Losing Your Shit

Reflections on the Turning of Michael Kohlhaas and Courage in the Face of Injustice

“Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men.” ~ Proverbs 22:29 (KJV)

Heinrich von Kleist (1777 - 1811), German author and tortured man of letters was the progenitor of my first (but by no means last or only) moment of academic embarrassment in my first weeks of University life, embarking on the study of German literature 206 years after his birth. It came about because of the following passage from his novella “The Marquise of O—”

He smashed the hilt of his sword into the face of one of the murderous brutes, who still had his arms round her slender waist, and the man reeled back with blood pouring from his mouth; he then addressed the lady politely in French, offered her his arm and led her into the other wing of the palace which the flames had not yet reached and where, having already been stricken speechless by her ordeal, she now collapsed in a dead faint. Then – the officer instructed the Marquise’s frightened servants, who presently arrived, to send for a doctor; he assured them that she would soon recover, replaced his hat and returned to the fighting. In a short time the fortress had been completely taken by the enemy; the Commandant, who had only continued to defend it because he had not been offered amnesty, was withdrawing to the main gate with dwindling strength when the Russian officer, his face very flushed, came out through it and called on him to surrender." (from "The Marquise of O -: And Other Stories" by Heinrich Kleist, David Luke, Nigel Reeves)

If - which I don’t doubt for a moment - you are more astute than I am (or was, for sure), you will have immediately pricked up your ears and put yourself on DefCon 2 alert at the appearance of that little hyphen (not the double-length hyphen which attenuates to the “O” in “Marquise von O—” to provide a fine veil of anonymity and with which the book, given all its aristocratic characters, all evidently in need of anonymization, is replete) after the word “Then” at the beginning of the second sentence. No? Well neither did I.

The whole story hinges on that hyphen. A few months after the siege, which the above paragraph describes, the Marquise discovers she is pregnant and the gallant Russian officer who saves her in the heat of the battle and later comes urgently begs for her hand in marriage is in fact the father of the unborn child, procured, as it were during that hyphen and just before he handed her over to her “frightened servants who presently arrived”. How on earth was I or anyone else supposed to know that? I duly asked in front of the entire lecture hall when the dastardly deed was supposed to have happened and my professor - a young chap with a pock-marked face and John Lennon glasses - took great delight in humiliating me in front of my fellow students, something which I am sure as eggs are eggs he did with sadistic pleasure at the beginning of every academic year. The only thing I got out of it was a white T-Shirt I had printed that afternoon with the words “Fancy a Hyphen?” emblazoned on the front with the subtitle “Heinrich von Kleist Appreciation Society” in much smaller letters underneath and a lifelong genuine fondness for the writer, plus a wariness of hyphens in general.

All of which by way of introduction to Kleist and another one of his stories - my favourite by far - which has relevance to these Pitchfork Papers, today more than ever before and whose hero - if that is the correct designation - is the subject of today’s reflection. The Story of Michael Kohlhaas is based on a true series of events, embellished of course with liberal artistic license (true to Mark Twain’s rhetorical question “Do you want the truth or a good story?”) which took place in the chaos of the Reformation and the 30 years of war and dislocation that followed on the heels of the Protestant revolution in the middle of the 16th Century in what is now the eastern part of the Federal Republik of Germany.

Here is the potted version:

Michael Kohlhaas is a successful, well-respected, and wealthy man of business living in the Principality of Brandenburg. He is married, a family man loved and admired by those who know him. He has a reputation for honesty and fair dealing and is a model citizen in every respect. So far so good. Whilst on a business trip taking a string of expensive horses to market in Dresden, in the neighbouring Kingdom of Saxony he comes across a toll gate set up on the road and is met with a rude request to pay a toll to a rough-looking lout, an employee it transpires of the aristocrat Junker Wenzel von Tronka, upon whose land he finds himself and whose castle is visible from the road. Kohlhaas refuses to pay, knowing that the Junker’s ability to levy a toll is restricted by local law. He demands to see Tronka who, as he arrives at the castle with his stable boy and string of horses, is just returning from a hunting party with a group of friends. Tronka rather fancies two of the horses for himself, a beautiful pair of black steeds, so he coerces Kohlhaas into leaving them as a “security deposit” in lieu of the disputed toll until he should return to settle the matter on his way back home. Kohlhaas leaves the horses, begrudgingly, but commands his groom Herse to stay with them and look after them, not wanting to waste any more time on his trip.

He departs for Dresden, settles his business, drops off at his lawyer’s office to get a ruling on the invalidity of Junker Tronka’s toll, and sets off home again. No hyphens so far, so all good.

