page_title: The Prince of Homburg (play)
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Prince of Homburg (play) / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Heinrich von Kleist Memorial in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. Situated in the Park at the St. Gertraud Church. Made by Gottlieb Elster in 1910. Deutsch: Heinrich von Kleist Denkmal in Frankfurt (Oder), Deutschland. Es steht im Park an der St. Gertraudkirche. Angefertigt von Gottlieb Elster 1910.
context_page_description: The Prince of Homburg is a play by Heinrich von Kleist written in 1809–10, but not performed until 1821, after the author's death.
  The title relates to the real Prince of Homburg at the Battle of Fehrbellin in 1675, Friedrich von Hessen-Homburg, but beyond the name and place there is little if any resemblance between the Romantic character in the play and the eponymous Friedrich, a successful professional soldier of many years' standing.
  The play has been filmed a number of times, and inspired the opera Der Prinz von Homburg by Hans Werner Henze.
context_section_description: The play was not published or produced during Kleist's lifetime. The author dedicated his work to Princess Marianne of Hesse-Homburg, the protagonist's great granddaughter and wife of Prince William of Prussia. The princess felt her family honour insulted by the play and blocked its productions. In a shortened version under the title Die Schlacht von Fehrbellin it had its premiere in Vienna in 1821, but after only four performances was taken off when Archduke Karl objected to it. In 1828 it was performed for the first time in Berlin, again in a shortened form, but after three performances the King banned it.
  This, Kleist's last play, met with resistance not only from his contemporaries. The fear of death scene was long held to be unperformable and was always omitted. Equally criticised were the prince's sleep-walking and the trick played by the Elector. This was because although these were things that were acceptable in comedy, they offended the rules governing the portrayed behaviour of the aristocratic figures of tragedy. This was a convention that really only disappeared shortly before the First World War, when it did become possible to portray an aristocrat as a figure of comedy, for example Baron Ochs in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Der Rosenkavalier.
  Heinrich Heine praised the work as "as though written by the genius of poetry itself". For de la Motte Fouqué it was "the most divine poem ever to proceed from the pen of Kleist". Friedrich Hebbel however commented that through the representation of the fear of death, an enlightenment of the protagonist was achieved that in other works could only be produced by death itself. Otto von Bismarck simply thought that the prince was a "weak reed – with his fear of death".
  It was a very popular piece however during the Third Reich, generally with a number of significant amendments to tailor it to contemporary circumstances. This resulted in its almost total neglect in the period after World War II and it returned only slowly to the German stage.
caption: Relief showing the Prince of Homburg on the Heinrich von Kleist monument of 1910 in Frankfurt an der Oder
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