartered during the winter of 1757–1758 in Leipzig during the Seven Years' War, he found relief from his irksome military duties in the society of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

[3] Thomas Carlyle offers a description of his death, possibly apocryphal: Kleist was attached to Finck's division at the Prussian right.

Later that night some Russian Hussars found Kleist in this situation, took him to a dry place, set a watch fire and gave him some bread.

[4] Kleist's chief work is a poem in hexameters, Der Frühling (1749), for which Thomson's Seasons largely supplied ideas.

[5] Kleist also wrote some odes, idylls and elegies, and a small epic poem, Cissides und Paches (1759), the subject being two Thessalian friends who die an heroic death for their country in a battle against the Athenians.

See also Arthur Chuquet, De Ewaldi Kleistii vita et scriptis (Paris, 1887), and Heinrich Pröhle, Friedrich der Grosse und die deutsche Literatur (1872).