Not only marionettes and mannequins: Kleist and Schulz
The paper discusses several striking affi nities between some passages in the prose of Heinrich von Kleist and that of Bruno Schulz. The Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, designer of a life-size puppet and author of a text on his fetish, published in 1925, appears here as a go-between between Kleist’s marionettes and Schulz’ mannequins. All of the presented similarities by no means qualify as a case for plagiarism, nor even as imitations. Rather, they prove a soul affi nity, Schulz’s intensive reading of Kleist’s prose, and his accommodation of certain motifs and stylistic oddities, which are further developed in his prose, and, linked to other, not only literary, inspirations, yield a new and unique quality.
