This year, the world commemorates the 200th anniversary of the death of the poet Heinrich von Kleist, who ended his life at the age of just 34 on November 21, 1811, with a gunshot at the Kleiner Wannsee in Berlin. He had been deeply troubled by the world: so troubled that I would almost say, when I stick my nose out the window, the daylight hurts me, which glimmers upon me. (Letter to Marie von Kleist, November 10, 1811) The relentlessly sensitive poet is celebrated today as one of the greatest poets and as a founder of literary modernism in the German language. In his masterful novella "The Marquise of O," first published in the literary magazine Phöbus in 1808, Kleist tells the shocking story of a woman who, unknowingly pregnant, is abandoned by her family and left to fend for herself with a newspaper advertisement.