Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography [Course Book ed.] 9781400856787

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Heinrich Heine

HEINRICH el HEINE }® A MODERN BIOGRAPHY

By Jeffrey L. Sammons PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © kjT9 by Privceton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Cojigress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found 071 the last printed page of this book This book has been composed in Linotype Janson and designed by Frank Mahood Clothbound editioiis of Prmceton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

To my Teachers HERMANN J. WEIGAND HEINRICH E. K. HENEL

Henri Heine est, si ces mots peuvent s'accoupler, un Vol­ taire pittoresque et sentimental, un sceptique du XVIIIe siecle, argente par Ies doux rayons bleus du clair de Iune allefnand. GERARD DE NERVAL, 1848

He is (and posterity too, I am quite sure, will say this), in the European literature of that quarter of a century which follows the death of Goethe, incomparably the most im­ portant figure. MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1862

Heine is the poet of the profane vulgar; and it is the ex­ ceptional merit of him to have uplifted into the sacred sphere of poesy the consciousness of what is vulgar and profane in our experience of ourselves. He did not with­ hold his pearls from the swine's snout; for he knew that his audience dwell not so much in a paradise as in a piggery. E.R.B. LYTTON, 1870

I dream with open eyes, and my eyes see.

Attributed to HEINE, 1839

Preface IN 1972, on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of Heine's birth,

an elaborate scholarly conference was held in his birthplace of Diisseldorf. Its ambience was enlivened by a certain amount of the fracas and disruption that had by then become normal at scholarly meetings in West Germany, though from time to time it achieved some special effects of its own. A panel discussion in which I was supposed to take part—already bedevilled by a gremlin in the public address system— ended with a local Diisseldorf character, who designates himself an "art-policeman" (because he is, literally, a policeman and a student at the Academy of the Arts), on his knees on the stage, gesticulating and shouting, while a very elderly man who a few decades ago occupied a position of some prominence in German scholarly life stood in the center of the hall, gesticulating and shouting. Going on at the same time was a protracted and still unresolved conflict over a proposal to name the new University of Dusseldorf after Heine, an innocuous enough suggestion, a foreigner might suppose. But it generated an impressive display of bullheaded resistance on the part of the uni­ versity authorities, as well as the most hyperbolically exaggerated claims on Heine's behalf by its supporters, and in the course of time the dispute embroiled even the local politics of the city while provid­ ing a delicious topic for West Germany's enemies at home and abroad. In 1976 an otherwise pacific seminar on current Heine research at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in New York was interrupted by a man who vociferously objected that we did not suffi­ ciently acknowledge the fact that Heine is one of the six—perhaps seven, he amended himself—greatest writers in the history of the world; the gentleman would neither identify himself nor would he desist. It is well known that Heinrich Heine is one of the most controversial writers in Western literature. But there is something peculiar about his case that transcends the limits of what we customarily associate with such controversies. In moments of exhaustion I sometimes wonder if there is not a strange curse lying upon the topic. It is not merely that there is rough debate or that Heine energetically engages alle­ giances, prejudices, antipathies, and ideological commitments of all kinds; like no other writer that I know of he attracts extremists and crackpots, and he can generate the most eccentric styles, not only of public altercation, but sometimes also of scholarly discourse. In this hall of distorting mirrors, to try to be thoughtful and even-handed in

PREFACE

judgment about him, as I should like to be. may seem as idiosyncratic and biased as any other response to him. For something over fifteen years Heine has been one of the liveliest topics in German literary scholarship. More has been learned about him in this phase than in any comparable space of time since the first epoch of Heine scholarship before World War I. This may, therefore, be a propitious moment for the first attempt in many years at a compre­ hensive biography and the first fully documented one in more than a century. To be sure, the current Heine industry, which generates some two hundred books and articles annually, still retains a great deal of momentum, and much is yet to be learned. Therefore this can no doubt be only an interim biography, but in the historical flux of literary reception there is a sense in which any biography of a figure of great significance and resonance can be only interim. Much that has been produced in the current era of interest has been illuminating and instructive. Much has also been, in my opinion, manipulative and mis­ leading, attempting to use Heine for ulterior purposes rather than to understand him, and some work has been of dubious integrity. My intention in what follows is to avoid polemic as far as possible; my judgments on current Heine studies are recorded elsewhere. But there are certain matters, some of them quite fundamental, about which nothing can be said without becoming contentious, and on some few points I find it necessary to take a rather firm stand. Wherever this is the case I have endeavored to make it transparent to the reader. My main purpose is to relate what is known about Heine, without, I hasten to add, pursuing every scrap of detail, every passing relationship and minor quarrel. Any biography requires an effort of the imagination to recover a complex and coherent self from recalcitrant documents and conflicting evidence. But in Heine's case the quality of imagination has been rather overstrained in the past; few literary reputations are so encrusted with legend and speculation. I have therefore tried to hew to the line of the demonstrable or at least the reasonably inferable. Where imaginative or speculative reconstruction and personal judg­ ment out of my own intellectual, political, and moral allegiances have been unavoidable, I have tried to make this, also, transparent. Considerations of space have made it necessary to characterize rather than interpret Heine's works. I have attempted an extensive interpreta­ tion of his major writings elsewhere, and I have been consoled by the remark in John Wain's biography of Samuel Johnson that "in the biography of a writer one tends to view his works as episodes in his life." Nevertheless the effect may be a little frustrating for author and reader alike. For Heine's texts owe their resonance and brilliance to

PREFACE

detail; sentence by sentence they hook into circumstances, issues, cliches, and tabus of his own present with an adroitness that demands attention to every nuance, allusion, juxtaposition, and transition. He was a complex but not really a profound writer; his density is of the surface, making his texts all the more difficult to abstract and para­ phrase, and their activist and committed character causes them to require vastly more commentary to be read intelligibly than those of any other nineteenth-century German creative writer of importance. I hope the reader will accept more or less on faith my conviction that it is the works that make the life important, and that the purpose of literary biography is to be a handmaiden to a more informed and alert apprehension of the works. The publication circumstances of his works are exceptionally complicated, and summarizing them even selectively generates a certain amount of clutter in the narrative. I beg the reader's indulgence on this point, because these circumstances graphically illustrate the tribulations of a progressive writer in repressive times and are significant details of the historical meaning of Heine's life; nor are they without contemporary relevance. All translations of Heine are my own; they are intended to be no more than faithful to his meaning and utilitarian. Acknowledgment is due to the American Council of Learned Socie­ ties, which provided me with a generous fellowship that allowed me to complete the book. Over the years I have had several occasions to be grateful to the staff of the Heinrich-Heine-Institut in Diisseldorf for ready and cheerful assistance; I wish particularly to thank Dr. Eberhard Galley, Professor Manfred Windfuhr, Dr. Joseph A. Kruse, and Dr. Franz Finke. For gracious advice on specific problems I am indebted to Professor Jakob J. Petuchowski of Hebrew Union College and Professor Helmut Koopmann of the University of Augsburg. For helpfulness in providing illustrations grateful acknowledgment is owed to the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University and, with special em­ phasis, to Dr. Joseph A. Kruse of the Heinrich-Heine-Institut. I must make special mention of Professor Hermann J. Weigand; as with my first book on Heine, he permitted me to read him the entire manu­ script and he made many alert and valuable comments. In that book I said that he "taught me more of fundamental importance about Heine in nine months than I have been able to learn for myself in the nine years or so since." Now another decade has gone by, but that relation basically still holds. I owe more than I can properly express to my wife Christa for careful reading and loving support. The Princeton University Press and especially Ms. R. Miriam Brokaw have been

PREFACE

prompt, encouraging, sustaining, and forbearing to a degree unusual in my experience, for which I am very grateful indeed. Finally, since my response to some contemporary Heine scholarship has been a little combative, I want to say that I have learned copiously and gained greatly in understanding from the work of others. New Haven, Connecticut Winter, 1979

χ

Contents Preface List of Illustrations Introduction

vii xv 3

PARTI: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

ORIGINS

The Birthdate Riddle The Mother's Side The Father's Side Uncle Salomon The World of Heine's Boyhood Schooling The Great Love Affair(s) The Businessman

11 15 20 23 30 35 42 47

PART II: THE STUDENT 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Bonn The Poetry Essays and Tragedies Gottingen Berlin Valuable Connections Prose Beginnings "Rooti" The Rabbi of Bacherach Gottingen Again The Harz Journey and the Meeting with Goethe Harry Heinrich Dr. Heinrich Heine

PART III: 1. 2. 3. 4.

POET

DRIFT

The North Sea Julius Campe The Breakthrough to Fame Masterpiece: Ideas: The Book of Le Grand xi

55 58 66 70 74 81 85 89 94 96 98 107

113 118 124 127

CONTENTS

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

England Munich

129 13 2 138 141 147 150

Itafy Count Platen Sensualism and Liberation The Revolution of 1830

PART IV:

THE PROMISED

LAND

1. Saint-Simonianism

159

2. Heine in Paris 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

168

Foreign Correspondent The Salon I De l'Allemagne Mathilde The Ban of 1835 Struggling with the Ban Struggling with the Purse Shakespeare's Maidens and Ladies Stuabians and Other Enemies Heine "over" Borne The Salon IV

PART V: THE RADICAL 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

172 183 188 197 205 212 218 225 228 233 242

PHASE

Gratifications and Pressures Political Poetry Karl Marx Journeys Home A Winter's Tale am? A Midsummer Night's Dream New Poems The Inheritance Feud Heine as Capitalist Heine's Faust

PART VI:

THE

249 253 260 265 268 275 278 285 287

MATTRESS-GRAVE

1. Prostration 2. The Revolution of 184.8

295 298 xii

CONTENTS 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Breach with Campe The "Return" Romanzero Miscellaneous Writings Lutezia The Last Poetry The Mysterious Memoirs Last Contacts Camille Selden The End

302 305 310 315 321 330 335 338 341 343

AFTERMATH 345 REFERENCES 355 BIBLIOGRAPHY 401 INDEXES Index of Heine's Works Index of Names

413 418

xiii

List of

Illustrations

Following page 142 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Etching of Heine by Ludwig Emil Grimm, 1827, Heinrich-HeineInstitut, Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Pencil portrait of Heine by Marcellin-Gilbert Desboutin, ca. 1853. Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Watercolor and pencil drawing of Heine on his deathbed by Seligmann. Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Heine's sister Charlotte Embden. Photograph of a lost painting, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Heine's brother Gustav. Photograph of a lost painting, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Heine's brother Maximilian. Photograph of a lost painting, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Uncle Salomon Heine. Lithograph of a portrait by Otto Speckter, 1842, Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Cousin Carl Heine. Photograph, Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Heine's mother Betty, nee Peira van Geldern. Portrait by an unknown artist, ca. 1840, on permanent loan to the Heinrich-HeineInstitut from the Historical Museum of the City of Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Cousin Amalie Friedlander, nee Heine, the first love. Photograph of a bust by an unknown artist, Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Cousin Therese Halle, nee Heine, the (?) second love. Portrait by an unknown artist in the Heinesches Wohnstift, Hamburg. Landesbildstelle Rheinland Heine's publisher Julius Campe. Steel engraving b y August W e ger, post 1840. Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland

xv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

13. Heine's wife Mathilde, nee Crescence Eugenie Mirat. Photograph ea. 1845, Heinrieh-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland 14. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. Speck Collection of Goetheana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 15. Rahel Varnhagen von Ense. Speck Collection of Goetheana, Beineeke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 16. Goethe in 1824, at the time of Heine's visit. Medallion by Antoine Bovy. Speck Collection of Goetheana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 17. August Wilhelm Schlegel. Speck Collection of Goetheana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 18. Ludwig Borne. Lithograph in the Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf from a portrait by Moritz Oppenheim, ca. 1835, in the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt. Landesbildstelle Rheinland 19. Heinrich Laube. Steel engraving by F. Randel after F. Elias, Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland 20. Karl Gutzkow. Speck Collection of Goetheana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 21. Title page of the first edition of the Book of Songs. German Literature Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 22. Title page of Borne, showing Campe's embarrassing incorrect title. German Literature Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 23. Heine's first publication in 1817. German Literature Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 24. First page of Heine's article for the Augsburg Algemeine rLeitung, April 30, 1840 (corresponding to Lutezia V), showing the sixpointed star with which Heine's contributions were identified. From the Kohut-Rutra Collection of Heineana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 25. Campe invents the illustrated book jacket for Romanzero in 1851. Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

26. Original wrapper of Heine's Faust. Design by Richard Georg Spiller von Hauenschild. Speck Collection of Goetheana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 27. A foul-copy page from the manuscript of Atta Troll, Caput XVI, characteristic of Heine's habits of thorough revision. From the Kohut-Rutra Collection of Heineana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 28. The inn on the Brocken where Heine stayed during his Harz jour­ ney on September 20, 1824. Speck Collection of Goetheana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University 29. The island of'Norderney, where Heine vacationed in 1825, 1826, and 1827, and wrote the North Sea poems. Engraving in HeinrichHeine-Institut Diukseldorf. 30. The island of Helgoland, where Heine vacationed in 1829 and 1830. Steel engraving in Heinrich-Heine-Institut Diisseldorf. Landesbildstelle Rheinland

Heinrich Heine

Introduction WHEN at the beginning of October 1819, the twenty-one-year-old

Harry Heine from Diisseldorf arrived in Bonn to begin his university studies, he also came within the scope of our vision. Thenceforward until the hour of his death we rarely lose sight of him for more than a few days at a time. Before that, however, most of his life is shadowy, murky, or just blank. What we know of it is pieced together for the most part by inference or second-hand report; we are left with some vexing problems and no very sharp perception of Heine as a boy and youth. In part this is owing to the state of the record from his own hand. The relatively unbroken sequence of his preserved correspondence begins only in the spring of the following year; before that we have only two letters to a friend from 1816, though they are important. It is also around this time that his publication career begins in earnest; his biography is in large measure a chronicle of publications. His first published poems had appeared in a newspaper in 1817; from 1819 for the rest of his life not a year passed without a work from his pen appearing in print, although, of course, some of the years were slim. In this, as in other respects, his arrival in Bonn marks the passage from a primarily private to an increasingly public existence. Up to this point his world and activities had remained within the bounds of family life; before he had completed his university studies five and a half years later, he had become a visible public personage. He had entered into a larger world and, like all of us in modern life, he began to leave behind him a recoverable trail of records and documents. The obscurity of the first third of his life, however, has other and, for the biographer, exasperating reasons. In the course of time, and long before his death, a large body of recollection and anecdote began to accrue around his life and personality. This material is frequently of considerable interest, but scholars have found that it has to be used with caution. The motto for the memoir literature of the nineteenth century, at least insofar as Heine's case is representative of it, seems to have been: si non e vero, e ben trovato. One notices how often persons reporting alleged experiences with Heine actually repeat anecdotes and topoi from one another. Where such materials cannot be controlled by reliable extrinsic information, as is generally the case for Heine's early life, it is always difficult to know how much confidence to place in them. Members of his own family contributed to these difficulties. Although their memoirs ought to have a certain authenticity, Heine

INTRODUCTION

was, by and large, an embarrassment to his family, and their technique of reporting on him can best be described as deflective, so that we learn little of what might interest us most and are uncertain about the quality of what we do learn. At the source of our difficulties, however, we find Heine himself; in the last analysis it is he who made the record of his life so difficult to recover. In one sense this is very odd. Heine upon first acquaintance appears to be the least taciturn of writers. He talks about himself un­ remittingly; his mode is the first person singular in most of his writings. He is known, if not quite exactly, as the most subjective of writers and appeared so to regard himself. But, as far as the biographer is con­ cerned, a great deal of this is optical illusion. It has been said of Henry James that his "biographer is confronted with the most elaborate and most organized game of hide-and-seek or hunt-the-author ever con­ ceived."1 I would confidently enter Heine into competition with James in this game. He was not forthcoming about his empirical self and life. He was, in fact, very reticent, though in a deceptive and sometimes mischievous way. This was his habit generally. His way of dealing with us, his poster­ ity, is not so different from the way he dealt with his contemporaries, and this is one of the reasons that the recollections of others present us with such difficulties. Some of the canards in circulation about him are traceable to Heine himself, and we are inclined to suspect this of others as well. He had relatively little capacity for intimacy, and in his mature years he kept his inner life carefully shielded. The resistance to intimacy becomes, in fact, a major theme for his biographer. Some­ times he gives the impression that he did not really regard his empirical self as of any particular importance, relative to the ideal self of poet and public personage that he assiduously and resourcefully projected. At the same time he hid parts of himself, in his personal relations as well as in his work. The recollections of others suggest that he was strangely Protean and hard to get into focus; while certain common themes begin to run through them as he grew older, they exhibit con­ tradictions that are sometimes quite peculiar and not infrequently show his acquaintances as the victims of his exceedingly well-developed sense of drollery. Sometimes the strangest preconceptions interject themselves between Heine and his observer—in regard to his Jewishness, for example. Ludolf Wienbarg, an important activist writer of the 1830s, who was personally acquainted with Heine, described him in one place as blackhaired and in another as brunette,2 while all the other evidence is unanimous that he was dark blond. Such a strange misperception can

INTRODUCTION

only arise from a racial stereotype; there are numerous other examples of this kind. The Protean character appears also in his portraits. There are quite a few of these, but in many cases we would not know they were of the same man if they were not identified. In 1827 the painting brother of the Brothers Grimm, Ludwig, drew him in sharply defined, Byronesque profile, gazing sincerely at the heavens; in 1831 Moritz Oppenheim gives us a direct, moon-faced gaze; in the 1840s he appears as an urbane man of the world. Doubtless some of this has to do with the conventions of nineteenth-century portraiture; no one ever de­ scribed Heine as handsome, though most of his portraits present us with a quite respectable looking, sometimes even attractive man. In the late years of his "great suffering a certain Christ-like beauty becomes thematic; in general the pictures of the latter part of his life resemble one another more clearly, perhaps owing to the rise of photography, which forced a more conscientious verisimilitude on portraiture. Heine's tendency to present to the public a literary, fictionalized transform of himself is crucial to any understanding of him; in his works we encounter a "Heinrich Heine" who is a central, command­ ing, fictional figure in the works of Heinrich Heine. But even where "Heinrich Heine" draws substantially upon Heinrich Heine as a re­ source, as he naturally often does, a particular characteristic of his mode of writing interferes with the biographer's purpose. Heine was not a narrator. Whenever he tried to be one, he either got into insoluble difficulties or switched his mode. His characteristic projection is situ­ ational, a kind of tableau with an inner, often antithetical dynamic. Rather than narrating sequences, he offers dramatic segments in which images, allusions, opinions, and even "facts" are ordered according to the thrust and meaning of his immediate concern. Experience, memory, allusion, and invention are undifferentiatedly subordinated to his pur­ pose. For his communicative ends his own self becomes mutable ma­ terial as do anecdote, literature, philosophy, or public event. Probably this should be regarded as a lyrical mode of apprehension, and therefore the current tendency to deny his own self-understanding as a poet obscures the fundamental character not only of his texts, but of his perceptual habits. It is for these reasons that Heine has sometimes been called an "im­ pressionist." The term has aroused much objection insofar as it appears to aestheticize him and to reduce the level of extrinsic commitment in his writings. I think that we can do without it; at the same time we should be clear that he was never, under any circumstances, a realist. One of his most ingenious modern interpreters has remarked on the "notional, abstract level at which he presents the world" and the

INTRODUCTION

absence of "object-images" in his poetry; "he frequently writes about himself as if he were another person. . . . Heine's person, from the point of view of his intellect, was just one of the many images at large in the world or employed in poetry; not more explicable, not less notional."3 His texts, like his thinking, strive for inner coherence of diction, image, and allusion, and they tend, furthermore, to be pictorial, even static, rather than linear. To be sure, from his point of view, neither text nor perception was constitutive of the world; in that re­ gard he was no longer a Romantic. Rather, he believed that the poet's particular apprehension, which he was confident was given to him, is cognitive of reality in its essence, even, and especially, of mundane, non-transcendental reality. But he never acknowledged the priority of fact and event over imagination, and therefore it was never his interest to record and recollect with precision, to empathize, to turn observa­ tion into narration. Categories were more important to him than contingencies and, as he was an imagist rather than a historian of his time, so he was not a narrative historian of himself. Consequently nearly everything he has to say about himself, and especially of his own early life, is instrumental, poetically and argumentatively, and only incidentally reminiscent. For the critic and the biographer these habits of Heine have differ­ ing aspects. One is creative and generative, and is of primary interest to the critic. But the other is a strategy of hiding, and it constitutes the biographer's problem. The reverse side of his fictional recreation and employment of himself is the suppression of large areas of the self the biographer seeks to know. This is especially true of his childhood and youth. To say that his life prior to his emergence as a student in Bonn at the age of twenty-one was private and familial is not to say that it was restricted in scope and experience, and certainly not that those years, so crucial to the shaping of the self, are not of interest to the biographer. Heine came from a family part of which had been of significance and standing in the past, and part of which was to achieve a certain kind of significance and standing during his lifetime and in the future. As a boy he was a local witness to major historical upheavals along with serious social and economic dislocations that demonstrably shaped his consciousness. He was given a variegated and, in some re­ spects, unusual education. He had been a businessman of sorts for a couple of years. He had undergone an emotional experience that fueled, in part if perhaps not in whole, the most widely read corpus of German poetry in the world. Of course he makes occasional allusion to much of this. But the allusions tend to be vignettes, purposefully located in complex texts

INTRODUCTION

centered on present rather than past consciousness. From the biogra­ pher's point of view, they are very fragmentary and more often than not obviously fictionalized. Over large and important areas his silence is downright deafening. Less is genuinely known about his parents and his relationship to them than some older biographies would lead us to believe. The quality of religious life in his home is difficult to recover. On one of the most famous love affairs in world literature he is almost unrelievedly silent, so much so that it has been reasonably doubted whether it actually occurred. Of his commercial experience he has next to nothing to say, for reasons that invite speculation. The beginnings of his creative efforts as a poet are vague and uncertain. But, apart from all these gaps of detail, what is really missing to the biographer is fabric and tone, the coherent texture of life, environment, and experience, a sense of real chronology, rounded personalities, and depth of setting. Too much has to be pieced together by more or less attenuated inference from scraps of scholarly results. These difficulties are not merely an absence, blank spaces of the kind the historian always encounters. They are a silence that nags for explanation. Heine became an internationally famous man in his time, and his time was not in the obscure depths of the past. He lived into the age of railroads, steamships, the telegraph, mass journalism. In the year that he died, the careers of Ibsen and Flaubert, Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln, were well established, and Darwin began work in that year on his great book. But, burdened though we may be with information and assertion, his person is much harder to recover than that of most writers of post-Romantic self-consciousness. The reader may notice in what follows how little there will be to say of the quotidian substance of his life: how he passed his time and scheduled his days, how and when he wrote, what his personal belongings and his living surroundings were like, and—one of the most impenetrable mysteries of his adult life—where in blazes his money went. In these absences a biography of Heine is indeed quite different from that of many other figures of comparable eminence. We are not simply with­ out information; we are being blockaded. It is my intention in this study to avoid the derring-do of psychobiography; indeed we should be very much lacking in the necessary materials if we were to attempt it. But the biographer can hardly work without an attempt to recover the logic of the self with which he is dealing. Heine's noisy and asser­ tive reticence about himself has a particular kind of ominous eloquence. In certain areas—his silence about his commercial career, for example— one can, I have concluded, sense reasons. In general, however, we are forced to the view that we are dealing with a person whose relationship

INTRODUCTION

to himself was distressed and for which his literary career with its fictionalization of the self was meant to provide not only a surrogate but also a burial of the unsatisfying and perhaps even shamed part of the real self. The consequence is a self visible and viable, but of great fragility. The account to be given here of his early years will not only catalogue what we can know, but will make a cautious attempt to feel out the person Heine went to such lengths to hide. I cannot stress enough here the word "cautious." The history of Heine's reputation is intimidating and suggests very much the advisa­ bility of making minimal claims. His instrumental handling of his own self has made him highly manipulable to others who have come after. The clear evidence he gives that he has kept secrets and his habit of tantalizing us with them have led in the past to embarrassing excesses in filling in the blanks, usually by reconverting fiction into fact. Of late, his silences and reticences have led to a practice of trying to write what he would have said if he could have said what he meant. Why this occurs, and with what justification, I shall try to suggest at the end. The difficulty lies in the method of making of Heine's "Heine" yet another ' "Heine" ' devised for our own purposes and to suit our own notions of what we would like him to have been. This process has shown signs of getting out of control; he has become a puppet of unsubtle propagandists. My own purpose cannot be to present the "true Heine," for I do not know what that is. But the record is such that one cannot avoid extrapolating from it more than is perhaps cus­ tomary in biography; I shall try to do so with restraint while remaining constantly aware of the devious silence against which we must work. With all this in mind, let us see what we can make of the first twenty years of Heine's life.

I ORIGINS Düsseldorf—Frankfurt—Hamburg 1797-1819

Π] The Birthdate Riddle ONE straightforward and reasonable way to begin a literary biography

would be to start with the author's birth: to mention its time and place and then get on with it. It is altogether characteristic of the problems we face in recounting Heine's life that an effort to begin this way at once plunges us into exasperating difficulties; if we were to recapitulate the problem in all its details, it would take him almost as long to get born as Tristram Shandy. For we are dealing here not only with a fuzziness in the empirical record; that would not be much more than a pedantic nuisance. Rather, the problem of Heine's birthdate is symptomatic of the pattern of misdirection often encountered in reconstructing his life; we suffer, not from a dearth of evidence, but from a surfeit, some of it obviously wrong, and most of that generated by Heine himself. After some decades of scholarly attention, we think we have established the birthdate, although the result still has not satisfied everyone; what we do not know is why the problem became so entangled in the first place. December 13, 1797, is now generally accepted as the date of Heine's birth. There is no birth certificate or other explicit documentation, but the evidence recoverable from Heine's youth all indicates a date in 1797 or early 1798. The recollections of his boyhood friends, all close to him in age, the classes he attended in school, and other indi­ cations that must have proceeded from Heine himself, all suggest this. Since the circumcision records of the Jewish community in Dusseldorf had been destroyed, the rabbi of the community was asked in 1809 to reconstruct them from memory, and he gave Heine's birthdate as February 1798. This discrepancy, which may be regarded as still out­ standing, need not concern us here; the two dates fall into the same year of the Jewish calendar. As late as 1843 a Prussian government report gave the year of his birth as 1797. All the confusion that had emerged in the meantime was introduced by Heine himself.1 Shortly after his arrival in Bonn, he promptly got into trouble with the authorities. The protocol of his interrogation by the Academic Court in November 1819 begins: "The summoned studiosus juris Harry Heine from Dusseldorf, 19 years old."2 Perhaps Heine, who was a good deal older than most other students, wished to impress the court with his youth. But in 1823 his father in a document gave his age as twenty-one rather than twenty-five, suggesting that there may

I. ORIGINS

have been some family involvement in the problem.3 The real diffi­ culties, however, begin in 1825, the year of Heine's university gradu­ ation and also of his conversion, under duress, to Christianity. In his application of admission for his doctoral examination he wrote: "Natus sum mense Decembri anni 1779 Dusseldorpii ad Rhenum."4 Obviously this is a slip of the pen. But for what? The common error of numerical transposition suggests that Heine meant 1797, but the sequel shows that the error is a symptom. For, two months later, his baptismal certificate gives the date of his birth as December 13, 1799.5 From now on all is confusion; the pattern is, however, that Heine regularly supplies a date later than 1797 and usually at the end of 1799. His passport from England, dated August 14, 1827, gives his age as twenty-eight, which, if he was born in December, indicates 1798. But his passport to Italy a year later, dated August 8, 1828, again gives his age as twenty-eight, which yields 1799.6 After this the end of 1799 begins to establish itself, quite conceivably because it gave him an opportunity to present him­ self as a figure of transition and modernity; he first suggests this in the form of a joke in The Baths of Lucca of 1828: "And how old are you, Dottore?" "I, Signora, was born on New Year's Eve 1800." "I already told you," remarked the Marquis, "he is one of the first men of our century."7 Heine liked the year 1800 well enough to supply it as biographical information to a French journalist,8 and in the preface to the French edition of the Travel Pictures of 1853 he says that he was "ne au com­ mencement du XIXe siecle."9 On his marriage license he gave the date as December 31, 1799, and the "first man of the century" dating is repeated in the memoirs of his niece. His brother Maximilian, however, canonized the date December 13, 1799.10 The oddity of this situation is compounded by Heine's own manner. In the record he left behind, he obscured the question while at the same time drawing attention to it. Two documents from late in his life strongly reinforce this impression. The first is a letter of Novem­ ber 3, 1851, to Saint-Rene Taillandier, again supplying information for a French biographical account, in which he admitted that the birthdates in his various biographical notices were not exact, and con­ tinued: "Entre nous soit dit que ces inexactitudes semblent[! ] provenir d'erreurs yolontaires qu'on a commises en ma faveur Iors de l'invasion prussienne, pour me soustraire au service de Sa Majeste Ie roi de Prusse. . . . En regardant mon acte de bapteme, je trouve Ie 13 decembre 1799 comme date de ma naissance."11 That might seem plausible

I. ORIGINS

to someone who did not know that his certificate of baptism was is­ sued when he was twenty-seven years old; even so, the evasiveness of the formulation is patent. In any case, the inaccuracies to which he refers were of his own making and, so far as the French were con­ cerned, consisted in the date 1800, no great difference after all. The explanation offered for the discrepancy raises another problem to which we shall return presently. The second document is more striking; it is a letter Heine wrote to his sister a year and a half later, supplying biographical information, perhaps for an encyclopedia article. Here he writes: "With regard to my date of birth, I observe to you that, accord­ ing to my certificate of baptism, I was born December 13, 1799. . . . Since all our family papers were destroyed in the fires in Altona and Hamburg and the date of my birth in the Diisseldorf archives cannot be correct, for reasons that I do not wish to men­ tion, the above date is the only authentic one, in any case more authentic than the recollections of my mother, whose aging mem­ ory cannot replace lost papers. In this connection I observe to you, dear Lottchen, that you are perhaps much younger than mother thinks, since you came into the world many years after me."12 One cannot escape the impression that this letter communicates pretty nearly the opposite of what it purports to assert. Heine's mother can­ not know the birthdate of her first-born child; if there are any official documents (there are not, as far as we know), they cannot be correct for reasons that a fifty-five-year-old man cannot discuss with his own sister; only the baptismal certificate, a wholly arbitrary document, can be authentic. In the face of such stonewalling, it is not surprising that observers have come to suspect that a body is buried somewhere. The logic of the situation, along with a couple of cryptic remarks dropped by Heine here and there, suggested the notion that he might have been illegitimately born or, to put it more exactly, born before his parents' civil marriage could be performed. This situation is not unthinkable in nineteenth-century Jewish life, when Christian communities placed severe legal restrictions upon the number of Jewish marriages that could take place. But the explanation fails to satisfy completely. Such circumstances could not really be regarded as dishonorable, especially from the point of view of Heine's convictions; why beat around the bush late in life to his sister? On the other hand—and this is always the more difficult question with these problems—if it were true, Heine

I. ORIGINS

could have hid it much better than he did. In any case, we need not go into the extensive body of argument on this point, as it was con­ vincingly established a number of years ago that Heine's parents were married on February i, 1797, which makes him legitimate by any reckoning.1* The collapse of the illegitimacy theory has given impetus to the draft-dodger theory, which again derives from Heine himself, in the letter to Saint-Rene Taillandier cited above. Though it still has its ad­ herents, it is also open to damaging objections. The age of conscription in Prussia was twenty.14 Heine was never old enough to be drafted into Prussian service during the Napoleonic Wars; by the time he was twenty, at the turn of the years 1817-1818, Napoleon was long gone, and Heine was not resident in Prussia, but in the independent citystate of Hamburg. The letter to Taillandier was written one month before the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon. It seems likely that Heine thought it a suitable moment to call attention to his youthful Bonapartism; in the very next sentence he refers to his early poem "The Grenadiers," "qui vous fera voir que tout mon culte d'alors etait l'empereur."15 For he could state quite the opposite when he thought it politic to do so, and did. In his application for his doctoral examination of 1825, apparently adapting himself to the nationalist atmosphere of that time, he claims that he had volunteered for the Prussian campaign against Napoleon.16 There is no evidence that this is true, and it is hardly possible; some of his classmates did volunteer in the spring of 1815, but Heine had left school by then.17 The long and the short of it is that we do not know why Heine created such a confusion about his birthdate. The record gives an im­ pression that he had a reason for doing so and that it may have been a fairly serious one in his own mind. No one has been able to dis­ cover what it was. I think it at least possible that he actually did not know when he was born. In one early biographical notice he sent to a publisher in 1821, he gave his age as twenty-four (thus making him­ self older rather than younger, as later became his custom), and then put a question mark after it.18 One's birthdate is not, after all, a datum of experience, but a fact derived from documents and hearsay. In Heine's case there is no document and he seems concerned to discredit the hearsay. Yet there hardly would be an issue if he had not made one of it. The problem incapsulates, further, a point that any biographer of him must keep in mind. At one level of judgment, it is necessary to say that Heine was care­ less of the truth. He developed an irrepressibly opportunistic habit, though it not infrequently led him astray, for he was not able to

I. ORIGINS connect it to reliable insight into other people and objective circum­ stances. He did not strike his contemporaries as a person of integrity, and it must be said in frankness that he cannot always appear so to his biographer today. Many modern observers, concerned to erect him into an icon of revolutionary morality, would object to such a judg­ ment as a device of petty-bourgeois moralism with a disingenuous pur­ pose of discrediting him. It is true that he often conducted his life as a singular kind of guerrilla warfare against a hostile and dangerous environment; it is always possible to argue that he kept his eyes fixed firmly upon a higher purpose—at least Heine wishes us to do so. But the biographer can do nothing about the circumstance that he regu­ larly and demonstrably reshapes the truth to his particular ends, and the difficulty is not so much moralistic as methodological, for it makes one uncomfortably dependent upon speculation, inference, and one's own sense of the probable.

The Mother's Side HEINE'S mother, Peira van Geldern (1771-1859), known to everyone as Betty, came from a family of considerable standing in the German Jewish community. Her father, Gottschalk (1727-1795), was a prom­ inent physician, as was his son. Their father, Lazarus van Geldern (d. 1769), had been like his father before him a wealthy court Jew, a financial advisor to the ducal court of Jiilich-Berg, of which Diisseldorf was the chief city. Their period of genuine wealth lay, however, well back in the eighteenth century; it became a victim of the arbi­ trariness with which Jewish financiers in their adventures with abso­ lutist princes always had been treated. Biographers have experienced some difficulty in separating Betty Heine's true character from the picture of her that Heine was pleased to project. It does not seem altogether possible to do this, except to note that he was rather inclined to heighten her stature by various stratagems, and to speculate that their relationship was perhaps some­ what more complex than he himself knew. His concern was to portray her as a forthright, cultivated, Enlightenment personality, a Rousseauist and deist with, as he once remarked in a letter to her, a pronounced dislike of Jews.1 Most observers have concluded that he overestimated her learning, though some preserved letters from her younger days,

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written in Hebrew characters, not in Yiddish but in a somewhat faulty German, indicate that she was observant, a reader of modern eighteenth-century literature, and could play the flute.2 She did not marry until she was twenty-five, a rather advanced age for a Jewish girl of her time. Whether this was on account of independence of character, lack of means, or simply that she had not won anyone's favor, no one can tell; one factor was probably the turmoil of the time and another her grief at the death of her father and brother in quick succession. When she did choose to marry, she did so with de­ termination, energetically arguing with the local community for her husband's right of residence. If Heine's account is to be trusted, she governed her husband with similar energy from then on. One of his boyhood friends recalled her as a strict mother, not hesitant to box her son's ears as well as those of the other children in the neighbor­ hood.3 Heine tells us further that she took command of his education with ambitious ends in view, altering in detail as the world changed: in the Napoleonic age she dreamed of him as a high official in military uniform, afterwards as a great banker, then as an influential civil ser­ vant, sending him off to the university to study law.4 He presents her as trying to keep her eye on the main chance, the locus of power, and in his Confessions says that she even entertained the notion of having him become a Catholic priest, which the aging Heine expands into an exceedingly comic fantasy of himself as an urbane, dignified prelate, eventually becoming pope.5 All these successive purposes, Heine observes in his Memoirs, were fiascos, for they were grounded in an effort to deflect him from his true poetic vocation, which his mother regarded as the sure road to ruin. In this we can see him, as was his custom, allegorizing his own self, projecting upon his parentage the dichotomy of rationalism and poesy that he felt so strongly in himself. Behind it, however, we can sense a certain futility, or disjunction, in his upbringing by his mother. That there was no full and rich communion of spirits between them is strongly indicated by his correspondence with her, which, even though many letters are missing, including all of those before the au­ tumn of 1833, consists of more than a hundred preserved items. They are filled largely with domestic chit-chat, certain minor errands for his mother to run with his publisher in Hamburg, assurances that things were more or less all right, even when they were not, and complaints about his wife's extravagance. In the latter part of Heine's life, when they become much more frequent, they consist largely of strategies of appearing to keep her informed about the state of his health while attempting to blunt the worst details of it. What the letters do not

I. ORIGINS

indicate is that he made his mother a companion in his intellectual concerns or allowed her to see very far into his inner life, which gives us reason to believe that his claims about her cultural and intellectual level were somewhat heightened. He had another curious strategy of raising her status: he liked to hint that the family name van Geldern, an originally Netherlandic place-name designation, was actually "von Geldern" or "de Geldern," suggesting noble ancestry. Two sonnets to her are ambiguously dedi­ cated "To Betty Heine, nee v. Geldern,"6 and he gives this impression elsewhere as well.7 Furthermore, in the 1830s there emerges the no­ tion, which occasionally found its way into biographical materials, that his mother was Christian. This is rather odd, as she was not a wholly obscure person and it was well known that she was Jewish. The rumor is traceable to three men personally acquainted with Heine: the deaf painter Johann Peter Lyser and the Young German oppositional writ­ ers Ludolf Wienbarg and Heinrich Laube.8 It seems therefore alto­ gether plausible that Heine himself told them this; Laube (whose mem­ ory, unfortunately, was not always precise) indicated that this was the case. One is otherwise at a loss to imagine how or why the rumor could have started. The psychobiographer might wish to make something of the fact that Heine makes his mother the chief recipient of his complaints about his wife. In the second of his sonnets to her, dating probably from around 1821, he says that after having searched the world for love, he has found true love only with her.9 A curious recurring image in his works is the mother as avenging or terrifying witch; at times she is the poet's ally, but in one folkloristic poem the mother drives the son away from his harp and song to heroic adventure, and on his return he hacks her into five thousand pieces.10 Even in a relatively late poem of longing for Germany and his mother he asserts, though in a less Gothic sense, that she has bewitched him.11 One tends to won­ der whether his strong-willed and ambitious mother did not contrib­ ute something to the deformation of his eros, if some image of her did not impose itself in his curious pattern of unrequited love and the conspicuous lack of full-hearted affection and regard for his be­ loveds. One might link this impression to other constant images in his works of women as cold marble statues or a fearsome sphinx, as well as to an undeniable streak of misogyny characteristic of his personal­ ity, despite an abstract allegiance occasionally expressed to women's rights and equality. But such matters are, in my view, unrecoverable and threaten to lead into chartless waters. In any case, Heine always regarded his mother with love and re-

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spect, and both feelings, especially the love, grew stronger and were given searing expression in his last years, as he grieved at the weight that his own sufferings must put on her heart. Once, in January 1850, when he felt the hand of death very close to him, he burst out with, by then, uncharacteristic passion: "And now, dear mother, farewell. May God preserve you, protect you from pain and eye trouble [Heine was partly blinded by his illness], take care of your dear health, and when things do not always go as you would like, console yourself with the thought that few women have been so loved and honored by their children as you are and as you truly deserve, you my dear, good, honest, and faithful mother. What are the others in com­ parison with you! One ought to kiss the ground that your foot has touched."12 He mourned with her over his impending death, and sev­ eral times expressed the hope that he would manage to outlive her in order to spare her grief. It was not to be; Betty Heine outlived her son by three years, dying in 1859 at the age of eighty-eight. Betty had a brother in Dusseldorf, Simon van Geldern (1768-1833), an eccentric, bookish recluse who lived in a little house called "Noah's Ark." Heine indicates that he was neither very bright nor very ra­ tional, but exceedingly good-hearted, and he seems to have taken a liking to his nephew, whom he allowed to putter around in the house and to whom he frequently lent books, both classic and contemporary. There the boy was able to discover some old family junk—including his mother's abandoned flute, now a cat's plaything—of the sort that can give a child's imagination a sense of the temporal depth of his blood relations and thus also of his own self. The greatest treasure he turned up there was some papers of the oddest of all his forebears, his great-uncle Simon van Geldern (1720-1788). Known as the "Cheva­ lier" or the "Easterner," he greatly excited the boy's admiration as an adventurer who broke out of the staid pattern of family life and over whom his old aunts shook their grey heads. Heine cannot have been able to make much of the papers themselves, which he describes as being written "with Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic letters";13 actually they were written in Hebrew with, as the boy noted, frequent interpola­ tions in French. What Heine says about his great-uncle in his frag­ mentary memoirs must, therefore, have been pieced together from family tradition. Today we know a great deal more about the "Chevalier van Geldern" than Heine could have; a lengthy biographical essay has been written about him and further discoveries continue to appear.14 The diary Heine saw is now lost, but there is another one, along with a good many other papers and materials. The elder Simon was one of

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the fascinating actors on the stage of the eighteenth century, which, as the womb of the modern world, produced so many experimental existences. A child prodigy in the Jewish community, he tried the commercial life, but it did not suit him. He traveled back and forth across Europe along the broad web of family connections, a naturalborn house guest. He found his way to North Africa and the Holy Land, collecting certificates from wise men attesting his mastery of the Cabbalistic mysteries. In Bedouin costume, purportedly collecting funds for the Palestinian communities, he toured Europe, consorted with aristocrats, and let himself be presented to courts large and small, while escaping from pirates, gambling losses, and gallant adventures. He dined with Voltaire and his path crossed several times with Casa­ nova's, whom he somewhat resembled. In the course of time he con­ ferred both the doctor's and the chevalier's degrees upon himself. If he had a calling, it was peddling rare books and manuscripts, though he intermittently applied for sinecures. One of these was at the DucaI Library at Wolfenbiittel, but he lost the post to Lessing. Part Jewish wise man, part high-class schnorrer, part charlatan, he made some­ thing out of the credulous reverse side of the Enlightenment. In one episode so comic it would strain belief if it were not well documented, he became involved in 1777 with a crackpot ofFshoot of Freemasonry, a mystical flimflam that victimized a number of gullible reigning princes. Simon got himself a position as an oracle to the Prince of Hesse and soon was ordered to locate by his Cabbalistic powers the vanished confidence man who had started the swindle. It took some presence of mind to extract himself from this affair, but not before he had got more journeys to England and Holland out of it. He lived the last decade of his life as a "Magic Councillor" in Hesse-Darm­ stadt. But at the very end he became involved in an episode of excep­ tional dignity and significance: he was an advisor to the Abbe Henri Gregoire in the composition of his prize essay of 1787 arguing for the emancipation of the Jews in France, a document that played a signifi­ cant role in achieving that end after the Revolution. Heine, though he may not have known of this, was to comment movingly on Gregoire's death in 1831.15 In fact much of what Heine thought he knew of his adventurous ancestor was inexact. He got the idea that Simon had been a captain of Bedouin robbers,16 but he was not quite that much of an adventurer; he was more than once a victim of robbers instead. We can, however, easily believe that the family legend fired the boy's imagination; in his Memoirs he tells us that for a year he identified with his great-uncle and was preoccupied with exotic fantasies as though he had been the

I. ORIGINS Chevalier in an earlier life.17 Undoubtedly the tale was one of the stimuli to the development of his poetic imagination. Beyond this, it must have indicated to him, more than anything in his immediate en­ vironment could have, that a Jew did not have to be a physician or a merchant, conducting his life in anxious conformity; a Jew of his own blood had been able to live a capacious, impressive life and had mastered the world and its pitfalls with panache, instead of allowing the world to master him. Heine's fantasies about his great-uncle were one of his first significant steps to his own individuation.

[ 3 ]

The Father's Side HEINE'S father Samson (1764-1828) is not a very clear figure to us. Much of what we know of him as a person comes from Heine's own fragmentary Memoirs. No portrait of him has survived, though Heine describes one that had been lost in a fire.1 We know of no letters to his son, and only a very few to others on business and family affairs.2 His forebears, too, had been court Jews, though the family had de­ clined long before and Heine seems not to have known this.3 He knew only that his paternal ancestors had lived in the town of Biickeburg, southwest of the city of Hanover where Samson grew up. Heine re­ marked of this that it was a stroke of luck for him, as he heard from his father a purer German than the broad Diisseldorf dialect of his own environment, in which he once professed to hear the "frogcroaking of the Dutch swamps."4 There may be something to this phonetically, if not necessarily in regard to grammar and usage; as he was wryly aware, Heine was a little weak in grammar, especially in the employment of the dative and accusative, all his life. But it is true that the Hanoverian dialect closely resembles standard German; to this day it is a place in Germany where one can hear something like the German one learned in school actually spoken by the streetcar con­ ductor and the store clerk. Later the family moved to Hamburg, from whence Samson came to Dusseldorf, marrying Betty van Geldern at the rather advanced age for a Jewish man of that time of thirty-three. He settled down in the yard-goods business. Heine tells us that his father had been a commissary officer in the Hanoverian army at the time of the French Revolution; however, it is not certain that this is true, for he continues with a certainly exagger-

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ated account of Samson as a confidante of high noble officers and own­ er of numerous fine horses, an extravagance, he says, of which Betty had to break him. He was elevating his father as he did his mother, making him more prosperous and more of the gentleman than he could have been. He goes on to say that his father never lost his love of things military—the showy rather than the heroic part of it—and he passed much of his free time carousing with the Diisseldorf town mili­ tia. This, if true, would give a pleasant impression of the integration and good relations of the Heines with their Christian fellow-citizens, which in general there is no reason to doubt. However, the skimpy public record we have of Samson's personal life concerns honorific po­ sitions he held in the Jewish community. There can be no doubt that Heine loved his father very much. The accounts of him are suffused with a soft and affectionate tone such as is not very commonly found in Heine's writings. His father's death, which occurred at a time when his own affairs were going poorly, plunged him into the deepest grief of his life, from which he only slowly recovered. If it is true, as I suspect it is, that his mother's love was rather on the tart and businesslike side, it may be that he obtained from his gentle and sweet-tempered father the most generous, un­ stinting love he ever experienced. At the same time, however, that he communicates his love for his father, he does not grant him very much stature as a man. He describes Samson as a "great child" of boundless goodheartedness and naive vanity.5 A delicately handsome man in Heine's account, his features had something "too soft, characterless, almost feminine."6 He hastens to add, in keeping with his lifelong touchiness on the subject of homosexuality, that there was no lack of manliness in his father's character, but the only evidence he gives is that Samson managed to father a son. In his role as distributor of alms to the poor, which he greatly enjoyed, as it permitted him to add his private generosity and kindness to the public dole he administered, he distinguished himself, Heine tells us, by giving much better advice on the affairs of others than he had ever been able to give to himself.7 Despite the warmth of feeling between Heine and his father, he can­ not have been any closer to him with his full self than he was to his mother. They had no intellectual interests to share. Heine remarked once that his father did not read his writings,8 nor is there any indica­ tion of interest in the world of ideas and imagination burgeoning in the son. They must have had relatively little to talk about as Heine grew older, and his habit of keeping his inner life to himself may have developed early in the parental household. It is another weird aspect of his application for his doctoral examination—the same document in

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which 1779 appears as his birth year—that he gives his father's name as "Siegm[und]."9 It is likely that Heine was attempting to mask his Jewishness by Germanizing his father's name; nevertheless, it is an odd sort of filial gesture. In assessing his account of his father, we must keep in mind his habit of externalizing elements of his personality by projecting them upon his environment. As his mother is made to rep­ resent the rational and purposive side of his personality, so his father appears as a model of sensuality, elegance, and lust for life. Samson's alleged passions for horses, dogs, and tippling were not inherited by his son, but they are meant to exhibit the kind of attachment to the pleasant things of life that he was to erect into a principle; and he drops broad hints that his father was something of a ladies' man, as he himself would very much like to have been. His father's somewhat labile character, however, presented him with profounder difficulties than he ever wanted to express, as we shall see. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that he had a rebellious confrontation with his father. For that purpose another member of the family was much better qualified. Before we turn to that great subject, however, an introductory word may be said about his siblings. Heine was the eldest of four children. Of his two brothers, Gustav (? 1804-1886)* had, at first, the harder time making his way in the world. He was trained as an agronomist, but could not find a position; after failing in business he entered Aus­ trian army service and ultimately edited a newspaper in Vienna friend­ ly to the Austrian government, thus placing himself at the opposite end of the political spectrum from his older brother. As a reward he was knighted and in 1870 created Baron von Heine-Geldern. He was highstrung, somewhat officious, and clumsy in human relations; late in Heine's life, when Gustav attempted to intervene in what he thought was a helpful way in his brother's affairs, Heine sometimes had reason to become very exasperated with him. Maximilian (? 1805-1879) was more stable and intelligent, though of unexceptional mentality and temperament. He became a physician in the Russian army and settled in St. Petersburg, where he, too, came to occupy a high social position —he married the noble widow of Tsar Nicholas I's court physician, who was thenceforth styled "von Heine"—and evolved in a conserva­ tive direction. He wrote books on medical subjects and memoirs of no his service in Turkey. Their sister Charlotte (? 1800-1899) was way a remarkable person. She married a Hamburg merchant named Moritz Embden, who did not turn out to be a friend to Heine and * The problem of Heine's birthday has created uncertainty about the birthdates of his siblings as well. The question remains unsettled.

