Help, help me; I am not well!
Käthchen, 5.11

The work views the character Katharine Friedeborn (aka the 15-year-old Käthchen von Heilbronn) as a teenager who wanders through Kleist's theatre play, lost in a dream. The original Käthchen thesis, exposes the idea that Kleist was inspired to create the character by medical reports from the Heilbronn doctor Dr Gmelin. The potential historical role models are three young female neurotic and cataleptic local patients who were being treated by the doctor for nervous disorders using the then-fashionable method of mesmerisation. Therefore, the figure's visionary rapture and obsession could have been caused by "nervous fevers" and "soul sickness". (Österle, 2001). While speechlessness and the unspeakable are central to Kleist's play, this work uses the word as a stylistic device to elucidate the conscious and the unconscious. To do justice to the complexity of the character, text excerpts and adjectives are used, revealing the less popular layers of Katharine's personality.

The work is based on literary observation and consists of two parts:

In the cut-up triptych, all descriptions of the character's condition printed in the original text have been exempted and rearranged. They show statements of Käthchen, Count von Strahl and outsiders. They reveal the sheer nature and variety of Katharine's emotional states and projections by outsiders. Contrary to the received female image of tender innocence, the text portrays Käthchen as a patriarchally patronised and submissive young woman who acts solely out of emotion. She is "one of the strangest female characters in world literature, a dream-lost creature who unconditionally follows a love that she herself cannot explain and accepts every humiliation in return." (Kopka, 2020).

This is supplemented by eight linoleum prints on original text and historical collotype illustrations by Alexander Zick of a literary edition from 1890. Focusing on the dualism typical of Kleist's style, dichotomous, reductive adjectives were worked out for this purpose, which Kleist and his interpreters use to describe Käthchen von Heilbronn. In the form of striking graphic prints, these labels show how "the psychological conflict ... is not an abnormal, even morbid one that is specific to Kleist's characters, but a dualism of human character." (Harlos, 1984). The prints with the labels are framed inside wooden boxes - these stand for categories and pigeonholes, which serve solely to categorise and need to be broken open.