The trip, as was the case in those slower days, had taken the best part of six weeks. He returns home, stopping off at Junker Tronka’s castle to collect his horses. Here he finds his stable boy disappeared - sent home in disgrace for insubordination he is told - and his horses, emaciated, exhausted, filthy, and near death tied up in a pig sty that is not big enough for them to stand up in. He is furious at the appalling treatment of his property and demands restitution of his horses in the condition in which he left them. There is an altercation, the Junker and his ruffians threaten him physically, tell him to take his nags, and be gone. Kohlhaas, refusing to recognise them as his property, leaves them there.

Then the fun starts. His first port of call is of course home where he demands to know what has become of his groom, Herse, and why he deserted his post and had behaved so badly that they had been forced to evict him. The truth it turns out was wholly different: Herse is lying in bed recovering from a severe beating at the hands of the castle staff who had chased him away as he tried to protect the horses from brutal mistreatment. The horses had been deprived of feed, had been used to plough the fields, ejected from their stabling, and generally abused from morning until night. He had moved them to the pigsty to prevent them from being without shelter completely and even removed part of the roofing so that they could at least stand upright. One day not long after his Master’s departure he had been attacked and beaten to within an inch of his life and fled the property to return home, near to death himself.

Kohlhaas is now furious and instructs his lawyer who tells him he has a shut-and-closed case against the Junker and writes the petition to the court in Saxony asking for summary judgment. However the case, after months of delay which turn into a year, is dismissed as vexatious and he is ordered to stop making trouble and collect his horses, which he is reminded he has not been prevented from collecting from day one. Shocked and angry, Kohlhaas now escalates and petitions the Elector of Brandenburg who hears his case, but because of Junker von Tronka’s extensive family connections both in Dresden and in Berlin is persuaded also to dismiss the case. After an interminable series of appeals, Kohlhaas has exhausted his legal options and is seething with anger at the injustice of the system and its corruption. He plots his revenge.

He informs his wife that he is selling their property, sending her and the children to the safety of her relatives in Schwerin, and is taking matters into his own hands. In a moving scene she, horrified, begs him to reconsider and, quoting the New Testament verses pleads with him to forgive his enemies. After all, it was, was it not, just a pair of horses. He responds

“What would you have me do? Should I just give up? Should I go to the Tronkenburg and ask the Junker to return me my horses, climb up on them and just ride them home to you?” — Lisbeth did not dare to cry: Yes! Yes! Yes! - instead she shook her head tears streaming down her face.”

Seeing that his mind is made up she asks him to wait until she has personally intervened on his behalf with the Elector, as she has a cousin who is at court and well-placed to arrange an audience. He acquiesces and off she goes to Berlin. She returns a week later, severely wounded with a punctured lung only to expire shortly afterward. It appears that as she tried to approach the Elector an overzealous guard had pushed her away with the blunt of his halberd, causing her to fall and sustain the injury of which she then died.

Kohlhaas now has nothing left to lose, packs his children off to safety, gathers his reserves and with a small band of men, loyal servants including the now recovered Herse marches off towards Tronka Castle. He attacks and sacks the castle, killing all the men who had mistreated his horses and servant as well as anybody else he can find there, and razes the castle to the ground, saving his horses just in the nick of time before the pigsty is also enveloped in flames. Junker Wenzel escapes by the skin of his teeth and flees to a monastery run by his aunt. Kohlhaas goes off in hot pursuit, arrives at the monastery, and demands of the abbess that she disgorge her errant nephew. She informs him that he has fled there too. Before he can make short shrift of the monastery in his blind frustrated rage, it starts to rain hard and Kolhaas moves on to the town of Wittenberg, whither, he has been reliably informed, Wenzel von Tronka has retreated and is now ensconced.

News of his beating of the generally unpopular landlord has spread quickly, even without recourse to Twitter, and his little band of Kohlhassian loyalists has now swelled to a couple of dozen men, eager for plunder or just the opportunity of giving one of the 1% a good beating. Kohlhaas approaches Wittenberg as head of a small well-armed force and demands that the town elders hand Tronka over to him otherwise he will start burning the town. They don’t and he does.

Kohlhaas now shows the first signs of delusion by proclaiming that he has been contacted by the Archangel Michael, and has formed a ‘new world government’, calling upon good Christians to support his claim against Tronka. Horrified, the town sends out a force of a good hundred men to meet and engage him and his band and in one of those pivotal turns of events, from a mixture of arrogance and incompetence, manage to lose the battle, are destroyed, with a good number of the remaining troops joining Kohlhaas’ army.