I. ORIGINS who contributed to his stresses with his family. Heine always re­ garded her with great affection. A poem in the Book of Songs origi­ nally addressed to her looks back elegiacally at their childhood games together,10 and there is a loving, almost erotic tone in his letters to her. Since she alone of the Heine children remained in Hamburg, she was a main link to his mother, and many of his letters home are addressed to, or meant to be read by, both of them. After his death she became the resident Hamburg expert on Heine, though many of her recollections must be treated with caution. Scholars and biogra­ phers, and even Empress Elizabeth of Austria, a deep admirer of Heine, made pilgrimages to her.11 She lived to be nearly a hundred years old, the last living link to Heine's whole life.

Uncle Salomon HEINE'S father was one of six brothers, all of whom entered the busi­ ness life. Two of them, Meyer and Samuel, died while Heine was still a youth and had no known connection with him. Isaak (1763-1828) removed to Bordeaux, where he was very successful. Two of his sons went to New Orleans, where they made an enormous fortune in the slave trade. Upon returning to Paris they took over a bank that they renamed Heine & Co., which continued to exist into this century. One of these sons, Michel, became a regent of the Bank of France. Uncle Henry (1774-1855) was a successful banker in Hamburg. Heine's re­ lations with him were quite pleasant and remained so all his life; Henry helped him out financially from time to time and showed lively interest in his nephew's writings. His few but affectionate letters suggest that, of all the members of the family, he was the most sympathetic to Heine's conduct and difficulties. The thought occurs that Heine might have had a much happier time in life if his Uncle Henry had been his father; in kindness and civility Henry seems to have rather resembled Samson, but was much stronger and more successful. All of these men, however, were overshadowed by the mightiest figure in Heine's envi­ ronment, Uncle Salomon (1767-1844). Salomon Heine came to Hamburg from Hanover in his teens and began his career working in a banking house of his mother's relatives. His abilities having been quickly recognized, he rose in the bank and then became the partner of a money-changer; he founded with a

I. ORIGINS

friend a small bank of his own in the year of Heine's birth and within a little more than a decade had bought out his partner and was already a millionaire. An uneducated man of limited though shrewd and sharp­ ly focussed intelligence—his letters are very clumsy and innocent of any rules of orthography, punctuation, or grammar—he was without doubt a financial wizard. In his will he was at pains to point out that he had married only 10,000 marks and had acquired his fortune by his own efforts.1 He dealt primarily in government and municipal bonds and in currency speculation; his assiduous avoidance of the stock mar­ ket, given the gyrations of capitalism in that time, may have helped to keep him out of trouble. At any rate, he steered his course through exceedingly volatile economic times apparently without ever making a serious error or suffering a significant setback. His fortune ex­ panded continuously; at his death he must have been one of the wealthiest commoners in all of Germany, leaving an estate estimated in value at forty-one million francs.2 This vast fortune weighed heavily upon Heine's consciousness. It is one thing to have a rich uncle; but to have an uncle so preposterously rich as Salomon Heine was clearly unnerving. In the first version of The Harz Journey, in a passage diplomatically removed from the book version, he spoke apropos of his visit to the Hanoverian silver mines of "that magically powerful metal of which the uncle often has too much and the nephew too little."3 His relations with Uncle Salomon went through a variety of phases, but his policy remained constant: to obtain a portion of that fortune for his own use. In the course of time the struggle took on some of the characteristics of a game, though a deadly serious one. How serious it was emerged in the utter panic that befell him when it at length appeared that he had finally lost it. In the course of time the game became a public one, as he saw to it that it was played out under the eyes of all Europe. Whether, in the long run, it gained him more than it cost is hard to judge; the cost, however, was considerable. In the folkloric morality play of Heine's life that persists to the present day, even in academic circles, this struggle appears as a con­ flict of genius versus moneybags. This is one of Heine's several vic­ tories over the judgment of posterity, for it is in just such terms that he liked to present the relationship. The case, naturally, was more complicated; for the conflict lay far more in the irreconcilable sense of purpose of the two men. It must further be said at the outset that Heine pursued his purpose with much clumsiness, and it is easy to imagine, as a number of his contemporaries acquainted with the situa-

I. ORIGINS

tion did imagine, that he might have gained more and yielded less with a better strategy. It is first of all necessary to remember that Salomon contributed, intermittently and later regularly, to Heine's support until he was well past forty years of age. He also carried Heine's father for some years, supported his widowed mother with an annual allowance, and fi­ nanced the education of both his brothers. For as careful as Salomon was about money, it cannot be said that he was a miser. Indeed, he was noted for his charities and benefactions. Among the major ones was the Israelite Hospital in Hamburg, which he founded in 1841 as a memorial to his wife. Heine wrote a rather odd poem celebrating it, at the same time suggesting that it would never cure Jewishness, "the thousand-year-old family disease, / The plague dragged along out of the Nile valley / The ancient Egyptian unhealthy faith."4 Salomon sup­ ported the theater in Hamburg generously and attended it frequently. He seems, in fact, to have been widely admired and respected. His public character showed itself to particular advantage at the time of the great fire that devastated Hamburg in May 1842, on which occa­ sion his own town house was blown up in the efforts to contain the conflagration. The seventy-five-year-old man waived all his insurance claims—the insurance companies were reeling from the astronomical losses—and to keep the city's credit intact he organized a large loan at the charitable rate of three and one-half percent, for which he alone provided eight million marks, a quarter of the total. He handed out money to the poor and helped feed the homeless. By his example he prevented speculators from inflating the discount rate on bills of ex­ change, an action that may well have kept the situation from becoming more desperate than it was for many small merchants and others of modest means.5 A half-century later some of these acts were still grate­ fully remembered in the city of Hamburg.6 The recognition that Salomon Heine was a man of character, gen­ erosity, and public spirit has produced another folkloric variant, the reverse of the original one: Salomon as the wise patriarch, treating his nephew with a kindhearted discipline and attempting to guide him onto a responsible path. As an antidote to this view, which derives primarily from respect for his financial success, it is perhaps useful to recall Samuel Johnson's observation that "trade could not be managed by those who manage it, if it had much difficulty." No doubt that would be to underestimate Salomon's special gift, and it is true that he thought his nephew careless of money and for that reason always kept him on a short leash, even when he was being most generous. It never

I. ORIGINS

appeared to him that Heine was pursuing an orderly course in life; it is anecdotally reported that he once remarked of his nephew, in Yiddish cadence, that "if he had learned anything he wouldn't need to write books."7 Doubtless Heine profoundly wished that he could ex­ tort from his uncle some respect for his literary achievements, red morocco-bound copies of which he sent to Salomon with cordial ded­ ications; it was a forlorn hope. The difficulty lay at a more fundamen­ tal level, best illustrated by considering the progress of the Heine family in the following generations. It has already been remarked that one of Heine's brothers became a baron. His sister's son became a Baron von Embden, and her daughter married an Italian Principe della Rocca. Uncle Salomon's son Carl had no children of his own, but his adopted daughter married a descendant of Marshall Ney, the Due d'Elchingen, and their daughter in turn married in the Napoleon line, becoming a Princess Murat. The daughter of one of the slave-trading sons of Uncle Isaak married, first, a Due de Richelieu, and second, Albert I, Prince of Monaco, from whom she was divorced in 1902. Barons, duchesses, princesses, and a descendant of the obscure Heines of Buckeburg on a European throne! The ambitious thrust of the Heine wealth was not into middle-class assimilation, with its concomi­ tant implications of liberalism and culture, but into what from a liberal and historical point of view must seem an increasingly anachronistic titled nobility, an alliance of new wealth with the fading trappings of social sovereignty. For this family evolution Heinrich Heine was not a very useful connection, with his eloquent scorn for the nobility and all the remnants of feudalism in nineteenth-century society, with his pointed disrespect for the idols worshipped by this tribe of par­ venus. It may be that he would have obtained his relatives' financial support with more readiness and regularity had he been instead an in­ consequential scribbler, an amusing family idiot. For the more success­ ful and eminent he became, the more Uncle Salomon's side of the fam­ ily regarded him as a nuisance and an embarrassment, and the more necessary the support he demanded became coupled for them with the need to curb him. A plausible anonymous anecdote has Uncle Salomon needling his nephew about his satirical verses on the King of Bavaria: "What are you in comparison to him? A lout is what you are!" Heine is said to have answered: "You're quite right, uncle . . . , but you see, making verses is my business. The King of Bavaria makes some too, damages my trade, and I don't have to put up with that, so—."8 King Ludwig of Bavaria did have deplorable poetic pretensions, but the issue was more than one of poetry, as both men understood. As be­ tween kings and poets, Uncle Salomon was on the side of the kings.

I. ORIGINS

On Heine's side it must be said first of all that he had become de­ pendent upon his uncle at an age well before he had anything to say about it himself. The huge disparity in wealth and success between his father and his uncle meant that Salomon rather governed his brother's family, and this authority became more complete after Heine's and his father's failures in business. By the time Heine began his studies his father had become Salomon's charitable ward and was completely dis­ placed as the parental authority. It was Uncle Salomon who guided young Heine's early career; it was Uncle Salomon who set him up in business and Uncle Salomon who shut him down; it was Uncle Salo­ mon who enabled him to go to the university and therefore Uncle Salomon who insisted that he pursue and complete the course of study that Uncle Salomon thought best for him. In retrospect one is in­ clined to think that nothing would have been healthier for him, at least upon completion of his studies, than to find a way to get free of this eternal Uncle Salomon in his life, and certainly that was what Salomon, sensibly enough, wanted. Brother Max pointed out that he maintained affectionate relations with Uncle Salomon because he was independent and asked for nothing.9 But for several reasons this course was not easy. The most obvious of these was that Heine did not have much prospect of making a liv­ ing at his true literary calling. The self-employed writer was a rela­ tively new phenomenon in society at that time, and with rare excep­ tions it was a skimpy existence at best. Heine was persistent in his vocation; at the same time he had little capacity or inclination for con­ ventional work. His desultory searches for employment were so de­ vised, as we shall see, as to guarantee failure. Indeed, apart from the ill-starred early adventures in the world of commerce, Heine held a paying position for only six months of his life. His capacity for selfdenial was not very well developed either. He was not a wastrel, as Uncle Salomon may have thought from time to time, but neither was he frugal. Like his father he had a gentleman's tastes and he did not wish to forego them. He was persistently out of money, even though in later years his income, while not enormous, became relatively sub­ stantial. But a major determinant of his feelings was the frustrating presence of the fortune itself. He was a Tantalus, virtually standing in an ocean of money, with comfort and independence just out of his reach. From his point of view, his wants could be satisfied with sums that Uncle Salomon could scarcely be expected to feel. Like many people contemplating the rich, Heine imagined that money must be cheaper to Uncle Salomon than to other people. To the wealthy composer Giacomo Meyerbeer he once wrote: "one franc has more

I. ORIGINS

value for me than 400 for you."10 But Salomon probably did not be­ come as wealthy as he was by thinking so, and his often niggling busi­ ness correspondence indicates that he did not. Furthermore, it was Heine's view that in a properly organized world the great poet should have rich material reward; the failure of the world to acknowledge this principle became the theme of one of his late tragic poems, "The Poet Firdusi."11 At the same time his uncle's famous charities, in the thousands and tens of thousands, were a sour sight to one who had to beg a hundred here and a hundred there with the constant risk of humiliation. A probably apocryphal anecdote has Heine writing into his uncle's autograph book: "Dear Uncle, lend me a hundred thousand talers and forget forever your loving nephew H. Heine."12 Some such arrangement, little as it would have been Salomon's way, would have been the best solution for everyone concerned, as things turned out. The phases of Heine's struggle with this frustration will be recounted in their proper places. A word may be said here about the unfortunate strategies he developed to gain his ends, because they are symptomatic of the difficulties he always had in managing personal relations. The overall pattern of his dealings with his uncle is an amalgam of assever­ ations of love and obedience, outbursts of self-assertion, and threat. Examples of the first are the inscription in a dedication copy of the second volume of the Travel Pictures in March 1827 "as a token of affection and obedience," or a letter of September 15, 1828, assuring his uncle of his love and observing dolefully that all his uncle's com­ plaints against him were reducible to money matters.18 An example of the second is the remark he once blurted to his uncle that "the best thing about you is that you bear my name."14 As one measures Heine historically against all those forgotten barons and princesses, one can fully appreciate the justice of this claim, but it can hardly be said to have been politic. Salomon never forgot it and alluded to it in his letters to his nephew for years afterwards. One such letter began: "Herr Docter [sic] Heinrich Heine, Esquire, the founder of the family, after whom all Heines are named who are worth the trouble of being so named. . . ."15 Threat was the most ill-chosen of the strategies, for it explicitly fed the fears the family had of him and stiffened its resistance. How this worked to his disadvantage will appear when we come to the eventual denouement. The flavor of it is sufficiently apparent in a letter to his uncle of September 1837, written unwillingly at the urging of his friends as a plea for reconciliation: "You have no idea how unhappy I am, unhappy through no fault of my own; indeed, I owe to my better qualities the cares that gnaw at me and perhaps destroy me."

I. ORIGINS

Interspersed with this lament, however, are these passages: "My con­ science is calm, and I have besides seen to it that, when we are all long since in our graves, my whole life, my whole pure, spotless though unhappy life, will find its just recognition" and "what keeps me still erect is the pride of intellectual superiority born to me and the con­ sciousness that no one in the world can, with fewer strokes of the pen, more powerfully revenge himself than I for all open and secret injury done to me."18 This kind of warning—that he would revenge himself on his family with his pen or had already done so in unpublished writ­ ings—naturally did him no good, and there is reason to think that it eventually lost him part of the battle. This particular example was not delivered, as brother Max wisely intercepted it,17 but there are numer­ ous other utterances of the kind. Heine was nearly forty years old when he wrote this letter. Its last paragraph shows as well as anything how desperately bedevilled he was by the relationship and the bearing it had on the almost mythic sense of self he developed in the latter part of his life: "But tell me, what is the final reason for the curse that lies upon all men of great genius; why does the lightning of misfortune strike the elevated spirits, the towers of humanity, most often, while it so lovingly spares the low thatched skulls of mediocrity? Tell me why the man who is so soft, so compassionate, so merciful to strangers shows himself so hard now to his poor nephew?"18 Lament, self-assertion, threat, and captatio benevolentiae, all woven together. As to the last, Heine is sometimes depicted as feeling a complex love for his uncle, intermingled with his resentment and frustration. This is hard to judge at this distance; most of his asseverations of affection are meant directly or indirectly for his uncle's ears and could as well be interpreted as part of the overall strategy. His earliest recorded comments on his uncle are marked by resentment and the scorn of the eighteen-year-old poet for the man of affairs and his entourage of the rich and the prominent.19 A little further on I shall offer a reason why Heine could only with the greatest of difficulty have felt any genuine love toward Uncle Salomon. Two other aspects of this relationship may be mentioned briefly here. One is Heine's tendency, which became more pronounced as the problem reached its crisis stage before and after Uncle Salomon's death, to ascribe his difficulties with him to the whisperings of illdisposed relations and hangers-on in his uncle's house. It is altogether probable that his sons-in-law and others in his entourage, being com­ mitted to the family pattern of social advancement, campaigned against their famous and unspeakably tiresome relative. But there is no reason to suppose that Salomon was incapable of thinking for himself, or that

I. ORIGINS his policy, even though Heine was on rare occasions able to soften it or talk him around, was not basically his own. Heine had a habit of assessing adversity obliquely. Instead of looking it in the eye, he tended to devise circumstantial explanations in his imagination suggesting to him that matters could be arranged to his satisfaction if only one hostile ancillary circumstance or another could be neutralized. We shall ob­ serve from time to time situations of considerable importance when his judgment was deflected by this kind of wishful thinking. Secondly, without wishing to tread too bravely on psychoanalytic ground, I do think it reasonable to conclude that Heine was spared a critical confrontation with his own father because his father's authority and dignity were displaced by the sheer force of Uncle Salomon. In a certain sense, father and son became brothers in humiliation before this stronger parent, the father yielding and losing, the son battling to a combination of victory and loss that left his identity wounded but intact.

m The World of Heine's Boyhood HEINE was born into a world of uncommon political mutability. In the most accomplished of his autobiographical fictions, Ideas: The Book of Le Grand, he joked about a schoolboy's difficulties in learning geography in times when the borders of countries and their colors on the map were changing practically every day.1 His birthplace is cer­ tainly not to be confused with the Dusseldorf of today, one of the richest looking cities of Germany with its gleaming towers of inter­ national banking and commerce risen from the rubble of World War II and its seemingly endless stretches of prosperous residential neighbor­ hoods. In 1797 it was a town of about 16,000 inhabitants, de jure the capital of the Duchy of Jiilich-Berg, a patchwork state on the lower Rhine with a colorful and complex dynastic history reaching back to the high middle ages. At that time, however, it was under the absentee rule of the Elector Palatine and, more importantly, it was under French occupation. French revolutionary troops had bombarded Diisseldorf and set it afire in 1794 and occupied it the following year. This period was a hard one for the city, which had to pay heavy tribute and did not find the French very pleasant masters, who remained until the Treaty of Luneville in 1801. In the meantime, in 1799, Julich-Berg had

I. ORIGINS

passed to Maximilian Joseph, the Bavarian and Palatine elector. In 1806 he became the first king of Bavaria. Heine was a Bavarian for a couple of months, until Max Joseph joined the Confederation of the Rhine and ceded Jiilich-Berg to Napoleon. One of the most amusing and skillful passages in The Book of Le Grand recalls this crucial transition from the perspective of the eight-year-old boy. With the abdication of the father-figure of the patriarchal state, the world seems to have come to an end; but the following day, as though by magic, the world has become French, and the day after that the change did not seem so profound, as school resumed once more.2 Napoleon now transformed this territory into the Grand Duchy of Berg. It was one of three French states he created on German territory, the other two being the Kingdom of Westphalia and the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt. As grand duke he appointed his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, a superb cavalry general but an avaricious ruler of dubious competence. In two years Murat spent but five months in the duchy; his wife, Napoleon's sister Caroline, never left Paris, much to the dis­ appointment of the socially ambitious in Diisseldorf. After draining the duchy's treasury for the sake of the royal standard of living to which he was trying to become accustomed, Murat was promoted to King of Naples in 1808. Napoleon personally took over the administra­ tion of Berg, though in the name of his four-year-old nephew Napo­ leon Louis. The state now became somewhat more orderly, largely owing to the administrative skills of Napoleon's finance minister in Berg, Jacques-Claude Count Beugnot, whom Heine spoke of as "the good Frenchman who, despite his hateful position, gave the inhabitants of the Grand Duchy of Berg so many fine proofs of a noble and great character."3 With the fall of Napoleon the fate of the duchy became uncertain for a time, but in 1815 it was incorporated into Prussia. Thus Heine, who had been Bergish, Palatine, Bavarian, and French without moving from the spot, became a Prussian at seventeen. The environment was less turbulent than this would suggest. Its crucial aspect, as Heine always recognized, was that his formative years had been largely governed by the French spirit. This was to create a complexity, if not an ambivalence, in his character, which put him out of tune, in his own mind and eventually in his relation to the German public, with the increasingly obsessive and bristling German nationalism that emerged from the Napoleonic episode. For Heine, both subjectively and objectively, the French component of his youth­ ful environment was an advantage and an enrichment. This is largely because he emphasized the positive aspect of it; for Dusseldorf and

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Berg generally the experience was decidedly mixed. The chief advan­ tage was the replacement of an archaic legal and judicial system with the Napoleonic Code and a structure of government on the French model. Although this process was completed late in the grand ducal period, in 1812, it had a lasting effect, for Berg was the only German territory to retain the more modern French administrative structure and the Napoleonic Code, with trial by jury and courts of appeal, after the restoration of 1815. As a student Heine vigorously defended the institution of trial by jury against its Prussian critics.4 Efforts were made against stiff resistance to abolish serfdom and feudal obligations. The French also instituted a constitution. It was of the typical early nineteenth-century type, with power concentrated in the rich bour­ geoisie, but any steps taken toward constitutional government in Germany at this time must be considered an advance. Certain liberties, especially freedom of the press, were more secure than was customary elsewhere in Germany. These and other progressive consequences of French government were not unappreciated. But other circumstances made the regime onerous and, in time, disastrous. Napoleonic rule always involved heavy taxation as well as continuous and irritating conscription for his relentless military adventures. Berg suffered severely, more than any other European country, from Napoleon's blockade of Europe against English economic power. The area was already becoming an industrial territory and was sensitive to inhibitions to trade; at the same time, tariff barriers kept it outside the French national economic system. Napoleon could not be prevailed upon to relieve this squeeze, and the result was a profound depression: businesses failed, industries stagnated, unemployment and criminality increased. The Rhinelanders had little desire to become Prussian, but any allegiance they might have main­ tained to French sovereignty was dissolved in the economic suffering caused by Napoleon's Continental System. Heine's attitude was relatively little marked by these circumstances, even though his own family was brought down in the aftermath of the economic dislocation. Political and economic details rarely caught his attention; for example, the gruesome Rhenish famine of 1816-1817, which sent twenty thousand emigrants to America, left no trace in his writings. His thinking tended to larger and more abstract categories. For him the main issue was the historical potential of the modern liberties released by the French Revolution versus the antiquated re­ pressiveness of German conditions. He was not at all a blind partisan of France, but his criticism was always directed against French failures to realize and remain faithful to the new and great thing France her-

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self had brought into the world. In The Book of Le Grand he describes the Prussian post-French Dusseldorf as diminished and impoverished. It is true that the fortunes of the area did not significantly improve at once under Prussian rule, but the gravest difficulties began in the French period. Heine did not want to tarnish the French glory by presenting his history in that way. It is sometimes argued that this position of Heine's was owing to the advantages the Jews had obtained under French administration. One theory has it that he established December 13, 1799, as his birthdate because that was the date of the completion of the Napoleonic con­ stitution that extended civil rights to the Jews.5 But it is not easy to find direct evidence of this. Doubtless the Jews of Berg did benefit from French principles of equality, even if Napoleon's own policy toward the Jews was opportunistic and narrow. But Heine seems to have had no experience of Jewish oppression in his youth, and he always subsumed Jewish emancipation under general principles of human freedom. The context of his views is probably more accurately found in the pattern of sympathy for French revolutionary principles in the western German states. It is not without significance that, in the areas where the Germans knew the French best, in the west and south­ west, democratic and progressive sympathies thrived most. But Heine's response to this aspect of his environment acquires a special configuration from his particular focus upon the figure of Napoleon. His imagination tended to oscillate between general prin­ ciples and sharply delineated personification. In Napoleon, Heine chose to see the incarnation of the French Revolution as a militant and heroic force. That the real Napoleon was not wholly congruent with this mythic role was a fact that Heine recognized and was prepared to acknowledge in his later years. He once admitted that if Napoleon had been differently constituted he could have been the Washington of Europe.6 But that sort of thought could not hold his attention very long. His concern was to impose mythic and heroic dimensions on Napoleon, the modern Prometheus.7 It is of great importance that Heine saw in him the synthesis of the revolutionary and counter­ revolutionary in exceptional greatness elevated above the common run of mankind, taming "the many-headed monster of anarchy."8 But it is also important that, no doubt somewhat naively, he regarded Napo­ leon, at least at the outset, as a destroyer of feudal nobility. In a passage designed to give the greatest possible offense to the adherents of the ancien regime, he imaged Napoleon's marriage to the Austrian Em­ peror's daughter as the "incarnated revolution that, with boots and spurs and spattered with the blood of the battlefield, climbed into the

I. ORIGINS

bed of an Imperial blonde and stained the white sheets of Habsburg."9 In his constructed autobiographical romance Heine made Napoleon the presiding genius of his boyhood. Perhaps the most frequently quoted passage in The Book of Le Grand is the account of Napo­ leon's visit to Diisseldorf in November 1811, when Heine was thir­ teen years old. The event is moved for poetic effect into the spring and is described as a blasphemous parody of Christ's entry into Jeru­ salem. Had Heine been more interested in political detail than he was, he might have treated the occasion more soberly, for, despite its Baroque ceremony, it turned out to be a disappointment to the city, as Napoleon declined to take steps to relieve its economic distress. More important to Heine was the evocation of a combined image of progress and power, an ineluctable force emanating from the French furnace of liberty, humiliating the petty, philistine, feudal backward­ ness of Germany. The readiness to locate the elan of liberty and progress in the autocratic, world-historical individual had its obvious dangers; one recent critic has defined this aspect of Heine's political imagination as "Caesarism."10 It is an early example of the frustrated longing of the liberal intellectual, the hopeless dream of the amalga­ mation of poetry, progress, and power, which came to be one of Heine's main themes. When Heine was seventeen, the Congress of Vienna created the system under which he was to live for the next sixteen years and from which he was to suffer for the next thirty-three. The crazy-quilt of German states was reduced to thirty-five principalities and four free cities—Heine always spoke, inaccurately but pungently, of thirty-six kingdoms—deftly balanced between the two most powerful of the states, Prussia and Austria. A Federal Diet in Frankfurt was formed, whose function it was to ratify the policies of those two states, espe­ cially Austria's, whose chancellor, Clemens Lothar Wenzel Prince Metternich, a Rhinelander like Heine, effectively governed Central Europe. Shrewd and cynical, Metternich was doubtless devoted to the maintenance of peace in Europe, a policy sometimes admired today, but it was the peace of stasis and repression, the grimly bucolic peace of a prison farm. He had many grave matters to contend with, and in retrospect it can be seen that he was not all-powerful but entangled by Austrian domestic politics; nevertheless, from where Heine and his generation sat, his policy seemed reducible to a single proposition: nothing must ever change. The balance of power in Europe, the social caste system, the governing alliance of throne and altar, the ideas and ideologies in the minds of men, must remain forever as they were, or, rather, as they had been before the French Revolution and Napoleon.

I. ORIGINS But, whether Metternich and his allies liked it or not, things were changing: new ideas, new historical, economic, social, intellectual, scientific developments were in motion, and they required above all articulation and discussion. The determination of the Metternichian system to resist this pressure and prevent any discussion of it led to increasingly desperate repressive measures that were to embitter and sometimes blight the lives of Heine and the other dissidents of his time.

N*:I

Schooling BEFORE turning to what we know of Heine's early years and what we may reasonably extrapolate, we may venture a general observation. His childhood and boyhood, as such things go, seem to have been relatively cheerful, or at least they remained so in his consciousness. Possibly this is a superficial perception, for there must have been more anxiety and stress in his young life, in order for his character to have been shaped as it was, than he saw fit to communicate. At times he felt that his suffering nature was congenital. He had a "toothache in the heart," he wrote once; his misery had been present with him in the cradle, "and when my mother rocked me, she rocked it, too, and when she sang me to sleep it fell asleep with me, and it awakened as soon as I opened my eyes."1 At other times he associated it with his sensitivity to the condition of the modern world. Along with his contemporaries he codified the concept of Zerrissenheit, the condition of being torn and disrupted;2 it was a mood of the times and somewhat later he denied that it was a merely subjective one but was a response to the alienated state of the world, which the poet feels more intently: "Since the heart of the poet is the midpoint of the world," he wrote, echoing a famous line of Eichendorff, "it must in these times be miserably zerrissen. . . . Through mine went the great rip in the world, and just for that reason I know that the great gods have highly blessed me above many others and have considered me worthy of the poet's martyr­ dom."3 Modern commentators have tried to reduce this split in the world and consciousness to the class conflict, but Heine meant much more by it: it is the sense of historical disjunction from an ordered, integrated, and comprehensible world of the past that pervades the epoch of German thought from Kant and Schiller through Classicism and Romanticism to Hegel and his followers.

I. ORIGINS

The passage just cited illustrates another symptom of insecurity that is perhaps the oddest single aspect of Heine's personality: his habit of obtrusive and hyperbolic self-praise. In places, such as the passage in The City of Lucca where the mountains do him homage as though he were an emperor,4 it is a rhetorical device heightening the Active persona and not without an ironic undertone. The constant association of the persona with figures of power—knight, king, emperor—is no doubt to be understood as an optative statement about the power and dignity of poetry. But there is more to it than rhetoric, for the gestures permeate Heine's expository writing and his private letters as well. His constant insistence upon his unique greatness, his "divinity"—he once wrote, in an ironic context, to be sure, that the aroma of his soul rose to heaven and intoxicated the eternal gods themselves5—and especially his claims for revolutionary purity and virtue and an insight into life and the world superior to that of all his contemporaries naturally got on the nerves of his contemporaries, who often just laughed at him; as early as 1831 one reviewer concluded that he had simply gone crazy.6 Indeed the habit does make a pathological impression, especially when one reads a great deal of Heine in a short period of time, and it is in the nature of things that one suspects a source in an early psycho­ logical disturbance. But it is equally significant that Heine, never loath to complain, did not cast a pall over his early years. Despite what we know of the in­ security of the world around him, he seems to have felt his immediate environment as, on the whole, supportive and encouraging; in his early years, at least, the family seems to have been modestly pros­ perous; he had good family relationships, a reasonable number of friends, and a fairly unrepressive upbringing. Another observation we can make is the perhaps somewhat odd lack of evidence of youthful rebelliousness. Even though his vibrant imagination differentiated him from the ethos of his environment, and despite his dislike of the career and pattern of life mapped out for him, he acquiesced, for better or worse, until his own failure necessitated a change of course. His relative adjustment to his environment is exhibited by his school career. He was a passable but, considering his intelligence, curiosity, and literacy, by no means outstanding pupil. Neither do we find, as we do in the biographies of so many other writers, especially in Germany, vigorous rebellion against school. In later years he took, on the whole, a humorous view of his school experience. He found most of it spiritless and tedious; he recalled, as we all do, an occasional episode of chagrin; and he spoke of some of his instruction and a couple of his teachers in the upper grades with gratitude and affection.

I. ORIGINS

His easygoing attitude towards school, his lack of that ambition that characterized the mature writer, suggest to me that he did not ascribe great importance to it, that he perhaps never anticipated going on to the university, and that, in the latter part of his youth, at any rate, as the family fortunes deteriorated, he accepted the prospect of a commercial career. When Heine was just short of four years old, he was put into what, in this country around the same time, would have been called a "dameschool," operated by one Frau Hindermans. There he began to learn his ABC's in a roomful of girls and felt out of place; late in life he wrote a funny and mildly obscene poem about it.7 Two years later he was placed in a communal Hebrew school run by a distant relative of the family named Rintelsohn. It is not easy to say how much he learned in this school. One of the deepest students of his Jewish en­ vironment thinks it probably was not much and that the time would have been taken up largely by relating Midrashic legends,8 which would have suited young Heine perfectly. In the greatest of his late Hebrew Melodies he ascribes to the poet Jehuda ha-Levi a youthful preference for the homiletic and parabolic narratives of the Talmud to its legal disputation, which very likely reflects his own boyhood inclination. It is doubtful that he ever learned to read Hebrew with any facility. He knew some words and phrases, naturally; he could remember part of a verb paradigm, which he built into a joke in The Book of Le Grandf and he could write the cursive script, which he employs very occasionally for a word or two in his letters. But his transliterations of Hebrew phrases are often wildly faulty and, when he needed a translation of sections from the Passover service, he had to ask a friend to do it for him.10 This raises, in turn, the difficult question of the quality of Jewish life in his home. Opinions on this have ranged from nearly traditional to lukewarm reformist to a pattern of assimilationist evasion and con­ cealment of Jewishness altogether. It is clear that Heine was on one side of a rather rapid generational transition. His father appears to have been conventionally if sincerely pious, though at the end of his memoir fragment Heine tells us that his father advised him against the appear­ ance of atheism because it would be bad for business; furthermore, Samson Heine was apparently a Freemason, which he certainly could not have been if his orthodoxy had still been intact.11 Uncle Salomon was certainly strongly committed to the Jewish community, which he supported generously and to which he left a variety of significant legacies in his will. But in that same document he excused his son from all memorial rituals, including the kaddish, which, of course, he had

I. ORIGINS

no right in Jewish law to do.12 The ambitious social climbing of the family naturally presupposed conversion to Christianity by all hands, and Salomon must have regarded this circumstance with equanimity, though in fact his own son resisted it. There are anecdotes indicating that Heine was raised to keep the Sabbath, and his evident familiarity with the Passover seder, so effectively described in The Rabbi of Bacherach, suggests the probability that it was celebrated in his home. Heine remarked there that even renegade Jews are moved in their hearts when they hear the melody of the Passover ritual; very likely he was thinking of himself.13 There is no other evidence that the family was observant. Heine nowhere mentions celebrating any holy days and there is no indication that he ever had a bar mitzvah or was even exposed to the rites and customs of the observant Jew. In fact he makes errors in simple Jewish matters of a kind that would not be usual for one with a traditional upbringing.14 As we shall see, during his student days he undertook an extensive study of Jewish history and tradition, and it is likely that most of what he knew derived from that experience rather than from his boyhood. It is true that he was very firm in the Bible—in Luther's translation, of course—and that his interest in it increased as the years went by. But Luther's Bible has always been a fundamental resource for German writers, and Heine differs from the usual pattern perhaps only by a somewhat greater emphasis on the Old Testament. Even more difficult to estimate is young Heine's inner relation to his Jewishness, especially as he does not have a great deal to say about it. He records only one significant anecdote. Once, feeling some curi­ osity about his paternal grandfather, he asked his father, who told the boy that his ancestor had been "a little Jew with a big beard." Heine repeated this in school and, as such things will, it struck the funnybone of his fellows, who set up an unholy ruckus of hooting and hollering. The teacher, finding young Heine, with customary injustice, to be the instigator of this outbreak, gave him a caning. Heine remarks in his Memoirs that the memory of this punishment greatly inhibited his further curiosity about his forebears.15 One can believe that; still, as atrocities go, it does not weigh very heavily, especially as it is the only one of the kind he has to report. Early in life he developed a habit of making'derogatory remarks about Jews, some of which make an unpleasant impression on the modern reader, and from the outset this habit was joined to his tend­ ency to associate Jews with oppressive and philistine wealth: "I call all Hamburgers Jews," he wrote in his second preserved letter "and those I call baptized Jews in order to distinguish them from the

I. ORIGINS

circumcised are called vulgo: Christians."16 On this point as in many other things Heine had inherited an eighteenth-century Enlighten­ ment position; the Enlightenment was often sympathetic to Jewish emancipation, but almost never to Judaism as such. This is particularly true of two of the major figures in his intellectual heritage: Spinoza, who had written in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that "the Jews of today have absolutely nothing to which they can lay more claim than the rest of mankind" and blamed them for developing religious intolerance and hatred of foreigners,17 and Voltaire, who was very dismissive about Hebrew culture and scriptures and markedly antago­ nistic to the Jews.18 In the same letter cited above, incidentally, Heine gives a hint that his catastrophe in love has drawn him to Catholicism: "I must have a madonna. Will the heavenly one replace the earthly one? I can only roll off my infinite pain in the infinite depths of mysti­ cism."19 But this was a fleeting affect without consequence except for a long overestimated Catholicizing poem entitled "The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar."20 My own impression is that the young man who came to the uni­ versity in 1819 did not feel very uncomfortable about his Jewishness. He had not grown up in a ghetto; his family had standing and was integrated into the life of the larger community; his and his family's associations had been with Jew and Gentile alike; and religious alle­ giance does not seem to have been taken very seriously in his immedi­ ate environment. Beyond this, he must have had reason to suppose that the Jewish problem was easing in the world at large. He grew up in an atmosphere of the Enlightenment and might be excused for think­ ing that history would continue to progress along its lines. Jewish emancipation was in the air and Napoleonic rule had given it an impetus. If he did feel such optimism, he was to be unpleasantly dis­ abused of it during his student years. Indeed, in that very year of 1819 economic distress ignited anti-Jewish rioting—a troubling symptom of the reversal and reaction that was to come—in several parts of Ger­ many, including Hamburg. The family's insouciance about Jewish allegiance is exhibited by the fact that, beginning in 1804, Heine attended Catholic schools, mainly because these were the schools that Diisseldorf provided. The system was French in organization and spirit, but it was built on a Catholic base; the schools were housed in a former Franciscan cloister and largely taught by Catholic clergy. It was a priest, one Father Dickerscheit, who gave Heine the hiding he remembered so well. He dropped a broad hint in his Memoirs that Dickerscheit was removed from the school for a homosexual transgression.21 That was in the

I. ORIGINS

elementary school, which he once referred to as a "fusty-Catholic cloister school."22 In 1807 he entered the preparatory class of the Lyceum and in 1810 the Lyceum proper. There Heine remembered particularly his French teacher, an elderly emigre named Abbe Daulnoy, whose pedagogical ineptness left the boy with a deep dislike of French literature. He was never to get over this aversion, especially for the metric regularity of French poetry, which he characterized as "rhymed burping."23 But he learned his French, which was the im­ portant thing. Although he always spoke it with a pronounced accent and frequently made errors in writing, it became a second language for him. From Daulnoy he also learned traditional rhetoric, which be­ came a firm component of his writing style.24 Other teachers Heine remembered with more affection, and he recalled the rector of the school, Agidius Jakob Schallmeyer ( 1 7 5 7 1817) with cordial respect. Schallmeyer, who seems to have been friendly with the Heine family and concerned about the boy's welfare, taught philosophy in an enlightened and rational spirit that Heine re­ called gratefully, remarking that he saw in him how religion and skepticism could be peacefully combined without hypocrisy.25 All in all, he seems to have had reasonably good schooling by the standards of the time and to have benefited from it. However, he did not graduate. In 1814, upon the reorganization of the school from a French lyceum into a German gymnasium, the senior class was extended to two years. Since Heine's commercial future was now decided, there apparently was felt to be little point in continuing, and he left the gymnasium in the fall of that year, auditing some classes until the beginning of 1815. One other boyhood reminiscence may be related, as it seems to bear on his curious aversion to seeing his first name in print. He always published his works as "H. Heine" and objected vigorously to seeing his full name spelled out; he usually signed his letters that way also. As a boy he was called Harry, in honor, he tells us, of an English business connection of his father's,28 but probably just as a secular version of his Jewish name, assumed to be Chaim; variations of the name (e.g., Henry, Henri) occurred frequently in the family. It seems there was a garbage collector with a broken-down donkey that he guided with the loud call of "Harriih!" and young Harry's "homonymity with the shabby long-ear"27 caused him to be teased by the other children. Since he later obtained his Christian name, Heinrich, under far from gratifying circumstances, one wonders if his uneasiness about his name is not a symptom of insecurity of self, as though he did

I. ORIGINS

not have an intimate given name in which he could dwell comfortably. On his final sickbed he remarked that, now that he was free of all social vanity, he was able to speak of the matter without inhibitions.28 Outside of school, Heine's family tried to provide him with private instruction, in dancing, the violin, and drawing. These efforts were not successful. According to comical stories related by Maximilian Heine, Harry allowed his violin teacher to play in his stead in order to give the family the illusion of progress; when this was discovered, the enterprise was scotched.29 As for dancing, Harry is supposed actually to have thrown his teacher out the window onto a manure pile, so that the family had to-indemnify him. One may believe that if one likes, though Max's further comment that Heine never danced again in his life is, I think, credible.30 His lack of musical talent is a point to remember when considering his large amount of reportage on musical events later on. His drawing instructor was Lambert Cornelius, brother of the prominent Nazarene painter Peter Cornelius, whose acquaint­ ance Heine also made, but to no artistic profit. Books were what young Harry really wanted; his lifelong reading habit established itself early. The records of the public library in Diisseldorf show Harry to have been a constant borrower;31 only one student at the University of Bonn borrowed more books from the library than Heine, and he was one of the most frequent borrowers at Gottingen also.32 Almost all of Heine's writing exhibits traces of a vast amount of conventional and uncon­ ventional book-learning, for which he seems to have had an enduring if not always precise memory on which he was able to draw, some­ times unsystematically but always to relevant effect. He was no scholar, as he tended to speed over the surface of texts, snatching from them what he found usable for his own purposes, and he had no interest in the judicious and thoughtful apprehension of them. His was a mind of quick disposition, of sudden evaluation and categorization, a mind that imposed a strongly felt if antithetical order of allegiance on every­ thing he encountered. His thinking, despite its complicated antinomies, was basically dualistic, identifying things, ideas, and people as friends or enemies to himself or to his ideas of progress, emancipation, ration­ ality, and imagination. Still, the range of his learning becomes ever more remarkable the more closely one examines it. There was one other educational influence that Heine frequently emphasized when he came to speak of his boyhood: folklore. He clearly regarded the folk tales of the Rhineland that he heard in his childhood as an important influence on his imagination; folk materials are a significant component of much of his writing, and a systematic

I. ORIGINS interest in the folklore tradition developed strongly in his middle years. He symbolized this influence in his Memoirs, with the splendid and notorious tale of his boyhood affection for the executioner's daughter, Josefa or "Red Sefchen." Much futile ingenuity has been devoted to identifying this person, and recently it has been shown that Heine might possibly have known of an executioners' family in the neighborhood.33 But the details defy documentation, and the story con­ tains so many fantastic and folkloric elements, some of which are obvi­ ously drawn from his reading on the subject, as well as an echo of Goethe's attraction to his Frankfurt Gretchen, that it must be regarded as a fiction, synthesizing components of his formative experiences. First of all, the social position of the executioner was dishonorable, and the retrospectively imaged affinity with the pariah girl reflects less his boyhood consciousness than his mature sense of himself as an out­ sider. At the same time, she is of the people; Heine always wanted his predilection for folklore understood as an allegiance to the common people as against the official culture. To this subculture he often asscribed a sensuality repressed in the dominant culture; at the same time, Sefchen's erotic attraction is associated with a kind of subdued terror and with images of death. Heine's susceptibility to the Gothic is often linked to his feelings about eros, a significant point regularly missed in discussions of his sensualism as a progressive, emancipatory element. All these features set the poetic in contrast to rationalism in familiar Romantic fashion. But, unlike the true Romantics, Heine was never able to come down fully on the side of the poetic or to devise a synthesis of the poetic and the real. Instead, he always associated the poetic, with all its aesthetic, imaginative, and liberating aspects, with the unreal, and this tension, more than any other, marks his cast of mind as a writer. It is characteristic, therefore, that when he comes to speak of the sources of his poetic imagination, he resorts to fiction. The story of Red Sefchen, like so many of his reminiscences, is a narration of his inner rather than of his empirical biography.

in The Great Love Affair (s) THERE is nothing remarkable about a boy in his teens believing that he has fallen in love. If a boy had a pretty and elegant cousin his own

I. ORIGINS

age, there would be nothing remarkable if he were to imagine that he had fallen in love with her and, if he were a dreamy, perhaps some­ what maladroit, and relatively poor relation, there would be nothing remarkable if his cousin, concerned with more substantial prospects, were in a friendly manner to turn aside his advances. If this poor rela­ tion's cousin were to be very rich indeed, and if she should have a pleasant and attractive younger sister, it would not be remarkable if he were to transfer his affections to the sister for a while. Finally, it would be altogether unremarkable if the young man were to write poems about all this. This may seem a curious style of writing biography, especially when it concerns one of the most celebrated love affairs in all literature. Yet it approaches the outer boundary of what the biographer can with any assurance say, and may indeed exceed it. The story of the great unrequited love of Heine for his cousins is almost entirely a creation of literary historians, working on the same principle by which touch­ ing stories were constructed for barely visible courtly love poets of the Middle Ages. His lack of cooperation in the effort made it the more piquant. If ever a poet was more silent about the primordial love experience of his life than Heine, it would be hard to think who he was. Yet Heine was not completely silent; he left us with a lattice of hints making it clear that something happened. In the first place, it is un­ sentimental but necessary to bear in mind that his cousins were the heiresses to the fortune that so bewitched him, and it is not im­ probable that not only he, but also his parents, entertained designs on the fortune through a marriage that would in no way have been unusual in Jewish custom. It has been suspected that beneath the lit­ erary theme of Heine's unrequited love there is a subtext of family maneuvering around Uncle Salomon's treasure, sublimated into death­ less poetry like the archetypal squabble over the gold of the Nibelungs. Just when Heine first met his cousin Amalie (1799 or 1800-1838) is not clear, possibly in 1814. He had an opportunity to court her in Hamburg in 1816, and his first two preserved letters, in July and No­ vember, make it clear that he was not successful and that he was dis­ traught.1 After that he has little to say directly. In his published works he never names Uncle Salomon's daughters, and there is but one ref­ erence to them, not by name, in a passage in his Memoirs that is cor­ rupt owing to the censorship of the family.2 In 1844 he wrote a strange, obliquely vengeful poem for Amalie's daughter.3 In his letters there is an occasional bread-and-butter note and a few hints. In 1821 Amalie

I. ORIGINS

married an estate owner, John Friedlander. Six years later Heine saw her again: "This morning I am about to visit a fat lady whom I have not seen in eleven years and with whom they say I was once in love. Her name is Madame Friedlander from Konigsberg, so to speak a cousin of mine. . . . The world is stupid and insipid and unpleasant and smells of dried violets."4 The eleven years cannot be quite right, for he had seen Amalie after 1816. As for Therese (1807-1880), the evidence is very slim and consists in the main of some remarks during a visit to Hamburg in 1823; it will be noted that Therese, like Amalie before her, was then around sixteen years old. "The old passion breaks out in force once more," Heine wrote, and, a few weeks later: "a new folly is grafted upon the old."5 Most of the rest is extrapolation from Heine's work, including much naive biographical interpretation of the poetry. Therese married a stockbroker named Adolf Halle in 1828. On the occasion Heine drafted a letter to Uncle Salomon in which he denies that he had ever disrespected his uncle's house—"I loved it only too well"—sends con­ gratulations "in a qualified way," and adds wryly: "Next to myself there is no one to whom I would more gladly grant her than Dr. Halle."6 This might be phrase-making, but it is bitter, for Heine deep­ ly disliked Halle. He was never mollified by Halle's occasional friendly gestures toward him; twenty-two years later, upon hearing that Halle had suffered an episode of mental illness, Heine's only comment was an icy: "How witty God is."7 It remains only to be added that Therese visited Heine on his sickbed in 1853 and showed him considerable sympathy.8 In keeping with his habit of hiding his empirical self, Heine ob­ jected to direct biographical interpretation of his works. In 1823 he wrote in a letter: "Only one thing can injure me most painfully, when people try to explain the spirit of my works from the history (you know what this word means), from the history of the author. I was deeply and bitterly offended when I saw yesterday in the letter of an acquaintance how he tried to construct my whole poetic being out of accumulated tattle and dropped unedifying remarks on impressions of my life, political position, religion, etc. Speak­ ing of similar things in public would have quite outraged me, and I am cordially glad that the like has never happened. However easily the history of a poet could throw light on his poem, how­ ever easily it could really be shown that often political position, religion, private hatred, prejudice, and discretions have affected

I. ORIGINS

the poem, one must nevertheless never mention these things, espe­ cially not during the lifetime of the poet. One deflowers, as it were, the poem, one tears its mysterious veil, if the influence of history that is demonstrated is really present; one distorts the po­ em if it is falsely figured in. And how little the external frame­ work of our history often fits with our real inner history! With me at least it never fit."9 This passage has often been quoted, though not always in its en­ tirety. It rather looks like a smokescreen, and it will be noted that it does not in principle sever the biographical link; instead it is an argu­ ment for discretion toward the poet's private life and the right of a poem to its own autonomous existence. However, it appeals to the temper of modern criticism, which has justly reacted against the gen­ uine excesses of biographical interpretation of the past. In 1962 an English scholar, William Rose, published a little book entitled The Early Love Poetry of Heinrich Heine: An Inquiry into Poetic Inspi­ ration, which proved to be one of the major turning points of Heine interpretation. After having analyzed all the evidence and the chro­ nology, he concluded with splendid understatement that "there has been much building with unsound materials."10 Rose's strongest argu­ ment is that the poems supposed to refer to Amalie were mostly writ­ ten five years after the rejection and at least two and a half years after Heine had last seen her. Some poems supposed to be associated with Therese were clearly written before this alleged affair, while others are several years later. Rose's loosening of the link of Heine's early poetry to the higher gossip of biographical speculation might have released it to more serious intrinsic consideration, but in the long run this has not been the effect. Rather, the impeachment of the biograph­ ical interest seems to have contributed to the general loss of inter­ est in the poetry, especially in German criticism. At length the con­ cept of "Petrarchism," which had been applied to Heine as early as 1827,11 was introduced into the discussion.12 It has come to mean a primarily formal manipulation of prefabricated tropes, an exercise whose inventiveness lay in the ingenious variations of limited resources within constricted limits. There has been value in this, both in bringing to a halt the scripting of soap-opera that clutters so much older writing on Heine and in drawing attention to the verbal artistry of the poetry. But the term "Petrarchism" needs to be used with restraint. It suggests a literaryhistorical category with which Heine had nothing to do; the ancestry of his verse was more recent and nearer to hand. We associate Pe-

I. ORIGINS

trarchism primarily with ever more recondite variations on the praise of the beloved; praise of the beloved was the last thing Heine had in mind, and in any case the subject of his love poetry is not the beloved but the poetic construction and retrieval of his own self. Much later in life he wrote that the "so-called Platonic love" in Petrarch and his successors had disgusted him and that he had "campaigned against it all my life in rhyme and prose."13 By associating his poetry with an often precious tradition, the term makes his lyrical effort appear to be less earnest than it was. Finally, in its reaction against past excesses it probably cuts the biographical link too emphatically. There can be no reasonable doubt that Heine at the age of eighteen suffered an unrequited infatuation for his cousin Amalie. The evidence for this is scattered and somewhat slender but unambiguous. It is even possible that afterwards he transferred his affections to Amalie's younger sister; the evidence for this, however scant, otherwise re­ quires too much explaining away.14 Rose's chronological arguments do not completely destroy the relevance to the poetry, for Heine had the capacity for carrying emotional pain intact in his memory for many years; in fact the memories rose to the surface again very late in his life. The details of the relationships have no significance for the poetry, first of all because they are unrecoverable, and secondly be­ cause the poetry, despite all the persistent attempts to novelize it, is not narrative but turns over and over the gradually evolving compo­ nents of a state of mind. Nowhere in Heine's poetry and fiction, ex­ cepting his relatively unimportant verses on his mother and his wife, is there a recognizable female person. The female figures are functional and thematic in a fictionalized drama of the self. But the main theme is defeat and frustration, often even in later scenes of erotic success, and it is not excessive to surmise, not that Heine's dismissal by his cousin (s) caused his torment or inspired his poetic imagination, but that it derailed the relatively complacent track of his life, breaking open the space between his real self and his aspi­ rations for himself, and thereby making the recourse to the poetic imagination an urgent necessity. The first phase of his writing bears witness to a hurt more devastating than the category of Petrarchism can comprehend, and it demanded repair. It is altogether reasonable to believe that this hurt was at least catalyzed by a failure in love of the kind that probably most young men experience but that Heine never completely outgrew. Perhaps it was more difficult to deal with be­ cause it accompanied a host of other problems in his young life.

