Heine E-Book

Ritchie Robertson

• Herausgeber: Halban
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) is one of Germany's greatest writers. His agile mind and brilliant wit expressed themselves in lyrical and satirical poetry, travel writing, fiction, and essays on literature, art, politics, philosophy and history. He was a biting satirist, and a perceptive commentator on the world around him. One of his admirers, Friedrich Nietzsche, said of him: 'he possessed that divine malice without which perfection, for me, is unimaginable.' Heine was conscious of living after two revolutions. The French Revolution had changed the world forever. Heine experienced its effects when growing up in a Düsseldorf that formed part of the Napoleonic Empire, and when spending the latter half of his life in France. The other revolution was the transformation of German philosophy in the wake of Kant: Heine explained this revolution wittily and accessibly to the general public, emphasizing its hidden political significance. One of the great ambivalences of Heine's life was his attitude to being a German Jew in the age of partial emancipation. He converted to Protestantism, but bitterly regretted this decision. In compensation, he explored the Jewish past and present in an unfinished historical novel and in many of his poems.

Leseprobe

Heine

Ritchie Robertson

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

1 Poetry versus Politics

2 The Spirit versus the Senses

3 Between Revolutions

4 Between Religions

Notes

Further Reading

Index

Also in the Jewish Thinkers Series

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) is now recognized as one of Germany’s greatest writers. Yet his full admission to the literary canon has at various times been hampered by both political and literary obstacles.

Even during Heine’s 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 Düsseldorf 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 Germany’s 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, Heine’s 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 Draper’s 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 Heine’s 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 Heine’s prose—travel writing, essays on literature and philosophy, cultural and political reportage—are thus marked as inferior. But it was a prose work, The Harz Journey (1826), that first established Heine’s 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 Heine’s 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. Heine’s 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 Heine’s 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 Haskalah—the 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 Heine’s Sämtliche Schriften (Munich: Hanser, 1968–76), in six volumes. Quotations are identified by volume and page number. For longer quotations from Heine’s poetry I have quoted from Hal Draper’s The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), identified as D and page number. Heine’s letters are quoted from Friedrich Hirth’s two-volume edition of the Briefe (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1949–50), 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 Heine’s 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.

1

POETRY VERSUS POLITICS

Heine was a literary latecomer. When his first collection of poems was published, in 1821, the greatest period of German literature was approaching its end; its dominant figure, Goethe, was already in his seventies; and its established literary modes seemed almost worn out. The sense of the fragility of his literary materials is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in Heine’s early poetry. A few years later he goes further and suggests that art itself is obsolete. ‘The principle of the age of Goethe,’ Heine writes in 1828, ‘the idea of art, is in retreat; a new age, based on a new principle, is dawning’ (1:455).

The age of Goethe annoys literary historians by refusing to fall into neat patterns. Its two main tendencies, Classicism and Romanticism, are sometimes opposed and sometimes interpenetrate. Heine’s own writing is indebted in complex ways to both, though with Romanticism his love–hate relationship was particularly intense. By 1828, however, he felt that both belonged to the past, and for two reasons. Firstly, and more generally, they excluded modernity. Their underlying principles debarred them from dealing adequately with the complex and conflict-ridden modern world. Secondly, and more specifically, they excluded politics. They either ignored or obscured the political problems which had assumed a new urgency in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The main such problem, Heine came to feel, was the emancipation of mankind from political repression. By evading this problem, Classicism and Romanticism had become complicit in outworn and repressive political structures, and would perish with them. But if art could link itself to the new principle of emancipation, this new principle could ensure the survival of art, albeit in a new, rejuvenated form which by Goethean standards would not be recognizable as art at all.

Heine called the age of Goethe ‘the period of art’ (3:72) on the grounds that it was dominated by a conception of art as a separate and self-contained reality, without practical application and unsullied by politics. This separate aesthetic realm was mapped by Kant in his Critique of Judgement (1790). Kant argues that the beauty of a work of art, unlike that of a natural object, comes from its having been deliberately shaped; yet the work of art is not subordinate to any purpose, but is contemplated by the spectator with ‘disinterested delight’.1 Goethe uses the image of a balloonist to convey the serene, detached contemplation which art permits: ‘True poetry is a secular gospel which announces its presence by freeing us, through inner serenity and outward pleasure, from the earthly burdens that oppress us. Like a balloon, it raises us and our ballast into higher regions, and affords a bird’s-eye view of the intricate labyrinths of the earth below.’2

The aesthetic distance that permits serene contemplation is certainly one of the principles of the Classicism practised and promoted by Goethe and Schiller at the ducal court of Weimar. Heine acknowledges that Goethe’s power of portraying objects solidly and vividly make his art truly classical. Hence he calls Goethe ‘Wolfgang Apollo’ and mocks the prudes who denounced ‘the great pagan and his naked godlike figures’ (2:219). But Heine also stresses that Goethe’s works do not lead to action. Goethe’s masterpieces, he writes, ‘adorn our dear country as statues adorn a garden, but they are statues. One can fall in love with them, but they are sterile’ (3:395).

