The Earthquake in Chile

Das Erdbeben in Chili; The Earthquake in Chile (written 1805-06; first published 1807)

Das Erdbeben in Chili; The Earthquake in Chile is one of the shortest – and most savage – of Kleist’s stories. It begins with a natural catastrophe, an earthquake, and ends with a man-made one: a massacre in a cathedral. There was an actual earthquake which struck Santiago de Chile on the night of 13 May 1647; but Kleist’s readers would have been reminded of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which inspired Voltaire’s novella Candide (1759).

The tale has little local specificity; it is set in Chile, but what Kleist offers us is a model of European society, one which functions as test case in the exploration of how human beings negotiate the need to find meaning after a major disaster. Jeronimo Rugera, a tutor in a noble household, has an affair with Josephe, the daughter of the family. She is sent to a nunnery where she gives birth to a little boy, Philipp. The town is scandalized. Both Jeronimo and Josephe are to be put to death. At the very moment when the procession is taking her to the place of execution and Jeronimo, in prison, is about to hang himself in despair, the earthquake strikes. In the chaos and confusion that follows, the two lovers and their child are saved. Together with many of the survivors, they go to a valley outside the town where an almost paradisal scene unfolds. The following day a service is held in the cathedral. Jeronimo and Josephe and their child go, together with Don Fernando, a courageous and principled man who has a small child whom Josephe is caring for. In the cathedral a sermon is preached which interprets the earthquake as a judgment sent by God to punish the town for its immorality. The mob turn on the two lovers and kill them and the child that they assume to be theirs. But they make a mistake. The child they batter to death is Don Fernando’s. Philipp survives.

The central issue the story explores is the processes of interpretation by which the survivors of the earthquake desperately need to give meaning to the cataclysm that has befallen them and to their survival – and the practical consequences of those interpretations. Time and again the narrator obliges us to register the fact that societies, cultures, institutions, individual people tend to project their values and assumptions on to the divinity. Josephe’s imminent execution is viewed by the townspeople as a spectacle ‘das der göttliche Rache gegeben wurde’; ‘that was given for the pourpose of divine revenge’. Jeronimo, making good his escape from the town, bows down in order to thank God for his miraculous rescue (‘Gott für seine wunderbare Errettung zu danken’). Josephe believes that her child is a being ‘den ihr der Himmel wieder geschenkt hatte’; ‘who had been again given to her by heaven’. And the lovers, reunited with their child, almost see themselves as a reincarnation of the Holy Family: we read that they ‘waren sehr gerührt, wenn sie dachten, wie viel Elend über die Welt kommen musste, damit sie glücklich würden’; ‘they were very moved when they thought how much misery had had to come upon the world in order for them to be happy’. The God-centred interpretation reaches its climax in the scene in the cathedral. The preacher insists that the earthquake happened at a sign from God and as a sign from God. And he spells out the meaning of the sign; it bespeaks God’s displeasure at the sexual promiscuity that is rife in the town. The two lovers are discovered in the crowd, and they are cursed as being ‘gottlos’ (godless) and ‘gotteslästerlich’ (blasphemous). Nobody thinks to question the how the lovers, who are claimed to be the chief target of divine anger, have escaped disaster. The need to put the world order together again, to have meaning and justification for one’s life carries all before it. The need is so intense that the crowd are prepared to kill for it. Hence the bitter irony that one disaster follows hard upon the other. The paradisal interlude between these two events is likened to the Garden of Eden, and brings the survivors together into one family. Yet, like the glory of the night, this is an epiphany ‘wie nur ein Dichter davon träumen mag’; ‘as only a poet can dream it’. It cannot last. The need to return to society, to one of its central institutions that provides meaning, is simply too great.

Das Erdbeben in Chili; The Earthquake in Chile, then, demands to be read as a kind of parable that warns against the God-centred interpretation of the world. Yet it is important to recognize that any such reading of the story runs the risk of turning it into a cautionary tale. But it does not feel like that. Two factors make it a much more exacting reading experience. One is the sheer pace of events that sweeps it – and us – along. Moreover, it is crucial to note that the narrative voice both quotes, and on occasion seems to share in, the God-centred interpretation. It is not judgmentally distanced from the stresses and strains of the characters’ experience. Rather, it implicates us in the cast of mind that it ultimately criticizes as being, in its supernatural claims, inhuman. We must, therefore, conclude that the only valid explanation for the earthquake (and it is only briefly and unemphatically touched on at certain points in the story) is that of ‘Zufall’ (chance, accident). The earthquake does not mean anything; it is simply a random event. All of which is little comfort; but it does not mean that life is meaningless or purposeless. At the end of the story there are survivors: Don Fernando is a good and noble man. And there is the child that needs his help. ‘Zufall’ (chance, accident) has dictated that he is left with Jeronimo’s and Josephe’s child, not his own. But there is some hope, some glimmer of joy; and it is wonderfully expressed in the subjunctive mood of the tentative final clause: ‘und wenn Don Fernando Philippen mit Juan verglich, und wie er beide erworben hatte, so war es ihm fast, als müsste er sich freuen’; ‘and when Don Fernando compared Philipp with Juan, and how he had acquired both of them, it almost seemed to him as if he would have to be happy’. It is one of the greatest endings in the whole of German prose literature.

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/kleist/erdbeben/chili.html