Things now go from bad to worse. Still no sign of Wenzel but Kohlhaas has become unstoppable. His army swells to significant proportions, partially attracted by the offer of pay and bounty and he begins a campaign of terror across Brandenburg and Saxony in which eventually Martin Luther himself is asked to mediate. Kohlhaas reveres Luther so agrees to talk. Society, Kohlhaas argues with Luther, has set him outside the law by refusing him the law’s protection; he is, therefore, justified and compelled to use force. His quarrel with the Junker has already cost him his wife and it is too late to stop now. Luther, as his spiritual father, urges him (as his dying wife had done) to forgive his enemy, and when Kohlhaas remains obdurate on this point, refuses him absolution. However, he does agree to intercede on his behalf with the King of Saxony, pleading with the latter to readmit the case rather than treat him as a rebel. This he manages to do, Kohlhaas disbands and presents himself at court where his case is reopened.

However, the backstage shenanigans have not stopped and the Tronka relatives at court keep plotting away to have the case dismissed although we discover that they are furious at their country relative for putting the family in such a public and embarrassing position. Kohlhaas soon discovers they are not playing fair and is tricked, much as Mary Stuart was tricked into revealing her complicity in a plot against Elizabeth I in a letter, into admitting that he would be willing to retake command of his army from the rebel leaders who have kept the fight going in his absence. The Elector of Brandenburg gets involved as does the Holy Roman Emporer, the case against Kohlhaas is moved to Brandenburg, the corrupt officials there are dismissed, Tronka gets a two-year gaol sentence and is commanded to pay full restitution, the horses are restored to Kohlhaas in pristine condition who in turn gifts them to the Elector’s own sons, whilst he is sentenced to be beheaded for disturbing the Imperial peace. He takes his punishment stoically and with unmistakeable joy that justice has eventually been done and the story ends with his beheading and the dubbing of his two sons, who are there to witness his demise, to the rank of Knights (“Ritter”) by the Elector himself.

Kleist’s story contains a rather bizarre subplot of a Macbethian tinge with a prophesy by a witch which keeps popping up like a bad penny during the narrative, but in a nutshell that is it. A previously good man who has prospered with the system, finds himself frustrated by the law and by corrupt powerful people who are able to manipulate that system to avoid responsibility for egregiously bad behaviour. In his quest for what he perceives to be justice, he loses friends and even his wife and goes rogue and slightly batty. His trajectory is nourished by the energy of the time (Zeitgeist) and takes on a dimension he could never have foreseen involving the entire political power structure, but in the end, justice is done and seen to be done and his family is ennobled even though he has paid for it with his life.

This story, at least the first part of it could easily be translated into a modern context: A previously prosperous business owner sees his small store shut down during COVID and deemed “non-essential” by a system that lets the big box supermarkets with whom he has successfully competed all his life, open, thereby crippling his business. The on-and-off-again policies which don’t affect the larger businesses force him to close down, decimating his savings. His attempt to find redress through a petition for restitution on constitutional grounds gains attention and signatures but he is vilified in the press as a troublemaker and the constitutional court refuses to even admit his claim, citing reasons. Meanwhile his wife, a lifelong nurse and caregiver is forced to participate in the mandatory vaccines against her will and better judgment in order to continue working and dies from a mysterious heart condition a week after her last injection. His attempts to have the cause of death certified as vaccine injury is refused and he is left distraught, exhausted and mad as hell at the system which he feels has betrayed him. Doesn’t sound that implausible, does it?

The story throws up so many questions about the nature of justice, the compact between the individual and the State, the question of accepting injustice, of when to disobey bad laws, of the right moment to resist and be civilly disobedient, of dealing with obvious corruption and evidence of “one rule for them and another for us” practices. Was Kohlhaas in any way justified in taking the law into his own hands and attacking the Tronkenburg? Was he justified in killing the inhabitants of the castle who resisted him? (that is an easy one to answer)? What should he have done? Should he have listened to his wife and let the matter go? How should he have dealt with his own rage at the frustration of his claim for restitution?

If the answer to all of the above is no, he should have accepted the ruling of the court when he had exhausted all paths of appeal open to him and written off the horses as a tax loss; he should have listened to his wife; he should have prayed for strength and forgiveness for the weak, privileged men whose corruption he and his staff had so viscerally experienced. He should have left it to God and fate and the passage of time to bring in its revenges and not taken it into his own hands.