Romanticism is conventionally opposed to Classicism. But while Heine often employs this antithesis, he also treats Romanticism as in some respects a continuation of Classicism. To see how this was possible, we must distinguish among three possible meanings of the word ‘Romanticism’. Nowadays it refers to a Europe-wide movement of art and thought between roughly 1790 and 1830. For Heine, however, ‘Romanticism’ had the same meaning as for A. W. Schlegel, whose lectures on literary history he attended at Bonn University. It meant Christian art of the Middle Ages and later, in contrast to the classical art of the Greeks and their imitators. When Heine calls himself the last Romantic poet, he means to invoke a thousand years of poetry, including Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes, of which he is at the end. Thus he describes his mock-epic Atta Troll as ‘the last free forest song of Romanticism’ (4:570). And he writes (3.1.1846) to his friend Varnhagen von Ense: ‘the thousand-year empire of Romanticism is at an end, and I myself was its last and fabulous king, who abdicated the throne.’ The word is already used in this sense in one of Heine’s first publications, the essay ‘Romanticism’ (1820), which paraphrases Schlegel: ‘what is known as Romantic poetry, which flourished most radiantly in the Middle Ages, later withered away mournfully in the cold breath of religious conflicts, and recently has again sprouted from the soil of Germany and unfolded its most splendid flowers’ (1:400). Here Heine is referring to the literary groups whom German literary scholarship, using the word in a third and much narrower sense, classifies as ‘Romantic’. One group, centring on A. W. Schlegel, his brother Friedrich, Novalis and Tieck, came together in the university town of Jena in 1799–1801; another group, dominated by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, was based in Heidelberg between 1804 and 1809. Heine generally calls these groups ‘the Romantic School’; this term becomes the title for the polemical study of German Romanticism which he published in 1836.

Even Heine’s early writings show that he felt as ambivalent towards Romanticism as he did towards Classicism. If Classicism established a self-contained realm of art, Romanticism went further in the same direction by constructing a still more rarefied world. The formal garden of Classicism at least contained visible objects; Romantic art retreated into the inner world of the imagination. Although he praised Romanticism in 1820, Heine published in 1821 a verse dialogue, ‘Conversation on the Paderborn Heath’, in which a Romantic tries to defend his imaginative perceptions against the other person’s prosaic common sense. When he claims to hear distant violins, bugles, shepherds’ pipes, church bells, and other Romantic paraphernalia, the other explains them away as the grunting of pigs and the tinkling of cow bells. Allowed the last word, the Romantic claims that at least the content of his heart cannot be dismissed as illusion. But this desperate move implies that Romanticism is an inward retreat from an unsatisfactory external world.

In thus criticizing the artistic possibilities of his day, Heine shows some points of contact with the aesthetic theories of Hegel. When Heine began studying at Berlin in 1821, Hegel was at the height of his fame as Germany’s greatest philosopher, the living culmination of the revolution in thought initiated by Kant. Heine echoed the general opinion when in 1823 he called Hegel ‘the profoundest of German philosophers’ (2:87). He also claims to have known Hegel personally, though his anecdotes about him may be fiction. Despite Hegel’s formidably difficult and abstract style, his lectures were thronged, and we know that Heine attended some. Although he complains of Hegel’s style, his references to him are always admiring. In 1834 Hegel is emphatically described as the greatest philosopher Germany has produced since Leibniz in the seventeenth century (3:633). Even ironic references acknowledge his stature, as when he is called ‘the Prophet of the West’ (4:40) by analogy with Mahomet, the Prophet of the East. Since Heine’s close friends included some of Hegel’s most ardent disciples, it is safe to assume that from direct and indirect sources he had at least an outline knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy, including the aesthetics.

In his monumental survey of art, Hegel argues that while for the ancient Greeks art could be the supreme expression of truth, in the modern world this task has passed to religion and philosophy. ‘For us,’ he writes, ‘art counts no longer as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself.’3 Tracing the history of art through Romanticism, he concludes by forecasting the dissolution of art in two ways. Art must surrender either to the objective world, by depicting everyday reality in faithful but unimaginative detail; or to the subjective world of the artist, by making the external world subordinate to his arbitrary fancy. The former possibility is represented, at its best, by seventeenth-century Dutch painting; the latter, by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.4

