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What a wide array of narrative arcs are inscribed in Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas: the story is a Baroque, textual architecture overlaid with the tight coils of a horse's braided mane; the cuneiform lettering of illuminated scripture; the swath of destruction Kohlhaas cuts across the German countryside; finally, the last arc inscribed in the story is the broad parabolic sweep of the executioner's axe: "Kohlhaas aber [. . .] wandte sich zu dem Schafott, wo sein Haupt unter dem Bed des Scharfrichters fiel. Hier endigt die Geschichte vom Kohlhaas" (Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 103) [Kohlhaas, however . . . turned to the scaffold where his head fell under the axe of the executioner. Here ends the story of Kohlhaas] . Yet, as attested in the language with which Kleist reports Kohlhaas's execution, each narrative arc is figured in distinctly textual terms; again, the swing of the executioners axe "endigt die Geschichte vom Kohlhaas" [ends the story of Kohlhaas].
As Clayton Koelb points out the story is overall coherent despite its turn from an initial realism, centering on the provincial horse-dealer who suffers injustice at the hands of the Prussian government, to the fantastic character of its conclusion where an old gypsy woman's prophecy is deciphered to reveal the end of a royal line. The horses whose abuse seems to trigger Kohlhaas's vengeful wrath, "come into play mainly as stand-ins (that is, as collateral) for a missing document." It is not the horses per se that are at issue; rather, Koelb rightly argues, it is "Kohlhaas's lack of a 'permit [Pafischein]' that starts all the trouble" (Koelb 1099).
Consider in this regard the following exchange between Kohlhaas and an officer at the border between Brandenburg and Saxony:
Der Burgvogt, indem er sich noch eine Weste iiber seinen weitlaufigen Leib zukniipfte, kam, und fragte, schief gegen die Witterung gestellt, nach dem Pafischein. - Kohlhaas fragte: der PaSschein? Er sagte, ein wenig betreten, dafi er, soviel er wisse, keinen habe; dafi man ihm aber nur beschreiben mochte, was dies fur ein Ding des Herrn sei: so werde er vielleicht zufalligerweise damit versehen sein. (Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 10)
(The warden, still fastening a waistcoat across his capacious body, came up and, bracing himself against the wind and rain, demanded...