Romanzero
Romanzero (1851)
Romanzero, Heine’s late masterwork, is both profound and heartbreaking. The political engagement which characterised Heine’s middle period has faded. In the place of the topical concerns of his previous poetry, Heine sets his sights on the ultimate questions. These poems are full of life and death, love and hate, happiness and sorrow, and pretty much everything in between.
Romanzero consists of three sections:
(1) Historien; Histories
(2) Lamentationen; Lamentations [this includes the Lazarus cycle of poems]
(3) Hebräische Melodien; Hebrew Melodies
Hebrew Melodies contains the poem ‘Jehuda ben Halevi’, which is arguably Heine’s most sustained reflection on the complex relationship between Jewish tradition and secular modernity.
Willi Goetschel (see reading list below, pp. 271-72) focuses on the image of the shalshelet in the poem. Shalshelet (Hebrew: שַלְשֶלֶת) is ‘a birdlike flourish in the recitation’ of the Torah (Goetschel, p. 271) which suggests that the subject is experiencing hesitation (which, for Heine, connects with the Zerrissenheit of the modern poet). However, the word also means ‘chain’, ‘necklace’, or ‘tradition’. Goetschel argues that the play on shalshelet ‘opens the door to a reconsideration of the fundamental significance of tradition for modern art (and vice versa)’ (Goetschel, p. 272).
The final poem in the book is ‘Disputation’, which depicts a theological debate in medieval Toledo between Caputian monks led by Brother José and Jewish champions led by Rabbi Judah of Navarre. The two sides debate who is the true God, the Trinitarian God of the Christians or the Unitarian God of the Jews. The debate soon becomes abusive and the result is undecided.
For English translations of individual poems, please click on the links below:
Erinnerung; Memory [= poem 6 of the Lazarus cycle]
Further Reading
David Constantine, ‘Heine’s Lazarus Poems’, in Heine und die Weltliteratur, ed. by T. J. Reed and Alexander Stillmark (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 202-14
Roger F. Cook, By the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine’s Late Songs and Reflections (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998)
Willi Goetschel, ‘Tradition as Innovation in Heine’s “Jehuda ben Halevi”: Counterhistory in a Spinozist Key’, in Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 266-76
Anthony Phelan, ‘Mathilde’s Interruption: Archetypes of Modernity in Heine’s Later Poetry’ in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine, ed. by Roger F. Cook (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), pp. 285-313
S. S. Prawer, Heine. The Tragic Satirist. A Study of the Later Poetry, 1827-56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961)
Nigel Reeves, ‘Religiöse Disputation und Ermordung: Kräfte und Grenzen der Dichter und der Dichtung in Heines Jehuda ben Halevy. Betrachtungen über Heines Verhältnis zu jüdischer Dichtung und zum Judaismus’, in Harry... Heinrich... Henri... Heine. Deutscher, Jude, Europäer, ed. by Dietmar Goltschnigg, Charlotte Grollegg-Edler and Peter Revers (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2008), pp. 101-09
Peter Routledge, ‘“Jehuda ben Halevy” and the Restructuring of Memory within Poetic Discourse’, Heine-Jahrbuch 54 (2015), 58-83
Jeffrey L. Sammons, ‘The Poet Prostrate: Romanzero’, in Sammons, Heinrich Heine. The Elusive Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 349-397
Ernest Schonfield, ‘Heine and Convivencia: Coexistence in Muslim Spain’, Oxford German Studies 47:1 (2018), 35-50
Michael Swellander, ‘The Arabic-Spanish-Jewish School of Poets: Heinrich Heine’s “Jehudah Ben Halevy” and World Literature’, The Germanic Review 98:1 (2023), 33-45
