Available until now only in verse translation, it has been newly
rendered for the American stage by Diana Stone Peters and Frederick G.
Peters.
A work of profound psychological insight, Prince Friedrich of Homburg
probes with passionate intensity questions fundamental to "civilized"
behavior. Prince Friedrich, the hero of the historic battle of
Fehrbellin (1675) against the invading Swedes, receives not laurels for
his victory but the sentence of death for disobeying orders in the
field. Faced with certain execution, his mood swings from abject terror
to high-minded exultation as first he challenges, and then accepts, the
rule of law and subservience to the state. The action moves relentlessly
in the near-frenzied pace characteristic of Kleist. Intended as a paean
to a Prussia triumphant in the Napoleonic wars. the play was,
ironically, censured and never produced in Kleist's lifetime. In our own
day, Prince Friedrich of Homburg has been both denounced as a
protofascist work and lauded as a supreme metaphysical disquisition.
Whatever the merits of such intellectualization, it remains one of the
most moving and performable plays available for the modern stage.