Der Zerbrochene Krug

A justice system comedy where the judge is the criminal. That's the setup for Kleist's masterpiece of theatrical irony. In a sleepy Dutch village, the local magistrate Adam presides over a case to determine who broke a widow's ceramic jug. The twist: everyone in the room knows Adam did it. Not only that, but the damage occurred during his attempted assault on the young village woman Eve. The play's title carries the period's brutal double meaning: 'breaking the jug' was slang for deflowering a woman. So Adam sits on his bench, interrogating witnesses, fabricating alibis, and desperately trying to hide his wounds from the arriving imperial inspector, all while the villagers watch him dig his own grave. Kleist wrote this at Napoleon's Prussia, when the courts were a joke and everyone knew it. The comedy still cuts because it shows justice as theater performed by the guilty for the benefit of the complicit. You'll laugh at Adam's increasingly absurd contortions, then realize Kleist was writing about something very dark.