Heine

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

Heine is a great poet and wickedly funny. His poetry offers a glittering play of surfaces and ironic allusions. It encompasses a range of registers from the sublime to the ridiculous, although Heine agreed with Napoleon’s opinion that: ‘du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas’ (‘from the sublime to the ridiculous there is but a step’) https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/heine/legrand/legrand.html

Heine’s works explore his own deeply divided consciousness; because of this he is regarded as an important precursor of 20th-century literary modernism. In Die Bäder von Lucca; The Baths of Lucca (1830; in Volume 3 of Reisebilder; Travel Pictures ), Chapter 4, Heine explains that because the modern world is divided and disunited, modern poetry must lack unity as well, any sense of organic harmony would be false:

Ach, teurer Leser, wenn Du über jene Zerrissenheit klagen willst, so beklage lieber, daß die Welt selbst mitten entzwei gerissen ist. Denn da das Herz des Dichters der Mittelpunkt der Welt ist, so mußte es wohl in jetziger Zeit jämmerlich zerrissen werden. […] Einst war die Welt ganz […] und es gab ganze Dichter. Wir wollen diese Dichter ehren und uns an ihnen erfreuen; aber jede Nachahmung ihrer Ganzheit ist eine Lüge.

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/heine/reisebld/reise324.html

Ah, dear reader, if you want to complain about my being torn / my internal conflict [Zerrissenheit], then you should rather complain that the world itself is torn apart down the middle. Since the poet’s heart is the centre of the world, it had to be torn apart miserably in these present times […] Once the world was whole […] and poets were whole. We want to honour these poets and enjoy reading them, but every imitation of their wholeness is a lie.

Heine’s poetry therefore refuses semantic closure; everything he writes is relativised and modulated by a self-reflective irony. Reading Heine helps us to learn to negotiate contradictory desires. In his early work in particular (Buch der Lieder; Book of Songs, 1827) Heine enjoys creating a romantic mood and then puncturing it; this technique has been called Stimmungsbrechung (breaking the mood).

In 1819-1820 Heine spent a year studying law, history and literature at the University of Bonn. One of his tutors there was August Wilhelm Schlegel. He continued his studies at the University of Göttingen (1820-21) and the University of Berlin (1821-23). In Berlin he encountered the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, the Sanskrit scholar Franz Bopp, the Homeric scholar F. A. Wolf, the writer Karl Immermann, and the liberal diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense and his wife Rahel Varnhagen.

Heine was a non-practising Jew who converted to Christianity for career reasons upon his graduation in 1825, since many professions were forbidden to Jews. Heine moved to Paris in May 1831, inspired by the French Revolution of July 1830. He stayed there for the rest of his life, returning to Germany only briefly in 1843-44; this visit forms the subject of his masterpiece Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen; Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1844). His other masterpiece Atta Troll: Ein Sommernachtstraum; Atta Troll: A Midsummer Night’s Dream was published in 1843 and revised in 1847.

Heine was loosely affiliated with the political and literary movement known as Das Junge Deutschland; Young Germany. He was friends with German revolutionaries including Karl Marx and Ludwig Börne, although he soon fell out with Börne, who claimed that Heine was politically immature and lacking in moral fibre.

From 1834 Heine lived with a Frenchwoman, Crescence Augustine Mirat, whom he called Mathilde; he married her in 1841. In 1848 he was disabled by disease and was bedridden for the rest of his life; he called his bedroom his ‘Matratzengruft’ (mattress crypt). His final works contain profound – and humorous – reflections upon religion and mortality.

Heine modelled his literary persona on Lord Byron and his work articulates the mid 19th-century shift from Romanticism to realism. Heine’s Romantic belief in the aesthetic autonomy of poetry clashed with his Romantic belief that poetry should express the soul of the common people. This latter belief led to Heine becoming interested in left-wing politics in the 1830s. In an 1851 preface to his drama William Ratcliff Heine draws attention to ‘The Great Soup Question’ [die große Suppenfrage] – in other words, something will have to be done about poverty in Germany. Heine thought that social justice in Germany would require a radical redistribution of wealth as the Communists planned, but he was extremely ambivalent about the prospect of a Communist revolution. In the preface to the French edition of Lutezia (published in 1855) he writes that he fears a Communist revolution since it would almost certainly lead to the suppression of art and poetry; however he points out that if we accept the basic premise that ‘all human beings have the right to eat’, then there is a certain logic which calls for a revolution.

Out of this tension between his Romantic, aristocratic inclinations and his wish for social justice Heine produced some fascinating texts. Michael Minden (in Modern German Literature, Cambridge: Polity, 2011, p. 175) describes Heine as ‘the champagne socialist of German literature’. Yet this ignores the opening of Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen; Germany: A Winter’s Tale, where Heine calls for ‘Zuckererbsen für jedermann’; ‘fresh green peas for everyone’.

Heine was a gifted essayist and travel writer, whose Reisebilder; Travel Pictures set a new standard for literary journalism. He wrote a history of religion and philosophy in Germany and a history of German Romanticism, and several reports from Paris for German readers. These prose writings are important: they influenced Marx and Nietzsche. His greatest prose work is arguably his critical portrayal of his fellow political exile in Paris, Ludwig Börne.

Heine’s poetry includes:

Gedichte; Poems (1822)

Buch der Lieder; Book of Songs (1827)

Neue Gedichte; New Poems (1844)

Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen; Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1844)

Atta Troll: Ein Sommernachtstraum; Atta Troll: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843/47)

Romanzero (1851)

Gedichte. 1853 und 1854; Poems: 1853 and 1854 (1854)

Heine’s prose writings include:

Briefe aus Berlin; Letters from Berlin (1822)

Reisebilder; Travel Pictures, 4 vols (1826-31)

Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski; The Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski (1833)

Französische Zustände; French Affairs (1833)

Französische Maler; French Painters (1833)

Zur Geschichte der neueren schönen Literatur in Deutschland; On the History of New Literature in Germany (1833)

Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland; On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834)

Die romantische Schule; The Romantic School (1833/36)

Florentinische Nächte; Florentine Nights (1836)

Der Rabbi von Bacherach; The Rabbi of Bacherach (1840)

Ludwig Börne (1840)

Der Doktor Faust; Doctor Faust (1851)

Lutezia (1854)

Die Götter im Exil; The Gods in Exile (1854)

Geständnisse; Confessions (1854)

Memoiren; Memoirs (1884)

English Translations

The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version, trans. by Hal Draper (Oxford and Boston: Oxford University Press, 1982)

Heinrich Heine, Everyman’s Poetry, trans. and ed. by T.J. Reed and David Cram (London: J.M. Dent, 1997)

Heinrich Heine, Selected Prose, trans. and ed. by Ritchie Robertson (London: Penguin, 1993)

Heinrich Heine, Self-Portrait and Other Prose Writings, trans. and ed. by Frederic Ewen (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1948)

Heinrich Heine, Deutschland: A Winter’s Tale, bilingual edition, trans. and ed. by T.J. Reed (London: Angel, 1997)

Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter’s Tale, trans. by John Goodby (Middlesborough: Smokestack, 2005)

Heinrich Heine, North Sea Poems, trans. and intro. by Richard Crockatt (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2021)