Michael Kohlhaas' pitchfork moment went spectacularly pear-shaped as it cost him his family, his prosperity and ultimately his life. He got his restitution and revenge on the Tronkas eventually, but at a cost far in excess of the value of the horses, which at the core were what the whole episode was about. In business, we make decisions all the time not to pursue what we could easily subsume under “injustices” on a cost-benefit analysis, taking into account value lost, time spent, legal fees, and the probability of a court deciding in our favour based on precedent. I once faced a judge in Munich on a trumped-up VAT tax charge over two decades ago who was a chronic choleric and who screamed at my lawyer for 15 minutes like a madman, before forcing us into a settlement and making me pay a fine to his favourite charity on whose board which I later discovered he sat. There was no way we were ever going to get a rational ruling from him and I felt for the 45 minutes we were in there as if I had been transported to a kangaroo court in east Siberia (not an unusual experience for plaintiffs in a Bavarian commercial court case by the way). Did I harbour Kohlhaasian feelings of revenge? - You bet I did. Did I act on them? No, because at the end of that particular day, it wasn’t worth it, but I felt sullied as if my dignity had been affronted and my reputation besmirched. Did I lack courage in not yielding to my impulse? No, I was being rational and saving my energy for other, better fights than against an emotionally incontinent rageaholic who probably had a miserable private life, a wife who hated him and chronic hemorrhoids (I hope).

But Kohlhaas provides a fascinating and relevant benchmark against which to measure courage and appropriate responses to injustice, if only by demonstrating that not every pitchfork strategy is a good one and that things can go horribly wrong if you chose the wrong fight to pick (or respond to the wrong one that happens to pick you) and can’t control your temper and your ego. Lessons in courage are legion and good to read (and contrast against Kohlhaases behaviour): I enjoyed this story from Ryan Holiday’s “Courage is Calling” of the Roman Senator Helvidius Priscus

who was commanded by the Emperor Vespasian not to appear in the Senate. It was a summons quite a lot of people get. The one to stop asking questions. To quit poking around. To be very careful, lest we find ourselve sin the middle of something. What was vespasian trying to do? We don’t know. Maybe he wanted to ram through some piece of legislation to cover for one of his crimes. Or maybe he just wanted to prevent a headache. He just knew that intimidation deterred everyone else in Rome.

“It is in your power not to allow me to be a member of the senate” Helvidius replied, ‘ but so long as I am, I must go in.”

“Fine” Vespasian said with surprise, “but you better not say anything.”

“Do not ask my opinion,” Helvidius told me, “and I will be silent.”

“But I must ask for the Senate’s opinion,” Vespasian told him growing angrier.

“And I must say what I think right,” was Helvidius’ reply. And so it came inevitably to the threat of death. “If you don’t stop, if you say what I’ve asked you not to say,” Vespasian said with a flip of his wrist motioning to the Praetorian shock troops standing behind him, “I shall put you to death.”

While most of us will never receive such an explicit ultimatum, the dynamic remains the same. They want us to toe the line, To get out of the way. To leave things alone Or else…

…

What kind of a world would that be? Not a good one. Certainly not a safe one.

Which is why Helvidius fearlessly looked Vespasian in the eye and said “You will do your part, and I will do mine: It is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; and mine to depart without sorrow.”

And eventually he was baished; he was kicked out of the parlour, and later executed. He lost his job. He lost his life. Those two things we fear losing most.

But while he had those things, he actually used them.

I continue to think and my belief grows deeper with every passing day, that being in business for oneself, alone or with trusted partners is the single most impressive option of rebellion and the best expression of autonomy possible. Hard as they might make it (and God only knows they are trying everything to do just that as the German Minister of Economics Robert Habeck, probably the most economically illiterate representative of his caste, demonstrated so admirably this week)

TheRealTom™ ✊ @tomdabassman

The German Minister of Economics, Robert Habeck: 'Bakeries, craft businesses, cleaning companies.... they can just stop producing this year, but they don't go insolvent. They don't work into the red.' #Germany #EnergyPrices #Energy

public servants don’t understand business and will wait until the very end of their authoritarian development path to outlaw it and they never can entirely even under the most oppressive of regimes. Success is the very best form of revenge and business is unparalleled in its ability to create substance, freedom of creative expression, community, value, and a place to hide for longer than anywhere else within the confines of a decaying society. Added to which is the fact that for all the unease we may be feeling about the way of the world, we are a very long way off that point currently. If these Pitchfork Papers do anything at all it is to encourage you to practice avoiding intimidation and unconstitutional limitations on your personal autonomy placed there not by explicit laws but by manipulated group think and insidious appeals to a vaguely defined common good.

Channel Helvidius, not so much Kohlhaas and you will be fine.