The danger of subjectivism, whereby art becomes confined to the increasingly private imagination of the artist, was bound to concern a poet writing in the Romantic tradition, and it is explored several times by Heine. He examines it at most length in his fragmentary work of fiction Florentine Nights (1836), but touches on it more briefly, and for us more conveniently, in one of the reports on French cultural life which he wrote for German readers in the early 1840s. The mediocrity of the 1841 Salon, contrasted with the enthusiasm aroused by Liszt’s concert tour, prompts Heine to a Hegelian excursus on the history of art. As Heine and Hegel tell it, art progressively detaches itself from material form and becomes more intangible, intellectual and abstract. Starting from the massive buildings, like the Pyramids, that survive from the ancient world, art passes through Greek sculpture and Renaissance painting to literature and music, which are almost entirely independent of their material medium. Heine declares that ‘our present age will go down in the annals of art as the age of music’ (5:356). For Heine, music is the most spiritual of the arts, in that it has no visual form and thus appeals to the mind rather than to the senses. As such, its utmost extreme is represented by the late Beethoven, who developed it ‘to the musical death-agony of the phenomenal world, the annihilation of nature’ (5:358). Heine thinks it significant that his deafness deprived Beethoven of the last thread of sensory contact with music, so that ‘his notes were only memories of a note, the ghosts of departed sounds’ (5:358). Such ghostly art might be a strange and sublime achievement, but one unthinkably remote from the turbulent realities of modernity.

In trying to confront the world around him, Heine ran the opposite risk: that of surrendering the imagination and capitulating before the sheer complexity of the modern world. Hegel describes how the modern world, unlike the simpler world of Homeric epic, resists the imagination. ‘We must dismiss out of hand the idea that a truly epic action can take place on the ground of a political situation developed into an organized constitution with elaborate laws, effective courts of law, well-organized administration in the hands of ministers, civil servants, police, etc.’5 Hegel therefore suggests that poetry is out of place in the prosaic modern world; epic poetry has given way to the novel, the epic of middle-class life. But if prose can describe the modern world, it does so at the cost of entanglement in mundane detail which debars it from any great artistic achievement.

At the outset of his career, therefore, Heine was faced with an obvious opposition between two genres of writing: poetry versus prose. Both literary modes presented dangers. Poetry had prestige as the accepted mode of literary expression; but it could imply retreating, as Heine thought Goethe had done, into a self-contained realm of art. Prose was frowned on as utilitarian; even the novel was not yet a fully respectable literary form. Most forms of prose writing—criticism, journalism, travel writing—were of still lower status. But they did provide ways of engaging with the modern world. And so we find the young Heine divided between prose and poetry. In his prose writings, above all in the Letters from Berlin (1822) and the Pictures of Travel (1826–31), he comments on the world around him with tireless interest and enthusiasm; while the poems of the Book of Songs (1827) convey nostalgia and regret for the past. But Heine was also working to reconcile this division, by bringing each side closer to the other. He introduced the everyday world of German society into his poems. And he made his prose much more than a workaday mode of communication, by giving it the imaginative richness and formal intricacy of poetry.

For Heine, the most genuine poetry was folk-poetry. Interest in folk-poetry had been aroused two generations earlier by Herder’s essay On Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples.6 Herder maintained that the poetry produced in modern society was over-intellectual and artificial; vivid and vigorous poetry could be found only in the past, in Homer and Shakespeare, or among peasants and ‘primitive’ peoples as yet unaffected by the spread of civilization. By publishing a collection of folk-songs, Herder prepared the way for the famous collection of German songs, The Boy’s Magic Horn (1806–8), made by Arnim and Brentano from oral sources and printed broadsheets. In The Romantic School Heine praised this collection extravagantly, though in fact Arnim and Brentano had never scrupled to adapt their originals to match their own notions of artless simplicity. They inspired a generation of German poets, including the young Heine, to refine the folk-song, keeping its spirit while removing ‘the old awkward and clumsy expressions’ (letter, 7.6.1826, to Wilhelm Müller, whose cycle of modern folk-poems, Winter Journey, was set to music by Schubert). Heine was not disturbed by the oddity of using artistic resources to achieve an effect of artlessness. But, despite some early successes in this line, he soon turned to a different kind of poetry. ‘What matters,’ he wrote in 1823, ‘is to grasp the spirit of popular poetic forms, and with this knowledge to create new forms, adapted to our needs’ (1:427). This meant using the language and imagery of folk-song but introducing scenes from modern society.

Heine’s early poems were collected in the Book of Songs, which composers like Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn have made into Heine’s most famous work. Throughout the collection, Heine presents what Hegel called ‘the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circumstances’.7 But in case we expect Heine to retire from the unwelcoming outer world to the riches of his inner world, we have an early warning in the disillusioning poem ‘Believe Me!’, which catalogues Romantic cliches and concludes:

But songs and stars and flowers by the ton,

Or eyes and moons and springtime sun,

No matter how much you like such stuff,