46

M

The Businessman AFTER Heine left the Lyceum in the fall of 1814, he attended a busi­ ness school in Diisseldorf. According to such meager accounts of this experience as we have, he was not very attentive or industrious.1 It is likely, however, that it was here he learned English, which was natu­ ral, as English was the language of modern commerce. He never was able to speak or understand it, but it is evident that he could read it with some facility, a skill that was to prove useful to him in the future, although for purposes that could not then be foreseen. One important dividend was the access it gave him to Byron, whom he seems to have begun to read around 1819.2 As a student in Bonn, partly under the challenge of August Wilhelm Schlegel's opinion that Byron could not be translated successfully into German,3 Heine translated the opening scene of Manfred, two sections of the first canto of Childe Harold, and "Fare-thee-Well," along with its motto from Coleridge's "Christabel." His rendition of the songs of the elemental spirits from Manfred is especially accomplished, even if it contains occasional translation errors. Byron became an important role model for young Heine; echoes and allusions recur in his early writings, and one passage in par­ ticular shows how he mirrored himself in his perception of Byron, who, "instead of lamenting the decline of the old forms like [Scott], feels himself vexatiously constricted even by those that still remained, wants to rip them down with revolutionary laughter and baring of teeth, and in this anger injures the most sacred flowers of life with his melodious poison and, like a mad harlequin, plunges a dagger into his own heart, in order teasingly to spatter the ladies and gentlemen with his gushing black blood."4 The affinity was easily perceived by con­ temporary observers. Byron's German translator, Elise von Hohenhausen, whose Berlin salon Heine frequented, dubbed him the "Ger­ man Byron."5 In fact the identification threatened to become a cliche and Heine eventually found it necessary to defend himself against it; but his allegiance endured. He was greatly affected by the death of "my cousin, Lord Byron, at Missolonghi" and eulogized him in his letters.6 Indeed their reputations in their respective countries were to have quite similar fates. In September 1815 Heine began his ill-starred meanderings in the world of commerce. In assessing his failures, we do well to remember as background that this postwar period was a time of steadily worsen-

I. ORIGINS

ing economic distress. Heine's father's business was deteriorating and even his genius of an uncle had to keep all his wits about him. Bank­ ruptcies had become common. It was a bad time for a boy to start out to become a businessman, especially if he did not have his heart in it. Heine was taken to Frankfurt and apprenticed, first to a banking house, then to an important grocery dealer. He tells us that he spent three weeks with the first and four with the second, and that he learned how to draft a bill of exchange and what nutmegs look like;7 this is the sum total of what he has to say about the episode. One sight in Frankfurt that gave him something to think about was its cramped, teeming, but important ghetto, the first he had ever seen. By Novem­ ber he was back home. After he had been sitting around in Diisseldorf for a few months, in June 1816 Uncle Salomon took him directly under his wing in Ham­ burg, making the boy an apprentice in his own banking house of Heckscher & Co. Here Harry was obliged to get his nose a little closer to the grindstone, although by now he was full of his sense of himself as a poet and suffered from the contrast with the tedious and banal world of work. The city-state of Hamburg had at this time some 150,000 inhabitants and was growing fast. It was a major commercial center with a cultural and literary life rather diminished from livelier times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the next few years Hamburg was to replace Diisseldorf as Heine's actual home town, but he had little reason to develop any affection for it. His ex­ periences there were mostly unhappy and sometimes humiliating. He conflated his personal affects with a growing hatred for the commer­ cial ethos that pervaded the personality of the city and its inhabitants, so that there came to be a strong private component in his ideological attitudes. For the rest of Heine's life Hamburg was the butt of his satire and scorn. It was a city, he wrote later, governed not by Mac­ beth but by "Banko," where the people looked like walking numerals.8 Yet the move to the bigger city was not without value for him. It be­ gan to urbanize him, and in his mature years many of his major links with family and friends were to that city. Ultimately Hamburg be­ came one pole of his existence, as Paris became the other. In Uncle Salomon's house Heine was able to glimpse some promi­ nent people, the most impressive of whom was Field Marshal Prince Bliicher, the great Prussian general of the Wars of Liberation. He made some new friends in Hamburg, but his most important connec­ tion was his correspondence with a boyhood acquaintance from Diisseldorf, Christian Sethe (1798-1857), son of an old friend of Samson Heine; he later became a Prussian official and politician. It is to Sethe

I. ORIGINS

that Heine's first extant letters are addressed, both in 1816, full of highstrung love lament and complaint about the unpoetic Hamburg environ­ ment. They attended the University of Bonn together and maintained friendly relations for several years afterwards. Heine addressed several intentionally rough-hewn "Fresco Sonnets" to him.9 The next two years are for us the blankest period in Heine's whole life; we know next to nothing about them. How he passed into adult­ hood is wholly lost to us. We do not pick him up again until 1818, when, with evidently indefatigable optimism, Uncle Salomon set him up in business in Hamburg. "Harry Heine & Co." was established as a family dependency, an outlet for unsold English yard goods from Samson's crumbling business in Diisseldorf. This enterprise lasted ten months. The anecdotal literature reports that Heine conducted the business with insouciance, that he often absented himself as the spirit moved him, and that he became quite elusive to his creditors. Such was the story as we have known it until recently. Not long ago, however, a historian of the Jewish merchant community in the Rhineland at this time pursued the matter in more detail and changed our understanding of what happened. He did this by examining the records and the commercial paper, the Wechsel, that circulated in the affair. A Wechsel, a bill of exchange or promissory note, was basically an instrument by which a merchant wrote his own credit. It circu­ lated from hand to hand, discounted, of course, at each transaction, until it returned home for payment. Since the Wechsel was essentially unsecured, its integrity was of the utmost importance for the conduct of commerce. Creditors might well be patient with a certain amount of procrastination, but for a merchant persistently unable to honor his Wechsel when presented to him, or whose Wechsel were regularly protested by third parties on whom they had been drawn, it was The End, commercially and socially. In that segment of society, a man had sooner not been born than fail to make payment on such obligations. By 1818 Samson Heine was confronting this fate. For several years he had been beset by severe cash-flow problems and had been juggling protested Wechsel. His trade in English velveteen and other luxury fabrics was a reasonably good business for good times, but a bad one in bad times, because he dealt in goods that people could easily do without. Furthermore, he had begun to develop symptoms of epilepsy and amnesia by 1814, and worries about his mental competence began to emerge. His wholesale creditors were pressing him, not out of cruelty, but because they themselves were in difficulties and had no choice. In this extremity, Samson in August 1818 apparently hit upon the idea of drawing Wechsel on Harry Heine & Co. Naturally he did

I. ORIGINS

not suppose that his son had any money; it was a device for getting into his brother's pocket. One had to get up a little earlier in the morn­ ing than that to fool Salomon Heine, and he reacted decisively. After paying Samson's creditors, he shut off credit to his business, bankrupt­ ing it; it collapsed in February 1819 and in March Salomon liquidated Harry Heine & Co. as well. He then took steps to have his brother declared mentally incompetent. He insisted on bringing this action be­ fore a court in Hamburg rather than in Diisseldorf, perhaps, as has been argued, because people in Dusseldorf knew Samson and would have been able to attest that he was not as mentally incompetent as Salomon and his associates insisted.10 Whether or not Samson Heine was undergoing irreversible decay by then, this sequence of events finished him. In his fifty-sixth year his manhood was ended. He vegetated for the remaining nine years of his life, a charitable ward of the stronger brother. The family was got out of sight: the house in Diisseldorf was auctioned in 1820 and the family moved to the town of Oldesloe in Holstein, then, in the sum­ mer of 1822, to Luneburg. If this account is correct, as it seems to be, it would explain several things. Heine's silence about this period of his life becomes very un­ derstandable. It cannot be pleasant for anyone to see his father humili­ ated, especially one so loved as Heine's was, or to see him trap himself in something resembling a fraud. It is likely that the elusive proprietor of Harry Heine & Co. was hiding, not from his own creditors, but from his father's, which must have wrenched his heart. Doubtless puzzled, he refused payment on the first of his father's Wechsel pre­ sented to him; then he began his disappearing act, being regularly "out of town" or "not at home" as the creditors called.11 The episode sug­ gests a personal motive for the escalation of Heine's distaste for the commercial life into a profound hatred of the merchant ethos and capitalism. Finally, it raises the question about his true feelings toward his uncle thereafter. Could this be forgiven? I am inclined to think not; later he was to interpret Judas as a banker, remarking: "Every rich man is a Judas Iscariot."12 All the further tergiversations of the rela­ tionship between Heine and his uncle, as well as the family need to suppress his memoirs of this period, can be plausibly interpreted in the light of this sorry episode. Another victim of the crisis was the chimera of Harry Heine, future businessman. It was not difficult for Uncle Salomon to perceive that there was nothing to be achieved on this path, and it was decided that Harry should go to the university to study law. Heine tells a moving story in his Memoirs of his mother selling her jewels for this purpose;13

I. ORIGINS

it is evident, however, that his student years were primarily financed by his uncle, beginning with the grant of a generous annual stipend of 400 talers. Heine also had to deal with the further difficulty that he had not graduated from school. Especially his Latin was not in good shape, a deficiency that was to continue to plague him in his law stud­ ies. He was obliged to take a special entrance examination for admis­ sion to the university, and he spent the summer of 1819 being tutored for it. All this survived and accomplished, he was ready to cross the first major frontier of his life in October.

ii: T H E STUDENT POET Bonn—Göttingen—Berlin Lüneburg—Göttingen 1819-1825

CN

Bonn W H E N Heine arrived at the University of Bonn in the fall of 1819, t^ie

institution was only one year old. A university had been founded there in 1786, but the French had turned it into a lyceum in 1802. The Prus­ sian government refounded it in October 1818 and located it in the beautiful early eighteenth-century palace of the Cologne ElectorBishop Clemens August, to this day the handsomest university campus in Germany. The Prussian purpose was to establish in the Rhineland an academic counterweight to the Napoleonic spirit. It was soon racked by the intensifying conflict between the liberal patriots who emerged from the Wars of Liberation and the restorative and reaction­ ary policies of the German governments. Heine got himself into just that kind of trouble even before he ma­ triculated. On October 18 he took part in a torchlight parade in the mountains to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig. This kind of gathering had been banned the month before by the Carlsbad Decrees, the occasion for which had been the assassination in March of the popular playwright August von Kotzebue, a Russian agent of sorts, by the patriotic student Karl Sand, whose trial and execution in May had aroused much attention and concern in Germany. Conse­ quently the demonstration was investigated by the academic court of the university, which interrogated Heine on November 26.1 This was not trivial, as such matters were beginning to be taken seriously; the vigorously patriotic historian and poet of the Wars of Liberation, Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), from whom Heine was to take an­ cient German history and Tacitus in the winter semester, was banned from teaching in February 1820. Heine turned out to be not much of a witness; it seems that he could remember hardly anything that was said or done during the celebration and, except in one matter in which it was obvious that the court was in possession of the answers to its questions, he named no names. For an inexperienced freshman, he conducted himself well on the occasion, keeping his head and say­ ing no more than he had to. Perhaps the time spent in the world of business had not been wholly without value. The incident may well be taken as evidence of his early devotion to the cause of liberty. But it also shows him adapting himself to the student role, for nothing was more characteristic of the contemporary

II. THE STUDENT POET

German student than this kind of patriotic demonstration. Among his earliest poems are two, both entitled "Germany," that share so much of the patriotic rhetoric of the time to which he later was to be com­ pletely allergic that some observers have doubted he could have writ­ ten them.2 One of them was published in 1822; the other, which goes so far as to praise the King and Queen of Prussia, looks very much like an assigned school exercise. In 1820 Heine joined a student frater­ nity, a Burschenschaft, although these organizations, another out­ growth of the Wars of Liberation, had been declared dissolved by the Carlsbad Decrees. There is nothing remarkable in any of this; patri­ otic enthusiasm was the starting point for just about all the liberals and radicals of this generation. But perhaps Heine made an effort to con­ duct himself like a student because he was already something of an outsider. All accounts of him at this time describe him as a little shabby and a little gauche, tending to remain on the periphery of a conversa­ tion or a gathering, occasionally interjecting a comic or sardonic re­ mark—a kind of behavior that pleased some people better than others. It was early noticed that he did not yield much access to his inner self.3 Subjectively he felt lonely and neglected, and he said later that he had made enemies "with my repellent courtesy and irony and frankness."4" Still, his barbed aloofness cannot have been too extreme, for he had a good many friends and acquaintances in Bonn. Some were home­ town associates, like Sethe and Joseph Neunzig (1797-1877), the fellow demonstrator he had been obliged to name in the interrogation; Neunzig became a physician and a prominent liberal who played a lively role during the 1848 Revolution in Diisseldorf. He was a significant source for Heine's first biographer Adolf Strodtmann. Some were young men who shared Heine's literary interests, like Heinrich Straube (1794-1847), a future lawyer who was already the editor of a literary magazine, and Johann Baptist Rousseau (1802-1867), an aspiring poet who helped Heine with his shaky Latin and greatly endeared him­ self to him by spontaneously praising his pseudonymously published poems.5 Some were persons of future prominence, like Karl Simrock (1802-1876), who was to become one of the outstanding medievalists of his time and, like Heine, a liberal and admirer of Napoleon; the fu­ ture political poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (17981874); and the controversial literary historian Wolfgang Menzel (1798-1873). Some of these relationships were not to turn out well in the long run, as we shall see. But what, from Heine's point of view and our own, was to become the most unfortunate of them was with Friedrich Steinmann (1801-1875), who developed into a repellent Iit-

II. THE STUDENT POET

erary racketeer and forger whose unauthorized publications and fakeries aggravated Heine during his lifetime and created documentary con­ fusion after his death.6 Heine had been sent to the university to study law, and he did so in a desultory way, registering for courses in Roman and German legal history. But his significant educational experiences were in other fields, for history and literature were what he really cared about. Arndt, who was soon to be driven from his position as a patriot to one of perse­ cuted dissident, denounced dusty antiquarianism and ivory-tower scholarship and argued for the responsibility of intellectual work to the imperatives of the time. In the winter semester Heine took Roman law from Karl Theodor Welcker (1790-1869), who was to become a very important figure in southwest German politics. Heine was later much to the left of Welcker's moderate if vigorous liberalism, but in Bonn he was able to hear a reasoned critique of the reactionary His­ torical School of law that he was to confront later in his studies. Re­ cently the importance of the historian and first rector of the university, Karl Dietrich Hullmann (1765-1846) to Heine's education has been made clearer to us. Heine took more courses from him than from any other Bonn professor. He taught ancient history, cultural history, medieval Germanic political theory, and French history. He was an anti-republican, liberal monarchist, and he may have shaped some of Heine's ideas on these matters. He was clearly a continuator of the Enlightenment. He argued for including the fate of ordinary people in historiography; he was critical of the Middle Ages, drawing atten­ tion to its patterns of anti-Semitism and to the extent to which medi­ eval cultural achievements were founded on oppression. His criticism of the history of Christianity may have flowed into Heine's analysis of the origin of repressive doctrines in Christian traditions.7 The newly founded university's great coup had been to acquire Au­ gust Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845), who was, along with his brother Friedrich and Coleridge in England, one of the three great living lit­ erary critics in the world. During Heine's year he lectured on the his­ tory of German language and literature, on the Nibelungenlied, and on metrics, prosody, and rhetoric. Here Heine was introduced to funda­ mental ideas of Romantic literary theory, which he absorbed while altering their stresses. While retaining some of Schlegel's categories, he shifted their orientation from a past to a progressive and future-ori­ ented view of the poetic imagination. In retrospect, in his book on The Romantic School, he gave a fiercely satirical account of Schlegel, scoffing at his airs in the lecture hall and raking up the embarrass­ ments of his private life. At the same time, he remembered being im-

II. THE STUDENT POET pressed by the demonstration that a German poet and scholar did not have to be a shabby, peripheral figure. Schlegel "wore kid gloves and was dressed according to the most recent Paris fashion; he was completely perfumed with high society and eau de mille fleurs; he was delicacy and elegance itself, and when he spoke of the Lord Chancellor of England, he added: 'my friend,' and beside him stood his servant in the most baronial liv­ ery of the house of Schlegel and trimmed the wax candles that burned on silver candelabra that stood on the podium next to a glass of sugar water in front of this wizard. Liveried servant! wax candles! silver candelabra! my friend the Lord Chancellor of Eng­ land! kid gloves! sugar water! what unheard-of things in the lec­ ture room of a German professor!"8 The subsequent cruel treatment of Schlegel was rank ingratitude, for he was Heine's most valuable teacher in Bonn. Schlegel received young Heine graciously and subjected his poetry to helpful metrical criticism. As Schlegel was a vigorous advocate of the sonnet form, Heine appropriately addressed three grateful and admiring sonnets to him, composed in the summer of 1820 and published in a periodical the following spring; one of them was taken into the Book of Songs, though he later made fun of them.9 It is no small matter that this in­ ternationally eminent critic took friendly notice of the efforts of an unknown Jewish student from Diisseldorf. It contributed much to Heine's confidence as a poet, and says something about the poetry as well. In these times practically every literate person wrote verse and published it if he could, if necessary by founding his own periodical. Heine's poetry emerged in a sea of verse, and even though its begin­ nings were derivative and sometimes insecure, observant readers de­ tected a special quality in it at an early stage. In fact his poems began to appear in anthologies even before the Book of Songs was pub­ lished.10 No fewer than seventy-one reviews of his lyrical publications before the Book of Songs have been located.11 The maladroit law stu­ dent malgre Iui was gaining an accelerating reputation as a poet.

The Poetry IT IS not certainly known when Heine began to write poetry. It is doubtful that its beginnings are much earlier than we can see, or that 58

II. THE STUDENT POET

there was a body of early writing unknown to us, for he was not precocious. He himself sometimes dated poems rather earlier than scholars have been willing to accept; the precise dating of his first poems has always been a matter of difficult conjecture. I think this is because the significant beginnings are hidden in that blank space in his life from 1816 to 1818. His first efforts are verses for family occasions of the sort that any well-bred child in the early nineteenth century was able to write; one of them, for his parents' wedding anniversary in 1813, was copied with minor alterations out of a magazine.1 His patriotic verse is remarkable primarily for its exact mimicry of a contemporary fashion. Around the end of his schooldays, however, he got off an effort that fully anticipated one important element of his talent. It is called "Wiinnebergiad, a Heroic Poem in Two Cantos"; its subject is a schoolmate about whom little is known other than that he must have been on the chubby side.2 Composed in what was to be one of Heine's favorite meters, the springy, unrhymed, "Spanish" trochaic tetrameter of Romantic inheritance, it portrays poor Wiinneberg as a piglet being hopefully sent off to school by his doting par­ ents. Crude though the conception may be, it exhibits in embryo Heine's compact verbal and rhythmical skill and his cutting satirical edge. This, however, was for the future. His first and, to some extent, most enduring fame was based on a poetry derived from a different source and moving in a different direction, which we can already see taking shape in the verses in his letters to Sethe of 1816 and his first published poems of 1817, which appeared, oddly, in an anti-Semitic journal, Hamburgs Wachter (Hamburg's Watchman), under the ludicrous pseudonym of "Sy Freudhold Riesenharf," apparently the best anagram he could make out of "Harry Heine Dusseldorff." In attempting to sketch its genesis, it is useful to recall, first of all, where Heine was located in literary history. He came, of course, out of Romanticism, and in gross terms he is often thought of as a Romantic, at least outside of Marxist criticism. He liked to present himself as the last Romantic, at once Romanticism's harvester and gravedigger. But it is important to remember that he was born into a time when literary developments were following upon one another with unusual velocity. By the time he was a youth, the daring, experimental age of Romantic literature was nearing its end in Germany. Wackenroder, Novalis, and KIeist were dead; Arnim had largely withdrawn from literature to wrestle with his country estate; Holderlin was insane; Clemens Brentano was thought by some who knew him to be nearly so. Later Romantic poetry, in its effort to become a nationally more audible and resonating art, fastened upon the folksong and ballad model; it

II. THE STUDENT POET

became formally uninventive and more limited in its resources, more domesticated and less challenging. Some fine poetry is still to be found in this mode, at least where, as with Joseph von Eichendorff, the limited resources remained emblematic of a still intact, generous, tran­ scendental vision, but on the whole its conservatism began to be stifling: simplicity became simple-mindedness, feeling became sentimentality, the articulation of sharable experience became the reiteration of com­ monplaces. The modern frontier of German poetry had shifted else­ where: to Goethe's late symbolism, to the stricter, anti-lyrical meters of August von Platen, to the precise capturing of specific real objects and momentary epiphanies of Eduard Morike. This movement was not very obvious to Heine's time and he never perceived it. Late in life he wrote: "with me the old lyrical school of the Germans came to an end, while at the same time I opened the new school, the modern German lyric."3 While Heine claims support for this view from unnamed literary historians, it was a misapprehension; the poets of the time he acknowledged are now mostly forgotten, while those who are remembered he did not understand. To him poetry was, in its essence, lyrical melody in relatively simple forms, living in a metaphorical world binding feeling to nature by means of the pathetic fallacy, located outside of mundane, unkempt, oppressive reality, and pretty. At the same time he did perceive that poetry so conceived was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain conscientiously. At times he saw himself caught between a fine and admirable but obsolescent art, and a new art born of the age of freedom and emancipation, whose lineaments, however, were not yet visible. Thus he felt himself as an artist in this interim thrown back on his own personal resources; in 1831 he called for "the most self-intoxicated subjectivity, worldunbridled individuality, the divinely free personality with all its love of life."4 But this Dionysiac release of the self, as we shall several times have reason to observe, was not really in Heine's character; at best it was a vision of a far boundary of his imagined self. Out of these dilem­ mas grew the special tensions of the first phase of his poetic career. Heine wanted to be a poet. He associated high dignity and visionary privilege with this calling, and all his life, even in his relatively antiliterary phases, he laid claim to the appellation of poet. But he was heir to traditions about the employability of which he could not be certain. It was interesting and a little ominous that one of his prominent models, the Swabian ballad poet Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862), after the Wars of Liberation began to devote much of his attention to his activity as a deputy in the Wiirttemberg assembly. It seemed that Uhland himself had come to doubt the relevance of an archaizing mode of verse and,

II. THE STUDENT POET

since he knew no other kind of poetry, gave it up. But Heine was not quite ready to do this. In the first place, the poetic dignity was too intimately involved with his aspirations for himself. Secondly, he never got over some degree of commitment to the aesthetically and, in his mind, sensually liberating Utopian vision outside of reality. He was, however, in no sense an idealist. The Romantic options of unifying the real and the ideal or, alternatively, of coming down on the side of the ideal against the real, were not open to him. For Heine the real was real and the ideal was fiction, not vice versa. In this respect he was at one with the avant-garde of his time; in a sense, he was the avantgarde. But since it did not occur to him, at least at the outset, that genuine poetry could be about the real, he was in a quandary that broke the back of Romanticism's striving for a synthesis of self and world, and it contains an element of despair that is never wholly absent from Heine's spirit and is an aspect of the post-Romantic agony in general. It appears to me that it was the experience of frustration in love that supplied the solution, not to the whole dilemma, but to the problem of how poetry might be written at all. Later on, during a creative hiatus, Heine remarked, with one of his not infrequent self-directed cynical gestures, that if he could only arrange another unhappy love affair, he would be a made man.5 But I think that there was truth in the remark. The defeat in love supplied him, so to speak, with the realm of the unreal, insofar as the poetry is about something that did not, would not, could not happen. Thus far it could retain Romantic traditions of emotional longing, imagined harmonies, reintegration, gratification. But by taking the topic of love from its sour and defeating side, he found an instrument for dismantling the internal delusions of late Romanticism. Amorous lament is not a prominent feature of German Romanticism. Love might, of course, encounter obstacles, but primarily it is a unifying force, a metonymy for the longed-for reintegration of man with nature and the universe. For Heine love is a catastrophe, almost a vice. It lures and excites, holding out promises it does not keep, ripping up the fabric of the self. Yet the desire for love is inextinguish­ able; the longing that it might somehow actually be what it feels like, remains. Thus Heine found a way to make the kind of poetry he knew work against itself, restoring aesthetic intensity to a tradition gone soft. The wounded feelings acquire a cutting edge, the broken heart strikes back. If the poet—whether justly or not is of no consequence—felt himself to be hardly treated, he would mete out hard treatment to the beloved. One wonders if there had ever before been a body of love poetry in

II. THE STUDENT POET

which so much accusation is directed toward the beloved, her stupid treachery, her careless malevolence. Thus emerged the special quality of what might be called Heine's anti-Romantic irony. The unity of unalloyed feeling is broken up by his famous Stimmungsbr echung, the sardonic breach of mood, that fascinated and bothered his contem­ poraries. The tone shifts back and forth from the emotional to the conversational, from the delicate to the blunt, the setting from the realm of the imagination to the banal scenes of modern society. It is all true in Heine's poetry: the feeling and the frustration, the hope and the delusion, the desirability of the beloved and her dimwitted cruelty. But there is no mediation between these contraries in the situation. The resolution is the poetry itself. Thus the poetry and what it is doing for the poet are ultimately the subject of the poetry rather than the beloved or the love story. The poet recovers his shaken dignity through the creative achievement. This is the complex internal story of the first ten years of Heine's poetry.6 Not all of this was conscious in his mind. Heine was not much of a theoretician of literature, especially his own. It is remarkable how much of his commentary on poetry is workmanlike, concerned with metrics, rhythm, diction. In fact there is a great deal of meticulous craft in his verse, so much that observers attuned to Romantic intuitive spontaneity have charged him, irrelevantly, with calculating insincerity. His criti­ cal principles were almost exclusively affective. That he was not fully aware of his relation to the Romantic tradition is shown by his percep­ tion of one of his most important models, Wilhelm Miiller (17941827). In 1826 Heine wrote Miiller acknowledging his influence on the poems of Lyrical Intermezzo. "Very early I allowed the German folk­ song to affect me; later, when I was studying in Bonn, August Schlegel opened many metrical secrets to me, but I believe to have found only in your songs the pure sound and true simplicity for which I always strove. How pure, how clear your songs are, and all are folksongs. In my poems, on the other hand, only the form is somewhat folklike, the content belongs to conventional society."7 But Heine did not notice that Miiller had already gone a good part of the way to "conventional society." His pure tone is not folklike but artistic, and his simplicity is not naive but a gesture. Miiller surrounded his famous song cycle, Die schone Miillerin, with an ironic and urbane frame that shows clearly where the poet is standing.8 Heine shared a late Romantic confusion about folk sources and inspiration while actually carrying the artistry and urbanity of Romantic verse to a more explicit conclusion. One of his modern editors, Oskar Walzel, noticed that the examples he most

II. THE STUDENT POET

admired in the famous Romantic anthology, The Boy's Magic Horn (.Des Knaben Wunderhorn), were not original folksongs, but revised and modern texts of the compilers Arnim and Brentano.9 But some scattered comments show that Heine was not wholly unaware of his direction. He scorned phony antiquarianism in poetry; in one youth­ ful book review he remarked: "the author is on the wrong path when he seeks to imitate the folk tone with bumpy lines and crude diction,"10 and in another he required that new forms be modeled out of the folk tradition: it is "insipid" to "cloak the most contemporary material of cultured society with a form that perhaps an honest apprentice had found suitable to his feelings two hundred years ago."11 Retrospectively he called his early poetry "folksongs of contempo­ rary society,"12 and he became a little apologetic when he reverted to the form in the early 1830s: "I know very well that Germany has no lack of such lyric poems. Besides it is impossible to offer something better in this genre than has been delivered by the older masters, especially Ludwig Uhland, who sang forth the songs of love and faith so graciously and charmingly from the ruins of old castles and cloistered halls. To be sure, these pious and chivalric tones, these echoes of the Mid­ dle Ages, which resounded from all sides not long ago in the pe­ riod of patriotic narrowness, are dissipating now in the noises of the most recent freedom struggles, in the din of a general Euro­ pean brotherhood of peoples, and in the sharp painful jubilation of those modern songs that try to fabricate no Catholic harmony of feelings and rather, with Jacobin relentlessness, slice up the feelings for the sake of truth. It is interesting to observe how some­ times one of the two kinds of song borrows from the other the external form. It is still more interesting when both kinds fuse in one and the same poet's heart."13 Sometimes passages like this are cited to argue Heine's emancipation from Romantic conservatism; but they quite clearly show that his aes­ thetics remained not only contradictory but incongruent with his own practice. How insistent he remains that poetry consists of "pious and chivalric tones" echoing in Romantic ruins, while the sound of free­ dom and brotherhood is noise! Yet he would not repudiate poetry. One thing remarkable about Heine's early poetic career is the speed with which he found his way to his own voice from rather groping beginnings. He was much attracted, as he well knew, to the dark, form­ less, even Gothic side of the late Romantic imagination; he endeavored

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at the same time to use and to combat this aspect of his sensibility, which was both personal and epochal, and to turn his vision as far as possible to one of health, coherence, and reason. But he never quite severed the link between the poetic and the demonic, which contin­ ued to be a tension in his mind, probably because contemporary soci­ ety did not appear coherent and hopeful enough to him to allow a realistic commitment. An illustration is one of his earliest forms, the dream poem, a type that was to form the first section of the Book of Songs. Dreams were important to Romantics as visions of the veridical imagination, openings to a higher transcendental unity. Heine uses them differently. His dreams are little dramas of the imagination in which the cause-and-effect linkages of reality are suspended in favor of the juxtaposition of meaningful images. In this respect they resem­ ble real dreams, although they are much more ordered and controlled. But they are not positive revelations. Heine's dreams are nightmares, allegorizing defeat and frustration, the sufferings of the self; and fur­ thermore they always end in waking, in an acknowledgment of the boundary between imagination and reality. A less promising type he called Minnelieder, in reference to medieval German Minnesang. But, apart from the theme of unrequited love, they bear little resemblance to courtly love poetry; rather, they are marked by excessive use of coy diminutives and other ornaments of pseudo-folk Kitsch. By the time Heine published his first volume of Poems in Berlin in 1821, these early efforts had undergone self-critical editing. Conscientious and meticulous revising was a steady habit of his. When only twenty-two he advised Steinmann to revise his own poems: "Do not spare the critical scalpel, even if it is your dearest child that may have been born with a little hunchback, goiter, or other excrescence. Be strict with yourself: that is the artist's first commandment." And he added: "I believe I have often set you an example in this."14 In the Book of Songs the group was largely dismantled, some poems discarded, others sharp­ ened into a less precious diction, and the title Minnelieder replaced simply with Lieder. Well before that, by April 1823, when Heine published his Tragedies with a Lyrical Intermezzo, he had become firm in the mode that would make his name known around the world. This poetry, the foundation of Heine's place in world literature, is not held in high regard in German academic circles today. I shall sug­ gest some reasons for this in my concluding sketch of the history of his reputation. But it may be remarked here that some of his great fame in the world is grounded in misapprehension. This is in consider­ able degree owing to the fact that his poetry was carried out into the world, in his own phrase, "on wings of song."15 His poems began to

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be set to music very early—the first examples we know date from 1822 —and, within a year after the appearance of the Book of Songs, Franz Schubert, in the last year of his life, set six poems of Homecoming in the cycle Schwanengesang (1828). Beginning around 1840, Heine's poems became prime texts for the German art song. It is said that no other poet excepting the Psalmist has been set to music as often as Heine; settings of poems from the Book of Songs alone number close to three thousand.18 Unquestionably this is a significant feature of Heine's standing in the world and not out of keeping with his own intentions; he himself generally denominated his poems Lieder and he showed an interest in having them set to music. But it is possible that the art song has obscured part of the view into his poetry. On the whole, the musical Lied re-lyricizes and re-Romanticizes his verse, for by its nature it elides the spoken and conversational component of Heine's tone. It tends to reimpose sincerity of feeling upon poems in which the truth and reliability of feeling are the very problem; thus it softens the hard edge, smooths out the cross-grained skeptical tension that troubled much of Heine's original public, which often wanted to abstract from him a poetry of sincere, soulful experience while de­ ploring those inextricable gestures by which the poetry calls itself into question. As some popular criticism tried to dismiss or explain away the anti-lyrical, anti-Romantic tension within the poetry and its adversion to the mundane, the flawed, and the social, so the art song tended, with exceptions, to underpin this retrimming of a challenging poetry to a conventional horizon of expectations. Even one who has spent much time with Heine has trouble hearing the "Loreley" in his mind's ear without Friedrich Silcher's melody obtruding its hum and, while the great settings are certainly not as meretricious as this one, they carried the poetry in altered form to the larger public, especially in non-German-speaking lands. This process of reductive reception continues to get in the way of attentive apprehension of the early poetry. Perhaps, as poetry, it is not as important as its popular nine­ teenth-century and international reputation made it out to be. But neither is it a minor achievement, nor was it an immature phase in a career that realized its true vocation elsewhere. Despite Heine's re­ iterated uneasiness about the modern relevance of his lyric mode, he remained proud of the Book of Songs. When approaching these po­ ems, one must put aside aesthetic preconceptions and biases, even Heine's own; then their originality and intensity will yield to a criti­ cal reading. "One should study them," he said to a friend in 1824, "for they are not all that easy to understand."17 There is much reason to agree with him in this; 6S

Essays and Tragedies HOWEVER, young Heine was not content to remain within the lyric mode. Early on he began to experiment in both prose and drama, an indication that his sense of vocation as a writer was growing. Like his first verse, these efforts are groping ones, but they are not without interest for his now accelerating maturation. Especially in this early period of his career, some of our most useful insights into his thinking are found in his minor occasional pieces—little essays and book re­ views—some of them no more than a few pages long. His first essay is, appropriately enough, entitled Romanticism (Die Romantik). It was written in the summer of 1820 in Beuel, where he was relaxing from his university year, and was published in August in the Rheinisch-Westfalischer Anzeiger (Rhenish-Westphalian Adver­ tiser), where many of his poems of this period also appeared. In it Heine is clearly trying to organize his thoughts on his relationship to his literary environment, and we find him still astride a transition. The essay is actually a defense, partly on patriotic grounds, of Roman­ ticism against an attack upon it. Here we find the germs of one of Heine's most fundamental ideas, that Classical antiquity was an era of sensualism and surface objectivity, and that Romanticism, its antithesis, is the literary expression of the Christian Middle Ages. But he has not reached the point where he regarded Christianity as a repressive force crippling the healthy sensuality of antiquity. Rather he identifies Chris­ tianity's dialectical term as love, and he wishes to see modern Roman­ tic poesy as a synthesis of sentiment with "plasticity," that is, contour, dimensionality, tactile reality. True Romanticism is not, he says, "a hodgepodge of Spanish languor, Scottish fogs, and Italian jingling."1 Therefore the two greatest Romantics of the time, Goethe and August Wilhelm Schlegel, are at the same time the most "plastic" writers. This juxtaposition looks a little odd and forced; Heine is actually joining categories that Schlegel had opposed, and Goethe would most decided­ ly not have been pleased to be located in this way. But if we take the essay as an effort on Heine's part to locate himself, it makes better sense. He also occasionally used reviews to clarify his own thoughts. The first of these is a critique of a tragedy entitled Tasso's Death (Tassos Tod), a sentimental imitation of Goethe's Tasso by a friend of Heine's, Wilhelm Smets (1796-1848); the review was published in installments

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in June and July 1821 in a Berlin periodical, Der Zuschauer (The Ob­ server).2 The overlong discussion of this forgotten play is interspersed with a kind of term paper on genre theory, which is on the whole derivative of the accepted aesthetic ideas of the time. It characterizes genres according to their subjective or objective character, constructs a hierarchy of genres in which the lyrical is the most primitive and the dramatic the highest, discusses the differences between ancient and modern tragedy, and ends with an argument for the ethical purpose of poesy of conciliating and humanizing the passions. It is best under­ stood as a meditation on Heine's own dramatic efforts, to which we shall come shortly. In a review of the Rheinisch- r Westfdlischer MusenAlmanach auf das Jahr 1821 (Rhenish-Westphalian Poetical Annual for 1821) we find him taking up another much-discussed aesthetic is­ sue, and here he takes a more progressive stance. For a long time in Germany there was a debate over the status of prose, which cannot be said to have been settled, if then, until the appearance of the Young German critic Theodor Mundt's Art of German Prose in 1837.3 was a clear case of conservative versus modern positions, for the admission of prose as a literary medium implied realism and current relevance. In his review Heine explicitly rejects the view that true literature can only be written in verse and deplores the complete absence of prose in the Almanaeh. 4 Of his other writings of this kind, one more deserves mention, a review published in July 1823 in what became his main Berlin organ, Der Gesellsehafter (The Companion), of two volumes of poetry by his close acquaintance Johann Baptist Rousseau. Here Heine wrote a passage that bears interestingly on his own process of self-creation through literature. "What does a young man want? What does this peculiar excitement in his heart want? What do these evanescent forms want, that now lure him into the human crowd and afterwards into solitude? What do those indistinct wishes, presentiments, and inclina­ tions want, that stretch into the infinite, and disappear and emerge again and drive the young man to a continuous movement? Everyone will answer here in his own way, and since we too have the right to choose our own expression, we shall explain this phenomenon with the words: 'The young man wants to have a history.' "5 Indeed much of the rest of the review seems to be a brief meditation on Heine's own kind of poetry. When he gets down to cases, he does not seem to ad­ mire Rousseau's poems excessively, even though the second volume contained some sonnets praising him. At the end of the review he somewhat discourteously but accurately predicted a breach between the two men later on. The details need not concern us; the main point

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is that Heine detected in Rousseau a chauvinistic nationalism that he himself was beginning to identify as his enemy, and thus the disso­ nance was prophetic of his larger relationship to his contemporaries. Heine's most ambitious experiments in this period were in the drama. George Eliot wittily characterized his effort as the "chicken-pox of authorship."6 But for two reasons this dismissal seems too curt. The drama was the genre of the highest dignity in the literary theory of the time. Complicated philosophical reasons were adduced for this, es­ pecially by Hegel, but the underlying reason is doubtless social. The drama is the most public of the literary arts, and it was the best hope for the burgeoning new intellectual sensibility of the time for escaping its bookishness in order to reach and shape a larger public. For as long as most people then alive could remember, there had been hope for a national theater as an intellectual and moral alternative to political dis­ parateness. For half a century the Germans had been obsessed with Shakespeare, and the eternal model of ancient Greece was always in the background. The most prestigious author of the recent past among the educated class was Friedrich Schiller, whose standing outweighed Goethe's for some decades to come. In attempting to write tragedies, Heine was following a course that he shared with a great many writ­ ers of his age. Secondly, although his two tragedies are flawed and immature, they are by no means hopeless and show that he was not as devoid of dramatic potential as others, and perhaps he himself, may have believed. A while ago I was obliged to read some four dozen German Romantic tragedies, mostly contemporaneous with Heine's or a little earlier, a few a little later. A more ungratifying reading experi­ ence can scarcely be imagined.7 Had Heine thought to measure himself against this context, he might have obtained a better opinion of his abil­ ity and developed it further. It is, however, ironic and even a little comic that the first of his efforts is rather lamed by "Spanish languor" and the second quite full of "Scottish fog." Such circumstances show that Heine's literary thinking and experimenting were a kind of internal argument in his own mind, sorting out his resources and purposes. The first tragedy, Almansor, was begun in the summer of 1820 in Beuel, at the same time that Romanticism was written. In his verse prologue Heine alludes to the argument in that essay: "Romantic is the subject, the form plastic."8 He spent a fairly long time with it, completing it in the following year; in November 1821 he published excerpts in Der Gesellschajter. It is set in Spain after the forced conver­ sion of the Moors to Christianity, and composed in the iambic pentam­ eter of German Classicism. In tone, however, it reverts back to the Sturm-und-Drang, an example of Heine's tendency to reach back to

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traditions antedating the Classical-Romantic period. Its sources are in his reading in Spanish history and an Arabian love story, but the impe­ tus is deeply personal: "I have thrown my whole self into this play," he wrote to Steinmann and Rousseau, "along with my paradoxes, my wisdom, my love, my hate, and all my craziness."9 Almansor is a young Moor unreconciled to Christian duress, and also desperately in love with Zuleima, who tries unsuccessfully to displace his feelings with the concept of Christian love; eventually Almansor abducts her, and together they spring to their deaths from a cliff into a valley of flow­ ers. The play is a catalogue of dramatic conventions: mistaken identi­ ties, switched children, obstructed lovers, intrusive Shakespearian rem­ iniscences; and it is quite static over long stretches. But if one can work up a tolerance for the lushness of its language, one will find it written with a good deal of lyrical energy. The second tragedy, William Ratcliff, is quite different both in its genesis and its character. It was written very quickly in January 1822 and is much more compact in dimension and style. It is also composed in pentameter, but the language is hard and terse, and the action is starkly concentrated. It is set in Scotland; William Ratcliff, who has been refused by his beloved Maria MacGregor, has out of pique been murdering her fiances, but in the action of the play he is defeated in a fight by the current candidate, and the upshot is that he kills Maria, her father, and himself. However, this is not his or anyone else's fault, for the action is manipulated by the ghosts of RatclifFs father and Maria's mother, who were also frustrated lovers and whose ghosts re­ currently reappear in a pantomime of eternal longing; ghosts of the murdered bridegrooms cause Ratcliff's defeat in his fight. It does not take much perspicacity to see that we are here in the realm of lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Gothic, and a mischievous letter of Heine's to the most prominent German Gothic playwright of the time, Adolf Miillner, suggests that Cousin Amalie had challenged him to write something in this mode.10 The whole genre was beneath his dignity, as indeed he obviously knew, since he had denounced the meaninglessness of contemporary fate tragedy in his review of Smets,11 and the result is nonsense. The plays are contemporaneous with the growing corpus of Heine's love poetry and they share its mood of unjustly inflicted pathos and true love defeated by stupid fate and female obstinacy. While this is certainly the central inspiration, there are ancillary aspects to the trag­ edies of more enduring substance. Almansor is an early product of Heine's continuing fascination with medieval Spain and the tragic fate of its Moorish and Jewish populations. There can be little doubt that

II. THE STUDENT POET his Moors are an allegorical figuration of oppressed Jewry, and out of the concern sprang the most stunningly prophetic lines anywhere in his works: "Where books / Are burned, in the end people will be burned as well."12 The comic byplay of social satire interspersed in the tragic plot also points ahead to one of Heine's special gifts. Wil­ liam Ratclijf, too, has its ancillary implications, of which Heine in time was to try to make much. One of the scenes takes place in a robbers' tavern, and the conversation there develops some radical ideas about social inequality. In anticipation of Disraeli and Friedrich Engels, there is talk about the two nations into which the world is divided: the sati­ ated and the hungry, and of the great "soup question" of mankind.13 Some critics have followed Heine in trying to make this scene the real meaning of the play, an interpretation that the text will not bear, but it is an eloquent harbinger of the kind of issue that was increasingly to preoccupy him. Neither of these plays, of course, had any success. Heine lost faith in Almansor even before he finished it and at length repudiated it.14 The Braunschweig theater director Ernst August Klingemann, who later, in 1829, was to premiere Goethe's Faust, tried to stage Almansor in August 1823, but, owing to what appears to have been a misunder­ standing, it was hooted down.15 To William Ratcliff, however, Heine remained perversely loyal. He advertised it in 1831 in the preface to the book containing his reportage on England, arguing that he had given a true picture of the country without having seen it.16 He repub­ lished the play in 1851 with a preface stressing its radical voice, and intermittently tried to get it staged, without success.17 In modern times it has been performed occasionally, and several times it has been made into operas, including one by Cesar Cui in 1869 and one by Pietro Mascagni premiered in 1895, but none of these has had any fortune. Nor were these plays the end of Heine's dramatic ambitions; from time to time he conceived further plans, though nothing came of them. But his time with the two tragedies was not wasted. He learned some­ thing about himself, and he extended himself by attempting, for the first time, full-length works in an established genre.

