It seems to me significant that Kleist freely introduced into his drama the complete condemnation to death as well as night wandering and moon walking. In the first point he had turned tradition quite to its opposite. In the original the great Friedrich relates that on the triumphant battle field the elector has already forgiven the prince that he had so lightly risked the welfare of the whole state: "If I had judged you according to the stern martial law, you would have forfeited your life. But God forbid that I should sully the brightness of this day by shedding the blood of a prince, who was once the foremost instrument of my victory." Personal reasons, and, as we know from psychoanalysis, these are always infantile reasons, must have been involved when Kleist incorporated this directly into his poetry and yet in so striking a fashion. Some of these reasons I have been able to set forth above. It is now clear that the apparently asexual desire for fame does not lack its erotic foundation. The desire for fame is so greatly exaggerated in Heinrich von Kleist that he will do no less than tear the laurel from Goethe's forehead, because in his infantile attitude he hopes through an unheard of poetic activity to supplant the father with the mother. After the shipwreck of his masterpiece, the Guiskard material, he longed for death because life had no more value for him, but he finds later in the "Prinz von Homburg" a happier solution. For not only does the mother herself now crown him but does it with the father's affectionate blessing. And the old theme of night wandering and moon walking, that is climbing into bed with the loved one, finds its place here although in an opposite form and under a certain sexual repression. The child does not come to the mother but she to him and places the longed for crown upon his head even with the concurrence of the father. Also the fact that the prince transgresses the elector's commands as the result of his moon walking, to which the prince is subject, must somehow, at least by analogy, have been created from the poet's own breast. Nothing is said about this in regard to Kleist, of whose inner life we know so little. Yet his very great interest in noctambulism and similar "night sides of the human soul," as well as his exceptional understanding of the same, show that he at least must have possessed a disposition toward it. It should be emphasized once more in conclusion that the moon walking in the "Prinz von Homburg" does not lack the infantile sexual root, nor is the corresponding erotic purpose wanting, which we have always found, heretofore, to come to the loved one without being held responsible. "DAS SÜNDKIND," by Ludwig Anzengruber.