Germans of course have their own history of violence, both actual and ideological, a horrified fascination with which even trickles down into the seminar room. Kleist himself was capable of violence, not least against himself, but also of great courage. So were other members of his clan. One Kleist served Hitler as a field marshal; another tried to kill him and was executed. Is the renewed interest in Kleist, then, really about conflict, or (to put it more grandly) about action rather than observation? Does Kleist answer a desire to be, for once, politically incorrect?

There's more to the phenomenon than just the subversive appeal to the academic mind of being uncouth. Kleist remains a writer who cannot quite be grasped. In one sense he was a true European, with the mind of a Prussian soldier and the heart of an English Romantic. He was certainly not a crude German nationalist. Yet he was not what we think of today as a good European. It would be hard to imagine anybody less Kleistian than Angela Merkel, for example. Indeed, he might have reacted violently against Mrs Merkel's attempts to unite Europe by peaceful means, just as he did against Napoleon's attempts to do so by force.

In his extreme politics and aesthetics, Kleist is that desirable creature: a popular outsider, a poet of radically individualistic thoughts and ideas. He also reminds us of a different paradox: in order to bring about change, an outsider has to remain an outsider — especially in Germany.