1*1 Gottingen HEINE had a worthwhile experience in Bonn. He gave at least some attention to his major subject, but he quite willingly pursued others

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that broadened him culturally and intellectually. On the whole, despite his grumbling, Heine's time there was not unpleasant. But when the year was over it was decided that he should transfer to the University of Gottingen. There was nothing unusual about this, for it was until quite recently the custom of German students to attend several univer­ sities one after the other. Furthermore, Gottingen had the best repu­ tation of all German universities, and was regarded by some as the best in Europe. One of its outstanding strengths was the field of law, so that, at least from the point of view of those who were managing Heine's life, it was the obvious choice. Nevertheless, Heine was not enthusiastic about going to Gottingen and, the more he had to do with it, the less he liked it. Gottingen was the university of the Kingdom of Hanover, which since 1714 had been in personal union with the crown of Great Britain. Heine therefore necessarily associated the place with the victor over his hero Napoleon. He had reason to sense in its social atmosphere the international con­ spiracy of haughty restoration in which he always saw England as a major partner. In Gottingen the nobility, bred like horses, in an image Heine constantly applied to them, set a cold and overbearing tone. Later he was to describe how some of these young noblemen, "who studied the humanities," chased on horseback a hired sprinter on a hot humid day as though he were a hunted animal—"and it was a human being."1 Heine had not confronted this kind of aristocratic snobbery before, neither in provincial Diisseldorf, nor in patrician Hamburg, nor in Bonn, where one of his friendly acquaintances had been a Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, to whom one of his early poems is addressed.2 There was no cultural life in Gottingen and little connec­ tion with the modern intellectual spirit. Heine was shocked to discover that the lectures on medieval German poetry by Georg Friedrich Benecke, a seminal figure in the history of German philology, were at­ tended by only nine students.3 Heine not only hated Gottingen; he hated the law. It was a subject that in no way resembled what we in our society might associate with the law: an intellectual discipline with the purpose of making justice as consonant as possible with the most liberal and emancipatory ideas about human relations and the exercise of governmental power. What Heine had to learn was Roman law, case law based on the sixth-century Code of Justinian and its accumulated commentaries. Its relevance to pressing modern issues was difficult to discern. Even this tedium might have been supportable; the crucial odiousness of the subject was theo­ retical. Gottingen was a center of the Historical School of law, one of the modern sciences that owed its impetus to Romanticism. Its concern was to examine legal principles and institutions, not as abstract products

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of reason, but in their historical evolution; it argued respect for the local and community traditions out of which legal principles had evolved. In this respect the Historical School was the German coun­ terpart to Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution, to which it bore much ideological resemblance. This was an outgrowth of Romantic historiography, a facet of the new concern with an unprejudiced inquiry into the past, searching for its intrinsic logic and its continuity into the present. Thus far it was a significant expansion of modern scholarship. But the Historical School was also an ally of counterrevolutionary, restoration politics. By implying that local, organically developed institutions were sounder than principles derived from rational reflection and meditation upon what the human condition could potentially be, it repudiated the ef­ forts of the American and French Revolutions in favor of a justifica­ tion of the political and social status quo in Germany. To the extent that it argued that existing institutions were natural phenomena rather than the historical creations of particular people or classes in favor of their own particular interests, it became less historiography than ideo­ logical mystification. The outcome was that the monarchical, neofeudal, irrationally justified, and repressive constitution of the German states was defended against ideas of democracy, human rights, and the participation of the middle class in the governance of the nation. The ideological function is well illustrated by the fact that this concept of law in the 1850s attracted a good many American southerners to Ger­ man universities, where they sought arguments in support of slavery and against the natural-rights doctrine of the abolitionists.4 Heine was not only repelled by these implications; his exposure to them made his own oppositional rebelliousness more articulate. In retrospect he re­ ferred to Roman law as "the Devil's Bible," a code grounded in des­ potism and the privileges of the rich.5 It was inevitable, therefore, that he should dislike Gottingen. But he was under constraint and was at the outset apparently determined to make the best of it after having matriculated at the beginning of Octo­ ber 1820. Late that month he wrote a letter to Steinmann and Rousseau complaining of his isolation, remarking: "The only good thing one can do here is cram. That is what attracted me here"; and he added a poem beginning: "Cram, German youth."6 He registered for his courses and settled in as a student. But, as we shall see shortly, he more or less unconsciously created a situation that for some time separated him from the uncongenial environment. That Heine was not a radically rebellious student but one who still sought to adapt himself to his environment is shown by his friendly

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contacts with the moderately conservative historian Georg Sartorius (1765-1828), the faculty member with whom he had the best relation­ ship during his first Gottingen stint and to whom he dedicated an encomiastic sonnet and a grateful passage in The Harz Journey.7 Sartorius lectured on history and politics, and, interestingly, on the Constitution and administration of the United States, though he was not a partisan of popular sovereignty. Among the students Heine made an­ other acquaintance who was to become a downright mythic figure in his writings. This was Hans Ferdinand Massmann (1797-1874), who became an important scholar of the German tradition and a vigorous patriotic nationalist. In later years he became for Heine an icon of narrowminded chauvinism. Repeatedly he presented Massmann as a shaggy, filthy, Teutonic lummox and, in satirical derision of Massmann's anti-Western and anti-Classical position, he rang all sorts of comic changes to the end of his life on the, of course, quite unfounded allegation that Massmann knew no Latin. Other circumstances contributed to Heine's ill-humor during this first Gottingen stay. In November 1820 he offered a volume of poems to the Leipzig publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, but it was re­ jected.8 Around the same time he seems to have been expelled from the student fraternity. An unfriendly tradition of later times relates that this occurred on the ground of unchastity, an odd reason for stu­ dents to discipline one of their own, but one that suggests the increas­ ing pomposity of these organizations.9 More recent researches make it seem likely that Heine was expelled on anti-Semitic grounds, the consequence of a policy that was a reflex of the national chauvinism that had become the trademark of the Burschenschaften.10 Then came the depressing news of Cousin Amalie's engagement to the acceptable landowner John Friedlander. It was just at this time that Heine created the tangle that emanci­ pated him from Gottingen for a while. He got into an argument with a student named Wiebel and challenged him to a duel in early Decem­ ber. While duels are a feature of the lives of a number of major Euro­ pean writers of the nineteenth century, Heine's recurrent involvement in them is still an odd item in his character, for generally he was an upholder of rational and civilized values, to which the duelling ethos of the time, especially as it developed in German universities, certainly did not belong. At first it may have been another symptom of at­ tempted adaptation to the student sub-culture, for duelling, at least with pistols, had been forbidden by the German governments—one of the few sensible and humane things they did in this period—and within the university there were conflicting messages about the value of the

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"honor" code. It is reported that Heine already had had a saber duel in Bonn, to avenge an anti-Semitic remark.11 But it was not just a student folly; duels recur in Heine's life well into middle age. Three years after he had left the university he wrote that duelling was "a flower of beautiful humanity."12 It is not exactly known how many duels he became involved in during his lifetime, as some are known only from rumor and others were deflected by nego­ tiation. But the record indicates at least ten such affairs. As we shall see, he fought a serious duel at the age of forty-three, and he seems to have been close to another at forty-six. In fact, it seems that only his physical incapacitation put an end to the habit. It is evident in Heine's writings that courage occupied a high place in his hierarchy of values, and that furthermore he rather tended to associate it with pugnacity. A good many people who knew or observed Heine did not consider him very brave, and, although this kind of judgment is always hard to separate from the atmosphere of defamation surrounding his repu­ tation, he was nervous by nature and sometimes inclined to be very concerned about his personal safety. The readiness to duel therefore suggests a kind of compensatory behavior. Since he was also by nature touchy and easily angered, the duel was a device for asserting himself when he felt himself excessively ill-used, and threatening duels at times became an element of his public strategy. In any case, the duel with Wiebel did not come off. The authorities got wind of it, and Heine and Wiebel were confined to their rooms. A series of sessions before the academic court followed, during which Heine extracted a half-hearted apology from Wiebel.13 There the mat­ ter seemed to have rested at the end of the year, but in January 1821 Heine received the consilium abeundi, the "advice to leave," for half a year; Wiebel was also rusticated and given two weeks in the student prison to boot. In February Heine wandered back to Hamburg to con­ sult with his uncle about what was to be done now. It was decided to send him to Berlin. Because of this decision, the incident, which seemed to have derailed his academic career and cannot have pleased the family very much, turned out to have fortunate consequences for him.

in Berlin OF ALL the great cities of Europe, Berlin is the least ancient. When Heine arrived there toward the end of March 1821, it might well have

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been perceived as a new city, as much of what was to be seen there had been recently built. Its accelerating evolution from a small town of river commerce to a great metropolis paralleled the evolution of Brandenburg-Prussia from a poor and peripheral land to a world pow­ er. In the middle of the seventeenth century Berlin had barely 10,000 inhabitants; the number had risen to 70,000 by the beginning of Fred­ erick the Great's reign, and by 1816 it had reached nearly 200,000. Its growth throughout the nineteenth century continued to be phenom­ enal. Nor was its university very venerable. It had been opened in 18 io as a substitute for the University of Halle, which Prussia had lost to Napoleon's Kingdom of Westphalia; it was one of the most signifi­ cant outgrowths of the brief Prussian age of reform. By Heine's time it had become a major modern intellectual center; in retrospect we can see that it was much more vibrant and significant for the future than Gottingen with its staid conservatism. Like anything at that time full of the life of the mind, the university was the object of government worry and suspicion. It was kept under close surveillance; lectures were overseen, and professors were not supposed to extemporize but to stick verbatim to their lesson plans.1 Heine's involuntary removal to Berlin was another big step into the wider world. Larger than Hamburg at the time and a great deal more urbane culturally, Berlin provided his first real introduction to modern European civilization. Here he could experience at first hand the newest fashions in the theater and the opera; here he could encounter some of the leading writers, thinkers, and scholars of Germany; here he could observe the social life of an important capital and hear talk of something other than making money or Justinian's Code. Although he had been relegated from Gottingen for only six months, he stayed in Berlin for four full semesters. Heine continued to attend law courses but found little to give him much encouragement. One of his professors was Friedrich Karl von Savigny (1779-1861), a scholar of high standing with great erudition in Roman law and one of the major figures of the Historical School. He was married to a sister of Clemens Brentano and had close ties both to the Romantics and to high government circles in Prussia. He was, certainly, an estimable figure, but he was profoundly conservative as well as hostile to the Jews; he could not appeal to Heine, who spoke with distaste of his obtrusive piety and his Teutonic pose despite his French ancestry.2 The other law professor, Theodor Schmalz (17601831), was a blustering reactionary whom Heine regarded with con­ tempt. Later he recounted that while dozing in one of Schmalz's lec­ tures, when the professor began fulminating against human rights, his feet instinctively began to tap out French revolutionary marches.3

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Otherwise Heine was exposed to a remarkable collection of men at the forefront of their respective fields. Classical civilization was taught by Philipp August Bockh (1785-1867), one of the great systematizers of modern scholarly method, whose influence was felt well into our own century. Heine could learn about the new science of linguistics and Sanskrit literature from the outstanding Indo-Europeanist of the time, Franz Bopp (1791-1867). There was the most inventive and seminal theologian among the Romantic intellectuals, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), and a major political scientist and his­ torian, Friedrich von Raumer (1781-1873). From an elderly and oldfashioned but humane classicist, Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), Germany's leading Homer scholar, Heine was able to get an insight into Aristophanes and the employment of personal satire in illustration of large principled issues; Aristophanes became a major figure in his personal pantheon of literary forebears.4 Then there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). The relationship to Hegel is one of the most contentious questions in all Heine scholarship. The reason for this is the involvement of the current interest in Heine with the widespread revival of Marxism among West German intellectuals and scholars, one of the components of which has been a renewed emphasis on Marx's philosophical roots in Hegel and therefore on Hegel himself. In 1952 Georg Lukacs began what has become a series of quite elaborate efforts to present Heine as the historical intermediate term between Hegel and Marx.5 In this scheme Heine is seen as the quintessential Young Hegelian, operating the crucial disjunction of the progressive from the conservative ele­ ments in Hegel's thought, and more than any of his contemporaries carrying them forward into a new radicality of dialectical analysis and revolutionary vision that anticipates and may possibly even have in some degree influenced the young Marx. In order to make the scheme plausible, it is necessary first of all to try to show that Heine absorbed a significant influence from Hegel in Berlin, an endeavor in which Heine himself gives us very little aid. Long and difficult monographs have been written on this question, many of which I confess I regard with considerable skepticism. It appears to me that there were actually two stages in Heine's Hegel reception, one in Berlin and another in the 1840s during his most radical phase. In 1843 he refers to Hegel-as "my great teacher,"6 and in the same year he confessed that it had been his error to have regarded Hegel as a conservative loyal to the state; now we can see the "most liberal" doctrine hidden in his scholastic form;7 in other words, it is here that Heine is taking a Young Hegelian position. Since around the

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same time, in a discussion of penal theory, Heine quotes Hegel's views on that subject,8 it looks as though he may have been reading some Hegel in the early 1840s. In his student days and in the 1830s his reaction was different. He gives no evidence of really studying Hegel; in a letter from Berlin he said that he had "read a little in Schelling and Hegel."9 His adversions to Hegel are fleeting and anecdotal as well as rather dismissive. The most comic of these anecdotes, related, to be sure, a decade later, has Hegel on his deathbed, saying: " 'only one person has understood me,' but he added at once peevishly: 'and he didn't understand me either.' "10 The odd fact is that Heine put up a rather Romantic resistance to Hegel, opposing poetic intuition to what he perceived as abstract and mechanical systematizing. In a fanciful dialogue with a philosophical lizard near the beginning of The City of Lucca, the poet speaks of the cold and abstract figures of Hegel's thought, arguing that his doctrine is basically the same, in different form, as Schelling's, to whom Heine, incidentally, elsewhere referred to as "Confusius." The narrator speaks of "the learned caravansary at Berlin, where the camels gather around the well of Hegelian wisdom" ("camel" in German can mean "dunce"); the lizard, for his part, dis­ misses human thought and claims that the only true philosophy is found in hieroglyphics on his tail.11 Hieroglyphics, as the code of nature accessible only to intuition, are a familiar Romantic topos, and Heine appears here to give them the advantage over systematic phi­ losophy. In a sonnet written in Berlin, he demands an escape to Romantic India from "Berlin, with its thick sand / And thin tea and over-clever people, / Who have comprehended God and the world and what they themselves signify / Long since with Hegelian under­ standing," and in 1838 he called Hegel "the circumnavigator of the intellectual world, who has fearlessly advanced to the North Pole of thought, where one's brain freezes in abstract ice."12 Heine knew Hegel personally, but this is not remarkable, for in those times there was regular social intercourse between students and professors. The most significant anecdote that Heine records from these encounters he did not publish: Hegel's alleged remark that the famous phrase, "what is, is rational," could as well be expressed as "what is rational, shall be," or "ought to be" (the German allows both transla­ tions).13 Some experts on Hegel have found this hard to credit,14 and it seems rather that Heine was here suggesting an early formula for the characteristic Young Hegelian extrapolation of Hegel's conserva­ tism into a progressive or radical doctrine. Late in life Heine claimed that he had spent two years on a book about Hegel, but had burned the manuscript when some of his own philosophical views had undergone

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a reversal.15 This is very mysterious; Heine keeps us pretty well posted on the progress of his writing and his plans in his letters, and there is nowhere any hint of such a work. It is not easy to conceive what it might have contained, given his usually anecdotal or summary way of treating technical philosophical matters. At the same time, his vigorous repudiation of Hegel in the latter part of his life implies a stronger in­ volvement than had theretofore been evident on the surface. It is not even certain what lectures by Hegel Heine attended. Dur­ ing the four Berlin semesters Hegel lectured on logic and metaphysics (twice), philosophy of religion, anthropology and psychology, philos­ ophy of right, and philosophy of world history. The only course for which we have a record of Heine's attendance is the last, in the winter semester of 1822-1823. probable that he attended the philosophy of religion in the summer semester of 1821 and, as one of his law courses, the philosophy of right in the winter semester of 1821-1822.16 Some commentators assume that he also had some acquaintance with Hegel's aesthetics, but to what extent and just how he acquired it is very unclear; the lectures were not given in Heine's time and were published posthumously more than a decade later. It is hard to imagine that Heine had the equipment for the logic and the metaphysics, which are among the most awesomely difficult parts of Hegel's system. In Heine there is no obvious echo of Hegel's ontology, his anthropology, his doctrine of the dialectic of the self and the other (which Heine in his self-enclosure would have had difficulty apprehending), or of the self and the community, except insofar as Heine in a minor way shared the Romantic nostalgia for unalienated community. In fact, anyone without an ax to grind must wonder how well Heine would have been able to cope with Hegel at all. Hegel's incomprehensibility was pro­ verbial among students, although it was intermittently illuminated by bold metaphors and striking formulations, and to this day he offers challenging difficulties to the most profoundly trained philosophers. Heine himself said late in life that "I seldom understood him, and only through subsequent reflection did I come to an understanding of his words."17 That understanding, however, was largely of Heine's own manufacture. But just because Hegel is so desperately difficult, his great influence on that generation cannot have depended entirely on the ability com­ pletely to master his philosophy. His general impact seems to me to have been primarily twofold. First of all, he gave dynamic meaning to history. This was important at a time when the eschatological signifi­ cance attributed to history by religion was losing its power to convince.

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On the one hand, Hegel's philosophy protected against falling into a pessimistic view of history as meaningless: a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel, as Horace Walpole had put it in the eighteenth century. Hegel's view of history had aspects both of tragedy and of a kind of secularized divine comedy, but the important thing was that history had direction, even if its progress looped heli­ cally through the dialectic. Furthermore, this view of history clearly offered some hope for relief from the static torpor of the restoration system, which Heine described as "nothing but owls, censorship edicts, prison stench, novels of resignation, changing of the guard, bigotry, and imbecility," and retrospectively as "everywhere stagnation, leth­ argy, and yawning."18 Although Hegel eventually appeared to be the philosopher of the Prussian status quo, many of his followers construed him differently and perhaps more logically. Heine himself said that Hegel became a protege of the Prussian government because it just did not understand him.19 It is a great help to any kind of social and political purpose to be able to believe that time and history are allies. The dynamic of Hegel's view of history was therefore a source of encouragement. One of the most thoughtful modern observers of Heine has remarked in this connection that he "came across philoso­ phies—and an age . . .—which insisted that potentials . . . are superior to everything that exists," but he goes on to make the important point that Heine was not able to maintain a persistent faith in the ultimate resolution of disharmony in history.20 Hegel's other important contribution to the general intellectual mood was his postulation of the governance of the historical dialectic in the absolute spirit. This doctrine cut the link of philosophy to reli­ gious dogma without falling into what the Germans perceived as Voltairean sacrilege. The Romantic heritage left the Germans disinclined to materialistic doctrines, and Hegel seemed to have reconciled ideal­ ism with reason. The world was still governed by spirit, even if this spirit were in some convoluted way immanent in concrete reality. The breakdown of the Christian order had threatened the alienation of the individual from history and the moral order; for Hegel the individual is restored as an element in an intelligible historical flux. Against the secular individualism that had been a keynote of Goethe's thought and that in Western societies seemed to be atomizing the community, cut­ ting the traditional ties that had previously served for objective selfdefinition and that under capitalism seemed to be leading to a state of every man's hand raised against the other, Hegel offered a concept of freedom that involved self-realization through acculturation and so-

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cialization in the larger community. Thus conservative and progressive desiderata were neatly balanced at a time when it appeared that noth­ ing could be made to happen in the external world. As unsystematic as Heine's mind may have been, he was acutely sensitive to trends in the intellectual environment, and he made com­ mitted choices among them. It is not necessary to pore over his works searching for utterances consonant with Hegel's views to see that he belonged in a general way to the Hegelian generation. An illustration of Heine in transition between Hegel and Marx in his definition of the causes of revolution: "When the intellectual culture of a people and the mores and needs derived from it are no longer in harmony with the old institutions of the state, it gets into a necessary struggle with the latter, which has their reshaping as a consequence and is called a revolution."21 Among the crucial terms of his thinking was his reiter­ ated allegiance to the "idea." Heine was not an idealist, but neither was he a materialist—a term that he associated with a soulless and mechani­ cal French rationalism. He was a kind of immanent transcendentalist— the "idea" is in some not wholly defined sense the product of the most enlightened human strivings and is therefore a progressive and eman­ cipatory force, to which the poet, incidentally, has the clearest access. "We do not take hold of the idea," he wrote; "the idea takes hold of us."22 Once he argued that Napoleon fell because he reconciled prag­ matic interests, not ideas.23 Facts, he wrote, are the results of ideas, and doctrines are always formed to suit human "renunciations or needs."24 These are clearly habits of German thinking associated with the age of Hegel. Heine's efforts to reconcile the dualities of body and soul, spirit and nature, also have analogues in Hegel.25 While Heine shared the feeling that the motion of history has pro­ gressive meaning and was right then at a crucial juncture, he was also resistant to determinist implications that sacrificed the present to the future. Sometime in the early 1830s he mulled over this dilemma in a little unpublished essay that Strodtmann entitled Dijfering Perception of History (Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung), in which he rightly associated the cyclical model of eternal recurrence with con­ servative and reactionary ideology, and the helically progressive mod­ el, which places the Golden Age before us rather than in the past, with rationality and humanitarianism. Interestingly, Heine finds both pat­ terns uncongenial, arguing for the rights of the present and a view of life "neither as an end nor a means" but a "right." "Le pain est Ie droit du peuple, said St. Just, and that is the greatest word spoken in the whole Revolution."26 This little essay, brief and sketchy as it is, tells

II. THE STUDENT POET us much about the realistic side of Heine's reaction to philosophy of history. To anticipate somewhat, it might be remarked here that what did separate Heine from most of his Young Hegelian contemporaries and later linked him with Marx was his persistent refusal to see any hopeful aspect or potential in the existing order of things. In his personal con­ duct he might intermittently make efforts to arrange himself with it, but he was never tempted to seek any theoretical recourse to salvage­ able values in contemporary German civilization. This uncompromis­ ing moral and political negativism greatly burdened his relationship to his liberal contemporaries, but it has made him appear more prophetic and wakeful to many modern observers. They, in turn, have sometimes failed to see that his refusal of hope in existing institutions came in time to extend to the future as well.

Valuable Connections IN BERLIN, Heine's life outside the university was fully as important as his academic experiences. Shortly after his arrival he sought out a pro­ fessor in the Academy of Arts, Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz (17861870), who was, among other things, the publisher of the respected periodical, Der Gesellschafter. A series of Heine's poems as well as the first segments of Almansor promptly began to appear in it. Der Ge­ sellschafter continued to be a major vehicle for his work throughout the Berlin period, and Heine praised Gubitz vigorously in print, al­ though he became rather exasperated with the professor's editorial practices and devised the verb "to gubitz" to designate unwelcome emendation and blue-pencilling.1 But Gubitz liked Heine at first and did him an important service: he found a publisher, Friedrich Maurer, for the volume of poems that had been rejected by Brockhaus. En­ titled simply Poems (Gedichte), it appeared three days after his twen­ ty-fourth birthday, on December 20, 1821, with the imprint 1822, and contained the immature versions of the poems that, after much revision and rearrangement, were to form the first sections of the Book of Songs. Heine earned nothing from this publication other than forty free copies, one of which he speedily dispatched to Goethe, declaring his love and kissing Goethe's "holy hand."2 But it was a visible mile-

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stone in his accelerating literary career. It received a good deal of notice in the press, not without the author's assistance; he urged his acquaintances to write friendly reviews. A few weeks after his arrival Heine made an even more important connection. He obtained entree to the salon of Rahel and Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. Such salons were the hub of private social life in Berlin. Since they were often presided over by well-married Jewish ladies, they lay partly outside the social caste system and could there­ fore provide a meeting place for lively minds, whether of the middle class or the aristocracy. Their ambience of mannerly but spirited con­ versation provided a nurturing shelter for people of modern ideas and spirit, for which public life in Prussia had little use. They were the place to be for a young man from the provinces ambitious for intel­ lectual and literary contacts. The Varnhagen salon was then the most important of them, and its soul, Rahel, was and is regarded as one of the most interesting women of her time. Rahel Varnhagen, nee Levin (1771-1833), was fifty years old when Heine met her. She had never been very pretty, but by all accounts she combined a vivacious and charming manner with great seriousness, and she exercised exceptional personal magnetism upon equally lively, intelligent, and serious persons. Her mind was strongly engaged with the finest in contemporary German culture and she developed an al­ most idolatrous admiration for Goethe; at the same time she grieved at the disability she felt at being Jewish. Her younger years had been scarred by stressful and disappointing emotional relationships until her marriage in 1814 to a medical student fourteen years her junior pro­ vided her with at least some external equilibrium. He loved and ad­ mired her boundlessly and was desolated by her death after nineteen years of marriage;3 once he compared her to Jesus Christ and Spinoza.4 The sensitive, troubled, highstrung person that emerges from Rahel's diaries and private writings does not seem to be the woman Heine knew in Berlin. Rather, she appeared as a finely tuned lady of civilized society who exerted a friendly and stabilizing influence upon him. Young Heine was something of a bear in society, and Rahel's disci­ pline helped to polish his manners a little; she also made it quite clear to him that a tolerably enthusiastic attitude toward Goethe was ex­ pected if he wished to have the full benefit of her company. He was profoundly grateful and expressed his feelings to her with unwonted graciousness; her death in March 1833 grieved him and he published a memorial to her in the second edition of the Book of Songs.5 Their relationship was not without its ripples, however; when in 1826 he dedicated a poem cycle to her without asking permission, she was

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greatly pained, for she was not wholly edified by his lyrical manner.6 As valuable a support as Rahel was at this moment in Heine's life, in the long run it was less important than the connection with her husband, who is not an easy person to assess. Karl August Varnhagen (1785-1858) was born, like Heine, in Dusseldorf; the aristocratic "von Ense" was self-conferred, though retroactively legitimized. History has not always given him a good press, though from our point of view there is a good deal to be said in his favor. From 1815 to 1819 he served in the Prussian diplomatic service, but was eased out for his democratic sympathies, though he continued to perform special tasks and missions from time to time. Thereafter he occupied himself with memoirs of current events and literary criticism, which in time formed a quite large oeuvre. Much of his criticism was written for the Hege­ lian Jahrbucher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik (Yearbooks of Scholarly Criticism, which despite its title was a daily). He acquired something of a reputation as a gossipy old woman, though in retrospect his mali­ cious view of the society and politics of the Prussian court, which in the late nineteenth century aroused anger, seems to us just and informa­ tive. Goethe called him the "German Plutarch," an appellation often dismissed in his time.7 He was strongly sympathetic to the Jews and their significance for liberalism. He was certainly a liberal himself, though just as certainly one of an exceedingly cautious and pacific kind. Still, the studied diplomacy of his tone cloaked sharp challenges to authority; during the 1848 Revolution he moved, unlike others of his generation, sharply leftward.8 The point is that it was just this mix­ ture of qualities that made him a useful person for the more rambunc­ tious and intrepid younger writers to know. He regarded them with genuine if troubled sympathy, restrained by his strong allegiance to Goethe, and, if his advice was usually to moderation, it was often sus­ taining and sometimes helpful. He knew many people in high places in the Prussian capital and elsewhere, and, while his influence was not great, he regularly interceded to ease the lot of the harried oppositional writers, for example, in 1836 with a memorial addressed personally to Metternich, a diplomatically left-handed defense of them.9 With Heine he shared an orientation on the ideals of the French Revolution, a persistent distaste for German nationalism, and a strong interest in the Saint-Simonian movement. Heine's relationship with him had its ups and downs, but it lasted to the end of his life; they exchanged more than seventy letters and Varnhagen was the one person in Berlin to whom he turned when he needed help. In the first part of Heine's ca­ reer Varnhagen wrote carefully formulated but admiring reviews of all his works, a service of great importance.

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Another valuable connection Heine made during the Berlin period was with Karl Immermann (1796-1840), a Prussian legal official in Magdeburg and a writer of modest but genuine talent who struggled for years to find his appropriate genre. Like others of his generation, he was mesmerized by the theoretical standing and public potentialities of the drama, and he wrote many plays, most of which are barely re­ membered even by literary historians of the period. In later years he was transferred to Diisseldorf, where he tried manfully to maintain a theater of high literary standards. His true vocation was realistic satire, which he eventually realized in two ingenious novels, The Epigones (1835-1836) and Miinchhausen (1838-1839),10 after which promising beginnings he unexpectedly and lamentably died at the age of fortyfour. Immermann was a kind, well-intentioned, witty, and intelligent but somewhat insecure man of what one might call liberal-conservative views. His loyalty to Prussia was strong and he was not in any vigorous sense a democrat, but he greatly disliked nationalistic obscurantism— which got him into difficulties with the Romantics—and he was a mordant critic of social conditions. It has been aptly said of him that his satirical sense was grounded in the contradiction between the real and the ideal, but in favor of the real against idealistic illusion.11 At the end of May 1822 Immermann published in the RheinisehWestfalischer Anzeiger a thoughtful and very sympathetic review of Heine's Poems;12 he ascribed their joylessness to the opposition of genius to the insensitive world about him. Heine thirsted for recogni­ tion and appreciation; when he read this review in the following month, he wrote to a friend that he had nearly been moved to tears by it.13 It is not clear that he had heard of the man before this, but he began to read around in Immermann's works, and just before Christ­ mas he wrote him a grateful but also frank and critical letter.14 Immermann evidently responded at once, mentioning that he was in need of a publisher and asking Heine's aid. To this end Heine rectified Varnhagen's originally cool opinion of him; the result was a connection with Brockhaus, and the Varnhagens began to recognize Immermann as an ally. From these beginnings there developed for several years a correspondence with Immermann that includes some of Heine's most communicative letters. There is strong evidence that in 1826 Heine wrote a positive review of Immermann's theoretical work on Soph­ ocles, but it has never been found.15 It is worth noting that Heine met Immermann only once, visiting him in Magdeburg during the first week of April 1824. His personal relations often functioned best at a distance and through correspond­ ence. Though Immermann was the slightly older and the more expe-

II. THE STUDENT POET rienced man, he quickly yielded the initiative in the relationship to Heine, who felt himself already wise enough to prepare him for the tribulations of a struggling writer: "After the publisher's scorn and the spitting-in-the-face comes the tea-party scourging, the thorncrowning of stupidly clever praise, the literary-magazine crucifixion between two critical thieves—it were not to be borne if one didn't think of the final ascension!"16 Tractable by nature, Immermann ap­ parently accepted Heine's creative superiority and became the junior partner in a literary alliance. Thus he was a hard person to quarrel with, and the relationship thrived for quite some time; while it faded after Heine's move to Paris, in the difficult intervening years it was valuable to have had such a sympathetic friend, and he was grieved at the news of Immermann's untimely death, calling the conservative satirist his "old brother in arms."17

ALL through Heine's Berlin period his poetic corpus continued to grow. Poems appeared singly and in groups in a variety of periodicals. In April 1823 his second collection appeared, Tragedies with a Lyrical Intermezzo (Tragodien nebst einem Lyrischen Intermezzo). The tragedies were soon forgotten, but the group of sixty-six poems he placed between them was the first concentrated appearance of the poetry that was to make his name known in every corner of the world. Again he did what he could for the book's fame, sending copies to family and friends and a number of literary figures, including Goethe, Wilhelm Muller, Tieck, and the Danish Romantic Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager. At the same time, however, his attention was gradually but systematically turning to prose. Owing to his orientation on lateRomantic verse models and his conception of poesy as a realm of the unreal, verse no longer seemed to him an adequate medium of expres­ sion as his experience of the social and political world expanded and his own position regarding it began to take shape. He had written to Immermann, with a hyperbole today too often misunderstood as his whole meaning, that "poesy is, after all, only a beautiful irrelevancy." But he was quite serious about employing his writing in a "holy strug­ gle" against "obsolete injustice, the dominant foolishness, and the bad."1 He began to adumbrate this program in two prose works that can

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be regarded as preliminaries to the great sequence of Travel Pictures initiated a couple of years later. They do not yet fully exhibit the par­ ticular mixture of essay and fiction, public satire and personal imagina­ tion, that makes most of the Travel Pictures such remarkable compo­ sitions; they are essayistic, even journalistic in nature. But they foreshadow Heine's characteristic tendency to symbolize particular per­ ceptions into general critical observations, and they display the excep­ tional stylistic ease, now comic, now satirical, now wry, that matured early in his writing career and that shows him, as always, more adroitly confident and comfortable in the act of creation than he normally was in the conduct of his everyday life. The first of these was a set of Letters from Berlin (Briefe aus Ber­ lin). Heine originally offered such a project to Brockhaus. But he made the mistake of choosing as go-between a man named Klindworth, who was secretly an agent provocateur and police spy. Eventually Heine communicated directly with Brockhaus, but nothing came of it.2 In­ stead, the letters were published anonymously in installments from February to July 1822 in the Rheinisch-Westfdlischer Anzeiger; Heine was quickly identified as the author. The paper was published in Hamm, a little more than fifty miles from Dusseldorf, so that Heine was reporting back to a home-country audience. The Letters are a mosaic of impressions of public and cultural scenes in the bustling city, seen, characteristically, from the threshold of events; Heine takes on here the role of a flaneur, almost a tourist, reflecting his pastimes in restaurants, theaters, and salons. He dashes dizzyingly from one mat­ ter to another—"association of ideas," he explains, "shall always pre­ dominate"—3 and even by his standards the tone is exceptionally light and shifted toward the comic aspect of things. The frothiness, how­ ever, appears to an extent as a device to cut down to size the fashions and pomposities of the Prussian capital and also as a frosting on the critical undertone that rose ever closer to the surface in the writings of the 1820s. He captures well the hypertrophic public life of court ritual, theater, and opera, the circuses that distracted the populace from concern with its oppressed condition. A large portion was given over to the wedding of a Prussian princess. Heine comments on the love of Berliners for their royal family and treats it respectfully himself, though the stress on the overwhelming luxury of the occasion suggests a critical implication. His cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist sentiments are already in evidence, and, unlike more cautious writers, he was not hesitant about referring to personalities by name. In fact, one of these, a Baron von Schilling, took serious offense and Heine was driven to a public apology to escape a delicate situation.4 It is probably because

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his attitude was rapidly becoming more critical and threatened a con­ frontation with the Prussian censorship that the letters broke off abruptly, even though Heine had planned continuations. He had al­ ready been annoyed by censored passages that in places had made non­ sense of the text. In retrospect he did not seem to think much of this first reportorial effort. When he included the Letters in the second volume of the Travel Pictures in 1827, he cut the text by three-quarters and revised the rest, leaving a remnant, in modern format, of some twelve pages. He retained one of the most comic passages: his helpless exasperation at the ubiquity of the "Song of the Bridal Wreath" from Weber's Freischiitz, which had been premiered the year before, a tune that had evidently become as inescapable and nerve-wracking as a modernday hit song. However, even this fun had its oblique political implica­ tions. There was a conflict in Berlin between the popular Weber and the court-sponsored Gasparo Spontini. In an action typical of the style of government of the time, King Frederick William III banned criti­ cism of Spontini,5 and Heine's amusing passage was very likely in­ tended to call attention to Weber as the people's choice. In later edi­ tions of Travel Pictures II the Letters were deleted altogether. The second of the Berlin essays, On Poland (Ueber Polen), which appeared anonymously in Der Gesellschafter in installments in January 1823, was more serious in manner; it was the first of his works to be derived from an actual journey. The opportunity to visit Prussian Poland had come through a young Polish nobleman, Count Eugen (or Eugeniusz) von Breza (1802-1860), a student who did rather more carousing than studying; when his erotic and political adventures had attracted the attention of the police, he fled Berlin in March 1822. Like many of his compatriots, Breza had a difficult life. His participation in the lost cause of Polish independence in the 1830s landed him in exile in Paris, where he wrote a number of liberal works in French, German, and Polish, including a book on outstanding Jews throughout history.6 He was very hard up and several times appealed to Heine for loans. Like many of Heine's personal relationships, that with Breza is not very transparent to us in its details, but they must have been good friends in Berlin, for Heine addressed a comic and epicurean poem to him, later included in the Book of Songs,7 shortly after his flight, and at Breza's invitation he spent most of August and September 1822 vis­ iting the estates of Breza's father and relatives, passing a good deal of time in the provincial capital of Posen (Poznan) as well. Much of On Poland has a fairly innocent surface; Heine talks about the Polish and German theater, the beauty of Polish women and the

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gaiety of their dancing, the state of learning and literaure. But Poland was a touchy topic for both the Prussian regime and the German na­ tionalists. Like most German liberals and radicals of his generation, Heine was later to be moved to bitter pathos by the suppression of the Polish uprising in 1830-1831.8 In his essay he was clearly attempting to weigh the potential for modernity in Poland and to analyze its soci­ ological structure. He admired the good cheer and "Ossianic feeling for nature" of the peasantry,9 at the same time stressing its filthy des­ titution and exaggerated servility toward the nobility. He endeavored to understand the historical character of the aristocrats and their fierce desire for national independence. The nobility presented a problem for all liberals interested in the Polish question. On the one hand, it was the only genuinely modern and revolutionary class in the country; on the other, it was clear that it was ideologically retrograde, interested in restoring its feudal privileges rather than in releasing democratic freedoms. Several years after the failed Polish revolution, this dilemma became the theme of a major novel by Heine's friend Heinrich Laube, The Warriors (Die Krieger).10 Heine saw the problem, but in On Poland he was, on the whole, sympathetic to the nobility, whose guest, after all, he had been. Later he was to become sarcastic about the, in his view, tacky and parasitical aristocratic refugees from Poland in Paris.11 In place of a middle class in Poland were the Jews, who, Heine tells us, made up a quarter of the population (probably an exaggeration; Prussian authorities estimated one-fifteenth, except in the cities). De­ spite the backwardness of the Eastern European Orthodox Jews, Heine claimed an instinctive sympathy for their retained authenticity, which he preferred, he said, to the diminished selves of the assimilated, com­ mercialized German Jews.12 He expressed the wish that the Jews could break out of the pattern of minor commercial activities and take up farming. It was, of course, an idea with a considerable future in Euro­ pean Jewish thinking, but, given the conditions of land tenure in Poland at that time, the suggestion could have only revolutionary im­ plications. It is probable that Heine regarded On Poland also as a minor and immature work, for he never republished it. That it did, however, con­ tain an irritating political potential emerged promptly in the annoy­ ance expressed in the Grand Duchy of Poland and in reactionary circles in Berlin. A Posen journalist named Raabski attacked Heine vig­ orously (and anonymously) both in his own paper and in Der Gesellschafter.13 Raabski was able to impeach a number of Heine's facts. It is true that empirical accuracy was never a strong point of his report-

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age; facts were symbols for him, to be absorbed into imaginative pat­ terns and used as counters on his field of combat. But Raabski's exces­ sive shrillness was evidently impelled by his suspicion that the author of the essay was a Jew; he was outraged at the historical role Heine had suggested for the Jewish population. It was not unfitting that the first of his many stormy public feuds should revolve around his Jewishness, for his ruminations on the Polish Jews relate to a rather un­ expected turn his life took just at this time.

ilRootfi

SOMETIME in 1822 Heine became interested in a group of Jewish in­

tellectuals in Berlin that called itself the Verein fur Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for Culture and Science of the Jews). He was made a member on August 4, 1822, two days before his departure for Poland, and attended his first meeting on September 29, a few days after his return.1 For a time he was recording secretary of the Verein, and his interest in it continued after his departure from Berlin and even after the Verein S dissolution. The Verein had begun to take shape at a meeting of several men in November 1819. The moving spirit was Eduard Gans (1798-1839), an enthusiastic student of Hegelian philosophy of wealthy but financially troubled background. Among the others were Leopold Zunz (17941886), who had passed from an orthodox Jewish education through stages of the Enlightenment, Reform, and modern philological scholar­ ship; Immanuel Wohlwill (Joel Wolf, 1799-1847), student of philosophy and later master of a Jewish school; Isaac Levin Auerbach (1791-1853), preacher at the Reform temple in Berlin; Isaak Markus Jost (17931860), the first Jew of modern times to write a comprehensive history of Judaism; Lazarus Bendavid (1762-1832), a Kantian scholar and in­ novator in the area of Jewish education; and Moses Moser (1796-1838), a bank clerk with a special interest in Jewish culture and folkways, with whom Heine felt a specially cordial affinity. The Verein received its name and bylaws in 1821. Its concern was to overcome the isolation of Jewry from European culture by encouraging Jews to pursue other than commercial careers and to seek a resolution, through religious modernization, of the dilemma of integration and the maintenance of Jewish identity. It proposed to realize this program, according to r

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Wohlwill, through the scholarly study of the philology, history, and philosophy of Judaism.2 The ancestry of the Verein lay in the Iateeighteenth-century impact of Enlightenment culture upon the GermanJewish intellect, particularly concentrated in the powerful figure of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), philosopher and friend of Lessing, the first German Jew to play a role on the heights of modern intellec­ tual culture while retaining his Jewish identity and allegiance. One of the members of the Verein, the assimilationist reformer David Friedlander (1750-1834)—incidentally a relative of Amalie Heine's husband —had been Mendelssohn's pupil and was a link to that generation. Mendelssohn's dual allegiance turned out, however, to be difficult to maintain. It crumbled in his own family; four of his six children con­ verted to Christianity. His daughter Dorothea became, in her second marriage, the wife of Friedrich Schlegel and joined him in conversion to Catholicism and reactionary opinions. His grandson Felix became wholly assimilated to the dominant culture and composed music on Christian themes, which annoyed Heine, who once wrote in a letter: "If I had the luck of being a grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, I would surely not use my talent to set the pissing of the Lamb to music."3 Enlightenment thought, with its application of reason to the criticism of inherited verities, its stress on individualism, and its presentist and futurist rather than traditionalist orientation, made the Jewish commit­ ment seem archaic and superannuated. At the same time Jews had to contend with the severe assimilationist pressure, philosophical, practi­ cal, and institutional, in the environment. The men of the Verein groped for a formula that would reconcile the leading edge of modern scholarship and philosophy with Jewish identity, and for a program of action that would lift ordinary Jews up to their own level of intel­ lect and insight, thus making it possible for them to take an honored place within the German nation while keeping Jewish consciousness and community intact. Simultaneously they considered a fantastic project for a Jewish settlement on an island in the Niagara River that would proclaim itself an American state. Heine joked about this ap­ parition as "Ganstown."4 Heine's experiment in associating himself with this program rather resembles what a contemporary American student would call "finding himself." There is little indication in what we know of him up to this point that he had ever felt such a need very consciously. But evidently his sense of identity as a Jew in German society was not completely accommodated in his mind, and he took the opportunity of the Verein to explore the boundaries of his Jewish self and test the options avail­ able to a person in his situation. Furthermore, he was being brought

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up against his Jewishness whether he liked it or not. Just at this mo­ ment Prussia issued a decree prohibiting academic careers for Jews, a bitter shock for Heine. It is probable that he sought in the Verein an alternative middle ground between benighted Orthodoxy and the Jew­ ish Reform. His attitude toward the Reform was exceedingly hostile. In the first place, many of those associated with the pioneering Ham­ burg temple were in Uncle Salomon's entourage; Heine got along poorly with them and came to regard them as his enemies.5 More fun­ damentally, he saw the Reform as an accommodation to the philistine values of the dominant society, reinforcing and joining its regressive structures rather than emancipating them; and his intellectual's and poet's temper was uncongenial to compromise and the levelling of hu­ man authenticity. To Wohlwill he called the Reformers "some chirop­ odists" who "have tried to cure the body of Judaism from its disagree­ able skin growth by bleeding, and by their maladroitness and spidery bandages of rationalism Israel must bleed to death. . . . We no longer have the strength to wear a beard, to fast, to hate, and to endure out of hate; that is the motive of our Reformation." It was a doomed at­ tempt to climb aboard the sinking ship of Christianity, to establish "a little Protestant Christianity as a Jewish company, and they make a tallis out of the wool of the Lamb of God, make a vest out of the feathers of the Holy Ghost and underpants out of Christian love, and they will go bankrupt and their successors will be called: God, Christ, & Co."6 In hindsight it is easy to see that Heine's experiment with the Verein was not very auspicious. On the one hand, he was rather out of his depth in the company in which he found himself. They greatly out­ distanced him in Jewish learning and some, especially Zunz and Bendavid, had a grounding in Torah and Talmud altogether dispropor­ tionate to his dubious Hebrew and his shaky grasp of the commonest customs of Jewish life. The "science of Judaism" projected by the Verein presupposed an erudition that he could have approached only by years of concentrated, dedicated study. In addition, his enmity to religious thought and institutions, his apparent effort to separate a Jewish cultural identity from its religious component, was in its own way as contradictory and anomalous as he believed the Reform to be. He could not be, he wrote to Moser, "an enthusiast for the Jewish religion. That I will be enthusiastic for the rights of the Jews and their civil equality, that I admit, and in bad times, which are inevitable, the Germanic mob will hear my voice so that it resounds in German beerhalls and palaces. But the born enemy of all positive religions will never champion that religion that first developed the fault-finding with hu-

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man beings* that now causes us so much pain."7 In this as in other matters Heine is reproducing an attitude of the Enlightenment. But one could hardly be, I should think, much of a Jewish scholar with so poisoned a bias toward the Jewish faith. On the other hand, the Verein itself was not very auspicious. The solemn protocols, with their motions, debates, and votes, make poign­ ant reading in view of the fact that meetings were normally attended by eight to ten persons; at its height the Verein had eighty-one mem­ bers, including corresponding ones, one of whom was Heine's intellec­ tually dabbling uncle Simon van Geldern, and there was a small branch in Hamburg. Its spokesmen were clearer in their analysis of the con­ temporary Jewish dilemma than in their prescription of what Jews might do about it. In their programmatic statements there is a partly unacknowledged skepticism about the Jewish future. This is in consid­ erable measure owing to the Hegelian influence, especially upon Gans, for, while HegeI was an advocate of Jewish emancipation and civil rights, his philosophy of history saw the Jewish contribution to the unfolding of mankind as complete and sublated in European culture.8 This view infected much of the program of the Verein. which was largely reduced to restoring a dignified sense of the Jewish past by distanced scholarship from above and providing Jews with a remedial education in the knowledge and skills of European culture from be­ low. The yoking together of the most refined philosophical and schol­ arly study with such elementary needful tasks as teaching urban Jews standard German was uncomfortable and in the long run unfeasible. Heine came to see this emerging impasse without difficulty. He be­ came especially impatient with the abstruse style and content of the Verein's journal; nor was he the only observer to make this objection.9 He had a more accurate sense of audience than his fellows in the Verein; in his later essays on philosophy and religion he laid great stress on comprehensibility, arguing that the abstruseness of German philosophical discourse deprived the public at large of its progressive implications. Actually, style is not the problem with the journal; the contributions are readable enough. But most of them are relentlessly specialized. They are full of Latin, Greek, and, of course, Hebrew (without the vowel points that might be useful to the ordinary read­ er), along with some Arabic and French. Gans supplied professorial articles on the laws concerning the Jews in ancient Rome, the history of the Jews in northern Europe, and his own special topic of expertise, ancient inheritance law. Zunz delivered a philological catalogue of * Menschenmakeley; the word is an allusion to a passage in Lessing's Nathan the Wise, Act II, Scene j. It means intolerance and the claim of superiority.

