His best known works are the theatre plays The Prince of Homburg, 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.

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.

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.

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.

[1] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "Kleist's whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is reflected in his work.

He was by far the most important North German dramatist of the Romantic movement, and no other of the Romanticists approaches him in the energy with which he expresses patriotic indignation.

"[2] In the spring of 1799, the 21-year-old Kleist wrote a letter to his half-sister Ulrike [de] in which he found it "incomprehensible how a human being can live without a life plan" (Lebensplan).

They shared a fondness for music, and according to Ernest Peguilhen, Henriette Vogel asked her friend to explain to her the art of war, as well as to teach her fencing,[citation needed] for the dramatist was a soldier.

Prior to their departure, they penned farewell letters, which along with an account of the final night they spent at the inn Gasthof Stimming, are part of world literature.

The gravestone, erected by Germans in 1936, was rotated, and shows engraved original text written by Max Ring and the Pater Noster's request: "forgive us our guilt" as well as the names and data of Henriette Vogel and Heinrich von Kleist.

Of Kleist's other dramas, Die Hermannsschlacht (1809) is a dramatic work of anti-Napoleonic propaganda, written as Austria and France went to war.

[13] Kleist is also famous for his essays on subjects of aesthetics and psychology which, to the closer look, show a keen insight into the metaphysical questions discussed by philosophers of his time, such as Kant, Fichte and Schelling.

[14] And yet, Kleist employs the example of the French Revolution as the climactic event of the Enlightenment era whereby man broke free from his dark and feudal chains in favor of liberty, equality, fraternity.

In other words, the will to power has "its splendid source in the feelings," and thus, man must overcome his "struggle with Fate" with a balanced mixture of wisdom and passion.