Der zerbrochne Krug

zerbrochne Krug, Der (Ein Lustspiel), a full-length one-act comedy in blank verse by H. von Kleist, written between 1802/03 and 1807. Goethe produced his own stage version of Kleist's MS. (Lustspiel in drei Aufzügen) in March 1808 in Weimar with disastrous results. Kleist countered the misfortune of his rejected (and distorted) comedy by publishing parts of it in Phöbus in 1808; he published the whole work in 1811 after it had been rejected by Iffland for production in Berlin.

The situation on which the comedy is based was suggested to Kleist by a French engraving (by J. J. Le Veau) with the caption La Cruche cassée, which he saw in 1802 with his friends (among them H. D. Zschokke, who wrote a story with the same title) at Berne. The plot, set in the law-court of a Dutch village (a deliberate shift from the French environment), pursues the court proceedings dealing with the request for damages by Frau Marthe Rull against Ruprecht, her daughter Eve's lover, whom she accuses of having broken ‘the most beautiful of all jugs’. The village judge, Adam, would gladly convict Ruprecht of the crime, were it not for the interference of Gerichtsrat Walter, who, attending the proceedings as a visiting inspector, exposes Judge Adam himself as the culprit. The jug was in fact broken as it was accidentally knocked over by Adam on his hasty retreat from a secret, but, in its amorous intentions, unsuccessful, midnight venture into Eve's room.

Kleist combines comedy of situation with that of character (concentrating overwhelmingly on Adam), and yet hints at the serious aspect of the fallibility of human feeling and the dilemma of human justice characterizing his work in general. The play stands out among German comedies by the deft realism of the simple peasant characters and their environment, and the ingenious play of words pervading the dialogue. The satire hits out above all against man in general, as the descendant of Adam, as is indicated through the name of the village judge.

An operatic version by an East German composer, F. Geißler, was first performed in Leipzig in 1971.