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Spanish place-names in Hebrew and a very detailed biographical and bibliographical study of the great medieval rabbi known as Rashi. Bendavid wrote demythifying essays on the belief in the Messiah and the question of the written and oral law. It is doubtless all very inter­ esting for the Judaist, but for the purpose of affecting the common life of the Jews it was a little like using a fine watch to drive a nail. The journal indeed found no audience and collapsed after one volume of three issues. To others in the Jewish community the members ap­ peared arrogant and peremptory, with their confident notions of the direction Jewish history ought to take under their leadership and their rather bluntly dismissive attitude toward theological traditions. The Verein itself collapsed in futility and strife, and was dissolved in Feb­ ruary 1824. The episode, however, was of importance for Heine's development and education. For one thing, it was perhaps through the Verein that he became for the first time fully aware that there was, beyond anec­ dote and Midrash, a Jewish learning and history that could occupy the serious attention of serious people. This may have shored him up against any susceptibility to a Jewish inferiority complex from which, for example, Rahel Varnhagen so evidently suffered. He was never much afflicted by this, despite his not infrequent Semitophobic re­ marks, perhaps partly owing to his sense of past Jewish greatness. Sec­ ondly, it is altogether probable that much of what he did know about Jewish customs and traditions he learned during his association with the Verein·, the effect was to reconnect him somewhat with his own roots and to make him a little more secure when adverting to Jewish matters. Thirdly, his studies propelled him into Jewish history. Soon after leaving Berlin he took up the vast (and tedious) early-eighteenthcentury compendium of Jacques Basnage de Beauval, Histoire et la religion des Juifs depuis Jesus-Christ jusqu'a present (Rotterdam: Reiner Leers, 1706-1707). Thus he worked up for himself what he had hoped for from the Verein in vain: a living Jewish substance to coun­ teract the fashionable Enlightenment rationalism and what he regarded as the dessicated imitation Protestantism of the Reform. He landed, characteristically, in the Middle Ages and in the glorious and tragic age of Spanish Jewry, although Basnage is not very detailed on that subject, so that Heine must have pursued it elsewhere in greater depth. In fact, it is possible that he thought he himself was of Sephardic ex­ traction, and there is a sense in which he joins his aristocratic and tragic self-image as a poet with what has been called his "Marrano pose."10 Heine's relationship to the Verein was important in other ways. Al-

II. THE STUDENT POET though his friendship with Moser was to come to an unhappy conclu­ sion, it was valuable and sustaining during this difficult time. As late as 1827, when the Verein was long dissolved, he displayed his loyalty to the statute that obliged members to donate their written works to the Verein's library by sending copies of his books to Zunz. He also taught in the school for uneducated youths established by the Verein. Of this activity he had nothing to say, but, decades later, one of his pupils reminisced as a ninety-three-year-old man about Heine's instruc­ tion, which he remembered with the greatest admiration and grati­ tude.11 The edgy and sardonic Heine as a kindly and nurturing peda­ gogue is perhaps not easy to visualize; but there is other occasional evidence that he liked children and got along well with them.

Ε?!] The Rabbi of Bacherach THAT Heine's search for a viable Jewish identity through the program of the Verein was enriching but ultimately a failure has its exact coun­ terpart in the literary work that emerged from this experience, the fragmentary novel The Rabbi of Bacherach, on which he began work in the spring and early summer of 1824, when he was again in Gottingen and the Verein itself had dissolved. The actual genesis of this work is still not fully clear to us. It was not published until years later, under circumstances that will be related in their proper place. It is fairly clear that, of the three chapters we have, the third, and quite likely part of the second, were written at that later time.1 Heine's progress reports on the work to Moser, Rahel's brother Ludwig Rob­ ert, and Zunz, which extend over a period of more than two years, suggest that, after a promising and enthusiastic beginning, the novel got stalled. On June 25, 1824, he wrote to Moser that one-third was written;2 his subsequent references indicate that it weighed on his mind but at no time clearly state that any further writing had been done. Later he was to claim that the bulk of the original was destroyed by a fire in his mother's house.3 This assertion may be regarded with skepticism; why should he have taken only part of the manuscript with him to Paris? In its original conception the Rabbi is clearly an attempt to write a medieval historical novel with Jewish materials; it was quite likely inspired by the wide influence of Sir Walter Scott on the German

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novel at this time. Equally clearly, it derives from Heine's recently awakened interest in the Jewish fate and in Jewish history. It is set in the Rhenish town of Bacharach (which Heine misspelled) in the late fifteenth century, at the time when the great Spanish Jewry was nearing its catastrophe. The rabbi of the story has studied in Spain and brought back a more liberal cast of mind; Heine's fascination with Spanish Jewry as a contrasting model of Jewish elegance and urbanity was doubtless to be one of the novel's themes. After an accomplished beginning setting the historical and cultural scene, the story opens with a pogrom at Passover. Strangers smuggle the corpse of a child into the seder in order to fabricate a charge of ritual murder; the rabbi, ob­ serving this, escapes with his beautiful wife up the Rhine to Frankfurt. Heine's failure to get further forward with the narration has been the object of much speculation. Probably several difficulties converged to block the progress of the novel. In the first place, he was never com­ fortable in the traditional prose genres. His formal sense, though not without literary antecedents, was unconventional and, excepting the early lyric, he worked best in structures of his own devising. Sequen­ tial narration was not congenial to him and he always found it difficult to sustain over long stretches; his frustration with the Rabbi made him feel that he had no talent for such writing.4 The Rabbi is the first of three attempts to write a novel; none succeeded. Secondly, he got rather quickly into plotting difficulties. In saving himself, the rabbi leaves the congregation without warning of the impending slaughter, telling his wife, though he knows better, that the others will be saved, yet the following day finds him good-humored and even light-hearted. Here Heine's characteristic inability to enter into the complexities of other selves, which made realistic characterization impossible for him, exerts a damaging limitation on the work. Thirdly, as soon as he gets his characters on the moonlit Rhine, a Romantic mood supervenes that intrudes anachronistically into the setting. A more deep-seated difficulty lay in the assymetry of Heine's Jewish commitment. His interest was drawn to historical and cultural color, and, while his fine description of the Passover seder is sympathetic, there is a certain exoticism in all of his treatments of Jewish life that shows him to be beyond its boundary. Furthermore, his unwillingness to take strictly religious matters seriously was rather a disability in a story about a fifteenth-century rabbi. The later continuation of the novel exhibits a strong shift to satire of traditional Jewish life and cus­ toms and the introduction of modern rather than historical concerns. The consequence is a dissonant stylistic breach. In 1824-1825 Heine may have sensed that this was the direction in which his temperament

II. THE STUDENT POET must carry him, but he was as yet too close to his experiment in Jewishness to yield to it. Finally, in 1825, his sense of Jewishness, as we shall see shortly, was to undergo a disabling blow that would have made the continuation of the novel morally and emotionally incon­ gruous. The Rabbi of Bacherach has a certain reputation, especially among those who like to honor Heine from a Jewish point of view. There is very little in German literature of that time that treats Jewish matters with any richness and understanding, and for this reason alone the Rabbi stands out. It reflects Heine's genuine sympathy for the suffering in the Jewish past; the work is conceived in accusation of a dominant culture that could make a saint and martyr out of an alleged victim of Jewish blood ritual and build a handsome abbey on the Rhine to him. There is some fine writing in the first chapter of the fragment. But the novel was a failure, and it reflects Heine's failure as a student in Berlin to define an integrated Jewish identity for himself.

Gottingen Again ON MAY 19, 1823, Heine left Berlin for good and returned to his family in Liineburg. There he spent the next eight months, punctuated by rather tense visits to Uncle Salomon and his family in Hamburg and one vacation trip. It was a dreary time. He called Liineburg the "cap­ ital of boredom."1 He had become intellectually estranged from his family and could not share his creative concerns with them, although he tried to do so with his sister Charlotte. In June she married Moritz Embden (1790-1860), a Hamburg merchant with whom Heine could have nothing in common. He had little companionship, with the excep­ tion of that of a young lawyer and politician named Rudolf Christiani (1797 or 1798-1858), with whom he was to remain friends for the rest of his life, even though Christiani was not a wholly steady character; at one point he ruined himself gambling. Ten years later he married Heine's cousin Charlotte, the daughter of Uncle Isaak in Bor­ deaux, and later he was appointed literary executor in Heine's last will. Throughout these months Heine was gloomy and grouchy. In July he managed to have an unwise, though temporary, breach with Varnhagen, who was visiting in Hamburg. In August came the unwelcome news of the failed Braunschweig performance of Almansor. He com-

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plained of encountering anti-Semitism in the neighborhood, while grumping that "Jews here, as everywhere, are unbearable hagglers and dirt-rags."2 He complained constantly of headaches and poor health. Some people who knew him tended to regard his recurrent maladies as malingering and attention-getting. But he does seem to have had pro­ tracted uncomfortable spells; whether his headaches were of organic origin or were owing to his highstrung nature and his tense dissatisfac­ tions with his lot in life no doubt made little difference to the way he felt. Probably it worked both ways, his migraines and other indisposi­ tions reinforcing his customary bad temper. He was at this time on insecure terms with Uncle Salomon, the topic of dispute being, as usual, money. "It is awkward," he groaned to Moser, "that with me the whole man is governed by the budget," adding, somewhat ambigu­ ously: "The lack or excess of money has not the least influence on my principles, but all the more on my actions."3 Still, Uncle Salomon granted him ten louis d'or for a recreational trip. Heine spent part of July and all of August 1823 in Cuxhaven and Ritzebiittel; it was his first experience of the North Sea that was eventually to have so much impact on his imagination. This time, however, an attempted voyage to Helgoland was frustrated by a storm, and on the whole he did not seem to enjoy himself. Headaches and worries kept him from writing very much in Luneburg. He published only two small prose pieces: the review of Rous­ seau's poems mentioned earlier, and a little encomium on the composer Albert Methfessel (1785-1869), whom he had met in Hamburg.4 He read a good deal about Italy and spoke to his sister about a Venetian tragedy, but nothing came of it. But he kept writing verse. The begin­ nings of what were to be the eighty-eight poems of Homecoming (Die Heimkehr) began to come together; along with the Lyrical Intermezzo, Homecoming forms the backbone of Heine's wider fame. The poems appear to be at least in part connected with a recru­ descence of the old love agony during his Hamburg visits, possibly ignited by Amalie's sister Therese. Homecoming exhibits a greater variety of tone than Lyrical Intermezzo, reaching from the rarefied haze of amorous lament to quite realistic, not to say cynical, scenes. Heine's mood was in no way improved by the recognition that sooner or later he would be obliged to take up his law studies again and exchange boring Luneburg for irritating Gottingen. At the be­ ginning of 1824 the time had come; he arrived in Gottingen in January, in the middle of the winter semester, and from then on through the following summer he plugged at the law, lamenting it unremittingly. Repeatedly he asserted that he could not understand what he was

II. THE STUDENT POET studying, a symptom, of course, of his profound lack of interest and also of his deficiency in Latin. But he stuck at it because he had to. He had little to do with literature; his recreational reading consisted mostly of history, Jewish and general. During this period, apart from a few individual poems, only one work appeared: Thirty-three Poems (Dreiunddreifiig Gedichte) in March in Der Gesellschafter—a preliminary segment of Homecoming. He continued writing further poems of that cluster. From January to September he studied, with only one break: between semesters he spent most of the month of April in Berlin, re­ newing old acquaintances. By mid-September he had had enough of the law for the time being and was greatly in need of spiritual refresh­ ment. He decided to carry out a plan he had long had in mind to take an extensive ramble through the Harz Mountains. It was to be the most famous walking tour in the history of German literature.

[11] The Harz Journey and the Meeting with Goethe HEINE'S tour through the wooded hills and small towns of Thuringia described something like an oval with its long axis running east and west. From Gottingen he headed north to Norten and Northeim, then northeast to Osterode and Clausthal, where, on September 18, he visited the silver mines of the Kingdom of Hanover. He continued further north to Goslar, an imperial capital from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries but now a shadow of its former glory, and on the 20th he climbed the Brocken, spending the night on the mountain where, according to legend, on Walpurgis Night, the eve of the first of May, the witches hold a sabbath and pay homage to the Devil. There he encountered several of his fellow students. On the 21st he descended the eastern side of the mountain to Ilsenburg and Wernigerode, through a woodland drained by cheerful streams, then to Eisleben. By the 27th he was in Halle and on the 28th he had turned south to visit the playwright Adolf Miillner in Weissenfels. On the 30th he reached Jena and October 1 he went west to Weimar, where, on the following day, he visited Goethe, having introduced himself with proper ob­ sequiousness with the request only to "kiss your hand and go away."1 He continued westward by way of Erfurt and Gotha, taking in Luther's refuge of the Wartburg; then to Kassel, where he visited Ludwig Emil Grimm, the painting brother of the Brothers Grimm,

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and his old school friend Straube; around October 11 he was back in Gottingen. He had tramped some 280 miles of mildly mountainous terrain, including sightseeing, in about three weeks. He was used to walking—his journeys back and forth to his universities were mostly on foot—but the Harz journey is certainly the most athletic achieve­ ment of his life. Far from tiring him, it exhilarated him; within a few days after his return he was composing the work it had inspired. Neither in the preliminary nor in the final version of that work did Heine describe more than a fraction of the tour, although there is evidence that he intended to continue it.2 His account proceeds to the descent from the Brocken and then jumps, in the final version, to a retrospective vignette set in Hamburg. What for another traveller might have been the high point of the journey—the visit with Goethe in Weimar—is excluded with eloquent silence. Indeed, it was some time before he could bring himself to speak of it even in private letters, and even there he adverted to it only obliquely. This may be as good a place as any to introduce the difficult question of Heine's relationship to Goethe. It is perhaps best treated by distinguishing the problem that he shared with his generation of writers from his own complex strategy in dealing with it. When Heine was born, Goethe was forty-eight years old and had a career behind him that would have made any man renowned forever. He had written several of the major dramas and much of the major poetry in the German language. He had written most of the first part of Faust, the best known single work in the thousand-year history of German letters. He had written the first German literary work in nearly three centuries to obtain immediate international recognition, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the most seminal work in the German novel tradition, Wilhelm Meistefs Apprenticeship. For ten years he had been a chief administrator of a German principality. He was becoming a significant if aberrational figure in botany, anatomy, geology, optics, and meteorology, not to speak of poetics, aesthetics, and general wisdom. He was one of the greatest living human beings in the world, and the world at large was coming to be aware of it. When Heine began his university studies, Goethe was seventy. His scientific labors, his inventive prose, and his symbolic late poetry had escaped the horizon of understanding of the public at large, but he was still a towering figure. When Heine visited him he was seventyfive, and when Heine went to Paris he was eighty, still there. Heine was to be thirty-four years old when Goethe finally died, to the con­ siderable relief of the younger generation of writers. For his greatness was not only a model and a cynosure, but a burden and an annoyance.

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His communications with younger German creative spirits were, on the whole, poor. He had maintained, through subliminal stress and strain, a productive relationship with Schiller, but he snubbed Kleist, Holderlin, and Beethoven, surrounding himself with writers and com­ posers whose names are remembered only on account of their connec­ tion with him. "It became a patent of mediocrity to be praised by Goethe," Heine remarked.3 He disapproved of Romanticism, for all that foreign observers have persisted in seeing him as a Romantic. He thought he had reached through his own immense efforts an exemplary balance of Classical order and creative individuality, and he was not much interested in art and literature that appeared to deviate radically from that achievement. Goethe's relations with the younger generation were exacerbated by his stance in regard to public affairs. He took no part whatever in the nationalist enthusiasm of the Napoleonic era. He was not convinced that the political unification of the German nation was a good idea, thinking rather that its splintered condition contributed to healthy variety and alternative possibilities. He did not abominate Napoleon, as was then required, but admired him. While he deplored the French Revolution, hatred of the French nation was unthinkable for him. Goethe was cosmopolitan in outlook and was not susceptible to national chauvinism of any kind. He also stood aloof from the religious recru­ descence of the Romantic and Biedermeier periods. While he generally avoided a confrontation with Christianity, his attitude toward it went beyond indifference to a constitutional uncongeniality. At the same time, he in no way shared the democratic aspirations of part of the younger generation; indeed, he actively disliked democratic ideas of any kind. When his Duke Karl August, in this regard, at least, even­ tually growing beyond his friend's tutelage, granted Weimar a con­ stitution, Goethe scowled. He vigorously opposed the civil right of greatest importance to the liberal intelligentsia, freedom of the press. The notion that any wiseacre with access to print might criticize knowledgeable and responsible rulers or officials and rouse the ignorant public against them was to Goethe patent nonsense. He thought that if everyone would just sweep in front of his own door, the world would be a clean place, and that governing should be left to those who knew how to do it. The consequence of these views was that Goethe was embattled from both ends of the political spectrum. From the right he was at­ tacked as unpatriotic, an immoralist, and a pagan. From the left he was denounced as a complacent egotist and an enemy of progress. The republican Ludwig Borne, whose dismay at Goethe was a lifetime ioo

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obsession, looked upon him as an egotist whose emotions and human sympathies had become dessicated in courtly service: "Heaven has given you a tongue of fire, but have you ever defended justice? You had a good sword, but you were always only your own guardian."4 All agreed that he was a cold indifferentist, preoccupied with his own aesthetic refinement and his hobbies, as his scientific researches were generally regarded. "Goethe," wrote Borne, "could have been a Her­ cules, freeing the fatherland of much garbage; but he merely fetched the golden apples of the Hesperides, which he kept for himself, and then seated himself at Omphale's feet and remained sitting there."5 Other young liberals took a different tack: they split him in two, differentiating a young, revolutionary Goethe of Gotz von Berliehingen, Werther, and the "Prometheus" hymn from the conservative courtier and statuesque formalist of his latter days. Such was the environment of opinion in which Heine found him­ self. Perforce he shared some of it. He, too, thought Goethe offensively indifferent to the burning issues of the time, intransitively enclosed in a complacent aesthetic of artistic autonomy and perfection. "Goethe has become eighty years old," he wrote in 1830, "and minister and prosperous—poor German people! that is your greatest man!"6 He, too, split Goethe's career in two, and compared the later works to statues in the Louvre "that cannot suffer and rejoice with us, that are not men but half-castes of divinity and stone."7 He shared with Hegel the idea that the "epoch of art," the Kunstperiode, was drawing to its historical close, and he saw Goethe as its symbol; now, however, literature was obliged to serve the great progressive ideas of the present. At a deeper level, Heine like his contemporaries chafed at Goethe's sheer endurance and the chilling shadow it cast. The man seemed to have occupied the heights of Parnassus all by himself and pulled the ladder up behind him. Heine remarked that he had become a tyrant in the republic of the intellect.8 But Heine's response was more complex and stressed than this. For one thing, too many of Goethe's enemies were also his to permit him to join the general uprising. Heine's position against national chauvin­ ism and for a reconciliation between the two great nations of the Continent was one of the sturdiest of his fundamental convictions. He felt a strong affinity for what he interpreted as Goethe's non-Christian pantheism of Spinozist extraction, though the consequences he drew from this standpoint were more activist than Goethe's. He took Goethe's alleged "paganism" as a virtue rather than a fault, for in the cultural-psychological dichotomy that came to dominate his thinking, Goethe appeared on the "Hellene" and "sensualist" as opposed to the

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"Nazarene" and "spiritualist" side. He was only half joking when he referred to Goethe as "Wolfgang Apollo."9 Equally important, his poetic instincts did not allow him full use of the disrespectful dismissal of Goethe customary among some of his activist contemporaries. He could be rude enough when it suited him, but basically it went deeply against his own grain to be contemptuous of a great poet; for that, his investment in his own sense of himself as a poet was too profound. Against a liberal attack he acknowledged Goethe as a "genius" and a "poet-king,"10 categories similar to those of his own poetic persona. He understood and to an extent sympathized with the contemporary view that rated Schiller higher than Goethe because of the former's moral strength and commitment to the idea of freedom, but in the long run he thought it an evaluative muddle, and once remarked that Goethe would have been able to create Schiller and all his works.11 It is not easy to say how much of Goethe Heine knew and how well. He once told Rahel Varnhagen's brother that he had just read "all" of Goethe and exclaimed: "I am no longer a blind pagan, but a seeing one";12 but this is likely a little exaggerated and directed to the Varnhagens' pronounced adoration of Goethe.13 In June 1823 Heine wrote an essay for an anthology of contemporary views on Goethe edited by Varnhagen, but it was not included in the book and it has disappeared. Varnhagen said that it had been submitted too late; Heine guessed that he had not liked it.14 He probably knew most of the major works from the first half of Goethe's career pretty well and from time to time reread some of them, and undoubtedly much of the later auto­ biographical and aesthetic writing. The later literary works interested him less—like most of his contemporaries he had no appreciation of the second part of Faust—though he was strongly attracted by the exotic, sensual poetry of the West-Eastern Divan. On the other hand, oblique and underground allusions to Goethe, sometimes with a satiri­ cal or contrastive force, abound in Heine's works as a kind of shadow in his texts.15 There is, furthermore, in Heine's career a curious, if perhaps partly accidental, imitatio Goethii, again an amalgam of ana­ logue and contrast. Like Goethe, Heine was a poet who unwillingly took a law degree. Goethe, too, turned a Harz journey, undertaken, oddly, at almost the same age as Heine's, into a literary work, the poem "Harz Journey in Winter" (1777). Heine, like Goethe, made a journey to Italy and wrote an account of it. Heine wrote a Faust. And his marriage, as we shall see, somewhat resembled Goethe's. At times one has the feeling that, in his heart, he sought by a divergent route the succession to Goethe's standing as the major German writer. In

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this he partly succeeded, if not in German eyes, then to some extent in those of foreign observers. Whatever it was that happened during the visit to Goethe on Octo­ ber 2, 1824, Heine did not like it one bit. At first he maintained a grim silence about it, and then dropped only a couple of hints that the inter­ view had been unpleasant. "I was in Weimar," he wrote to Moser; "there is also roast goose there. . . . The beer in Weimar is really good; orally more about it."16 Maximilian Heine later reported that his brother had told Goethe he was working on a Faust and Goethe showed him the door.17 That is probably a canard, for it is hard to believe that even Heine would have been that impudent in the august Presence, but like other such canards it may well have had its origin with Heine himself. Not until the following May was he able to say anything about it; he told his friend Christiani, a vigorous admirer of Goethe, that the great man had appeared physically very decrepit, though clear-eyed, and then went on: "In many features I recognized Goethe, for whom life, the beautification and maintenance of it, as well as the actually practical in general, is the highest thing. Only then did I feel quite clearly the contrast of his nature with my own, to which everything practical is unedifying, which basically disdains life and would defiantly sacrifice it for the idea. That is just the split in me, that my reason stands in continual struggle with my congenital inclina­ tion to enthusiasm. Now I know quite exactly why Goethe's writ­ ings always repelled me at the bottom of my soul, as much as I admired them poetically and as much as my ordinary view of life agreed with Goethe's manner of thinking. I am therefore genu­ inely at war with Goethe and his writings, just as my views of life are at war with my congenital inclinations and the secret move­ ments of my soul."18 Here it can be seen how Heine's reaction is a special case of the dissatis­ faction of the younger generation, conflating Romantic disapproval of Goethe's worldliness with a charge of indifference to the "idea," a transforming, progressive vision of the world. He repeated this view in a letter to Moser five weeks later.19 Only several years later, after Goethe's death, was he able to stylize the visit in his book on The Romantic School, where Goethe is described as Zeus: "his figure . . . was harmonious, clear, joyful, of noble measure," gracing his visitor with a steady divine gaze and a sensual smile.20 As for Goethe, he took no notice of the occasion, other than to note in his diary: "Heine from

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Gottingen."21 It is hard to know what Heine expected from the visit. Goethe cannot have had much idea who he was; he had sent him copies of his books, but so did everyone else in the world, and it is not to be imagined that Goethe read everything that poured in. If he had seen anything of Heine's, it would have stamped him as one more young Romantic, which would not have impressed Goethe favorably. In all probability he was cool and preoccupied, as was his habit with the innumerable tourists with whom he had to contend. Even though the winter semester 1824-1825 began on October 18, Heine promptly began composing a literary work inspired by his tour, and he had completed the original version of it by the end of Novem­ ber. He then sent a copy of it to his Uncle Henry in Hamburg for the entertainment of his family. In the accompanying remarks and other letters at the time, a pattern asserted itself that became common with him: he spoke deprecatingly of the work, claiming that it was un­ finished and imperfect. These statements are more than a rhetorical captatio benevolentiae, but less than a fully sincere self-criticism. Like many writers, Heine was usually uneasy with his finished product; at the same time, his pursuit of a suitable publication medium indicated that he held his work in regard. With the publication of The Harz Journey (Die Harzreise), how­ ever, he initially ran into a little misfortune caused by the unreliability of his friends. In Berlin he had become an admirer of a great beauty, Friederike Robert (1795-1832), who was married to Rahel Varnhagen's brother Ludwig Robert (1778-1832), a comic playwright; Friederike's brother, a book dealer in Karlsruhe named Gottlieb Braun, was the publisher of a literary almanach entitled Rheinbliiten (Rhine Blos­ soms), to which Heine contributed several of his Homecoming poems, and Friederike had extracted a promise to contribute something else to it. He did not care for this sort of medium for The Harz Journey, but he had nothing else in hand, the Rabbi having stalled, so he revised the manuscript and sent it to Friederike in May 1825. What happened for the next few months was nothing, and it was not until the end of the year that Heine learned that the almanach was not to appear. He retrieved the manuscript and sent it to Gubitz for Der Gesellschafter·, Gubitz also stalled a bit, to Heine's annoyance, but it finally appeared in fourteen installments in January and February 1826. But Heine was horrified to discover that Gubitz had made alterations in the text, weakening the political allusions, even though he had pleaded with him not to.22 Gubitz blamed the censorship for this, but Heine broke off all further relations with him and Der Gesellschafter. Gubitz, in

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turn, printed polemical epigrams against Heine.23 It was the first of his many quarrels for which the censorship was the ultimate cause. Through these experiences Heine grew tired of periodical publication and conceived the project of publishing a book of travel pictures of which The Harz Journey would be one. The first publisher to whom he offered the idea, Ferdinand Diimmler, who had brought out the Tragedies with a Lyrical Intermezzo, found Heine's price too high, but together with the second he made literary history, as we shall see. Although a great many predecessors to and influences on The Harz Journey have been postulated, from the German travel literature of the eighteenth century to Laurence Sterne and Washington Irving, to whom Heine himself adverted,24 busy scholarship has sometimes exag­ gerated these influences; they are not important, except possibly for Sterne, who exerted a great fascination upon German writers. Heine's originality is impressive, owing largely to his exceptional stylistic and compositional control. His special skill is the maintenance of an appear­ ance of easygoing conversational narration and amusing verbal free association over a sub-structure of ordered form and integrating imagination. The travel form provides a superficial structure for sequential narration, but Heine does not wholly rely upon the acci­ dents of successive experience; rather, he imposes upon them a complex but visible and meaningful closure. The Harz Journey not only follows the progress of the trip but moves in a vertical plane as well: from the flatland of oppressive Gottingen, down into the rather frightening bowels of the earth where money is mined, to which descent several claustrophobic nightmares are put in parallel, then up to the height of the Brocken, a first refreshing, then somewhat giddy elevation, then down again among lovely woodlands and streams to a level of reno­ vated reality. The geometrical pattern is correlated to an inner trans­ formation; the narrator's testy frame of mind upon his departure passes through some sober meditations and bad memories, through a growing self-confidence and poetic sensibility, amused and distanced contem­ plation of low comedy among the students and tourists on the Brocken, to a restored self-regard and comforted spirit. The apparent—and it is only apparent—disjunction of his associative style is actually a mon­ tage of images and perspectives used as a sign system full of allusion and significance, to link the poetic imagination with a coherent stand­ point. Only relatively modern techniques of literary interpretation have turned out to be adequate to Heine's texture, although from the beginning the most intelligent observers sensed the carefully wrought fabric and resisted the" initial impression of formlessness and self-

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indulgent free association. In this respect they showed themselves to be more competent readers than many subsequent literary scholars down to the present day. At the core of the narration is a poetic imagination apprehending and evaluating reality. The interweaving of poetic fiction and public commentary is Heine's characteristic movement of an imaginative literature to active political and social involvement. Out of his observa­ tions he derives a progressive sensibility; of the deteriorated imperial capital of Goslar he remarked: "We live in times heavy with sig­ nificance: thousand-year-old cathedrals are torn down, and imperial thrones are cast into the lumber-room."25 The "poesy" of the piece is much involved with Heine's lyric theme of unrequited love—the suffering of which is somewhat relieved or relativized by the experi­ ences of the journey—but the centrality of the poetic persona, with its special relationship to a nature that admires the poet, is necessary to establish the credentials of right seeing and gives force to the often comic but nevertheless pointed observations on philistine behavior, nationalistic excess among students, and the repressive politics of restoration Germany. By this means Heine avoided the cataloguing danger of travel liter­ ature. He carried a guidebook to the Harz with him; while he lifted a good deal from it and other sources, he makes parodistic references to the dry transmission of information, inferior as it is to the poet's trans­ forming and connecting vision. In the case of The Harz Journey we have a rare opportunity to measure Heine's metamorphoses of real experience. In one passage he tells of encountering a journeyman tailor singing folksongs, whom the narrator teases to bring out his unspoiled naivete. This "tailor" turned out to be a witty travelling salesman who, upon reading The Harz Journey, submitted his own account of the encounter to Der Gesellschafter, by which it appeared that he was pulling Heine's leg while Heine was pulling his.26 Heine made a rather wry face when Christiani gave it to him, remarking only that it had "rather amused" him.27 It did not always suit him when the reality he transformed reasserted itself in its original shape. With The Harz Journey and the prose works that followed it, Heine practically created a genre in German letters; for some time they were more widely read than his poetry, and they formed the core of his French reputation as it took shape in the 1830s. There were many imitations in the nineteenth century.28 But they hardly ever reached his standard. His comic gift was inimitable; one would have to look a long way among his contemporaries for a scene of such skilled hilarity as his picture of the drunken students on the Brocken,

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gabbling sentimental gibberish or reciting in a closet from the Ossianic poems to a pair of yellow trousers that they take to be the moon. But there is a more subtle weakness in the imitations. It is clear from them that not all contemporary readers were attentive to Heine's subliminal art. His complex composition was perceived as formlessness; the central position he gave to the subjective poetic imagination became with others a license to sentimental and flabby self-indulgence; his principled political and social comedy sometimes turned to facile cynicism; and since his fictional recreation of the self was also usually not perceived, imitators regularly found in his manner a warrant to expound at length on their own empirical, often dull, autobiographical selves. It is one more body of evidence among many that to disregard the centrality of art in Heine's creativity is to miss him altogether.

[12]

Harry

Heinrich

Dr. Heinrich Heine

HEINE had hoped to conclude his studies by the beginning of 1825 but did not quite make it and was obliged to ask Uncle Salomon for one more semester of support. By April 16 he felt ready to submit his application for his degree, composed in Latin along with a slightly misleading curriculum vitae, not neglecting to add an account of his physical ills, unusual in such documents.1 He passed his preliminary examination in May with a grade equivalent to C. There was, however, one unpleasant detail still outstanding. In The Harz Journey, the narrator, after leaving the Brocken, climbs the peak of the Ilsenburg and, upon growing dizzy in the rarefied atmosphere, grasps the cross erected on the mountaintop. Some sardonic remarks on the ingratitude of the Germans to the Jews, who invented Christianity, were left out of the published text.2 It is a wry reference to one of the most awk­ ward circumstances of his life. In May Harry Heine began to take instruction in the Protestant religion from the pastor in nearby Heiligenstadt, and on June 28, 1825, he was baptized Christian Johann Heinrich Heine.3 I once expressed doubt that Heine had had very strong feelings about taking this step beforehand.4 While it is not easy to follow his mental processes in the matter, I now believe that I was in error. In the first place, he was, even for him, exceptionally secretive about it. In fact we would know nothing about what took place in Heiligenstadt

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if a naive report of his examination by the pastor had not appeared in a magazine decades later. Three days after the ceremony Heine wrote a letter to his intimate Moser without mentioning it. Beforehand he had hinted at it only to his brother-in-law Embden, quite in passing but clearly as a signal to the tribe of Salomon.5 He displaced his emo­ tions in a curious way by vigorously denouncing Eduard Gans for his conversion, shortly after which he composed an unpublished poem, "To an Apostate" (An einen Abtriinnigen), calling Gans a "scoundrel" (Schurke), which he misrhymes with (Edmund) Burke in order to connect the act to reactionary political apostasy.6 Years later he called Gans's act a "felony,"7 a word that at that time meant treason. Heine declared it to be the more repellent because Gans, the president of the Verein, had been the captain of the ship but was the first to abandon it. The point is not really exculpatory, however, for Gans's baptism occurred after Heine's, in December 1825. To Gans at the time Heine expressed himself in more convoluted fashion. A letter accompanying a presentation copy of Travel Pic­ tures I begins with the salutation: "Dear Gans! Cherished Colleague!" and continues: "The word 'colleague' refers to jurisprudence and not to theology. The word 'dear, however, refers to my heart, that still very much loves you, and right cordially—quand meme. . . . I want to imply that it angers me in the bottom of my soul that our books are no longer sources [i.e., for the work of the Verein ], that I therefore bear a grudge against myself and you. . . ." And he concludes, with wrenching irony: "I have nailed your name, so dear to me, on the door frame of my book. . . . Books, too, must have their mezuzahs."8 In letters to Moser at the time Heine complained of Gans's conduct and said of himself that "if the laws permitted stealing silver spoons, I would not have had myself baptized."8 This remark points to Heine's reasons, which are more easily de­ scribed. Prussia had been systematically restoring the pattern of dis­ crimination against the Jews that had been relieved during the time of Napoleon and the Prussian reform. In September 1819 Christian children were prohibited from attending Jewish schools; in June 1822 Jews were excluded from the higher ranks of the army; in March 1823 it was announced that the Jewish religion was only "tolerated." Of special significance to Heine was the decision taken in August 1822 and announced in December that Jews would henceforth be excluded from public academic posts; the immediate motive of this action had been to deny a professorship to Gans.10 This cut ofF a career option, and was in fact the direct cause of Gans's conversion, for he obtained his professorship in 1826. Apparently Heine's family expected

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it of him. Almost two years earlier Heine had written to Moser that "no one in my family is against [baptism], except me," and he went on to say that the act itself was a matter of indifference to him, but he would like to maintain his dignity before Prussia.11 His often-quoted aphorism that baptism was "the entrance ticket to European culture"12 makes him sound perhaps a little more cynical about it than he was. From a purely intellectual point of view, conversion had a certain logic, which Heine in his self-representations frequently exploited. Joining Protestantism meant joining the emancipatory tradition in German and European thought, from Luther, the Enlightenment, and Lessing to modern philosophy and liberalism. To the French he ex­ plained: "le protestantisme n'etait pour moi seulement une religion liberale, mais aussi Ie point de depart de la revolution allemande, et j'appartenais a la confession lutherienne, non seulement par acte de bapteme, mais aussi par un enthusiasme batailleur qui me fit prendre part aux luttes de cette eglise militante."13 But this is not literally meant, for, in a passage characteristic of Heine's forcible conflation of the elements of his allegiances, he virtually subverted the common mean­ ing of the word: "The blooming flesh in Titian's paintings, that is all Protestantism. The loins of his Venus are much more fundamental theses than those the German monk stuck on the church door of Wit­ tenberg."14 This is an especially strong example of that generation's habit of associating Protestantism with "protest," which became so widespread that in Prussia the terms "Protestantism" and "Protestant" were abolished in favor of "Evangelical," the official usage in Germany to this day. As to the matter of silver spoons, however, Heine had no advantage from the move, nor did it appreciably improve his social situation or immunize him from anti-Semitism; as he discovered this, his feelings about what he had done became more embittered. He wrote to Moser in January 1826: "I regret very much that I had myself baptized; I cannot at all see that things have gone better for me since then, on the contrary, I have since had nothing but misfortune."15 In the original version of The Harz Journey in Der Gesellschafter he concluded his allegorical vignette with the words: "No one will hold it against me that I did this, with such significant reasons, and I have not regretted it to this hour." Four months later, when the work appeared in book form, the sentence had been rewritten to read: "No one will hold it against me that I did this in such a precarious position."16 One may ask in retrospect whether Heine would have been better off in the long run had he not done it. The question is partly idle, for at the time he could in no way foresee that he would never occupy a position in

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which it made any difference whether he was Jew or Christian. Had he remained fully Jewish, his relationship with his public and environ­ ment might have been even more vulnerable than it was. But he suf­ fered a self-inflicted wound to his own integrity, for all that it had been sustained under duress. As he came to understand, his Jewishness re­ mained a significant fraction of his cultural consciousness and poetic imagination, and he could not, as some others could, cast it off like an old coat. He tried, to be sure. Sometimes he played games with the conflict, pretending to float over it as though it had nothing to do with him. He wrote, for instance, in The Book of Le Grand: "I always had a great predilection for the Jews, although to this hour they crucify my good name."17 Sometimes he attempted misdirection; in 1835 he declared that he did not belong to the Jewish religion and that he had never set foot in a synagogue, which was not true.18 Especially in France, he seemed inclined to hide his Jewish identity, and he became exceedingly furious if anyone portrayed him as a Jew in public. His distressing tendency to adopt vulgar anti-Semitic remarks and carica­ tures belongs also in this context. These devices cannot have strength­ ened him morally. Perhaps he would have remained somewhat braver and stronger if he had been able to avoid that ominous ceremony in Heiligenstadt. The other ceremony by which the newly christened Heinrich Heine was converted into Dr. jur. Heinrich Heine was more lighthearted. On July 20 he presented himself for a Latin disputation on five theses, among them the rather peculiar one: "ex jurejurando non nascitur obligatio."19 Fortunately for Heine, it was less a scholarly occasion than a public entertainment, and it undoubtedly had its comic aspect. Once again he got a C. On the occasion the internationally eminent jurist Gustav Hugo (1764-1844), whom Heine had joked about in The Harz Journey and privately described as frightfully boring, delivered a Latin laudatio in which he did not go out of his way to praise Heine's accomplishments in the law, but remarked that numerous other Ger­ man poets had been students of that science and that Heine had pub­ lished poems that Goethe himself would not need to be ashamed of.20 This was, of course, uncommonly gracious. It led Heine, who regarded Hugo as an ideological enemy and had feared his deanship, to remark, no doubt laughing, that Hugo "is one of the greatest men of our century."21 But beyond this it says something about the literary visi­ bility Heine had achieved while laboring at the most difficult task he ever had to undertake. That, at least, was now behind him.

D R I F T

Lüneburg—Hamburg—England Munich—Italy—Hamburg Potsdam—Hamburg Wandsbek—Hamburg 1825-1831

[Π The North Sea Now what? Heine's university education had done for him what a university education is theoretically supposed to do: it had clarified his vocation. That it was not the law was evident to the naked eye. Yet the time had been anything but wasted. The obscure young man from the prov­ inces of five or six years before had established himself as an important poet and writer; along the way he had acquired substantial learning, made worthwhile personal connections, and obtained at least a foot­ hold in good society. But it was evident to all concerned that none of this added up to a living. To make a profession of literature seems not to have crossed his mind, and not only because none of his family could have comprehended such a choice. Young Heine stood near the threshold of the age of the free-lance writer in Germany. The era of patronage by the great had vanished. Most of the writers of the Classical-Romantic age had lived, some of them precariously and penuriously, from income of other kinds. Lessing, bleakly poor for most of his life, ended as a librarian. Schiller was a professor, though he survived largely on the generosity of friends and a providential stipend from the Danish court. Tieck be­ came a kind of literary courtier; Brentano's family was wealthy; Arnim was a landowner; Novalis was a mining engineer; Eichendorff and Hoffmann were public officials; Morike was, miserably, a clergyman. Goethe was a very special case. As the companion to a ruling duke and, for a time, one of his chief ministers, his position was exception­ ally comfortable. At the same time he was a tough literary businessman and drove hard bargains with his publishers; for his collected edition he obtained eventually the first real copyright in German literature and thereby set some standards that were valuable to later generations of writers. But in Heine's youth there was no copyright system in Ger­ many; literary works were sold outright for a lump sum, sometimes per edition, to publishers; and pirating was more the rule than the exception. The audience for serious literature was numerically thin and, consisting as it did largely of students, middle-rank public officials, teachers, clergymen, and struggling intellectuals, its purchasing power was limited, while books were relatively expensive. Some figures will give an idea of the constriction of the market at that time. A new book might appear in an edition of 600 copies. About that many subscriptions

III. DRIFT

marked also the survival boundary for a literary or intellectual periodi­ cal. Major works might range from a low of 1,500 to a high of 3,500; most editions of Heine's books came within these limits. With 10,000 copies one clearly had a bestseller. Only one of Heine's works surpassed that level upon publication, Rornanzero in 1851. In the Letters from Berlin Heine compared the promising prospects of the English writer and the social integration of the French writer to the peripheral, lonely, consequently dreamy and idiosyncratic position of the writer in Ger­ many, a difference already remarked upon years before by Madame de StaeL1 In Heine's generation people did start making a living by the pen. But it was a meager and threatened living, and it furthermore required almost superhuman industry. Of Karl Gutzkow, an outstanding exam­ ple of this type of whom we shall hear more, it has been said that one can only imagine him standing at his writing desk driving his pen with a hasty hand.2 It meant doing every conceivable kind of writing and pursuing every conceivable opportunity to do it. The selected works of such people typically run to fifty volumes and more; in many cases their complete works may never have all been read by any single human being. Heine could not produce this way. As a writer he could not be hurried, no matter how much his publisher might urge and cajole, no matter how desperate his finances became. Once he exclaimed to the prolific Varnhagen: "For heaven's sake! How can one write such fat books!"3 Often he could be speedy enough when the inspiration was upon him, but in general he was a deliberate, meticulous, and constantly revising writer, and he could write hardly anything that was not urgent and important to him; his infrequent efforts at potboilers irritated and dissatisfied him. The con­ sequence is, on the one hand, that his total corpus is a great deal smaller than that of many other writers of his time and, on the other, that its average quality is very high. Like all writers, he produced unsuccessful and, by his standard, inferior works, but there is very little that does not contain something worth reading. Heine resisted from the beginning the transformation of art into a commodity, a system "where even the Muse is a cow milked for an honorarium until it gives pure water." An independent income, he thought, was much more likely than hunger to bring forth worthwhile art and science.4 However, we must not exaggerate this into an ideo­ logical point. It was an instinct rather than a moral stance; he was constitutionally incapable of maintaining the output of a professional writer. Rather than trying to make his living by extensive writing, Heine labored to manage his fame, "from which I must more or less

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live."5 His efforts on behalf of his reputation, doing everything he could and inducing his friends to do everything they could to increase and expand his visibility while at the same time combatting negative opinion and excessive curiosity about his person, are a major theme in his correspondence and represent an expenditure of energy that a differently constituted author might have employed for primary cre­ ativity, and that furthermore achieved less than he hoped or believed. We are the beneficiaries of these habits, not Heine, for although he became, work by work, probably the best paid serious German writer of his time, he never could earn enough from writing to support his way of life. During the several years after receiving his degree, Heine's external affairs are marked by drift, as he confronted this problem without find­ ing any resolution of it. His life seemed at an impasse; thoughts of suicide cropped up from time to time. From 1825 to 1827 he lived alternately in Luneburg and "damned Hamburg,"6 becoming increas­ ingly a ward of his family. Originally he had planned a diplomatic ca­ reer, an idea that does not suggest much self-knowledge.7 Then he thought, equally unrealistically, of becoming a professor at Berlin. Up­ on graduation he considered establishing himself, with the help of Uncle Salomon's influence, as an attorney in Hamburg, but this plan, he thought, was frustrated by his uncle's entourage, including his brotherin-law Embden, with whom he had frictions that obliged him to move out of his sister's house.8 Here continues a pattern that recurs over near­ ly the next twenty years of perceiving his uncle as surrounded by whisperers and backbiters intriguing against him. It cannot be said that he pursued the plan of becoming an attorney with great vigor, and, while such employment perhaps does not require a legal genius, it is hard to imagine him very comfortable or successful in the role; one shudders to think of the squabbles his highstrung, aggressive temper would have got him into. He did not really want to do such work; he did not want to do any work other than writing, and his increasingly quixotic efforts to find a suitable arrangement will be related in their proper places. Dr. jur. Heine's immediate concern upon graduating, however, was to find a way to go on vacation. The way to vacation, like every­ thing else, led through Uncle Salomon, who financed another North Sea sojourn in August and mid-September. This time Heine did get off the coast, journeying straight from Gottingen to the island of Norderney. Like most of his changes of scene, this trip was productive in experience and imagination, and he returned to Norderney twice more, in July to mid-September 1826, and from mid-August to Sep-

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tember 1827. On his first two visits he lived the good life, portraying himself as a social success, especially with noble ladies, and, on the second, engaging in a certain amount of gambling. This was a foolish and expensive pastime for a person in his position; he lost a good deal of his uncle's money, and he swore off that vice for the rest of his life. On the second visit he put some of his time to better use by learning how to swim. Heine's eye for the social implications of life on the island grew quite sharp. He lived at the beginning of the age of tourism, and he registered its manifestations with interest. In The Harz Journey we see the Brocken being transformed from a mysterious, fabled locale amid nature's beauty to a tamed place for outings, complete with inn and restaurant, antic students and fatuous philistines. On Norderney he observed the emergence of a fashionable resort amidst a harsh and poor population of fishermen and seamen. He had a double optic for such things; he saw that the island inhabitants were archaic and con­ stricted in their backwardness and their envy of the flaunted prosperity of the visitors might generate progressive dissatisfactions; at the same time he recognized that a loss in unalienated human immediacy was being incurred. But, "the spirit has its eternal rights"; intellectual free­ dom, in its victory over the patriarchal totalitarianism of the church, offers its own happiness, for all the unresolvable dissonance in self and society that it may cause.9 In fact Heine gave the North Sea tourist industry new momentum; in later times he was regarded as having made Helgoland, where he vacationed in the summers of 1829 and 1830, a fashionable place to visit.10 Of equal importance was the impact of the North Sea on his poetry. His coastal visit of 1823 had already left a trace in Homecoming in a little sub-cluster (Nos. 7-14) of verses describing an amorous in­ terlude with a fisher-girl; this emotionally unstressed relationship stands in contrast to the agony of unrequited love and, like similar encounters in The Harz Journey, represents a stage in the poet's emo­ tional rehabilitation. But on Norderney Heine began to write a poetry completely different from anything he had attempted before. He had with him a copy of Homer in the translation of Johann Heinrich Voss (1751-1826), a writer whom he greatly admired for his combination of Classical learning and form with a revolutionary sympathy for the oppressed common people. Under the impact of Homer he began for the first and almost the only time in his life to write free verse. With rolling periods and polysyllabic Homeric epithets he recorded the ma­ jestic moods of the sea and invented anecdotes about its gods. The poems are, for him, uncharacteristically long and expansive; the longest

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runs to ninety-eight lines. Varnhagen, picking up a phrase Heine him­ self had used in a letter, called them "colossal epigrams."11 There are twenty-two in all, ten in The North Sea I and twelve in The North Sea II, written in 1826, thus continuing his curious habit of composing clusters in multiples of eleven. They are not only formally original in Heine's oeuvre; oddly, he is the first German to write a body of major poetry about the sea.12 One important thematic concern in the North Sea poems is a pointed reckoning with the Romantic imagination and especially with the pa­ thetic fallacy. The stars and the sea are stirring and imposing, but they are unbridgeably other; they care nothing for the feelings and tribu­ lations of man and cannot be poetically forced into human sympathies. The gods, too, are preoccupied with their petty domestic affairs and are indifferent to the danger and fate they inflict on human beings, al­ though the Oceanides on one occasion at least acknowledge the poet's suffering. 18 Number 10 of the first cycle, "Sea Spectre" (Seegespenst), is especially revealing. The poet envisages a sunken town under the waves and becomes so mesmerized by this projection of his own imag­ ination that he leans farther and farther over the railing, threatening to slide into the depths, until the captain grabs him by the ankle and yanks him back on deck, crying, "Doctor, has the Devil got you?"14 The threat of the seductive imagination is exorcised, and the poet re­ locates himself on the surface of things. The following poem, "Purifi­ cation" (Reinigung) begins: "Stay in your ocean depths / Insane dream / That in so many a night / Used to torment my heart with false happi­ ness / And now, as a sea spectre / Even threatens me in broad daylight — / Stay down there in eternity"; and the poet flings after it his pain and sin, his fool's cap and his hypocrisy.15 With their overcoming of lyrical self-indulgence and their mature abjuration of a false transcendence, along with their originality and poetic excellence, the North Sea poems made a fitting conclusion to the Book of Songs. As if to emphasize their status as a closure and a boundary of his lyricism, Heine also wrote after his second Norderney visit a prose work that he entitled The North Sea: Third Part. At first it seems a rambling conglomerate of private ruminations, social obser­ vations, and North Sea legends, but it is held together by interlaced thematic variations, and its center of gravity is a contrasting analysis of the two great men of the time, Napoleon and Goethe. Heine's as­ pirations for himself led him to a heroic view of great men, who main­ tain, he believed, a mystical communion with one another across the ages. Despite his inner reservations about Goethe at the time, Heine's anti-feudal and anti-aristocratic mood led him strongly to defend

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Goethe's clear-eved paganism. It is Napoleon, however, who is ele­ vated to a tragic hero of epic proportions; Heine compares him to Agamemnon and asserts that his career forms a French epic dwarfing petty German conditions. He had been reading Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland's account of Napoleon's arrest, which he always interpreted as outrageous British treachery, a pathetic effort to repress eternal greatness. The passage points ahead to the apotheosis of Napoleon in The Book of Le Grand, and Heine thought it important enough to publish it in three different formats in the same year of 1827: a Braun­ schweig newspaper, a Munich political journal with which he was before long to be more closely associated, and the second volume of the Travel Pictures. North Sea III marks the consolidation of Heine's posture as an activist writer. During the late twenties he repeatedly announced that his lyric period was over and that he was turning to more serious and relevant matters in prose. As we shall see later, how­ ever, the North Sea sequence did not yet bring his early lyric phase to an end.

