Heinrich von Kleist is undoubtedly one of the great artists of the German language. The extraordinary event that revolves around his "Marquise of O..." has made it the epitome of the novella genre, and it contains perhaps the most consequential dash in literary history. Quite different, yet still typical of Kleist, is his "Earthquake in Chile": horrifying in its starkness and so modern that the reader is left breathless more than once. Renate Möhrmann, a media scholar and the first female professor in Germany, highlights the uniqueness of both novellas in her afterword, while annotations and a timeline place the texts and their author in their historical context.