Heine Heinrich - Heine

Heinrich Heine (17971856) is now recognized as one of Germanys greatest writers. Yet his full admission to the literary canon has at various times been hampered by both political and literary obstacles.

Even during Heines lifetime, there were anti-Semites who, to his anger and distress, denied that he could be both a German and a Jew. His familiarity with the culture of France, where he lived from 1831 until his death, irritated German chauvinists. Above all, his biting criticism of German political institutions led to accusations of fouling his own nest. Early in the twentieth century the proposal to erect a monument to Heine in his native city of Dsseldorf was defeated; a statue was erected there in his honour only in 1953. The National Socialists , of course, tried to erase Heine from the canon. In the forty-odd years of Germanys division into a Federal Republic and a Democratic Republic, both parts claimed him as a political forebear. In the Communist East he was put second only to Goethe among German classics, but criticism there tended to concentrate on his extreme radicalism of the early 1840s, when he was friendly with Marx, and to ignore his deep ambivalence about revolutionary politics. Yet to see Heine as a forerunner of Western democratic liberalism also distorts his thought, ignoring his elitism and his occasional sympathy for autocratic government .

Despite such political controversies, Heines writings have found a wide and appreciative readership in the nineteenth century and since. One sign of his popularity is the number of times his verse and prose are quoted by Freud, whose literary taste typifies that of well-educated, middle-class Germans. In the English-speaking world, he has always been among the most popular of German writers. Evidence of this runs from the essays on him by George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, and the flood of Victorian translations, to Hal Drapers admirable version of his complete poems, the product of thirty years devoted labour.

There are literary obstacles, not to the enjoyment of Heine, but to seeing just where his greatness lies. Some of his admirers, one feels, cannot quite admit that someone who is so much fun to read can be a great writer. To appreciate Heine fully, therefore, we need to overcome the barriers separating categories in our own thinking. We need, for example, to discard the prejudice (enshrined in the Dewey cataloguing system) which places lyric poetry and satire in separate categories and marks the latter as inferior. Nietzsche, one of Heines most perceptive admirers, said of him as a poet: He possessed that divine malice without which perfection, for me, is unimaginable . In Heine, above all in the late poetry, satire becomes great literature. Again, we need to enlarge our notion of the literary. A prejudice institutionalized in many university syllabuses identifies literature with (self-proclaimed) fiction. The main genres of Heines prosetravel writing, essays on literature and philosophy, cultural and political reportageare thus marked as inferior. But it was a prose work, The Harz Journey (1826), that first established Heines literary fame, and I have accordingly tried to do justice to the imaginative richness of his prose. Finally, we need to overcome the distinction between the humorous and the serious. Many of Heines German admirers , when defending him, have retreated to the firm ground of his lyric poetry or his political ideals, as though to prove that he was not frivolous. But is this necessary? Cannot one be perfectly serious while laughing? asks the heroine of Minna von Barnhelm, the comedy by Lessing, the German prose writer whom Heine himself most admired. Light and witty prose, when written by Heine, can be informative, challenging, and profound.

There is no contradiction, therefore, in presenting Heine as simultaneously a satirist and a thinker. But he was not, of course, a philosopher. He himself confessed: I was never an abstract thinker. His thinking is not laid out in treatises but worked into his commentaries on politics, literature, art, and philosophy. He can give a political interpretation of German idealism, and also of the can-can. His agile mind, his brilliant wit, and his restless imagination make him less disposed to adopt a definite stance than to circle round a question, examining it from several angles. Accordingly his thought is here presented, not as a set of conclusions, but as a series of conflicts and dilemmas, displayed both in his poetry and in his prose. His humorous and satiric techniques of writing let him develop his thought in such complex ways that some commentators, in despair, have dismissed it as incoherent and opportunistic. Heines thought is not always consistent, but it is coherent. While clarifying its broad lines, I have tried also to do justice to its many nuances. This has meant quoting liberally in order to stay close to the intricate texture of Heines thinking.

Given the range of his interests, it is inevitable that for much of this book Heine should appear less as a Jewish thinker than as a thinker who was Jewish. His attitudes to Jewish matters, such as the Jewish Reform movement, the Society for Jewish Culture and Scholarship, and anti-Semitism, are examined in the last chapter. But it is well to remember that his reception of European thought has a Jewish bias. He was a beneficiary not only of the Enlightenment but of the Haskalahthe Jewish Enlightenment pioneered by Moses Mendelssohn. Hence Lessing and Mendelssohn are both among his heroes. And though he was deeply attracted to German Romanticism, he was largely immune to the Germanic nationalism which was deduced, with ultimately fateful consequences, from Romantic premises.

I have quoted from the edition by Klaus Briegleb and others of Heines Smtliche Schriften (Munich: Hanser, 196876), in six volumes. Quotations are identified by volume and page number. For longer quotations from Heines poetry I have quoted from Hal Drapers The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), identified as D and page number. Heines letters are quoted from Friedrich Hirths two-volume edition of the Briefe (Mainz: Kupferberg, 194950), and identified by date and recipient. Recollections of Heine are quoted from Begegnungen mit Heine, edited by Michael Werner (2 volumes, Hamburg, 1973), identified as W and volume and page number. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own, though I have profited from others efforts and especially from the versions of Heines prose in the various books by S. S. Prawer. In order to keep references to a minimum, the notes indicate the sources of quotations from writers other than Heine, and the sources of statistics cited, along with a few suggestions for relevant reading. Where possible, the reader is referred to accessible English translations of foreign works.

Heine has attracted a larger and finer body of English-language criticism and scholarship than any other German author, even Goethe. My immense debts to this corpus, especially to works by Robert C. Holub, S. S. Prawer, Nigel Reeves, and Jeffrey L. Sammons (listed under Further Reading), will be patent to the informed reader; I have also profited particularly from the work of Albrecht Betz, Walter Kanowsky, Wolfgang Preisendanz, Dolf Sternberger, and Giorgio Tonelli. I am grateful to the editors of the Cambridge Review for permission to reprint some passages from my essay Heine, Hegel, and Shakespeare, and to Paul Connerton, Edward Timms, and Timothy Williamson for their painstaking and invaluable comments on drafts of this book. For all remaining defects I am alone responsible.