D: Julius Campe ONE day at the end of January 1826—so goes a not wholly reliable story 1 —Heine wandered into the Hamburg bookstore of Hoffmann und Campe in search of a copy of his own tragedies, spoke derogatorily of them, and was happily contradicted by the proprietor, a vigorous, square-jawed man who was to become the most important person in his life. Julius Campe, born in very modest circumstances near Braunschweig in 1792, was one of those fortunate people who are utterly suited to their lot in life. Orphaned and all but abandoned as a child and entirely self-taught, he embraced publishing as his profes­ sion and passion, and in his knowledge and understanding of the busi­ ness he came to be without master. "I work the way I do not just to feed myself," he wrote some years later to Heine; "I am driven and swept along by the joyful feeling that in the book business I have found a way of achieving something that is not given to everyone, and that repays me for my worries and torments!" 2 Despite his early deprivations, Campe was not without useful back­ ground. In fact his grandfather had been a von Campe who in an egalitarian gesture renounced his patent of nobility. His uncle, Joachim

III. DRIFT Heinrich Campe (1746-1818), was a prominent figure of the Enlighten­ ment; he composed, along with widely read educational and literary works, an influential adaptation of Robinson Crusoe and a dictionary of the German language still useful to students of that period. Julius Campe's family tree shows him related in the course of time along a web of marriages to four of the major publishing families of Germany: Vieweg, Westermann, Brockhaus, and Reclam.3 His two much older half-brothers were led by their famous uncle to become booksellers, one in Nuremberg, the other in Hamburg. The latter became associ­ ated by marriage with one Benjamin Gottlob Hoffmann, but he died in 1818, and the Hoffmann of Hoffmann und Campe was thenceforth a name only. Julius, in turn, after an appropriate apprenticeship, fol­ lowed by a stint as a volunteer in the Wars of Liberation and a twoyear tour in Italy, took over the firm in 1823 and began to build it into a powerful force in German letters. It helped to restore cultural vitality in Hamburg, and in time it became second in importance in Germany only to the great house of Cotta, even though it was quantitatively a relatively small firm. In terms of progressive and oppositional literature it was the most important publishing house in Germany. For Campe was a perhaps politically moderate, but temperamentally exceedingly determined and persistent liberal. His publishing career was one long struggle with the ruling powers, a struggle which he pursued with unflagging courage and legendary resourcefulness. He published every liberal and radical writer he could find; he bound dis­ sident works together with conservative ones in order to muddle the censor; he put imaginary printers and places of publication on title pages; he smuggled books; he risked shutdown and arrest. He was a painful thorn in the side of the German governments and within a few years obtained a prominent position on Metternich's enemies' list. Campe was a stupendously hard-working man. While he had appren­ tices and assistants, he seems not to have had a secretary; his volumi­ nous correspondence with Heine is in his own hand. He worked fif­ teen hours a day, Sundays and holidays. Many of his letters to Heine are dated on a Sunday;4 one was written at quarter to three on a De­ cember morning.5 His letters characterize him vividly: they are ener­ getic, often drastic in expression, hastily written in a staccato style, full of abbreviations and bad jokes, unkempt, colloquial, and some­ times so elliptical as to be difficult for a modern reader to follow. He was a genius at book distribution and at organizing public relations, advertising, advantageous scandals, and friendly reviews. Personally he appears to have been absolutely fearless; he had the character of the soldier he had briefly been. He could write to Heine, for example, durIl9

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ing the great cholera epidemic of 1831-1832 (without in any way seem­ ing to relate this circumstance to his own risk) that victims were falling dead on the street.® His frequent run-ins with the authorities, the po­ lice, and the courts are usually reported with a defiant snort. His in­ termittent appeals to Heine for political moderation and a return to literary subjects, therefore, derived not from anxiety but considered calculation. If Heine had not walked into Campe's shop that winter day, it is almost inevitable that they would have found their way to one an­ other before long. Such a man was Heine's obvious publisher, and Heine's rising career and growing oeuvre, as well as his oppositional vigor, had to be attractive to Campe's purposes. His aesthetic sensibili­ ties were blunt—on that head he was dependent upon the advice of others—so he was not the kind of critical partner to Heine's creativity that some publishers have been to their authors. But he had a very accurate sense of current events in Germany; for example, he pre­ dicted the 1848 Revolution in Berlin nearly a year before it occurred.7 In particular he was an acute judge of the public. He was rarely mis­ taken when he warned Heine that something would fail to please or would cause offense. Over the years he lectured Heine on his increas­ ing estrangement from the public, but Heine did not choose to believe him. Campe himself was pinned between an allegiance, shared with Heine, to a progressive if insolvent minority public and the need to do business with a complacent majority public that judged books, in his own estimate, according to their suitability as presents for ladies.8 If his economic interests made him sometimes appear as a philistine par­ tisan in his debates with Heine, it is also true that Heine would have done well to attend a little to his wisdom rather than projecting an enthusiastic public in his own imagination. Campe was a hardhead and Heine possessed a rugged ego. Their thirty-year connection was, consequently, one of the stormiest in the annals of publishing. Words passed between them that, with other men and in other circumstances, would have ended a relationship for­ ever. It resembled less a friendship than a marriage, an observation both of them had occasion to make.9 Indeed, it was Campe who from time to time tried to personalize their correspondence with news of his pri­ vate life, information, and friendly advice, while Heine, as was his custom, generally remained aloof from such intimacies. They raged and fought, they fenced interminably with reproofs and self-justifica­ tions, but they were held together by a bond that frayed and strained but ultimately held, though Heine repeatedly threatened to defect to other publishers and Campe, as we shall see, all but abandoned Heine

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at a critical point in his life. As in some volcanic marriages, they seem in the long run to have deserved one another. Heine might have driven any publisher less thick-skinned than Campe to distraction, and Campe was a roughneck with whom it was necessary to hold one's own. As in the case of Heine and his uncle, variant interpretations have grown up around this relationship. Readers of Heine's correspondence came to see it as a model case of the exploited writer versus the capi­ talist publisher. Heine's lengthy self-justifications and his reiterated assertions that he was sacrificing himself for Campe's welfare were taken at face value. It was noted that Heine was Campe's star and that his works eventually laid the foundation for the prosperity of the house of Hoffmann und Campe, which thrives to this day and continues to be the major publisher of Heine and Heineana in West Germany. Yet Heine himself had a constant struggle to keep his head above water. Then Campe's side of the correspondence became visible, and an interpretation favorable to him emerged. It became clearer that Heine was often unreasonable and unreliable, and that his memory about agreements and past events was selective and self-serving. His slow way of working constantly caused missed deadlines, sometimes by months and even years, sabotaging Campe's careful calculations. Campe wrote long letters, virtually essays, trying to explain the exigen­ cies of the book business to him, but they made no impression what­ ever. Then Heine appeared as the exploiter and Campe the victim. The truth of the matter is, as usual, more complex. In the first place, it is now clear that Campe did not get rich on Heine, whose financial value to the firm was mainly a phenomenon of the later nineteenth century. He paid Heine the equivalent of 89,292 francs in honoraria and 21,200 in annual pensions, and he and his son paid another 67,200 francs until the death of Heine's widow in 1883;10 in modern terms that amounts to something like $370,000 for Heine and another $225,000 for his widow. As a lifetime income that is not spectacular, but it must be remembered what has been said about Heine's sporadic and relatively limited productivity, and it was hardly a poverty-line income, nor were these earnings his only resources. With the excep­ tion of the Book of Songs, Campe's honoraria to Heine were compara­ ble to those paid by Cotta to his star authors, and generally higher than those he paid to his own other leading authors. From these earn­ ings alone Heine had from the beginning the (relatively modest) in­ come of a young academic and reached in time the living standard of the highest paid officials.11 His complaints that Campe was letting him starve and that he would have prospered better with another publisher were therefore without foundation. In fact, Campe does not seem to

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have been excessively interested in his own prosperity, beyond what was necessary to maintain himself, his family, and his firm. Ambition, more than covetousness, drove him. To secure his financial underpin­ nings he also published much non-controversial literature, including a great deal of utilitarian non-fiction. To be sure, he was quite given to the merchant ethos and to haggling as an art form of his vocation. But in his embattled circumstances he had to reckon very closely to keep the firm afloat. The cause would have been in no way served if he had gone under. Most of Heine's works did not sell well or were banned and confiscated. His manner, Campe remarked, was not one to appeal to a large audience: "You treat love and Your Self, and again Your Self, and people see that as stinking egotism."12 Heine had no head for business and no sympathy for Campe's struggle with the balance sheet. But Campe was determined to stay in business as a progressive publisher and by hard negotiation, stubbornness, and calculated footdragging he held the line against Heine's demands. At the same time Campe's practice could be sharp. Heine com­ plained that he printed excessively large editions in order to spare himself the honorarium of another. "Behave like a Christian in the size of the edition," Heine pleaded in 1835. "Oh, dearest Campe, I would give a lot if you had more religion! But reading my own books has much damaged your soul, that delicate devout feeling you once possessed is lost."13 Heine exaggerated this complaint, but in a couple of cases that have been unearthed by alert bibliographers, Campe did produce second printings without telling Heine, for which he ought by rights to have paid.14 It is possible that he felt himself relieved from the obligation to complete candor by Heine's abrasive and persistent opportunism. "With no other human being do I have the dealing and bargaining that I have with you, and it has so often clouded our re­ lationship and made me cool toward you," he wrote as early as 1833 (as a matter of fact, many of his authors had tough haggling with him; he became notorious for it in the literary brotherhood).15 I think that Campe's personality changed some over the years. He be­ came more hard-fisted and a little meaner. Whether this was the con­ sequence of his years of wearying dealings with Heine, or the inevita­ ble development of a publisher in capitalist society, is hard to judge. This familiar pull and tug between author and publisher was greatly exacerbated by the censorship situation. The censorship affected every­ thing published in whatever format. But, according to the Carlsbad De­ crees of 1819, binding on all the German states, all publications under twenty signatures, or 320 pages, had to be submitted to pre-censorship

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before they could appear. The idea was that large books would not be read by the people, while the real danger lay in newspapers, pamphlets, and easily accessible short works. This and other censorship regulations were repeatedly tightened during the Metternichian era. At first the excisions of the censor were indicated by blank spaces or dashes. Heine produced in The Book of Le Grand a wonderful persiflage of this practice by including a chapter consisting only of the words: "The German censors . . . blockheads," separated by some ninety dashes,16 and elsewhere he suggestively inserted dashes where no excisions had taken place.17 But in 1826 in Prussia and in 1834 in all of Germany it came to be illegal to do even this, and type had to be expensively reset to mask what Heine called "the higher criticism" of the authorities.18 The effect on the appearance of books can be seen to this day; dissident works of the time came to be printed in large type with wide margins, plenty of blank space, and twenty instead of the usual thirty or thirtythree lines to the page; such books can be found in any major library and attest to the efforts of oppositional writers to get beyond the 320page limit. Heine, too, was under this constraint in composing his works. Campe was in a relatively advantageous position because the auton­ omous city-state of Hamburg was a little more liberal than the rest of the German Confederation and he had good relations with the in­ fluential official who for some time oversaw the censorship, the Syndikus Karl Sieveking; he was a great-grandson of the important free­ thinker of Lessing's time, Samuel Reimarus, and a sensible man who admired Heine and preferred to censor as little as possible. But Campe had to worry about Prussia all the same. With thirteen million inhab­ itants, Prussia was the largest and best-educated of the German states and therefore the most important book market; a book that could not appear there could not hope to survive. Another publisher with whom Heine dickered for a time estimated Prussia as one-third of the bookbuying public.19 At first it was the understanding that a book censored in any German state was admissible in the others, but this possibility was closed at a secret conference of the German governments in Vi­ enna in 1834, and Campe was therefore concerned to find, somewhere, a censor who would meet Prussian requirements. Heine, on the other hand, was understandably insistent that his books should not be cen­ sored at all and absolutely forbade it; but Campe, after having pub­ lished several of Heine's volumes without pre-censorship and enduring their confiscation and banning, preferred to submit to it as a way of giving the books a little longer life under a cover of apparent legality.

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The quarrel over this point went on year after year. Heine was insisting upon his inviolable individuality as an author and demanding that Campe contend for it as well in a situation organized to subdue indi­ viduality as much as possible. Once Campe's patience gave way and he pointed out that Heine was lodged at a safe distance in Paris while consigning his publisher into "the Devil's kitchen."20 In fact the print­ ing-house Campe employed in the 1830s refused to print uncensored manuscripts, having had some disagreeable experiences.21 But Heine cared nothing for Campe's tribulations, and in this way the external pressures of the time added to the strain between author and publisher.

M

The Breakthrough to Fame HOWEVER, in the winter of 1826 all these troubles were in the future. Indeed, Heine must at first have thought Campe the most reasonable man he had ever met. He was accustomed to cajoling publishers into accepting his works and to being remunerated for them with a handful of free copies. Now he found his worth better estimated by a genuine professional. Would Campe be interested in publishing a volume of Travel Pictures, containing the true text of The Harz Journey ? He would. Would he actually like to pay something for it? He would, though whether it was thirty louis d'ors (ca. $1,800), as Campe's records indicate, or fifty (ca. $3,000), as Heine claimed, is unclear.1 What about a collected volume of the poems written to date? All right, although Campe did not want Heine to waste too much time with it.2 Heine expected no honorarium for this book, an offer he was later to regret. Campe seems to have paid him something for it retroactively on Heine's insistence.3 The acquisition of the Book of Songs (Buch der Lieder), which appeared in October 1827, for next to nothing, was one of the most splendid deals a publisher ever made. It has sometimes been cited as an example of Campe's heartless exploitation, to be set beside the sale of Milton's Paradise Lost for five pounds as a deathless indictment of the capitalist transformation of the work of art into a commodity. In fact neither man saw the transaction in this light at the time. Almost all of the 238 poems had been published previously, some more than once. The world was full of verse and it was becoming a drug on the market.

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Heine thought he had outgrown his lyric phase and at the time set no great store by the book. Campe was not excessively enthusiastic about it either; he cared about the Travel Pictures and Heine's potential for the future, and he took on the Book of Songs as a gesture of accommo­ dation to a writer he wanted to have. Neither man could then foresee that it would become the most world-famous book of poetry in the German language. Indeed, Campe was, as usual, right in the short run; the book remained for some years in the shadow of the Travel Pictures. The first edition of 2,000 copies lasted for a decade; a second did not appear until 1837; Campe had been ready for one a year earlier, but Heine stalled to bring pressure on him. Then the book began slowly to pick up speed, not accidentally accompanying the rise of the Ger­ man art song. A third edition appeared in 1839, a fourth in 1841, a fifth in 1844, the last that Heine corrected, making it the bibliograph­ ical standard. Eight further editions appeared in Heine's lifetime, and numberless others to the present day. Seen retrospectively and taken as a whole, the Book of Songs, the compendium of a decade of lyric production, is an absorbing work, though it requires of the modern reader an unprejudiced attentiveness and the ability to close the mind's ear to the accompaniment of the German Lied. It was composed with care; Heine thoughtfully clus­ tered poems thematically that originally had nothing to do with one another, yet in their new sequence yield a kind of poeticized auto­ biography. The book consists of five parts: Youthful Sufferings, sub­ divided into Dream Images, Songs, Romances, and Sonnets·, Lyrical Intermezzo·, Homecoming, to which are appended five narrative poems; five poems from The Harz Journey, and the two cycles of The North Sea. Starting with late Romantic materials along with a suspicion as to their genuine employability, the collection measures their strength in all manner of variations before reaching an eminently poetic repudi­ ation of Romantic illusion at the end. At the same time a poetic person­ ality is constructed, grappling with and gradually outgrowing an emotional devastation, a wounded victory accomplished through the display of poetic powers, so that poetry itself is the poet's salvation, but in a non-idealistic context. Read this way, the Book of Songs shows that Heine's occasional notion, shared by too many inattentive readers, that he could finally abjure poetry, was a misapprehension. Nor do the Travel Pictures exhibit an abrupt change to prose. The first two volumes contain lyric clusters, and the text of The Harz Journey itself includes, in traditional Romantic fashion, poems inte­ grated into the narration. Throughout the whole four volumes, how-

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ever, the gradual shift to prose, and increasingly to an activist exposi­ tory prose, is evident. The Travel Pictures (Reisebilder) took their title from The Harz Journey (Die Harzreise), but not all of them are associated with journeys. Heine here created a form well suited to his non-generic tendency and his habit of writing pieces of relative brev­ ity; it was a comfortable container for his variety of utterance, "to say anything I want," as he put it.4 This kind of publication also made it possible for him to stretch his modest output by republishing works that had appeared in other formats. His habit of duplicate and multiple publication, besides increasing the quantity of variants, has always made it hard for editors to know how best to structure a collected edition. It also occasionally exasperated Campe, who disparaged the practice as "book-making."5 The first volume, which Campe got out with encouraging prompt­ ness in May 1826, after having maneuvered it adroitly around the Ham­ burg censorship, contained the complete Homecoming, The Harz Journey, and The North Sea I. In the second edition of 1830, the five longer poems appended to Homecoming were removed (only to return in later editions) and were replaced with The North Sea II, which had originally appeared in Travel Pictures II in 1827 and, for that matter, in The Book of Songs. This is the sort of thing that keeps Heine philologists busy. Travel Pictures I sold slowly at first; after a year Campe still had 650 copies of the edition of 1,500.6 But, like many of Heine's works, it had endurance; four more editions appeared in his lifetime, in 1830, 1840, 1848, and 1856, as well as separate editions of The Harz Journey in 1852 and 1854—that is, thirty years after the event. The critics reacted to Travel Pictures I vigorously, though often with reservations. Heine's superior artistic skill and intelligence were recognized without difficulty, but some commentators were disturbed by the ego-centered posture, the disrespectful wit, the, for the time, occasional risque passages, or the explicitness of the social and political animadversions.7 It suffered little repression, although the faculty of the University of Gottingen was particularly outraged and the book was banned from that city. This in turn gave Campe a chance for a long-remembered practical joke: he sent Heine some gingerbread with the note: "From Professor Hugo in Gottingen." Heine threw it into the fire, thinking it might be poisoned.8 The book was also re­ viewed in England in the Foreign Quarterly, along with a translation of the Gottingen passage.9 The review was not very friendly; Heine generally did not suit the conservative mood in England in these im­ mediate post-Napoleonic years.

Masterpiece: Ideas: The Book of Le Grand THIS was an excellent beginning, and both Heine and Campe could see the desirability of following it up with a second volume. For his part, Heine, as he wrote to Varnhagen, was in need of fame and at the same time anxious to go on the polemical warpath.1 Campe could be pokey or quick as it suited his purpose; this time it suited him to be quick. He pressed his dilatory new author unremittingly for manu­ script. Travel Pictures II was in the press by March 1827 and it appeared in April. It contained the poems of North Sea II, the prose essay North Sea III, a new prose work, Ideas: The Book of Le Grand (Ideen. Das Buck Le Grand), and the greatly shortened Letters from Berlin, which Heine removed in the second edition of 1831, replacing it with a new cycle of poems. The critical response was lively and, as usual, very mixed. Once again Campe had a work of pleasing endur­ ance; further editions appeared in 1843, 1851, and 1856, all reprints of the second. With Ideas: The Book of Le Grand Heine produced a genuine masterpiece; it is the crowning work of his pre-Parisian prose. It is perhaps also the work most recommendable for an insight into the way his imagination incorporated and integrated personal experience, ideas, and views on history, society, and politics, and suspended these serious matters, as though in a colloid, in an apparently weightless, effortless, often highly comic style. The work is structured as a monologic con­ versation directed at a beautiful woman. Much effort has been applied to identifying her and fitting her into speculations on Heine's love-life. In all probability Heine had in mind Friederike Robert, whom he admired but with whom he certainly was in no way involved. In any case her identity is of no importance; she is a nearly silent figure who acts as a foil to the brilliance of the narrator, who treats her with elaborate admiration for her beauty and sympathetic charm, but addresses her as a simple and bemused auditor barely able to follow his imaginative flights and intellectual fireworks. For the sake of her limited understanding, the narration is framed by the love story familiar from the Book of Songs and The Harz Journey, seen now in retrospect; to the first, second, and last chapters Heine set a motto from an imaginary "old play": "She was amiable, and He loved Her; but He was not amiable, and She loved Him not."2 The old story has left permanent wounds, but the narrator has turned

IlJ

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it into history and literature and has turned himself from its debili­ tating melancholy to an allegiance to ongoing life. Woven into the text is a substantial amount of imaginatively transformed autobiograph­ ical reminiscence: childhood and schoolboy memories, the earliest en­ counters with poesy, and the genesis of the political consciousness. Here is the famous account of the boyhood sight of Napoleon. Le Grand, a fictional figure, as far as we know, is a French drum-major who communicates revolutionary principles to the boy with his drum­ ming, an obvious allegory of a linkage of rhythmic, poetic expression with political commitment. As often in Heine, we feel in the back­ ground the presence of Goethe, whose boyhood had been significantly touched by an urbane and cultured French officer quartered in his father's house. Le Grand stands in here for manly elegance in the grand revolutionary cause, a wish-dream of Heine's, and for La Grande Armee, tragically annihilated in the Russian campaign. The key to understanding Heine's strategy in the Book of Le Grand is to observe his avoidance of chronological narration and empirical autobiographical description. What is being presented to us is not a story—though there is a story buried in it—but a state of mind. It is the layeredness of present consciousness, the self that has been achieved up to this point, that is the subject of the work. In this way the irrevocable if elegiacally felt pastness of the past is underscored. Per­ sonal history is subsumed under a much larger awareness of history in general, now sensed to be at a crisis point. Lively and colorful as the work is, it is in the deepest sense static, concerned not with the true reminiscence of the unloved private self, but with the present standing of the poetically created public self. It is a wry and bruised self, but one ultimately in balance, gay, feisty, even confident. The sinew of the self is the consciousness of poetic dignity; on the brink of suicide, the narrator recites a monologue from the "immortal" Almansor, which gains him time until he catches a friendly passing glance from his beloved; his own literary creativity has almost liter­ ally a life-saving function. The rich text is a remarkable performance when one considers the insecure footing of Heine's life at the time and his dissatisfied, testy mood. Once again we see him more at home in his creativity than in his external circumstances. This time he knew what he had done; his customary diffidence after having completed a work did not set in. His letters to his friends are full of enthusiasm about the Book of Le Grand. Nevertheless, he was feeling hostile about the world in general, and found a curious and oblique way to work off his feelings. He opened the pages of Travel Pictures II to his friends, offering to include any

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satire or polemic they might wish to supply.3 No one responded to this odd offer except Immermann, who delivered a number of satirical couplets directed against literary fashions and personalities, which Heine appended to North Sea III. This mode of polemic descended from Goethe's and Schiller's satirical Xenia of some thirty years before, although Immermann's were not Classical distichs like theirs, but rhymed octonarii. They are not exceptionally witty and for the most part are more lumpish than barbed, and they are so esoteric in their allusions as to be incomprehensible without detailed commentary. Heine explicitly dissociated himself from a number of them by marking them with an asterisk. But including them at all was a maladroit maneuver, and it maneuvered him, as we shall see, into quite a hornet's nest.

C5H

England WITH Travel Pictures Il Heine had gone on the offensive and there­ fore thought it would be safer to be somewhere else when the book appeared. (Actually the reaction was not so fierce; it was banned only in the Rhineland.)1 Miraculously, he induced Uncle Salomon to finance a trip to England, and in fact left Hamburg on the very day the book was published, April 12, 1827. This journey occasioned the biggest fiasco yet to occur in the relationship between nephew and uncle. Salomon, possibly at his nephew's suggestion, gave him a letter of credit in a large amount; the sum varies in the sources, but the smallest given, £ zoo, is the most plausible.2 This instrument was not for Heine to cash but merely to show, in order to establish his identity as the great man's connection. Heine had hardly arrived in London when he presented himself to Nathan Rothschild and cashed it. This was a substantial sum in those days, equal perhaps to as much as $5,000 in modern purchasing power. Heine had been scraping and scrounging for too long to resist this temptation, and later he sent a substantial por­ tion, 800 talers, to Varnhagen for safekeeping for the future.3 Salomon was, of course, beside himself when he heard about this caper, and he remembered it for the rest of his life. Yet he was not in the long run as rabid as one might have expected, perhaps reflecting in a businesslike way that he 'had only himself to blame. According to brother Maxi­ milian, Heine is supposed to have written to his mother: "Old folks I29

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have caprices; what Uncle gave in a good mood he could take back in a bad one. There I had to keep a good lookout, for it could have occurred to him in his next letter to Rothschild to write to him that the letter of credit was only an empty form, such as the annals of the counting-houses of great bankers exhibit sufficient examples. Yes, dear mother, one must always keep a good lookout. Uncle himself would not have become so rich if he had not always kept a good lookout."4 What his mother thought of this is not recorded. Heine played the conventional tourist in England. He visited the insane asylum popularly called Bedlam, where he got separated from his guide and frightened himself by getting lost among the inmates, caught sight of the great Kean playing Shakespeare at Drury Lane, witnessed a trial at Old Bailey, and visited the House of Commons. His love of the seaside persisted, and he made several visits to Brighton, Margate, and Ramsgate. Evidence of his growing reputation was the notice in the Morning Herald of June 22 of the presence of "Dr. H. Heine, the German Satirist and Poet."3 It was all very interesting, yet it cannot be said that Heine enjoyed England. In the first place he was cut off from the language. He had learned to read English but could not understand it and in consequence he felt isolated.6 His personal connections were restricted to German-speaking people: business acquaintances of his uncle and the pianist and com­ poser Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870), evidently a likeable man whose wife was an Embden and with whom Heine often dined while in London. Secondly, he was somewhat intimidated by the metropolis. It was the biggest city in Europe, also very expensive, and even Berlin had not prepared him for this degree of urban crush and bustle. Thirdly, he had a deep prejudice against the English which he never overcame. He was still in his Napoleonide phase, and he held the Eng­ lish responsible for Napoleon's defeat and humiliation and for leading the counter-revolutionary restoration in Europe. He had written in The Book of Le Grand that long after Britain had vanished from his­ tory and the graves of its kings in Westminster Abbey were reduced to dust, mankind would pilgrimage to St. Helena "in colorfully beflagged ships" to worship the "secular savior, who suffered under Hudson Lowe, as it is written in the Gospels of Las Cases, O'Meara, and Antommarchi."7 He hated Wellington, who became in his mind the model for a theme of his late poetry, the victory of the worse man over the better, of "stupidity over genius."8 The English life and char­ acter also seemed pervaded by the commercial spirit he had learned to abhor. Heine could not get off the topic. He remained permanently conI3O

III. DRIFT vinced, as he wrote years later, that the English were a prosaic people utterly without imagination, tone-deaf and color-blind, and so dull of olfactory sense as to be unable to distinguish oranges from horse turds.9 In a newspaper article fifteen years after his journey, he wrote of the English: "sometimes I regard them not as my fellow human beings at all, but I consider them disagreeable robots, machines whose internal mainspring is egotism. Then it seems to me I hear the buzzing gears with which they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray—their praying, their mechanical Anglican church-going with the gilded prayer-book under their arms, their stupid boring sabbath, their maladroit piousness is the most repulsive to me; I am convinced that a swearing French­ man is a pleasanter sight for the Godhead than a praying English­ man."10 Thus Heine did not approach England in a frame of mind conducive to original observation. He saw what others saw: the worsening con­ dition of the working class and the urban poor, the crowds of beggars and the battalions of prostitutes, the queasy horror of a trial for a common but capital crime and the public execution, the dirt, sprawl, and anarchy of the hub of the industrial world. He was interested in the House of Commons and, coming from a land where open debate on public affairs was either out of the question or, where it could occur, in the southwest German parliaments, stultifying, he was fascinated by its smoothly lethal oratory, which he may not have actually heard as he suggests, but may have drawn from written accounts. He vastly admired the "godlike" liberal Prime Minister George Canning, the "much lamented, adored, great Canning,"11 who, however, died after only four months in office at the tail end of Heine's visit. A few years later he claimed that he went to London for the purpose of hearing Canning, but that is doubtless an exaggeration.12 He also became interested in the radical William Cobbett. But in general Heine could perceive in the English Parliament, as later in France, only a political system constructed for the advantage of the privileged; he did not sense the potential for expanding repre­ sentative democracy to the whole people, nor is it at all certain that he would have been enthusiastic about the prospect. There is a curiously wrong-headed passage where Heine argues that the Russia of Tsar Nicholas I—for almost every other progressive of the time a bugbear— had more future potential for freedom than England, giving as a reason that "freedom in England has proceeded from historical events, in Russia from principles"; English institutions are frozen "in unrejuvenatable medieval principles behind which the aristocracy is en­ trenched and awaits the battle to the death." Russian autocracy will !3i

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enforce liberal and democratic principles against the aristocracy.13 This viewpoint derives logically from Heine's opposition to the His­ torical School, with its exaggerated respect for a status quo allegedly derived from organic historical development, and his general allegiance to the Left Hegelian priority of the "spirit" or the "idea," by which we may understand the intellectual and critical tradition of Enlighten­ ment thought.14 But it was imperceptive analysis and poor prophecy, and it shows that Heine, despite his revolutionary posture, was himself limited by that deficit in German political thinking that has had such terrible historical consequences. Only a complete social upheaval based on principles, not on empirical reforms, would be able to sweep away the remnant of unjust and repressive medieval institutions.15 But how the consequences of such an upheaval might actually look he had no idea at this time, and the more he tried to envision them as the years went on, the more ambivalent his posture became. Near the end of his visit Heine wrote, in French, a warmly polite letter of farewell to a Mile. Clairmont.16 We do not know who she was, her first name, or even whether she was French or English. The scholarly gossip columnists have been busy with the matter and have linked her to a number of love poems, some published under the title Katharina, others found in his posthumous papers with the heading "Kitty"; the latter mention England.17 Thus "Kitty Clairmont" has entered the catalogue of Heine's beloveds. It is all possible but wholly unproven, and, if something of the sort did occur, it is buried in the silence he almost always maintained in such matters. The journey con­ cludes with another biographical blank spot. Heine left England on August 19 and, on his return via Norderney, apparently passed through Holland. We know no details of this part of the journey, but it is certain that it occurred, as it left significant traces in his writing later.18 In any case he was back in Hamburg by September 19 to have his head washed by Uncle Salomon over the affair of the £ 200.

£6]

Munich MEANWHILE, Heine had at last obtained a job. In May 1827, Varnhagen at Heine's request had written to the great Munich publisher, Baron Johann Friedrich von Cotta (1764-1832), warmly recommending Heine for employment.1 At the end of that month, while in England,

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he received an offer from one of Cotta's editors, Friedrich Ludwig Lindner (1772-1845) to co-edit a periodical, the Neue allgemeine politische Annalen (New General Political Annals). Here was a real opportunity. Cotta, who was the publisher of Goethe and Schiller, had the highest possible standing. He was also a conglomerate. He owned not only a number of periodicals of various kinds, but also a shop with steam-driven presses, another for lithography and copper-plate print­ ing, a hotel in Baden-Baden, a paper factory, steamship lines on Lake Constance and the Rhine, and a large landed estate. This makes him seem richer than he was, for he was constantly overextended and sometimes in deep financial waters. He was a liberal politician who admired Napoleon and supported Jewish emancipation, and he made more of an effort than most German publishers to print the news. To this end he was inclined to employ editors and writers of liberal and oppositional views. Such a one was Lindner, twenty-six years older than Heine, also an admirer of Napoleon, a strong opponent of German political conditions, and persona non grata at Metternich's court, which complained to Cotta about his employing such a man. Clearly he looked like a congenial person to work together with Heine, and so he was at the beginning, though before long he acquired a poor opinion of Heine's ethical character.2 Thus at the end of October 1827 Heine left for Munich. He took a very roundabout route, taking the opportunity of the journey south to see a good many people. He went first to Gottingen, where he visited Moser and Professor Sartorius, then to Kassel, where he sat for the drawing by Ludwig Grimm that makes him look as much like Byron as possible; on this occasion he also made the acquaintance of the more famous of the Brothers Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. In the second week of November he went to Frankfurt and there introduced himself to the greatest figure then occupying the dissident literary scene, Ludwig Borne. Borne was born in 1786 as Lob Baruch in the Frankfurt ghetto; his father was a man of high standing in the community who represented its affairs to the emperor, the alleged protector of the Jews. The son first studied medicine, as that was then the only university subject open to Jews, then, in Napoleonic times, political science, and he be­ came, of all things, a police official. But with the restoration of Jewish disabilities in Frankfurt in 1813 he lost this position, and turned to the life of the pen. In 1818 he converted to Protestantism with rather more good will than Heine, taking the name by which he is known to pos­ terity. Borne had a small independent income and, since his needs in life were always modest, he was able to live as a free-lance writer more

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comfortably than Heine. A witty moralist of strong libertarian con­ victions, he developed into the most effective scourge of the universal public outrage that modern Germany had ever seen. He had a rapier in one hand and a hammer in the other, and he flicked and pounded in a stunning style that exerted a great influence on the younger gen­ eration of oppositional writers, including Heine; another of his stylistic pupils was the young Friedrich Engels. As a satirist he could be im­ mensely funny—there are extensive passages in his writings that can hardly be read even today without laughing out loud—and he could roar like a Biblical prophet. Since political commentary was not per­ missible in Germany, he began his writing career as a theater critic, but he used the theater, which, on the whole, he despised, as an ana­ logue for public affairs and an occasion for killing remarks about them. He was not, however, as he has often been represented, a man without aesthetic sensibilities, for all that he stressed the social and political im­ plications of literature; he was, like many German liberals and radicals, an admirer of the popular-Romantic novelist Jean Paul, composing a famous eulogy on his death in 1824. In fact Heine set as an epigraph to The Harz Journey a passage from that eulogy saying that "life would be an eternal bleeding to death if it were not for poetry," which re­ stores the Golden Age denied us by nature.3 But his main interest was political emancipation. That Heine should want to meet him was hard­ ly surprising. His later relations with him were among the most fateful and unfortunate of his life, but that was in the future. The Frankfurt meeting was collegial, and Heine dedicated a copy of Travel Pictures 11 to Borne and his life-long friend Jeanette Wohl.4 From Frankfurt Heine went on to Heidelberg, where his brother Max was a student. Here he met a young man ten years his junior who had written to him while he was in England and with whom he was to maintain an enduring friendship: Johann Hermann Detmold (18071856), an oppositional satirist and politician up to 1848; their friendship survived his subsequent conversion to conservatism and his tenure as minister of justice in the reactionary post-revolutionary Imperial gov­ ernment. Judging from his letters, he was a rather light-weight per­ sonality who had the virtue, however, of discipleship to Heine and his opinions. During this stage of the journey Heine was arrested and expelled from Wiirttemberg on account of the Travel Pictures. It is the first major backlash he suffered from the authorities for his writ­ ings. Curiously, he says nothing about this episode; we know of it only from a second-hand source.5 The next stop was Stuttgart, where he renewed his acquaintance with the most influential literary critic of the day, Wolfgang Menzel, whom he had known in Bonn. He was to

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be one of the most hated of Heine's antagonists, but that, too, was in the future. One observes a certain method in this journey, on which Heine restored old friendships and made new connections that must have appeared to him useful to his course in life. He arrived in Munich at the end of November. In an interview with Baron Cotta he was offered the respectable sum of 2,000 gulden a year to co-edit the Politische Annalen. It was the best offer Heine had as yet had; for the first time in his life people had come forward to meet him and open an opportunity for him. The salary was the equivalent in today's purchasing power of something over $13,000. He was not impressed. From a very early date in Munich he regarded his employ­ ment with the periodical as provisional, and he contracted for only half a year. He wrote to friends that he would stay if the climate suited him, which it did not, nor did he much like what he perceived as a Catholic clerical spirit in the cultural life of the Bavarian capital. He did not give himself much trouble about the Folitische Annalen and left the real editing to Lindner. Heine claimed that Cotta had of­ fered him additional editing responsibilities for more money, but he refused them;6 as always he regarded employment as primarily a sine­ cure freeing him for his own interests. Campe, with his usual perspi­ cacity and possibly some jealousy of Cotta, had seen that it was not a job for "a genius like you, to be sacrificed to such day-labor; you would collapse under a burden for which a capable pack-horse is suf­ ficient, who smells the oats and offers it to his fellow horses as fod­ der."7 Heine did write some letters to his acquaintances soliciting submissions to the periodical, and he published in it himself the first versions of his reportage from his English journey. His only other con­ tribution was a cautiously friendly but critical review of Menzel's his­ tory of German literature, which he used largely as a rumination on the contemporary literary crisis; he vigorously rejected Menzel's lib­ eral denunciation of Goethe as lese-majeste.8 His only other publica­ tion at all in these months was an anonymous review of Michael Beer's tragedy Struensee in installments in Cotta's Morgenblatt fiir gebildete Stdnde (Morning Sheet for the Cultured Classes) during April. Beer (1800-1833) came from an extremely wealthy Jewish family in Berlin with whom Heine had some connection; his brother, the com­ poser Giacomo Meyerbeer, was to play a complicated role in Heine's life in the future. Beer had written a play called The Pariah, whose Jewish theme engaged Heine's attention and drew his praise, but his praise of Struensee was pretense, designed to ingratiate himself with the Bavarian court, where Beer was, for the moment, a favorite. Heine was at pains to make this clear to several of his acquaintances. To

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Moser he wrote: "And imagine—I, I, I, I wrote it! The gods them­ selves are dumbfounded. Think what you please."9 Indeed, Heine's unscrupulousness in this period is disconcerting to the biographer, espe­ cially as it became so marked at a time when his fortunes appeared to have taken a decided turn for the better. The problem is well illus­ trated by his weird involvement at this time with a peculiar character of obscure antecedents who called himself Johannes Wit von Dorring (1800-186.3), an ingenious and vain political adventurer who had re­ cently published a book that was regarded as having betrayed the Ger­ man opposition.10 Heine had met him in Hamburg the year before; now he had become a kind of press agent for the Duke of Braun­ schweig, who was engaged in a complex conflict with his former guardian. Heine had no trouble recognizing that there was something slovenly about Wit. When Campe gave Wit a letter for Heine that was never delivered, he told Campe that it had been an unwise thing to do, and to Varnhagen he said twice that if he were in power he would have Wit hanged.11 But in some perverse way Heine saw in Wit a mirror of himself, as he explained to Varnhagen: "In Germany we are not advanced enough to understand that a man who wants to further the most noble things in word and deed may often allow himself some little shabbinesses, whether for fun or advantage, if he only does not harm the great idea of his life with these shabbinesses (that is, actions that are basically ignoble)—indeed that these shabbinesses are often praiseworthy when they put us in a position to serve the great idea of our life the more worthily. In Machiavelli's time and today in Paris this truth has been most deeply grasped."12 We see here one of Heine's most curious psychological devices: the attempt to deflect the effect of his ethical weaknesses by ingenuous confession of them; what is dis­ tressing is his unreal estimate of the effect they had on other people and of their appropriateness to his own purposes. The Wit affair is an example of the way this dubious shrewdness tended to backfire. Heine admired Wit's mental agility and not only offered the pages of the Politische Annalen to him but began an essay in his defense, which was, however, never completed or published, perhaps because the King of Bavaria had in the meantime expelled Wit from Munich, and Heine's distressed co-editor Lindner had been vigorously intervening with Cotta to prevent the article's publication.13 In a letter to Wit of Jan­ uary 23, 1828, Heine dropped—in a joking tone, to be sure—a broad hint that his services might be worth a decoration from the duke.14 Now the Duke of Braunschweig was of all German princes the most detested for his rapacious despotism, and a short time later he was to

III. DRIFT have the honor of being the only German ruler to be driven from his throne in the wake of the Revolution of 1830. When the exchange be­ came public in 1842—whether through Wit himself, no one knows— Heine's reputation was damaged.15 This strange episode, which remains puzzling to this day, would per­ haps not be worth mentioning if it did not fit into a pattern of behav­ ior at the time, to which the review of Beer's Struensee also belongs. For Heine was not satisfied with the job he had obtained and could have done if he had put his mind to it; he aspired to a position that, as it turned out, he could not obtain and for which one may reasonably doubt that he was fit. He wanted to be a professor at the University of Munich, which had been established in its modern form two years before. To this end, Heine, recently an expellee from the Kingdom of Wurttemberg as a subversive, had to go to some lengths to ingrati­ ate himself with the Bavarian court. He formed a friendship with a writer and politician, Eduard von Schenk (1788-1841), who was orig­ inally from Diisseldorf. Schenk had become a favorite of the Bavarian court and in September 1828 was named minister of the interior; he was a patron of Michael Beer, and it seems clear that the friendly re­ view of Stmensee was composed with this in mind. It is odd that Schenk was so friendly to Heine, for as a politician he was a committed reactionary. Nevertheless, he admired Heine's po­ etic genius despite the divergence of their views and he encouraged his purpose; on July 28, 1828, Schenk applied formally to King Ludwig of Bavaria for a professorial appointment for Heine.16 What concerns us here is Heine's conduct. He cultivated Schenk throughout the spring of 1828. On June 18 he wrote an astonishing letter to Cotta. He sent three of his books, which he hoped Cotta would convey per­ sonally to the king, adding: "it would be very helpful to me if you would intimate to him: the author is much milder, better, and perhaps now quite different than in his earlier works. I think the king is wise enough to estimate the sword only by its sharpness, and not by the, let us say, good or bad use to which it has previously been put."17 In the current discussion of Heine, one will not find much mention of this passage; it is tabu. Yet it is bluntly on the record that he attempted to sell his pen to the Bavarian court with the broadest of hints that his fierce polemical skills were at the buyer's disposal. The biographer is hard put to know what to do with this, for in the context of Heine's mind and career it really is eccentric behavior. I can think of only two considerations that might help us grasp it. Accustomed as he was to be in every way embattled and threatened, Heine developed an instinct for the nearest exit, and became inclined r37

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to do whatever was possible to relieve the most immediate pressure, without the leisure to afford a balanced judgment on all the moral or long-term implications. Secondly, he was obsessed with the need to find a remunerative position that would leave him free to realize his creative and emancipatory purposes. It may seem strange to us that he would think he would be in a better position as a professor by the grace of the King of Bavaria than as an editor in the house of Cotta; but apparently he did think so. It was a phantasm.

Π73 Italy THE prospect of a professorial appointment encouraged Heine in a plan

that had been lurking in his mind while he was supposed to be work­ ing for Cotta: to travel to Italy. Campe supported him in this project, hoping for a renewed impetus to his productivity.1 After scarcely a half year of employment, he decided to go, and to this end collected from Varnhagen the 800 talers he had placed with him for safekeeping. During the journey he expected a letter from Schenk informing him of his appointment, and he watched for it anxiously at each stop. It never came. His disappointment was made more bitter by the circum­ stance that the position, or a similar one, eventually went to the Teu­ tonic enthusiast Hans Ferdinand Massmann, who was, to be fair about it, much better qualified. This, of course, was the motive of Heine's lifelong campaign against Massmann. Apart from the obvious reasons for undertaking the Central European's classical cultural tour, Heine was probably also in search of something to write about. Almost from the moment of the appearance of Travel Pictures II, Campe had been hounding him for a third volume. Heine promised but sent nothing; he had written no new work since The Book of Le Grand and for the time being he needed his English reportage for Cotta's periodicals. As usual he could not write out of thin air. Italy would give him an op­ portunity to set the Travel Pictures in motion again. Again we sense the presence of Goethe in the background and Heine's calculated deviation from that model. Like Goethe, Heine en­ tered Italy by way of Innsbruck and the Brenner Pass, but unlike him and most other travellers who took that route, he did not head for Rome, which played no part in his plans; instead, he followed his char­ acteristic bent toward the seacoast and resorts. He left Munich early

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in August with his brother Max, who accompanied him part of the way. By August 10 he was in Trent, and he continued by rather quick stages to Verona, Milan, Genoa (which he disliked as he did all com­ mercial centers), and Pietrasanta, where he took a ship to Livorno, arriving at the beginning of September in Lucca. There, in the Bagni di Lucca, he spent most of the month. On October ι he arrived in Florence, where he stayed until November 24, waiting in vain for news from Schenk. What he did there for so long we do not know; it is one of the few extensive blank spaces in his adult life. He then went on to Venice by way of Bologna, Ferrara, and Padua. About this time he re­ ceived worrisome news about the state of his father's health and he began to have premonitions that accelerated his journey northward. He reached Munich by the middle of December and after a few days headed home, now again Hamburg, where his family had returned the preceding summer. Meanwhile, Samson Heine had died on December 2 and the news caught up with Heine in Wiirzburg on the 27 th. Early in January he arrived at his widowed mother's house. Heine was deeply grieved by his father's death, as the observations of several acquaintances attest.2 It may be significant that there is a complete lacuna in his preserved correspondence from mid-November 1828 to mid-March 1829, though that may be owing to a subsequent accident. Perhaps the psychobiographer might find the intensity of his feelings a little disproportionate. Samson was sixty-four years old, a reasonably advanced age for that time. He had been rather disgraced and he had deteriorated mentally and physically; his life cannot have been much of a pleasure to himself or to anyone else, and his death was quite in the natural course of things. Would one be inclined to speculate that Heine's feelings contained some unacknowledged guilt at his lack of respect for the bumbling and failed father? My own im­ pression is that Heine simply loved the man as much as any other per­ son in the world, and he grieved over his father's life as well as over his death. He was, furthermore, very vulnerable to melancholy at the time, for he had staked too much on the pipe dream of the Munich professorship, and he was not only deeply disappointed but also found himself in the same perilous situation he had been in before going to Munich. The tour had, however, served the purpose of providing him with new material. He wrote as he travelled, and the first fruits, entitled simply Journey to Italy (Reise nach Italien), appeared in installments in Cotta's Morgenblatt in December 1828 even before the trip had come to an end. A second batch appeared as Italian Fragments (Italienische Fragmente) in November 1829, though Cotta was not enthusi-

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astic. Ultimately Heine was to get three sequential works out of it: Journey from Munich to Genoa (Reise von Miinchen nach Genua) and The Baths of Lucca (Die Bader von Lucca), which constituted Travel Pictures III, appearing in December 1829; and The City of Lucca (Die Stadt Lucca), which made up the first part of Travel Pic­ tures IV in January 1831; all three bore the inclusive title Italy. Heine was not wholly dependent on direct personal experience in these works. Especially the first of them confronts a large literary tradition in which he had read extensively.3 The piece has remnants of the tra­ ditional cultural tour—landscapes, antiquities, cathedrals, etc.—but he makes relatively little of them; rather he is more inclined to take a position of Romantic superiority to the conventional tourist as cultural philistine. These comic tourists are English in Heine's work; the Eng­ lish were becoming notorious as the touristing nation. But Heine was more interested in the life of the people than many of his predecessors. He readily acknowledged Goethean objectivity: "Nature wanted to know how it looked and created Goethe";4 but he makes no pretense to it himself. Instead he presents a sometimes subtle but nevertheless emphatic commentary on political repression and its deleterious effect on the Italian people. Everything Heine sees, or claims to have seen, is converted into meaningful ideational representation. Much of northern Italy was at that time under Austrian domination; this foreign occupation, along with the internal repression by the Catholic Church, receives the brunt of Heine's criticism. Italy for him is not the edifying land of Roman antiquity and Christian glory, but a degraded and oppressed nation. The shades of antiquity have been dissipated by the "Christian Aus­ trian present."5 Underground, however, there is a revolutionary cur­ rent, which it is Heine's office to sense and articulate. It is in this connection that one of his most often quoted self-definitions occurs: "I really don't know if I deserve to have my coffin decorated with a laurel wreath. Poesy, as much as I loved it, was for me only a sacred plaything or a consecrated means for divine purposes. I have never [he goes on disingenuously] placed great value on poet's fame, and whether people praise or fault my songs concerns me little. But you shall lay a sword on my coffin, for I was a good soldier in mankind's war of liberation."6 No doubt this stance is an advance over Goethe, though it is naive to take it too literally. It is worth remarking that Goethe, by trying to look directly at things, avoided the typological cliches that Heine, as he always did in foreign countries, allowed to order his perception. Italians are sly, treacherous, quick with the knife and greedy for tips, lascivious, elemental, passionate. At one point on

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the journey Heine came to resemble a modern European creeping in terror around fearsome New York City: in Genoa, as he wrote to Moser, he got the idea that someone had taken an oath to stab him to death.7 Nor is the apparently reportorial Journey from Munich to Genoa wholly without invention. In Chapters 29-31 there is a famous passage in which the narrator, on the leg of the journey from Milan and Pavia to Genoa, visits the battlefield of Marengo and there rethinks his view of Napoleon. For the first time he relativizes the myth of the heroic conquistador of the Revolution with considerations on Napoleon as dictator and oppressor of foreign peoples.8 This is an important matura­ tion of Heine's standpoint, and there is some reason to think that it might have been influenced by Borne, who was much more inclined to see Napoleon as an enemy of liberty. The scene, however, is appar­ ently invented, for, according to what we know about the posts and the route Heine's passport obliged him to travel, he cannot have been at Marengo.9 It is likely that other scenes in the work, especially those that conveniently symbolize a political or social point, have at least partly been formed by invention.10 Heine was even more hindered by lack of the language in Italy than in England: "I see Italy, but I don't hear it."11 All of the numerous scenes of dialogue with Italian persons are therefore probably invented. In the Lucca pieces the quality of fiction becomes much more dominant.

m Count Platen The Baths of Lucca is a highly comic work whose main theme is the absurdities of a wealthy Jewish parvenu called Gumpelino. He is ap­ parently at least indirectly modeled on a Hamburg banker named Lazarus Gumpel, and for once in his life Heine managed to write something that amused Uncle Salomon.1 Gumpelino is in Italy acquir­ ing the accouterments of Catholic-Romantic culture; his verbal com­ mitment to mystical and "poetic" obscurantism contrasts jarringly with his intact banker's instincts. His foil is a sobersided Hamburg lottery dealer and chiropodist named Hyacinth Hirsch, who comments deflatingly and with the most outrageous malapropisms on Gumpelino's pretensions, observing that a rich man can afford to drug his brain with Catholicism, but a man of his class has to keep his wits about

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him. Buried in all the slapstick is a complex meditation on the modern Jewish dilemma and the relationship of aestheticized religiosity to re­ pressiveness and reactionary ideology. The narrator functions as amused observer, putting his time to better use in the successful pur­ suit of a pretty girl, thus contrasting his healthy sensualism to the dis­ embodied Romantic cloudiness with which Gumpelino cloaks his pro­ foundly materialist and philistine nature. Thus far The Baths of Lucca is one of Heine's gayest and yet, in its implications, most substantial fictional works, a worthy successor to The Book of Le Grand. However, it is not primarily remembered for these excellences. For Heine had something else on his mind, and with the work he succeeded in provoking a monstrous scandal that has not come entirely to rest even to this day. It will be recalled that he opened the pages of Travel Pictures Π to Immermann's satirical Xenia. Among the objects of their scorn was a contemporary mode of verse inspired by Persian poetry. Its wellspring was Goethe, but there were two poets in particular who were prominent in this fashion and might feel abused by Immermann's satire. One was Friedrich Riickert (1788-1866), a minor but by no means unimportant poet of the period. He was a quiet, peaceful man and took no notice. The other was Count August von Platen-Hallermiinde (1796-1835), who was neither quiet nor peaceful and took plenty of notice. Platen was descended from an old and interesting family, with branches scattered in Pomerania, Braunschweig, Hanover, and Bavar­ ia. One of the chief contributions to public life of the Hanoverian branch had been to supply the Elector and King George I of England with mistresses. At times the family had been powerful and important, but our Platen was at the tail end of a cadet line—his father was a forestry official in Ansbach—and, count or not, he was quite poor. As in the case of Heinrich von Kleist, there was usually one thing to do with young noblemen in that situation: put them in the army. But, like Kleist, Platen was wholly unsuited to military life. In the first place he was a poet of the most determinedly elevated sort. Secondly, he was a closet homosexual, which made barracks life doubly unpleas­ ant for him. He was enabled to study at the university and eventually induced the King of Bavaria, who was not unappreciative of poetic accomplishment, to put him on permanent half-pay. As a poet, Platen is difficult to estimate fairly and accurately. At times one is inclined to say that he was significant without being really good. He did have certain highly developed skills and was very erudite in several languages; much of his poetry is impressive in its way and here and there it is fine and moving. He attempted with great

1. Etching of Heine by Ludwig Emil Grimm, 1827

2. Pencil portrait of Heine by Marcellin-Gilbert Desboutin, ca. 1853

3. Watercolor and pencil drawing of Heine on his deathbed by Seligmann

4. Heine's sister Charlotte Embden. Photograph of a lost painting 5. Heine's brother Gustav. Photograph of a lost painting

7. Uncle Salomon Heine. Litho­ graph of a portrait by Otto Speckter, 1842

6. Heine's brother Maximilian. Photograph of a lost painting

8. Cousin Carl Heine. Photograph

...

-'

9. Heine's mother Betty, nee Peira van Geldern. Portrait by an unknown artist, ca. 1840

10. Cousin Amalie Friedlander, nee Heine, the first love. Photograph of a bust by an unknown artist

11. Cousin Therese Halle, nee Heine, the (?) second love. Portrait by an unknown artist

12. Heme's publisher Julius Campe. Steel engraving by August Weger, post 1840

14. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense

13. Heine's wife Mathilde, nee Crescence Eugenie Mirat. Photograph ca. 1845

T o p left: 15. Rahel Varnhagen von Ense T o p right: 1 6 . Goethe in Antoine Bovy

1824,

at the time of Heine's visit. Medallion by

Bottom: 17. August Wilhelm Schlegel

T o p left: 18. Ludwig Borne. Lith­ ograph from a portrait by Moritz Oppenheim, ca. 1835 Bottom left: 19. Heinrich Laube. Steel engraving by F. Randel after F. Elias Above: 20. Karl Gutzkow

Top right: 21. Title page of the first edition of the Book of Songs Bottom right-. 22. Title page of Borne, showing Campe's embarrassing incorrect title Opposite page-. 23. Heine's first publication in 1817

24. First page of H e i n e ' s article f o r the A u g s b u r g Allgemeine Zeitung, A p r i l 30, 1840 ( c o r r e s p o n d i n g to Lutezia V ) , showing the six-pointed star w i t h w h i c h H e i n e ' s contributions w e r e identified

25. Campe invents the illustrated book jacket for Romanzero in

1851

26. Original wrapper of Heine's Faust. Design by Richard Georg Spiller von Hauenschild

27. A foul-copy page from the manuscript of Atta Troll, Caput XVI, characteristic of Heine's habits of thorough revision

28. The inn on the Brocken, where Heine stayed during his Harz journey on September 20, 1824

29. The island of Norderney, where Heine vacationed in 1825, the North Sea poems. Engraving

1826, and 1827,

and wrote

30. The island of Helgoland, where Heine vacationed in 1829 and 1830. Steel engraving

III. DRIFT persistence to break post-Romantic ground, but paradoxically he most often did so by recurring to pre-Romantic forms. He tried to move away from Romantic lyricism by reverbalizing poetry, by making in­ dividual words and strongly silhouetted images more prominent, and he did so by reviving strictly bound forms. He is one of the most skilled German sonnetteers between the seventeenth and twentieth cen­ turies; the sonnet was a form promoted by the Romantics, but Platen, being more architectonic than they were, was better at it. Like Klopstock in the eighteenth century, he employed complex Greek stanzaic forms and, like Klopstock, he provided the reader with a representa­ tion in symbols of the metrical pattern. He often used forms that brought two or more heavy, stressed syllables into immediate conjunc­ tion, thus highlighting the force of individual words, in contrast to the melodic elisions of Romantic lyric. Then he turned to the Persian model of the ghazel, a poem that begins with a rhymed couplet and then alternates the same rhyme throughout. Often the rhyme is a phrase of several syllables, occasionally as many as eight. The ghazels are certainly a verbal tour-de-force; reading a number of them at once can make one's head spin a little. The trouble with this strategy, of course, was that it was threatened by excessive formalism. The laborious constructedness of his poems of­ ten seems obtrusive. At the time it was hard to tell whether they rep­ resented a regress from Romantic vision and finely tuned emotion, or progress to a harder verba! edge and a less subjective and introverted tone. In retrospect one can more easily see that Platen has a place in the slow post-Romantic development to modern poetry in Germany. But there is a lot of sweat, both physical and spiritual, in his verse. For his psyche was in desperate condition. Fundamentally this is owing to his homosexuality, which blighted his inner life and made the conduct of his external life awkward and difficult. His aesthetic allegiances, to the Greeks and to Persian poetry, with its figure of the young winewaiter beloved by the poet, are in large part involved with an effort to justify and sublimate his inclinations. But his terrible insecurity ex­ pressed itself in a sometimes rather gross vanity. Much more explicitly than Heine, he claimed the succession to Goethe's mantle; sometimes he sounded as though he were claiming Homer's as well. He was amazed that Heine dared to attack "an obviously greater man who can crush him."2 It compounded Platen's misfortunes, as it turned out, that he was susceptible to commonplace anti-Semitic prejudices. It was for all these reasons very disagreeable to him to be subjected to persiflage by a man he perceived as an obscure Romantic in a book by some Jew writer; he could make himself forgive Immermann but not the Jew. H3

III. DRIFT It is clear that Platen was unacquainted with Heine and his works, and his failure to take the measure of the man contributed to the disaster that befell him. Heine, for his part, had been aware of Platen for several years and had read him with some care, with mixed admiration and revulsion. To Immermann he had commented that Platen was a true poet, but lacking in wit and richness, and to the moralistic Menzel he had also acknowledged Platen's talent, but complained disgustedly of his "sighing after pederasty."3 He had already needled Platen a little in the Journey from Munich to Genoa. 4 Platen was living in Munich at the same time as Heine, muttering threats and scattering anti-Semitic utterances. Heine probably heard something of this. Finally Platen's revenge took the form of a satirical comedy, The Romantic Oedipus. Primarily it is a parody on the model of Aristophanes of Romantic confusion and self-indulgence, but it also contains a number of witless word-plays on Immermann's name and Heine's Jewishness. Touchy as Heine could be about his Jewishness, this really not very lethal work would doubtless by itself not have pro­ voked the terrible vengeance he took, which indeed he was planning months before Campe gave him the play to read in June 1829.5 For Heine came to see in Platen a composite figure of all his enemies: not only an anti-Semite, but an aristocrat, a reactionary, an ideologue of aestheticism, a running dog of a Catholic and clerical cabal in Munich that was indeed hostile to Heine. The periodical Eos published in Au­ gust 1828 an exceptionally rude, reactionary, and racist attack on Heine by a prominent priest, Ignaz Dollinger (1799-1890), with whom Platen had some acquaintance.6 The tone of this sheet may be estimated from its motto: "Judaeis quidem scandalum, Gentibus autem stultitiam."7 The unfortunate thing is that, apart from the aestheticism, Heine was mistaken about most of this. Platen was in no serious sense an anti-Semite; in another of his comedies, a persiflage of the fatetragedy called The Fateful Fork, the chorus is an amiable Jew who is the voice of sense and reason. Platen had only, as so often happens, reverted in his annoyance to vulgar prejudice. He was not a reaction­ ary; he was a dissident political poet of considerable force who shared, although in a different key, many of Heine's fundamental positions. He hated despotism and cared nothing for the aristocracy of birth, and, though he had some connections to the Eos set, very little for Christianity, not to speak of fundamentalist Bavarian clericalism; his religious position, like Goethe's, was liberal with a tendency to the Classical-pagan. In fact, there was much in Platen that made him a potential ally of Heine; their democratic instincts coupled with an aristocratic view of the poetic calling and the perpetually frustrated I44

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hope that the poetic and royal principles might be united in modern society bear a strong resemblance. But Heine did not see it, or did not want to; he was boiling to make an example of him. The Platen theme courses through The Baths of Lucca, though it goes underground in much of the text. It begins with the mottos: first a malicious quote from one of Platen's ghazels: "I am like woman to man . . . ," suppressing the balancing remainder of the line, ". . . like man to woman to you," and then an aptly chosen quote from Mozart's Figaro: "If the count wants to try a dance / Then let him say so; / I'll play for him."8 In the second chapter, in a scene whose implication es­ capes most readers, Gumpelino attempts to court the sharp-tongued Irish Lady Mathilde by presenting her with a tulip, whereupon she storms off in a towering rage. The tulip is a prominent image that Platen borrowed from Persian poetry; being a flower without a fra­ grance, it symbolizes the non-carnal, higher aesthetic sensibility of homoerotic love. Naturally the lady finds it a grossly inappropriate token of courtship.9 Later, when Gumpelino is suffering from an at­ tack of diarrhea that has frustrated an assignation with a lady, he con­ soles himself for the loss of heterosexual pleasure by reading Platen's poetry on the chamber-pot, while the obsessively honest Hirsch pains­ takingly measures the metrical schemes against the verse to see if the poet might not have cheated. In the last chapter Heine drops the fic­ tional narration and turns to a direct, fierce attack on Platen. It is centered on a devastating criticism of the poetry, against which he takes a rather Romantic stance, accusing it of rhetorical rigidity, acro­ batic virtuosity, and lack of nature and true feeling—some of which objections were often made to Heine's own verse. But he drenches the attack in scurrility against Platen's person. He hoots at Platen's poverty and exposes his personality weaknesses, quoting his sometimes fatuous claims of greatness, which he identifies correctly as a neurotic facade but without considering that Platen was putting forward an idealized poet-figure that tried, like Heine's own poetic persona, to claim stand­ ing and significance in the affairs of the world. Like Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac lampooning his own nose, he draws on his virtuosity to devise even more biting anti-Semitic cracks against himself than Platen had been able to think up. Above all he maintains a continuous chain of punning allusions to Platen's homosexuality. Heine's abhorrence of homosexuality was doubtless sincere, as it crops up in several other places; for example, he refused on that ground to discuss Shakespeare's sonnets.10 He talked himself into thinking that homosexuality was an issue in the struggle against the enemies of liberty; pederasts, he claimed, are "intermediate links in the H5

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great alliance of Ultramontanes and aristocrats."11 Privately he referred to Platen as the "impudent pansy of aristocrats and priests."12 Platen's obvious effort to elevate his proclivity to a sensual though non-carnal level did not mollify Heine; it seemed to him all the more disingenuous and evasive, an anachronistic and clownish imitation of the mores of Greek antiquity, spiritualist and Romantic in a modern environment. His denunciation of Platen's poetry, however, was exaggerated for the effect. Other scattered remarks indicate that Heine, as indeed he must have, recognized Platen's poetic talent. He came to regret his immod­ eration post facto and promised his friends to remove the polemic from a later edition,13 but he never did so, and it would have been difficult, as it is so intertwined with the text. In a French version he substituted the name of an eighteenth-century poet who employed Greek models, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, with the effect of obscuring the sense.14 The Platen polemic went over very badly with the public. Even Heine's ally Immermann was very reticent in his praise,15 and many of his other friends were far from edified; one unhappy consequence was a breach with Moser.16 Goethe was pained and remarked reasonably if somewhat patronizingly that such unseemly squabbles were wholly su­ perfluous in literary life.17 As usual Heine tried to organize a press campaign in his behalf, but this time it was difficult. He planted an anonymous notice in a newspaper to the effect that the "German Aris­ tophanes" was planning to take legal action against him, so that Varnhagen could ridicule it;18 these tricks did no good. The affair was more than a breach of decorum and it is the first of a series of episodes that injured Heine's reputation in Germany during his lifetime and long afterward. The offense such things gave provided a warrant for the resistance and opposition to him to which increasingly accrued ideo­ logical, nationalistic, and racist components. Varnhagen loyally at­ tempted to defend the work in an anonymous review,19 but on the whole it became quickly clear that Heine's immoderate overkill had been a strategic blunder. Because he had set up a fictional "Platen" as a symbol of all his antipathies, his hatred escaped all bounds, and in­ deed many years later he published a polemical poem against Platen and his followers more than a decade after the poor man's death.20 The effect of The Baths of Lucca was, of course, not to destroy Platen, as Heine hoped—he always had strange notions of the efficacy of literary polemic—but to arouse sympathy for the victim. All Heine's defenses in his letters, insisting that he had to do it in order to make an example in the struggle against reaction and obscurantism, show that he failed to understand this despite the barrage of outrage under which he was flinching. The Platen polemic contributed not one

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whit to the cause of liberty. Instead Heine alienated his allies and sup­ plied his enemies with inexhaustible ammunition. A good friend, the deaf painter Johann Peter Lyser (1803-1870), who at Heine's request attempted a positive review, was obliged to exclaim in it: "What ju­ bilation for his opponents!"21 The subsequent history of reaction to this episode is paradigmatic for the course of Heine's reputation. In some quarters Platen's high-mindedness and earnest aesthetic striving were played off against Heine's alleged frivolity and defects of charac­ ter. More recently, now that Heine can do no wrong, the polemic is defended by taking at face value its ideological posture of resistance to reactionary forces; such arguments usually proceed in ignorance of Platen himself and they will not stand up to a fair-minded reading. There is a sense in which both Heine and Platen were entrapped in a repressive environment that forced them onto the periphery as semipariahs, so that their quarrel is a kind of analogue of the violence that occurs among the victims of an unjust society.22 But one cannot, I think, feel altogether comfortable with such arguments. The Platen polemic is repellent in its cruel excess, and it loses much of its intended force because of the unsuitability of the object for its purpose. These are prominent defects both in Heine's character and in his practice of literary polemic.

Sensualism and Liberation THE third part of Heine's Italy is entitled The City of Lucca·, its main

topic is religion, especially the institution of the Catholic Church. Here he devised a rather clever strategy: he put the most scornful and sac­ rilegious remarks into the mouth of the sarcastically glib Lady Mathilde, while making his own narrator-persona fairer, more tolerant, and more even-handed in response; but together they stage a duet of free-thinking and secularism. In the long run, however, Lady Mathilde's sarcasm gets on the nerves of the narrator, whose more cos­ mopolitan imagination embraces and absorbs the longings and beauties of religious transcendence, even as its employment for obscurantist, repressive purposes is exposed. Here it is evident that the critique of religion that Heine was to pursue for the next twenty years or so has begun to crystallize in recognizable form. He associated Christianity, and especially Catholicism, with what he variously called "spiritual-

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ism" and "Nazarenism": a systematic repression of human sensuality, a denial of the pleasures of the flesh. One of his most vivid presenta­ tions of the theme occurs at the beginning of Chapter 6. It opens with an account of the banquet of the gods from the first canto of the Iliad and continues: "Then suddenly a pale Jew, dripping with blood, with a crown of thorns on his head and a great wooden cross on his shoulder, came panting up; and he threw the cross on the high table of the gods, so that the golden cups shivered and the gods fell silent and grew livid, and they became ever more pale, until they finally dissolved in mist. Now came a sad time, and the world became gray and dark. There were no more happy gods, Olympus became an in­ firmary where flayed, roasted, and skewered gods skulked about in boredom, bound their wounds, and sang sad songs. Religion no longer gave joy, but consolation; it was a gloomy, sanguinary religion for criminals."1 At the same time Heine did not want to unbalance the dichotomy of sensualism and spiritualism toward the materialistic side. Rather he wanted to recover a balance, to vindicate the rights of the senses "without denying the rights of the spirit, not even the supremacy of the spirit."2 But he did want to show how in society religious repres­ siveness was associated with political repression, the alliance of throne and altar that denied to the majority its aspirations to the goods of this world and offered feeble compensation with promises of "pie in the sky when you die." On observing an Italian religious procession guard­ ed by soldiers, Heine remarked: "the observance of religion in these days requires many bayonets," and he thought that the abolition of state religion might make Germany freer: "An indifferentism in reli­ gious matters would perhaps alone be capable of saving us, and by growing weaker in faith, Germany could grow stronger politically."3 There will be more to say of his arguments of this kind from time to time. It is worth noting at the outset, however, that for Heine spirit­ ualist repression was not symptomatic of political repression, but its central feature. His politics is pervasively marked by the priority of sensual emancipation; his social radicalism and such materialism as he may be said to have advocated were a derivative of it. Heine's Italy is less well known in the international canon of his works than it deserves to be, having always been overshadowed by the more popular but less mature and complex Harz Journey. I wonder if this is not because the Italian pieces are rather inconspicuously titled. A title like Ideas: The Book of Le Grand invites some curiosity as to what such a book could be about. There is certainly no shortage of

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Italian Journeys in the world, and a title so determinedly pedestrian as Journey from Munich to Genoa does not immediately suggest that anything extraordinary is to be found in it; similarly with the Lucca pieces. The originality, richness, and variety of these works, not to speak of their exceptional entertainment value, has been somewhat hidden, and they merit a more prominent location in the landscape of nineteenth-century literature. The City of Lucca especially, under its brittle surface, is a masterpiece of the enduring dialogue of rational and secular imperatives with the humane thoughtfulness of the imagination. The first two chapters of The City of Lucca were originally pub­ lished in the Morgenblatt in 1829. In 1831 the whole work made up the first part of a book rather weakly titled Supplements to the Travel Pictures (Nachtrage zu den Reisebildern)·, at Heine's request, the second edition, published in September 1833 with the imprint 1834, was more appropriately retitled Travel Pictures: Fourth Part. Its second section was made up of the collected reportage from England, entitled English Fragments. They consist of eleven parts. The first three are vignettes of London and the English. The fourth is a bitter, denunciatory review of Sir Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon Buona­ parte, which Heine presents as a piece of meretricious hackwork in the interest of counterrevolutionary British policy, written for money. (Heine had read only the ninth and last volume, about Napoleon's death.)4 He pours scorn on Scott's effort to write his way out of his bankruptcy and his desire to meet his obligations to his creditors. The fifth is a grisly if somewhat conventional account of a trial at Old Bailey and the ensuing hanging, which, in typical fashion, Heine appears to have fictionalized and conflated from several experiences.5 The rest deal mainly with political matters: parts six and seven satiri­ cally discuss the change of ministry after Canning's death and the issue of the national debt, on which latter topic Heine includes a translation of an essay by the radical Cobbett, whose fierce and sarcastic style he must have found congenial, though he found the man himself common and unamiable. He may have noticed that two issues earlier Cobbett printed a vicious anti-Semitic attack; he always feared that this would be one of the components of popular radicalism.6 Like the review of Scott, this section also arises out of his Napoleonic sympathies, for Cobbett rages against the debt with which the Napoleonic Wars have saddled the nation and which not only lies heavily upon the poor classes but multiplies their number. Heine calls attention to Cobbett's shrewd question: why, if all institutions are said to be the king's—such as the king's army, the king's navy, the king's courts, the king's prisons— should not the debt also be called the king's debt rather than the national debt?7 The three subsequent sections deal with opposition

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parties, Catholic emancipation, and the Duke of Wellington, whose name, regrettably, will be immortal in its connection with Napoleon's as Pontius Pilate's is with Jesus Christ's.8 The final section is entitled "Liberation" and is a passionately rhetorical confession of allegiance to the French Revolution. "Free­ dom," Heine concludes, "is a new religion, the religion of our time. If Christ is not the god of this religion, still he is a high priest of it, and his name gleams beatifically into the hearts of the apostles. But the French are the chosen people of the new religion, in their language the first gospels and dogmas are recorded, Paris is the new Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan that separates the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines."9 This blasphemous rhetoric is meant to be not only confessional but also provocative; it challenges both German nationalism and the politically repressive alliance of throne and altar. But, as so often, Heine does not allow this tone to stand without contrast. Instead he concludes with a gloomy epilogue, dated November 29, 1830, in which, after his customary apology for the failings of the book, he laments the failure of the 1830 Revolution to have any liberating consequences in Germany, and tells a sad little historical anecdote of a court fool who brings to an imprisoned em­ peror the tidings of his impending release. When the emperor asks how he may reward the fool's loyalty, he replies: "My Lord, don't have me killed."10 Thus Heine, as he makes explicit, allegorizes his own tragic relationship to his sovereign, the people. The English Fragments are uneven in judgment and originality, owing to Heine's prejudicial antipathy, which inhibited a genuine freshness of vision. It is perhaps a little surprising to witness the re­ crudescence of the Napoleon figure as the worldly deity of freedom and revolution after the more measured stance taken toward him in the Journey from Munich to Genoa. But this is both an affect triggered by Heine's experience of the nation governed by Napoleon's counter­ revolutionary victors and a symptom of the great impending change in his own life. Four months later he was to cross the Jordan into the promised land of freedom.

CIOJ

The Revolution of 1830 AFTER Heine returned to Hamburg in January 1829, following upon the death of his father, he drifted aimlessly for the next two and a half

III. DRIFT

years. OfF and on he lived with his mother. In February 1829 he took off for Berlin, and from April to June he retreated to the suburb of Potsdam, living, as he said, "like Robinson [Crusoe] on his island."1 He vacationed on Helgoland in August and September, comforted, as usual, by the sea, then took a place of his own in Hamburg for a while. He squabbled with Campe over the quality of the paper for Travel Pictures 111, which he furiously compared to his old underpants;2 he threatened to leave Campe and flirted with Cotta.3 At the end of March 1830 he again retreated to what was then the little town of Wandsbek outside Hamburg, the eighteenth-century home of his admired model Voss and the gentle poet Matthias Claudius. He remained there until June, made another excursion to Helgoland until the end of August, when he again returned to Hamburg, remaining until the spring of the following year. It was not an altogether fallow period. Much of it was spent on The Baths of Lucca and The City of Lucca. Rather surprisingly, con­ sidering his repeated abjurations, Heine returned to lyric poetry. The impetus was a commission from the composer Albert Methfessel. It was the only time Heine wrote poems with the specific end of musical setting, and he recurred at a more refined level of artistic self-awareness to the mode of Lyrical Intermezzo and Homecoming (as it turned out, Methfessel set only one of them). Some of the verses began to appear in the Morgenblatt in February 1831, and ultimately they formed the forty-four poems of New Spring (Neuer Fruhling). It is also at this time that the most interesting document of Heine's practical poetics emerges. In the spring of 1830 Immermann sent him the manuscript of a satirical mock-epic with a Tom Thumb figure, Tulifantchen, writ­ ten in the unrhymed "Spanish" trochaic tetrameter at which Heine himself was especially skilled. Heine worked over the poem carefully and sent back his suggestions in a long letter that fills fifteen printed pages in a modern edition.4 His revisions—almost all of which Immermann accepted—are microtextual, in large part a matter of switching words and syllables about within the line with an eye to sound values and rhythm. Some suggestions concerned appropriateness of diction, but his sharpest focus was on the quality of the syllable in unstressed position; by placing long vowels and relatively heavy syllables in unstressed position he makes the trochaic rhythm less monotonously jogging, more subtle and varied. In this remarkable and unique docu­ ment we see the artist Heine still intact and functioning at the same time that he was moving into the posture of political publicist. For Heine was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the question of revolution. Towards the end of 1830 he got hold of a manuscript through Campe entitled Kahldorf on the Nobility in Letters to Count

III. DRIFT

Μ. von Moltke (Kahldorf iiber den Adel in Briefen an den Grafen M. von Moltke). Count Magnus von Moltke (1783-1864), a Danish politician, had published in 1830 a book presenting the modern con­ servative arguments in defense of the aristocracy as a class whose tra­ dition, culture, and freedom from material constrictions and petty concerns suited it to governing. "Kahldorf," who wrote a calmly analytic reply, was a pseudonym for Robert Wesselhoft (ca. 17951852), a liberal protege of the Duke of Weimar who later emigrated to America, where he became a prominent physician.* Heine's introduc­ tion was more sharply worded than Wesselhoft's pamphlet, though it was not as radical in tone as is sometimes claimed. He argues two widely shared liberal positions: for freedom of the press and against the institution of the nobility, ascribing, in a veiled warn­ ing, the bloodlessness of the July Revolution in France to the ex­ istence there of freedom of the press, and inveighing against the international aristocratic conspiracy to overthrow the new order. He ascribed the Terror of the first French Revolution to the ignorance of the common people, cut off from the exchange of mature political ideas by censorship. "That is just the blessing of freedom of the press: it robs the demagogue's bold language of all the magic of newness, it neutralizes the most passionate words by equally passionate refutation, and it suffocates at birth the lying rumors sowed by accident or malevolence, which so lethally and impudently luxuriate in conceal­ ment, like those poisonous plants that only thrive in dark forest swamps and in the shadow of the ruins of castles and churches, but miserably dessicate in bright sunlight."5 Campe published the book in Nurem­ berg at the end of April 1831; the introduction was heavily censored and did not appear in full until the seventh volume of Elster's critical edition in 1890. Heine, incidentally, made the acquaintance of Count von Moltke in Paris later that year; he found Moltke more liberal than he had supposed and apologized for mishandling him in the introduc­ tion,6 after which they got on well with one another. If this circumstance suggests a certain ambivalence between Heine's personal and his verbal commitment to revolution, the impression is reinforced by his conduct around 1830. He continued to make desul­ tory efforts at finding a living. He set in motion the rumor that he was being considered for a professorship in Berlin, but whether this was more than a tactic is unclear. In January 1831 he took it into his * Wesselhoft's highly successful career in America has remained unknown to German scholars. See Harold S. Jantz, "The View from Chesapeake Bay: An Experiment with the Image of America," Proceedings of the American Anti­ quarian Society 7 9 ( 1 9 6 9 ) : 1 6 2 - 6 5 .

III. DRIFT head that he would like to be a candidate for the vacant position of Ratssyndikus to the city of Hamburg. Not wishing to appear ridiculous by applying himself, he asked Varnhagen to start a campaign for him.7 Varnhagen complied, though he saw at once how quixotic the effort was and told Heine so.8 A Ratssyndikus was something like what today we would call a corporation counsel of a municipal government; the job was the highest appointive post in the city. Heine was in no way qualified either by experience or legal knowledge for so responsible a position in an important commercial metropolis. Nor can one imagine that, given his deepening dissidence, he could have been successful in high government service, even in relatively enlightened Hamburg, especially in view of his deep hatred of the city. Naturally nothing came of it. Varnhagen repeatedly advised him to moderate his pugnaciousness in order to make his situation more tenable, and to seek a reconciliation with Uncle Salomon. The Revolution of July 1830 caught Heine vacationing on Helgo­ land. Concerning his immediate response to the Revolution there has been some confusion for a particular reason. Ten years later, in his book on Ludwig Borne, he included a series of letters purportedly written before and after the July Revolution. These "Letters from Helgoland" haunt discussions of Heine as testimony to his prescience and revolutionary enthusiasm. It is doubtful that the letters in the form we have them were written at that time, although he may have begun, then abandoned, a text on the Revolution in the fall of 1830. There is much reason to believe that the text we have was largely com­ posed in 1839-1840 (see below, p. 237). Indeed, his documented reac­ tion to the Revolution is surprisingly muted, especially when one considers that for much of his generation it was an epochal event, a kind of revolution of the Hegelian cosmos, at last setting history in motion again after a decade and a half of depressing stagnation and regression. Heine did not, like many other Germans, hurry to Paris to witness the coming of the new age. He did not even have much to say about it until November, around the same time as the epilogue to English Fragments. He wrote to Varnhagen on November 19 of his awareness that the Revolution involves all social interests, not just opposition to throne and nobility, and speaks for his deep contempt for industrialism, which he ascribes to his own "brutal aristocratic pride, which is rooted in my heart and which I have not yet been able to weed out."9 There were some minor upheavals in Germany in 1830, but Heine was not much impressed by them, perhaps especially be­ cause the form they took in Hamburg was an anti-Semitic riot at the beginning of September. He always felt that anti-Semitism promised J53

III. DRIFT

to be among the popular passions released by revolution and that he himself was as likely to be a victim as a beneficiary of it. He made some notes on the 1830 Revolution in Hamburg, but never found a use for them in his writing.10 Heine did repeatedly speak in these months, as he had from time to time in his student days, of packing up and going to France, but always in connection with his deteriorating personal situation; he gives the impression that he might have stayed in Germany if he could have located himself satisfactorily. But the pressures mounted. He could not find a job. In the spring of 1830 he had a serious quarrel with Uncle Salomon, an event always threatening to his welfare. His writ­ ings kept running into harder resistance from the authorities; in addi­ tion to the mutilation of the Introduction to Kahldorf by the censor­ ship, Travel Pictures IV was confiscated and then banned in Prussia. Shortly before his departure Heine said he had received a signal that he himself was not safe in Germany,11 although we do not know from whom or why. In retrospect he described a fear of winding up in a Prussian prison.12 In May 1831 the argument with himself was over; Heine departed for Paris. It was a historical moment, or at least it was so perceived by posterity; since Heine later claimed that he had crossed the Rhine on May i,13 there existed at one time the belief that this date had been made the holiday of the international working class for that reason.14 Neither part of the proposition is true—he went first to Frankfurt and from there, by way of Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, and Strasbourg, to Paris by May 19. But the legend says something about the historical significance of this turn in his life. His own reasoning, in any case, was rather different. He was alternately depressed and excited by the events of 1830. He wrote to Varnhagen on April 1, 1831: "When after last July I noticed how liberalism suddenly acquired so many troops, how the oldest Swiss Guards of the old regime suddenly cut up their red coats to make Jacobin caps, I had no little inclination to withdraw myself and write artistic novellas. But when the thing grew more lukewarm, and terror reports, even if false ones, arrived from Poland* and the bawlers of freedom lowered their voices, I wrote an introduc­ tion to a work on the nobility. . . . In the meantime I wrote even wilder things, which I then threw into the stove as things looked up." Now the pressure from the authorities on him is too great, and he is full of indignation at the "liberal Tartuffes." But in the same letter falls * Heine is here referring to the crushing of the Polish uprising by Russia and Prussia; the terror reports were not false.

III. DRIFT

a hint of another significant impulse that urged him to Paris. "Every night I dream that I am packing my trunk and travelling to Paris to breathe fresh air, to give myself up entirely to the sacred feelings of my new religion, and perhaps to receive the final consecration as a priest of it."15 What this meant we shall soon see.

IV THE PROMISED LAND Paris 1831-1840

Saint-Simonianism THE religion whose priest Heine had intended to become was the

Saint-Simonian movement. It had grown out of the extensive writings of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), who had attempted to devise an ethics and a social order consonant with the modern historical development of mankind. Saint-Simon per­ ceived the emergence of industry and technology as an epochal stage profoundly altering both the material potential and the spiritual needs of mankind. As a philosophy of history, Saint-Simonianism bears a general resemblance to Hegel; in fact, untangling the elements of Hegel from those of Saint-Simonianism in Heine's thinking is a very difficult, perhaps insoluble, task. Heine himself tended to conflate the two, as appears in an unpublished passage: "God is not only contained in substance, as the ancients conceived Him, but God is in the 'process' as Hegel expressed it and as He is conceived by the Saint-Simonists."1 The remnants of medieval Christianity and feudalism, Saint-Simon argued, had become incongruent with the conditions of modern society, with its economic and scientific advances. The consequence was a disjunction of social power and social reality; power remained largely in the hands of an anachronistic and parasitical caste, while the true dynamism of modern society lay in economic productivity. Saint-Simon proposed to restore the integrity of society by uniting power and productivity. Authority was to be gained, not by heredi­ tary privilege, but by individual merit regardless of birth, and the guidance of society was to devolve on the economic producers, by which Saint-Simon meant not only the workers but also the inventors, the captains of industry, and the men of finance. Saint-Simonianism was one of the several significant proto-socialist doctrines to emerge in France at this time; its perception of the economic basis of society and history, its relativization of religious doctrine to human need, its recognition of the contradiction between social structure and forms of production, and the effort to take intellectual command over man's fate made it one of the several streams that eventually flowed into socialism. After Saint-Simon's death in 1825, his followers began to shift the emphasis. They greatly strengthened the authoritarian aspect of the doctrine and projected a hierarchical society that resembles the organi­ zation of a factory or even of an army. In time they transformed the

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

doctrine into a ritualistic and Utopian cult through which young intellectuals, sensible of the gap of consciousness that separated them from the order of society as a whole, began to act out a vision of ideological unanimity in society. Their views took on a notably coun­ terrevolutionary cast, distinguishing between "organic" epochs of dogmatically ordered harmony and "critical" ones of doubt and pluralism, like the present; they assertively required the restoration of organic dogmatism and confidently presented themselves as leaders for this purpose. One of the major modern students of the movement has called it "the most radical rejection of liberal and democratic institu­ tions by any of the reform of revolutionary movements of the 'Left' in the nineteenth century, not excluding Marxism."2 They turned their attention particularly to marriage and the family as repressive institu­ tions in society, and some of them began to argue for free love, polyg­ amy, and, in a phrase that was to become notorious, especially in Germany, the "emancipation of the flesh." In November 1831 the group broke apart over these issues, leaving it solely under the direc­ tion of that queer combination of charismatic prophet, rational entre­ preneur, and humorless clown, Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864). There can be no doubt that Saint-Simonianism had become im­ portant to Heine by the time he moved to Paris. But here we find ourselves again in our familiar biographical dilemma: he gives us precious little aid in our pursuit of the matter. Nowhere does he give any systematic account of his perception of the doctrine. He once said he would write a book about it, but he did not.3 His references to it, like those to Hegel, are generally fleeting and anecdotal. By at least 1828 he had become interested in Le Globe,4 a French newspaper that found many attentive readers in Germany, including Goethe, and that became the Saint-Simonian organ in January 1831. Immediately after Heine reached Paris, Le Globe published a notice of the arrival of "le celebre auteur allemand, docteur Heine . . . un de ces hommes jeunes et courageux defendant la cause du progres, ne craignent pas de s'exposer aux inimites des camarillas et des nobles. M. Heine, plein de verve et de franchise, a consacre sa plume a la defense des interets populaires en Allemagne, sans se renfermer toutefois dans une etroite nationalite."5 This statement is in every turn of phrase so congruent with the terms of Heine's self-understanding that anyone acquainted with his techniques of self-advertisement is likely to suspect that he was responsible for it more or less verbatim. We know that he attended meetings at Saint-Simonian headquarters in the rue Taitbout, as he is mentioned several times in the notices of them,6 and he was present

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

on January 22, 1832, when the police closed the hall.7 But of these meetings he says practically nothing except for the briefest of anec­ dotes.8 His personal acquaintance with several of the Saint-Simonian dignitaries, especially Michel Chevalier (1806-1879) and Charles Duveyrier (1803-1866), continued for years after the movement itself had subsided, but the fabric of Heine's relations with them in the early 1830s is nowhere visible. Above all, the chronology of his acquaintance with Saint-Simonianism is obscure and has been the topic of some contention. The external evidence points to the time around the Revolution of 1830, in the wake of which the Saint-Simonians gained an accelerating prominence. It was just around this time that the Varnhagens developed a strong interest in the movement, which was mediated to them at least in part by the travelling American socialist Albert Brisbane (1809-1890).9 They detected in the doctrine a link to Goethe's spirit and it became an important subject of their correspondence with Heine. By 1832 Varnhagen was publishing significant newspaper articles about the movement.10 It is certain that Heine read the first year of the expository lectures on the doctrine published by Armand Bazard (1791-1832) in 1829, for on February 10, 1831, he sent an extract from them to a Hamburg philanthropist, Hartwig Hesse (1778-1849), calling it "my new gospel" and asking for money to support him in the cause.11 This is his first statement of allegiance. The difficulty is that so much found in Heine's writings of the 1820s bears a strong resemblance to facets of the doctrine. This is especially the case with an extraordinary poem entitled "Mountain Idyll" (Bergidylle) in The Harz Journey. It is a reply by the narrator to a question by a simple mountain girl, like Gretchen's to Faust, concerning his religious belief, a reply that reaches far beyond her horizon by pro­ claiming the "third testament" of a new, emancipatory revelation transcending the one-sidedness of Christianity and of which the poetnarrator is himself the heroic prophet.12 The idea of the "third testa­ ment"—an old Utopian concept, to be sure—greatly resembles SaintSimonian positions,13 but it is not easy to see how Heine could have been in contact with them that early. His pantheistic ideas also antedate his acquaintance with the doctrine; they appear to be the consequence of filtering his experience of philosophy through a modernized recep­ tion of Spinoza, another of his inheritances from Goethe. It is not possible to enter into all the details of this question, on which much has been written.14 It appears to me, however, that Heine developed his basic outlook independently and found confirmation and encourage-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

ment when he encountered similar positions in the Saint-Simonian doctrine, which he then adapted very freely and with quite idiosyn­ cratic emphases to his own views. There is one document ascribed to Heine that would be important as his most explicit and unambiguous confession of Saint-Simonian allegiance. It appeared on February 26, 1832, in Le Globe, said to be "une lettre ecrite par l'un des hommes Ies plus distingues de la Prusse." It is a spirited response to the actions the French government was taking against the movement at that time. The emergence of SaintSimonianism is said to be "le fait nouveau, immense, miraculeux, de la naissance d'une nouvelle religion." It passes beyond the limits of Chris­ tianity and does what no previous religion or philosophy could do: it offers a remedy for our ills and points to an almost inconceivably beautiful future for mankind, while encompassing all past history and the preceding evolution of human progress. "Je me declare," writes the author, "le plus vif admirateur de la nouvelle doctrine; je veux consacrer mon temps et mes efforts a la comprendre de plus en plus et a m'elever a sa noble hauteur."15 If this document is Heine's it is stylistically unusual in its grandiloquent enthusiasm and unqualified subordination to a cause under the leadership of others; the allowance that he had any need to elevate himself from where he already was would be unique in his writings. For these reasons I suspect it a little, though Heine elsewhere took a priestly tone. In the preface to the French edition of the Travel Pictures, dated May 20, 1834, he expressed his admiration for the force of the Saint-Simonian phrase, "!'exploita­ tion de l'homme par l'homme," and asserts that opposition to religion has been replaced by a constructive alternative: "II ne s'agit plus de detruire violemment la vielle Eglise, mais bien d'en edifier une nouvelle, et bien loin de vouloir aneantir la pretise, c'est nous-memes qui voulons aujourd'hui nous faire pretres."16 On the other hand, there is good reason to think that Heine kept intentionally aloof from the activities of the movement, and at times he publicly distanced himself from it.17 As a born satirist he was not tolerant of absurdity, and the menage of Enfantin and his associates must have looked to him a little like a monkey-house. They devised a garment buttoned in the back, so that it could be donned only with the help of another person, in order to stress the principle of mutual dependence and aid, and Enfantin, now virtually convinced he was a messiah, had himself pictured in this get-up with the word PERE emblazoned across his chest, quite like a contemporary tee-shirt inscrip­ tion. He devoted a large part of his energy to a search for a "Mere" fit to govern the world beside him. Such antics were unlikely to appeal

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

to Heine's serious side, nor was he slow to remark on Saint-Simonian sectarian smugness and intolerance.18 He tried to keep his eye on the main philosophic issues, which were, the replacement of repressive Christian doctrine by a humanistic pantheism and attention to the material suffering of mankind in consequence of archaic patterns of exploitation. Furthermore, apart from the zany aspect of the movement, there are a number of other reasons for thinking that, despite Heine's occa­ sional professions of faith, he did not so much join it as adapt aspects of its mood to his own by what must have been a process of very selective and subjective reading and listening. When one reads the first year of Bazard's exposition, one has to find it an odd sort of docu­ ment to have made a strong impression on Heine. Its priestly and prophetic tone must have been what beguiled him, for it enabled him to join his deep sense of the poetic dignity to a, for a time, quite literal notion of priesthood in the great emancipatory movement of con­ temporary history. He apparently thought this a means of reconciling poesy and politics: "In Germany today . . . the party of flowers and nightingales is closely allied with the revolution," after which he quotes a famous line of Saint-Simon himself: "The future is ours."19 The stern­ ly hierarchical and authoritarian aspect need not have repelled him, for the idea of joining power in society to personal merit can have appealed to a man who felt so keenly a disproportion between his social stand­ ing and his sense of his own exceptional worth. Thus he gladly took over the notion of Napoleon as a "Saint-Simonian emperor" because he believed the legend that Napoleon had encouraged anyone to advance to the highest positions regardless of origin.20 But the other major aspects of the doctrine cannot have been congenial to him, and one of them must secretly have made him laugh: an elaborate scheme for managing the economic welfare of society through a system of banks and making the bankers answerable to nothing but their own wisdom for the distribution of wealth and credit. For Heine, bankers were people like Uncle Salomon and his Hamburg ilk; one can imagine what he thought of this proposition. But the incongruity lies at a more principled level. Bazard's exposi­ tion has a strong reactionary element. The Reformation and the Enlightenment are made responsible for the deplorably "critical" epoch in which men were now living; prominent among the villains of the historical scheme are Luther and Voltaire. Now these views run directly across the grain of Heine's deepest convictions. The Reforma­ tion and the Enlightenment were for him stages in the history of human emancipation into which he located himself, and Luther and

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

Voltaire were model figures of his own self-image. Furthermore, the vision of the doctrine is very dependent upon contemporary ultraCatholic thinkers such as de Maistre and, before his spectacular radicalization, Lamennais. The allegedly monolithic medieval Catholic Church is the model for the unified, quasi-totalitarian society of the future, and in places Bazard sounds as though an actual Catholic res­ toration is not far from his mind. Nothing could have been more for­ eign to Heine than this form of political Romanticism; the hatred of Catholic power and doctrine is one of the strongest and most enduring cords running through his adult life. It is true that the second year of the exposition—which we do not certainly know Heine read—touches upon the theme that was to become central for him: the Christian repression of the sensual enjoyment of this world and the need to recover a balance between the spiritual and the sensual by a "rehabili­ tation of matter"; Heine expressed his faith in progress toward a hap­ pier and more beautiful human race "born in freely chosen embrace."21 But this idea is not crucial to Bazard's thinking; recent researches have shown that it was Enfantin who developed it, giving it at times an al­ most orgiastic cast, and that it was his writings and lectures rather than Bazard's expositions that must have influenced Heine's theme of sensualism.22 But there was nevertheless between Heine and Enfantin a profound discrepancy, which Heine, curiously, did not seem willing to ac­ knowledge even when it was thrust under his nose. In 1835 Heine dedi­ cated to Enfantin the French edition of De PAllemagne, the book in which he applied Saint-Simonian views to German cultural history. At this time Enfantin was in Egypt, not only combing the Orient for his "Mere," but attempting to organize a project for digging the Suez Canal. On October 11, 1835, he wrote Heine from the Nile a long, exalted, and woolly letter that fills thirteen pages in a modern edi­ tion.23 It begins encouragingly enough: Enfantin informs Heine that it is his duty to lead the movement in Germany and pursue the unifi­ cation of all peoples of the world through pantheism, the true mean­ ing of the French Revolution. But then the letter turns critical and peculiar. Enfantin objects to Heine's opposition to Metternich's Aus­ tria, the repository of religion, order, hierarchy, and peace, a bulwark against immature revolution with which France should unite. He re­ claims the dreamy, artistic Germany of Madame de Stael—against whom, as we shall see, Heine's De FAllemagne was conceived—and praises the Catholic Romantics de Maistre, Bonald, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine, as well as Schelling, all representatives of views loathed by Heine. He deplores Heine's failure to consider eternal life—a hobby-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

horse of Enfantin's—and criticizes Heine's profanation of religion, calling upon him to be a true prophet of the New Christianity. Noth­ ing could be less congruent with Heine's convictions, or better illus­ trate the illiberal, obscurantist, and reactionary aspect of the move­ ment. One cannot escape the feeling that Heine did not peruse this missive very carefully; if he had, he must have dismissed it as arrant nonsense, as indeed it was, at least from any point of view sympathetic to Heine's, for it leaves out a crucial matter: political freedom. He wrote to his friend Heinrich Laube, jokingly, to be sure, that Enfantin had named him the "first church father" of the Germans,24 an often quoted remark but not what Enfantin actually said. In fact in early 1836 Heine had the letter published as a brochure in French and in excerpt in German translation!25 It was, however, like many of his self-publicizing strategies, an error; most of the public comment it drew was disre­ spectful. As late as 1845 Heine referred to Enfantin as "the most sig­ nificant mind of the present day."26 But that cannot have been his whole opinion. In the second edition of De PAllemagne in 1855 he removed the dedication to Enfantin, replacing it with some sour re­ marks on the Saint-Simonians' worship of the god of money.27 Heine had become annoyed at the unwillingness of the now prosperous Saint-Simonian entrepreneurs to share their largesse with him, as he thought the doctrine indicated they should.28 In one of the funniest passages among his unpublished notes he remarks that in His incarna­ tion as Enfantin, God had made the extreme sacrifice—He had made Himself ridiculous.29 In general I believe one can go too far in combing the Saint-Simonian doctrine and Enfantin's sometimes paranoid utter­ ances to find the sources of Heine's thinking. He did his own thinking, and he did not so much absorb influences as use them, setting his own priorities and stresses according to a quite sturdy inner pattern. If one were to try to reduce to a formula what Heine extrapolated from his apprehension of Saint-Simonianism, the most important idea would be, I think, the end of scarcity. What he understood from the orientation on technology and industry was that a stage of human po­ tential had been reached in which society no longer had to be organ­ ized, as it always had been heretofore, on the premise that the goods of the earth could not possibly satisfy the needs and desires of every­ one, that Malthusian gloom that caused economics to be called the "dismal science." Up to now the logic of both political organization and religious consolation had been that the basic material desires of the majority of men could not possibly be satisfied, and yet civilization and morality had to be preserved against the anarchic and revolution-

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ary pressure that this persistent deficit caused. Heine was all for civili­ zation and morality, but he came to believe, with the help of the SaintSimonians, that the repressive structure was no longer necessary and survived only as an atavism managed in the interest of the privileged. His attitude toward Christianity was much more dismissive than that of the Saint-Simonians; it needed to be retained, he wrote, only if there really is no hope of human progress: "the final fate of Christianity is dependent on whether we still need it."30 In the modern age there was potentially enough for everyone and the ideology of denial was no longer relevant. "We have measured the lands, weighed the forces of nature, reckoned the means of industry, and behold, we have found: that this earth is large enough; that it offers everyone sufficient space on which to build the cottage of his happiness; that this earth can nourish us all decently if we all work and do not want to live at the cost of another; and that we do not have to refer the larger and poorer class [another well-known Saint-Simonian phrase] to heaven."31 For this reason Heine steadily combatted the puritanical element of political radicalism. He rejected the anti-aristocratic affect that would reduce us all to an egalitarian share of the least the earth had to offer; instead he preferred to see the luxuries of the privileged, even as he himself longed for the wealth and comfort of Uncle Salomon's side of his family, as accessible to all if the forces of spiritualist repression could once and for all be consigned to the historical limbo into which they belonged. "We are fighting not for the human rights of the people, but for the divine rights of humans. In this, and in many other things, we differ from the men of the revolution. We do not want to be sans-culottes, frugal burghers, cheap presidents; we are founding a democracy of equally magnificent, equally holy, equally blissful gods. You demand simple dress, abstemious habits, and unseasoned pleasures; we, on the other hand, demand nectar and ambrosia, purple cloaks, sumptuous aromas, voluptuousness and luxury, laughing nymph-dance, music and comedies—be not annoyed, you virtuous republicans! We reply to your censorious reproaches with what one of Shakespeare's fools has already said: Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"32 It is from this vantage point that one must try to understand Heine's statement in a letter to Varnhagen in May 1832: "For my part, I am really interested only in the religious ideas of Saint-Simonianism";33 and it must be stressed here that his version of them bore no resem-

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blance to the institutional religious structure, a secular analogy to the all-encompassing Catholic Church, elaborated in the Saint-Simonian doctrine under the influence of contemporary Catholic restorationists whom Heine, of course, detested. By "religious" he meant the panthe­ istic relocation into human reality of the aspirations for plenitude, gratification, and justice that traditional religion, in coping with the deprivations of human existence, had projected and postponed into a transcendental realm. Rahel Varnhagen, in fact, found Heine's view too delimited; from her more tragic sensibility she saw the range of Saint-Simonianism as much broader, touching on the "old, great wound, the history of mankind on earth."34 But for Heine the pro­ gressive struggle was against repression and the postponement of grat­ ification, which were no longer necessary and served only as ideologi­ cal devices for maintaining social and economic privilege. This was what Heine meant by the revolutionary commitment he repeatedly ascribed to himself, and it accounts also for his bitter op­ position to contemporary radicals whose standpoint appeared puri­ tanically reductive rather than centered on the sensual emancipation of mankind. He had no concept of political institutions as such, and was interested in them only insofar as they were constructed in the interest of repression and therefore to be scorned. "The deeper ques­ tions" of the revolution, he wrote to Laube, "concern neither forms nor persons, neither the introduction of a republic nor the limitation of a monarchy; they concern the material well-being of the people. . . . And people will understand us when we tell them that in the course of time they shall eat beef every day instead of potatoes, and work less and dance more. Rely upon it; people are not asses."35 Of econom­ ics he had not the remotest idea. The Saint-Simonian doctrine, like others of the time, was critical of the distribution of private property. Heine noted the presence of these ideas in his time without associ­ ating himself with any particular version of them. He had merely be­ come convinced that scarcity and deprivation were the consequence of a policy rather than a necessity. The newest beneficiaries of this policy, in league with the remnants of the system of throne and altar, were the bourgeois capitalists, thrilling in their newness and elan, but hateful in the power they had gathered into their philistine hands, blocking the emancipation of mankind. He shared with Marxism only the identification of the enemy and the revolutionary affect. He did not share the detailed analysis of political and economic institutions and their origins and, while he sensed the revolutionary potential of the im­ poverished working class, he did not detect in it the will to assimilate the religious hopes, the philosophical ideas, and the poetic vision of a

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new epoch of this-worldly emancipation and expansion of human po­ tential. Only Saint-Simonianism—at least for a time—seemed to him to combine a systematic critique of repression with a revolutionary vision corresponding to his own for a world of freedom and gratification.

Vl Heine in Paris AFTER Heine had been in Paris a little less than a year and a half, he wrote to the composer Ferdinand Hiller (1811-1885) that if a fish in water were asked how it felt, it would say: like Heine in Paris.1 Cer­ tainly Paris pulled him out of the doldrums. It was still vibrant with the aftermath of the Revolution. While the propertied bourgeoisie clamped its classical limited democracy on France—owing to property restrictions only about 100,000 citizens out of a population of thirty million had the right to vote—revolution and counterrevolution were continually threatened by radicals and reactionaries, republicans, Carlists (the adherents of the deposed Bourbon King Charles X), and Bonapartists; the partisan press was a maelstrom. So much public life and public debate was exhilarating after the oppressive torpor of Ger­ many. No matter how critical Heine became of the order of things in France, no matter how clearly he came to see into the bottomless corruption of the Parisian press, no matter how often French authori­ ties confiscated seditious publications, he never ceased to value French freedom of expression and to contrast it to the systematic muzzling of every critical and dissident voice in Germany; once, after a bloody radical outbreak in Paris, he found occasion to remark that even un­ der a legal state of siege there was more freedom of the press than in other countries.2 To his first volume of reportage from Paris he set the motto: "Vive la France! quand meme—."3 In Paris Heine was also becoming a somebody. At home he had been barely tolerated in the society of his own uncle and had been, in his own view, harassed from pillar to post, apparently wanted nowhere. Here his public stature began to grow commensurate with his stand­ ing. In June 1832 an article about him by the young writer Edgar Quinet (1803-1875), who, curiously, devoted a lifetime to warning the French against the Germans, appeared in the Revue des Deux MondesJi This prestigious publication perpetually took an interest in

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Heine; in the 114 years of its continuous existence, only two portraits appeared in its pages: one of Carlyle and one of Heine. His relations with its autocratic and gruff editor Francois Buloz (1804-1877) re­ mained excellent throughout the years. Partly through it, Heine began to build his French reputation, which in time expanded to the point that he appeared to be almost a French writer in his own right. Alex­ andre Dumas is supposed to have said that if the Germans did not want him, the French would adopt him voluntarily.5 In that same month of June 1832, the Revue des Deux Mondes published a transla­ tion of the Brocken episode of The Harz Journey·, in July and August, four sections of the English Fragments·, in September, the Le Grand story from The Book of Le Grand·, in December, The Baths of Lucca. Nor was this periodical Heine's only vehicle. In November The North Sea III appeared in the Nouvelle revue germanique·, in December the scene on the battlefield of Marengo from Journey from Munich to Genoa in Le Temps. This was just the beginning of a growing presence on the French literary scene, which Heine in part organized himself and monitored carefully. Over the years Heine also made a vast number of acquaintances, in­ cluding many recognizable names and some illustrious ones. It is not possible even to chronicle them all. At different times and in different degrees he became acquainted with Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and Wagner; Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, Dumas, Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Musset, and Vigny; Hebbel, Grillparzer, and Hans Christian Andersen; Baron Rothschild and Princess Belgiojoso; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This is what it meant to live in a capital city with an intellectual and artistic society that had no counterpart in splintered, provincial, shackled Germany. It was, to be sure, very enriching; yet somehow it seems to the biographer that most of the names, great and less great, pass through Heine's life as though through a sieve; some sticking a little longer than others, but all eventually sliding through, leaving relatively little residue. The point should not be exaggerated; Heine was not a hermit. He was close to Gerard de Nerval, who translated his poetry and praised him as a Greek and pagan in eloquent essays that show that he accommodated himself quite precisely to Heine's self-image; Heine wrote for him a moving epitaph after his suicide in 1855.6 He was friendly with the historian Francis Mignet, who praised Heine frequently in his writings, and he had warm relations with Berlioz, whose wedding Heine attended, and with Gautier, who was a witness at Heine's wedding. Balzac dedicated a story to him in

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1844, Uη Prince de la Boheme, to be sure, a pasquinade both meanspirited and fluffy by Balzac's standards.7 Yet, despite all the bustle and the many contacts, Heine remained in some fundamental way alone. After having been in Paris exactly a year, he wrote to Varnhagen: "I remain just as lonely in the world as before. Only that I have more enemies now."8 He did not really have a friend in the deep European sense of the word: someone with whom one shares inner joys and sorrows, developing thoughts and ideas, with whom an affectionate and supportive relationship endures across distances of space and time; at least such persons do not emerge in his life until quite near the end of it. For most of it, his closest friendships were epistolary. It is quite remarkable, considering his own undeniable public prominence, how little trace he left in the lives and memoirs of the many people he knew, especially the eminent ones. There is reason to think that, in his own accounts of himself in Paris, Heine exaggerated somewhat his social integration and his intimacy with others. Although he was often lonely—not desperately or unremittingly, but often enough to make it a theme of his correspondence—he him­ self did not have the gift of friendship. For one thing, he rather used people up. He sometimes put heavy demands on acquaintances to ex­ ert themselves on his behalf in various quarrels and controversies, and not infrequently for loans and handouts. And he could turn on people, even the oldest friend, with utmost ferocity. He provided a saddening display of this quite soon after his arrival in Paris when, in a letter to Moses Moser of June 27, 1831, he formally renounced their friend­ ship. Moser had not been edified by the Platen polemic and Heine expected to be supported in such matters. When Moser sent him a letter of introduction for his brother, joking that the latter had no objection to Heine's writings, as he had not read them,9 Heine blew up, denying that he had any poetic vanity but demanding understand­ ing for his conduct. "You still don't understand it, you have never understood my life and striving, and our friendship has therefore not ended, but rather never existed." He then queerly concludes the let­ ter: "Be assured of my respect and love."10 Two and a half years later, Moser tried to restore the relationship on the occasion of a letter of introduction, but received no reply at that time.11 Heine remained silent until November 1836, when he quite abruptly asked for a loan of 400 talers, presenting this demand as proof of his friendly feelings toward Moser.12 To this Heine received no reply. His relations with other people were often like this. One sees from the example how his

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difficulties with them proceeded equally from the constitution of his personality and his beleaguered situation in life. Furthermore, he did not allow himself to be completely acculturated in France. Probably Heine had no idea in 1831 that he was moving to Paris for a lifetime, although even then he suspected he would live long in foreign lands.13 He had got out of the habit of thinking very far into the future and had no way of knowing what would happen. But even later on, when it became increasingly evident that Paris would be his permanent home and when he had become accustomed to life there, Heine retained his German identity and remained some­ what aloof. Since he had been born under French occupation, he was legally entitled to unlimited residence in France,14 but he never applied for naturalization, despite rumors to the contrary, even though there might have been some advantage in freeing himself from Prussian sovereignty or, as he thought, in obtaining lucrative posts. But it would not, as he put it, have been suitable "for a German poet who had written the most beautiful German songs."15 For all his admira­ tion for the French as the avant-garde of European revolution, he never quite got over the feeling that they were a people living on the surface of things, loquacious and convivial, but lacking true German emotional and philosophical depth. The future belonged to Germany, he wrote in 1841, even if the French commanded the stage at present.16 Since he himself lived on the external surface of French society, he found no other dimension of it; at the same time his profound German rootedness never withered, despite his increasing awareness that he was in fact in exile, at first voluntarily, then by necessity. His rela­ tionship to French literature was, on the whole, indifferent. He was not much fascinated by the emerging realism in fiction, and he had no use at all for French poetry, which on one occasion he called "rhymed burping" and on another, "perfumed curds."17 Although French was his second language, Heine never became fully bilingual; contemporary evidence is unanimous that he spoke it with a heavy German accent and he wrote it with resourceful verve but often somewhat faultily. He composed none of his works in French, even those that first ap­ peared in that language; everything was written in German and then translated, usually with his attentive collaboration. Like Thomas Mann and many other exiled modern writers, Heine's whole being was in­ volved in his mother tongue and could not be naturalized in another. It may fairly be said that the French adopted him, but he did not adopt them; the Germans cast him out, but he remained German to the end.

M

Foreign Correspondent HEINE obviously did not go to Paris only to pursue his interest in Saint-Simonianism. His main problem continued to be making a liv­ ing, and to this end he reconnected himself with Cotta. In Paris he emerged promptly as a star reporter for Cotta's publications. One of the earliest objects of his attention was the salon, the official art ex­ hibition of 1831, the first under the new order. Heine was curious to see whether the event of the Revolution had expressed itself visibly in contemporary painting. Actually the salon did not represent that much of a break with the past; several of the painters Heine singles out had already exhibited in the salons of the restoration period. Nor was the salon of 1831 historically very important; Heine, like other critics of the time, overestimated its significance. Except for Dela­ croix, none of the painters Heine mentions has gained much standing in the history of art, although some, like Decamps and Horace Vernet, were popular in their time. It was an eclectic and transitional period in French painting. Heine seems to have been overwhelmed by the hundreds of works and put off by what he perceived as a "misunder­ stood Romanticism."1 Yet he observed that of the three thousand paint­ ings, only twenty-nine dealt with sacred subjects, a sign, he believed, that Catholicism was extinguished in France.2 It is curious that his aesthetics are often most lucidly developed in connection with the visual arts, for he had no technical competence as an art critic; he made it clear that, in his choices, he was following the lead of indige­ nous critics and he would comment only on content.3 What this meant was that he converted painting into literature; while he was not without resources for describing the appearance and effect of an art work, he tended, oblivious of Lessing's famous genre distinctions, to dramatize pictorial content into sequential plot, speculating on the context of life or fiction of which the picture is a captured moment. To be sure, many of the pictures he found at the salon, with their sub­ jects drawn from literature or history, invite such a treatment: Ary Scheffer's Faust, Gretchen, and Lenore; Horace Vernet's Judith; the dozens of representations of scenes from the Revolution; Delaroche's pathetic moments in history. Scheffer's portrait of Louis-Philippe leads Heine to his first sight of the king himself; the juxtaposition shows that, just as he reified artistic images, he turned real observations into imaged epiphanies.4 Vernet's

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portrait of Camille Desmoulins inspires a defense of Robespierre's cruel virtuousness, an uncharacteristic opinion for Heine, incidentally.5 Delacroix's then and subsequently famous Freedom Leads the People το the Barricades naturally aroused Heine's particular interest, al­ though he interpreted the work into his own sensualist categories, de­ scribing the central figure as a "strange mixture of Phryne, fishwife, and goddess of freedom," and he goes on to stress his association of her with Paris street-walkers, not primarily for the sake of being sala­ cious but because sensual emancipation was for him the central politi­ cal category; the passage blends into a paean to the "holy days of July" and then immediately into a scene of an aristocrat and a priest mut­ tering counterrevolution. 6 He praises Louis-Leopold Robert's Reap­ ers because he detects in it the new doctrine of commitment to this life, free of the sense of sin.7 (It is nevertheless perhaps a little ominous that Heine had just described another painting by Robert depicting the funeral of a young lad amidst his mourning family. The pathos of mortality need not necessarily stand in contradiction to the doctrine of this-worldly sensuality; nevertheless, it hovers in the background of Heine's views until eventually it was to gain the upper hand.) Delaroche's painting of the corpse of Charles I inspires a lengthy compari­ son of Cromwell and Napoleon. At the end Heine's ruminations are interrupted by the uproar of the Parisians protesting the crushing of the Polish revolution. This seems to fulfill the prophecy of the end of the epoch of art, but France will give birth to a new art, not caught in the symbolism of the old regime, but in communal relation­ ship to the new freedom. Heine's artistic taste and his aesthetic principles were not wholly harmonized. His taste in visual art was realistic; he loved above all else the old Dutch masters, as he observes here and in numerous other places in his writings. But he was not a realist himself; in defense of Decamps' criticized Turkish scenes he writes vividly of the suprem­ acy of the imagination over normative principles and even over the antecedent idea of the painting itself. Each artist sets his own standards in symbolizing his deep idea and is to be judged by his effectiveness in executing it. "In art I am a supernaturalist," Heine says in an im­ portant and self-perceptive passage. The artist's "types, as the native symbolism of native ideas, are born in his soul."8 In this passage one can see how, with his persistent confidence in the privileged vision of the artist, Heine instinctively extracted the modern component of Romanticism without, I think, being much conscious that this is what he was doing, and he rejected the Classicistic unmediated imitation of nature, despite what one might call his ideological realism.

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These articles first appeared in Cotta's Morgenblatt in October and November 1831. In 1833 Heine had them translated into French and published them under the title Salon de 1831 in a book that included the Kahldorf introduction, Part xi, and the epilogue to English Frag­ ments, and a work here entitled De la France, which gave the title to the whole volume. At the end of that year they appeared in German under the title French Pamters (Franzosische Maler), with an appen­ dix on the salon of 1833. In this form they provided the collective title to the first of the next four-volume container of his various writ­ ings, Der Salon. De la France was the French version of the much more famous work that came to be known as Conditions in France (Franzosische Zustande), based on a series of detailed articles and reports published by Cotta from January to June 1832, not in the Morgenblatt, but in the most prestigious of his papers, the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (General Newspaper). This was the most important newspaper in South Germany. It appeared seven days a week in eight pages of large octavo; each day there was also a supplement that carried longer arti­ cles, sometimes serialized, and advertisements. Heine was not its only Parisian reporter; sometimes his articles would appear among two or three others giving different perspectives. Usually the section on France was preceded by a precis of items drawn from Parisian news­ papers. The Allgemeine Zeitung was in some ways a curious publica­ tion. Newspapers in Germany were not usually in a position to give the news, for the governments could see no reason why the public should have any. Their reportage on current events was customarily restricted to reprinting without comment government dispatches and announcements, which were naturally usually misleading and often trivial. Some years later this situation inspired the liberal poet Hoff­ mann von Fallersleben to one of his funniest political poems, "How Interesting is the Newspaper!" (Wie ist doch die Zeitung interessant/).9 For the rest, papers were generally reduced to cultural re­ portage, one consequence of which was a great inflation of theater and opera gossip. It was that kind of journalism that Ludwig Borne had turned to his own sarcastic ends, using it as a vehicle for stinging coded communications that were not permissible in any other form. But Cotta, doubtless partly out of a desire to sell newspapers, wanted to print the news and some reasoned discourse about what was going on in the world. To do this he had to walk a very complicated line. On the one hand he maintained diplomatic relations with the centers of power, with Metternich and his cultural factotum Friedrich Gentz in Vienna, and with Paris, especially with the rising politician who

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was to be one of King Louis-Philippe's chief ministers, Adolphe Thiers.10 The paper, of course, was directly subject to Bavarian cen­ sorship, which began to exert considerable pressure on Cotta just at the time Heine was writing for him.11 On the other hand, if he wanted educated people to read his paper, Cotta had to open it to the liberal spirit. Here he proceeded as he had with the Politische Annalen·, he installed a man of strong liberal commitment, a former student revo­ lutionary and fortress prisoner named Gustav Kolb (1798-1865), who worked on the paper in various capacities, becoming its editor and its soul in 1837. This policy naturally produced a great deal of wobble. Cotta was a man of enormous prestige, the first newspaper publisher in Germany to become a power in his own right, and he was thus better situated to fend off the drumfire of objections emanating from Vienna. But he could not always do so, for in the long run the paper could not survive without Metternich's tolerance. This circumstance is probably the reason for the persistent notion of the times, especially in France, that Heine was an Austrian spy.12 The result was often exasperating; Campe, using a phrase that must have been common, referred to the General Newspaper as the "general whore,"13 and Heine would rage at the inclusion in it of reactionary articles. But it is somewhat miraculous that the paper existed at all in these times. Kolb was a serious and principled man. He had first met Heine in 1827 and held him in high regard. He was persistently anxious to em­ ploy Heine for the Allgemeine rLeitung. He acquired, within a lesser compass, an importance in Heine's life similar to Campe's, and though they, too, had their ups and downs over censorship matters and edito­ rial differences, he remained patiently if not uncritically loyal to Heine. Heine, in turn, seems in the long run to have found Kolb easier to forgive than Campe. In touching on these difficulties in the 1855 French preface to his articles of the 1840s, he says that he was through­ out "convaincu de la fidelite et de la loyaute de ce noble et bien-aime ami, mon frere d'armes depuis plus de vingt-huit ans" who was himself not "couche sur des roses."14 Kolb was in Paris during Heine's first months there, and they were able to consult with one another about the articles on France. Heine was not what today we would call an investigative reporter. He was an observer who tried to find coherence in what he happened to see and hear. He was present at major public occurrences and at some political meetings, but it is all but certain that most of what he knew about events he drew from the Parisian press. Certain errors that he made indicate that some things he reports as having witnessed actu­ ally came from the newspapers.15 No one in that time and place had J75

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ever heard of "objective journalism"; Parisian papers were wholly committed to partisan and ideological purposes, reflecting the warring groups in society, and as a matter of course slanted or even invented the news to suit the party line. Nor did Heine discriminate in his choice of sources; he was as likely to draw from a reactionary Carlist or clerical paper as from a liberal or radical one. He was carefully to analyze the ideological biases of the press and explained in some detail the methods of propaganda, insinuation, and misdirection it em­ ployed.16 But not enough has been done to disentangle the effect on his reportage of his use of such deeply compromised sources, a task on which only a few beginnings have been made. Heine's journalistic technique was fundamentally literary, turning what he experienced and heard into metaphor and synecdoche in an effort to extrapolate it into a true perception of the situation as a whole. This, he thought, was the special gift of the poet: to detect the "signature" of reality in discrete perceptions more accurately than other men, or, as he later put it in prophetic extension of the veridical imagination, to perceive the oak forests slumbering in the acorn.17 This view, incidentally, bears a truly striking resemblance to those developed by Shelley in A Defense of Poetry, which for chronological reasons he can hardly have known. Shelley says of the poet that "he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time." Shelley even used the acorn image.18 Heine constantly repeated variations of such claims. "In the breast of the writers of a people," he wrote, "lies the image of its future, and a critic who were to dissect a recent poet with a sufficiently sharp knife could, as out of the entrails of a sacrificial animal, easily prophesy how Germany will develop in the future."19 And in another place, even more assertively: "In the poet's spirit is mirrored not nature, but an image of it, which, similar to the most accurate mirror image, is congenital to the poet's spirit; he brings, as it were, the world into the world, and when, awakening out of the dreaming age of childhood, he comes to consciousness of himself, every part of the external phe­ nomenal world is comprehensible to him: for he carries a con­ gruent image of the whole in his mind, he knows the last ground of all phenomena that seem enigmatic to the ordinary mind and can be grasped on the path of ordinary research only with diffi­ culty or not at all. And like the mathematician, who can immedi-

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ateIy specify the whole of a circle and its midpoint if one gives him only the smallest segment of it, so to the poet, when only the smallest fraction of the phenomenal world is offered to his view from without, there is revealed at once the whole universal con­ nection of this fraction; he knows, as it were, the circumference and center of all things; he comprehends things in their broadest compass and deepest midpoint."20 We should be careful not to take these claims too seriously, as they often are at present. Heine was an observant and ingenious reporter with many interesting things to say, but the veridical argument was made purely pro domo in an effort to link the poetic dignity, the sus­ taining component of his own self, with claims of a higher and more accurate insight into political and social reality. This was becoming necessary as he was already at the time of Conditions in France mov­ ing into his uncomfortable position between the fronts, vigorously combatting reactionary, aristocratic, clerical, and, increasingly, capi­ talist domination while dissociating himself from republican and Ja­ cobin radicalism. Heine's letters to Cotta and Varnhagen of the time reiterate his claims of both militancy and moderation, and whether or not these were, in some part, a captatio benevolentiae, it is true that many German dissidents began to wonder whether he had turned his back on the cause. It is important to remember that at the time Heine was regarded as a radical only by government authorities and reac­ tionary' spokesmen; he was not so regarded by radicals or liberals. As a reporter Heine had weaknesses and strengths. He was not much interested in political institutions or the realistic dilemmas of govern­ ing, though he followed the comings and goings of the king's minis­ ters and tried to assess their meaning. From time to time he could concentrate on strictly political issues. One of his articles includes an elementary essay on the difference between absolutism and constitu­ tionalism, brought up by the question whether Louis-Philippe could be president of his own council of ministers, which Heine, in one of the most lawyerly arguments anywhere in his works, denies.21 Critics have often asserted that Heine did not really know very much about France. It is not quite true, as it is sometimes claimed, that he per­ ceived only Paris, though he did assert that "Paris is actually France; the latter is only the surrounding area of Paris."22 He continued his annual habit of vacationing at the seaside: in 1831 in Boulogne; in 1832 in Le Havre, on which journey he passed through Normandy and Rouen, reporting on them to the Allgemeine Xeitung. But from his Parisian vantage point he did rather overestimate the finality of

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Enlightenment and revolutionary positions in France, especially in his persistent claim of the irreversible moribundity of religion, on which he was quite wrong. On the whole Heine tended to see events as scenes in a drama projected by his quasi-Hegelian philosophy of his­ tory, thus permitting his literary technique of synecdoche, of turning events into symbolic representations of the larger whole, into social and political homologies. Yet his perceptions were not rigid but fluid, the complexity of events intersecting with the complexity of his own inner allegiances. Some observers, like Borne, found him flighty for that reason, but actually the impression one gets from his early report­ age is that of an honest effort to comprehend an involved situation and measure the loyalty to the July Monarchy in the various classes of the people. Heine's single outstanding strength was his growing insight into the condition of society and especially the new factor of the urban prole­ tariat; of course, he was far from unique in his attention to this de­ velopment. It had not been so visible in Germany, where industry was less developed and where, especially in Prussia, there was a policy of locating factories in rural areas well outside of cities. Paris was packed with a growing and frightening, partly criminalized underclass of the destitute and starving. Here Heine could see the great social issue of the next hundred years in embryo, and he knew that this was what he saw. In this respect his relative lack of interest in political current events was in some degree justified, as Marxists have always argued. This is already evident in several of the original articles that he did not include in Conditions in France, in which he severely criticizes the leading figures of the government and detects a disjunction between their "liberalism" and the real needs of the people.23 He came to see the July Monarchy—despite its eighteen years of peace, restored in­ ternal tranquillity, and gradual and genuine, if highly inequitable, prosperity—as a facade maintained by men trying with inadequate means to repress a force so great that it threatened to overwhelm them: the growing class cleavage and the worsening condition of the work­ ing poor. The Revolution was still hovering in a state of incomplete­ ness. He was far from wholehearted about the prospect of a revolution­ ary apocalypse: "I couldn't stand to be guillotined every day," he re­ marked of the Terror, "and no one else was able to stand it."24 He respected the radical republicans for their principles; at the same time he thought them archaically fixated on the Terror of 1793 and prone to repressiveness. But at this early stage Heine was sympathetic to the cause of the people and he used his literary devices to highlight their

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situation. In one of his characteristic extrapolations of a momentary experience into symbolic epiphany, he remarked, upon observing workmen repairing the streets that had been torn up in the July Rev­ olution, that the paving stones were being stamped back into the earth like the people who had employed them.25 Everywhere in Conditions in France this technique is visible. In the spring of 1832, cholera fell upon Paris from the east, where it had carried off a number of persons of consequence, including Hegel. Heine remained in Paris in order to nurse Uncle Salomon's twenty-two-year-old son Carl, who was visit­ ing the city and who had caught the disease; both Salomon and Carl thanked him warmly.26 In his reportage Heine turns the disaster into a symbolic nexus of social illustration. High society behaves frivo­ lously, holding costume balls that remind one strongly of Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, which was apparently based on the same event, though not mediated through Heine.27 The poor, who naturally suffered most from the epidemic, are embittered at the flight of the rich out of the city. The archbishop declares it is God's punishment for deposing the legitimate king. The Saint-Simonians announce fatu­ ously that they are so progressive that they are immune from cholera. The police encourage the superstition that the epidemic was caused by poisoners, leading to some ugly killings in the streets, but the suspicion is turned against the Carlists, leading Heine to the correct conclusion that the influence of the elder Bourbon line is dead. Though cholera was not scientifically understood at the time, Heine clearly sensed that it was abetted by the unsanitary environment of the poor, but when the authorities try to clean the garbage out of the city, the rag-pickers who live from it revolt and must be put down by armed force. This scene, too, Heine allegorizes into a struggle between the forces of Enlightenment, trying to clean the rubbish out of mind and society, and the obscurantist oppressors, whom he objectively correlates with the benighted Lumpenproletariat.28 Heine may not have reported all these events accurately,20 but one sees in his handling of them the poetic integration of his reportage at its most effective. His attention, however, was not only drawn to the tumult at the base of society. He was also very curious about its apex, the newly installed king, styled not "of France," but "of the French." LouisPhilippe was fifty-six years old when he got himself invited into his historical role. He was the son of "Philippe Egalite," the dubious royal revolutionary who had cast the deciding vote for the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. He earned his revolutionary credentials as a teen-age officer at Valmy and Jemappes, where he acquired the hatred of war that never left him and that French radicals as well as Heine

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misinterpreted as philistine complacency. For more than thirty years Louis-Philippe had played only minor roles in French history be­ tween exiles, during which he taught school in Switzerland, tramped through the far north of Europe, visited the United States and be­ friended George Washington, and settled in the lumber business in England, where he acquired the bourgeois merchant's instincts that remained forever associated with his image. In fact he was an intelli­ gent, well-educated gentleman of uncommon political ability, al­ though a hard man inside his famous meek manners, without sympathy for the more progressive currents of the new age or the deepening miseries of the working class and the urban poor. Heine was fascinated by him. The reason for this is to be found in the shadow of Napoleon that haunted his political inquiry. Heine repeatedly asserted that, by inclination, he was a monarchist. This has to be understood in the con­ text of the liberal opposition of the time, in which only a minority was republican; much more common was the concept, with varying degrees of Romanticism, of a Volksmonarchie, a popular monarchy that would do away with the blockading aristocratic class and put king and "people"—by which the liberal middle class normally meant itself—into a direct, open, and cooperative relationship. Hegel had held a version of this view also.30 Heine shared this attitude to a considerable degree. He kept remind­ ing Louis-Philippe that the people, not the aristocracy, were the origi­ nal source of his power and that he should beware of losing track of it. There is no more constant, persistent theme in his reportage of the 1830s than the anathema poured upon the aristocratic class, whether French, English, or German. In addition, the old image of Napoleon's sovereign heroism in the cause of freedom was still active in him. He had a great respect for courage, and Louis-Philippe, whatever else one might think of him, was a brave man who stoically bore affliction, vili­ fication, and the eight assassination attempts that occurred during his reign. Heine wondered: was Louis-Philippe, as he often appeared to be, merely a cleverly manipulating politician, or was there real kingliness hidden in him? Heine was very suspicious of the king's bour­ geois manners, his ubiquitous umbrella, and his handshaking campaigns in the street. At times he worried that they were a mask for absolutist aspirations. "Under his modest felt hat . . . ," he wrote, "he wears a quite inappropriate crown of normal size, and in his umbrella he hides the most absolute scepter."31 At other times, however, Heine seemed to hope that there was royal purposiveness behind the charade; he be­ came impatient at the continuous lampooning of the king, the irre­ pressible representations of his head as a pear, and commiserated with

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him that his legal immunity prevented him from defending himself against slander.32 "But," warned Heine, "the king thinks: 'he who laughs last laughs best; you shall not eat the pear, the pear will eat you.' "33 In time Louis-Philippe became one of Heine's icons of the outstanding personality besieged and crushed by mediocrity. French Paintings closes with the observation that Louis-Philippe had saved monarchy in Europe, for which republicanism is not suitable, and therefore his defense is in the general interest. "I too have this insight. But we can both do nothing against the blindness of princes and dema­ gogues. Against stupidity even we gods fight in vain."34 With this last remark, a slyly altered quote from Schiller's Maid of Orleans, Heine shows, as he often does, his parallelization of the aura of monarchy with the poet's exceptional dignity. He recurred to the subject of the king repeatedly during the eighteen years of the July Monarchy;38 he came to reject the system but to sympathize with Louis-Philippe per­ sonally. Some observers have thought that, with his focus on the king, Heine excessively personalized political matters; but, like others in his generation, he was inclined to want to see and understand political authority located in a human being rather than in a system. "The best democracy," he wrote, "will always be one where a single man stands at the head of the state as the incarnation of the popular will, like God at the head of the governance of the world."36 Conditions in France became a particularly trying example of the pub­ lication difficulties with which Heine had increasingly to contend. The first article in the Allgemeine Xeitung, which was quite critical of LouisPhilippe, was published by an enemy of Cotta in abridged translation in a French republican newspaper. The paper was then confiscated, and Heine was drawn into the crossfire of the Parisian press.37 After several more articles, Metternich's factotum Gentz became jumpy at the militant tone of the "villainous adventurer Heine," and on April 21, 1832, sent a message to Cotta that they had better stop; even Kolb urged Heine to discuss French "life" rather than politics.38 Neverthe­ less, they continued for several weeks; however, the ninth article was refused and Heine, as far as we can tell, gave up the series voluntarily at this restriction.39 In August 1833 he offered the material as a book to Campe, who gladly accepted, without realizing that it was made up, as he grumped later, of "old newspaper articles."40 To it Heine wrote a very sharply worded preface, the purpose of which was to meet radical criticisms that he had betrayed the progressive cause with his moderation and excessive sympathy for Louis-Philippe. This argu­ ment involved, as usual, much praise for his own purity and fidelity. He mounted it, however, to lay the ground for a highly rhetorical

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faccuse against a set of German Federal Decrees of June 28, 1832, that banned all political organizations and public meetings or demon­ strations of any kind. He picked up a permanent theme of liberal out­ rage, Frederick William IIFs failure to grant Prussia the constitution he had appeared to promise in 1815, and directly charged the king with perjury. At the end he skeptically but ominously raised the ques­ tion whether that giant, passive fool, the German people, might one day be exasperated into crushing its tormentors. Campe was already under indictment as the publisher of Borne's Letters from Paris and, while he was confident he would be acquitted and was, the pressure against dissident literature was mounting; he found the Preface too strong, remarking that the printer would not accept it (printers were equally liable to prosecution with writers and publishers, a malicious device that increased the effectiveness of re­ pression). He suggested, therefore, that Heine allow the Preface to be censored, and then have it printed in Paris as a separate brochure with a Preface to the Preface. 41 He had a nephew in Paris, Friedrich Napoleon Campe (1808-1855), who operated a German publishing house, Heideloff und Campe, that could sometimes be called upon to print works that could not appear in Germany. Heine agreed to this, but when the censored Preface appeared in the book, he was appalled at the sight of it, claiming that it had made him sound servile, and he abused Campe as though the whole thing were his fault. 42 He pub­ lished in the Allgemeine Xeitung a repudiation of the Preface, the first of his efforts to carry on his quarrels with Campe in the press.43 Campe shrugged it off, but told him something of the long prison sentences publishers, book dealers, and printers had been receiving lately. 44 Heine kept quarrelling with him about this for much of the rest of the year, and Campe's feelings finally became very hurt. 45 In the meantime Campe had agreed to bring out the Preface with the Preface to the Preface separately and had actually printed it by March 1833. ^ut things in Germany were worsening rapidly. In Jan­ uary Frederick William III asked his ministry what was being done about Borne and Heine. 46 In April republican students in Frankfurt attempted a minor Putsch against the constabulary, which gave the occasion for new repressive measures and the formation of a "Central Investigation Committee" that had 1,800 people arrested. Campe be­ came increasingly uneasy that the uncensored Preface might lead to a ban on Heine in all of Germany; finally he proposed that the work be pulped. Though Heine's answer is lost, he evidently agreed. 47 A copy was retained and passed on to the Paris Campe, who printed the Preface under the name of one P. G[au]g[e]r and with Leipzig as the

IV. THE PROMISED LAND bogus place of publication; Gauger, a mere bookseller's apprentice of the Paris Campe, was subsequently arrested in Stuttgart and interro­ gated about the matter. 48 The Preface to the Preface was not included and did not appear until after Heine's death. The publication caused considerable turmoil. The authorities got to the bottom of it and the firm of Heideloif und Campe was banned in Prussia. About a year later, in March 1834, Campe himself, at Prussian instigation, was subjected to police interrogation. 49 He managed to get off the hook by dissociating himself from his nephew's outfit, for which he had come to have little regard and which had annoyed him with this, in his view, inopportune publication, about which he had in truth known nothing, and now, despite his caution, he had the trouble without the profit. He was agitated by this complicated affair —the details of which have been somewhat simplified here— 50 and urged caution on Heine in long letters. Campe saw it as only the be­ ginning of even greater difficulties. As usual, he was right.

1*1 The Salon I THE early 1830s were becoming an animated time for Heine. He was very busy; his move to Paris had expanded his productivity, and also his audience, for his works became a frequent topic of discussion in French and, to some extent, English reviewing organs. In one sense he had found his soundest footing yet as a writer, but his life became no more comfortable. He continued to wrestle for Uncle Salomon's purse. In February 1833 he received a note from Carl Heine, sending him a thousand francs but remarking that his father thought he had really done enough by now. 1 In the summer of 1832 Rahel Varnhagen's brother Ludwig Robert and his beautiful wife Friederike, whom Heine had so much admired, strangely died within ten days of one another, and Rahel herself died, to his sorrow, in March 1833. On November 3, 1833, his mother's house burned down; she sustained no harm, but a number of Heine's own manuscripts were lost. However, these troubles were dwarfed by his increasingly besieged position as an oppositional writer. He tried to pursue a tactic of saying what he pleased while verbally asserting his moderation, but it did him no good, and an increasing groundswell of conservative, nationalist, and reactionary opinion began to build against him. Prussia was banning

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his works one after the other; even the innocent French journal UEu­ rope litteraire was banned there because Heine had published in it, as Campe took pains to point out.2 In 1834 the Prussian foreign minister Ancillon commissioned a pamphlet entitled Heinrich Heine and a Look at Our Times, which goes so far as to indict Heine for treason and suggests prison or death as the appropriate punishment.3 Heine began to complain that he was surrounded by Prussian spies. Read by themselves, these complaints may give a slightly paranoid impression, but we know today that they were well founded. Both Prussia and Austria maintained a network of police spies—mostly amateurs who submitted to Berlin and Vienna a steady stream of information and misinformation on German dissidents. These people keep cropping up in Heine's life; for example, just at this time he made the acquaintance of a journalist named Bauernschmid, a secret agent who promptly re­ ported on him to Vienna.4 These circumstances led in 1833 to a both weird and characteristic episode. While vacationing at Boulogne, Heine received a message from a man named Nolte that some Prussian officers, offended by the Preface to Conditions in France, were plotting to trap him into a duel and kill him. Heine at once communicated his apprehensions to his friends. There then appeared in the Leipziger Zeitung on November 12, 1833, an anonymous communication describing the affair as a prac­ tical joke on Heine designed to exhibit his cowardice and deflate his pretensions as a dangerous revolutionary, incidentally ascribing his enmity to Prussia to a failure to obtain a government position.5 Heine reacted as he increasingly did in such situations: he composed a refu­ tation, entitled "Declaration" (Erklarung), and had it placed in the Allgemeine Zeitung and the Zeitung fiir die elegante Welt (Newspa­ per for the Elegant World), edited by his ally Heinrich Laube in Leipzig; the Leipziger Zeitung refused the submission, but then printed it as a paid advertisement.6 Heine denied the claim that the threat was not serious, and pointed out several outright lies in the article, defend­ ing himself with particular energy against the charge of having been rejected for Prussian employment (he had, indeed, probed that possi­ bility, but there had been no official negotiation). As in most of the contretemps of this kind, no one will ever get fully to the bottom of it. The modern guess is that the author of the Leipzig report was an orientalist named .Klaproth, to whom is also ascribed a report directly to the Prussian government, which gives a similar account of the affair and adds the suggestion that the Prussian minister in Paris, Baron von Werther, take steps to have Heine ex­ pelled.7 Heine had tried to forestall this sort of thing by pursuing

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good relations with Werther; nevertheless, the report of an Austrian spy, dated January 12, 1834, asserts that the Prussian government had instructed Werther to have Heine expelled, and also claims that the French government had put him under police surveillance.8 One never knows how much credence to give to these documents, for many of these spies were sycophantic and flighty, indiscriminately passing on rumor and gossip. There is no evidence that the French government acted on such a Prussian request at this time, although the question was to come up again a few years later. The episode graphically exhib­ its the kind of environment in which Heine was trying to survive as a writer. One reason that this one particularly bothered him was that he had intended to include Nolte's impeached letter of warning in The Salon, which was already in the press, and he thought it would be too late to remove it. Campe, however, lynx-eyed as always, saw what was happening and wisely suppressed the document at the last minute.9 Salon I therefore appeared in December without this particular em­ barrassment, taking its title, as we have seen, from the articles on the art exhibitions of 1831 and 1833. The volume also contained, along with some poems that will be discussed in a different context, Heine's second try at a novel, the fragment entitled From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabele r WOpski (Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski). This is one of Heine's oddest works and in places one of the most difficult to interpret satisfactorily. Even its genesis is more difficult to determine than is normally the case, as he usually keeps us pretty well posted on the progress of his works. A remark to a friend in a letter of August 24, 1832, "a novel has miscarried,"10 is usually referred to Schnabeleivopski, but even that is not certain. Fur­ thermore, some of the material looks as if it may be older than that, going back to the late 1820s. In form the work is a reprise of the fictional pieces of the Travel Pictures·, its initial setting is Poland, then Hamburg, which is the object of much satire on its commercial spirit; the remainder takes place in Holland, which Heine had passed through in the summer of 1827. For these reasons current opinion places the composition of much of Schnabeleivopski several years before 1833. It is easy to see that the novel "miscarried" quite early on. Heine at first made an abortive attempt to alter his customary narrative strat­ egy. Instead of employing his own poetic persona, who simultane­ ously is and is not identical with his empirical self, he installed as nar­ rator an initially completely fictive persona, the aristocratic, somewhat picaresque Polish student Schnabelewopski, born on April Fool's Day, who at the outset is a comic figure and the butt of what not unchar-

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itably might be called Polish jokes. But Heine did not have the gift for this more conventional kind of narration, located in a self distinct from his own. When Schnabelewopski begins to speak of his father, we de­ tect in the two or three sentences a portrait of Samson Heine, a fic­ tionalized fragment of Heine's memoirs such as we find in The Book of Le Grand, and from that point on the Polish persona practically disappears, metamorphosed into the familiar narrative persona of the Travel Pictures, a sentimental student with a love of freedom and sat­ ire, standing largely outside of events and commenting on them. Schnabelewopski is a fairly complex and in places somewhat puz­ zling text, and we cannot deal with all its aspects and problems here. But it contains three elements that are deserving of particular men­ tion, as they are related to the dominant theme of sensual emancipa­ tion from repressive spiritualism, which is the novel's primary thrust of meaning. One is a further elaboration of Heine's admiration for seventeenth-century Dutch realism and especially for the light-hearted popular paintings of Jan Steen, full of sensual life and unidealized re­ ality. "No nightingale will ever have sung so cheerfully and jubilantly as Jan Steen painted. No one has understood as deeply as he that there should be eternal carnival on this earth; he understood that our life is only a colorful kiss of God, and he knew that the Holy Ghost re­ veals itself most magnificently in light and laughter."11 Heine's views on this, incidentally, are quite similar to Hegel's, who praised the Dutch masters in his Aesthetics for expressing the "Sunday of life."12 A second important element, by far the most famous section of the work, is Heine's version of the legend of the Flying Dutchman, to which he had already adverted in The North Sea IILis The narrator claims to be describing a play he has seen in Amsterdam. No such play has ever been located, and it is now accepted that Heine's resolution of the story—the release of the Flying Dutchman from his curse by the maiden's suicide in order to guarantee her own fidelity—is original with him. This ending is, of course, barbed: "the Devil, stupid as he is," remarks the narrator sarcastically, "did not believe in female fi­ delity."14 The Flying Dutchman, released by the sacrifice, goes to the bottom at last; the moral of the story is that "we men, in the most favorable case, perish through women."15 This is the version that in­ spired Richard Wagner to his opera, as he acknowledged in the first edition of his autobiography; later, not wishing to seem indebted to a Jew, he altered the passage to make Heine only the unoriginal trans­ mitter of someone else's creation.16 For Heine, however, the legend is typically spiritualist in its implications; therefore the narrator frames

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it with a ribald account of an adventure with a nymphomanic young woman in the theater balcony. This aspect of the book, incidentally, did not sit well with the public; it sold poorly and some disgruntled buyers demanded their money back.17 The third significant segment, with which the fragment ends, is the pathetic story of the Jewish theist Simson. This scene occurs in a boarding house where students argue and banter various philosophical positions back and forth. But the tone of the argument grows ugly when the sex-starved landlady's meals are bad; thus does sensual dep­ rivation contribute to human strife. The feeble, unathletic Simson de­ fends his God in a duel with a free-thinker and is mortally wounded; in imitation of his Biblical namesake he shakes the posts of the bed, calling down God's wrath on the Philistines, but God is silent and Simson hemorrhages at the end of the work. Campe detected in Sim­ son a satirical representation of Ludwig Borne,18 and a few years later this idea came into general circulation. Simson, like Borne, is a Jew from Frankfurt, and Borne retained a certain persistent religiosity that got on Heine's nerves. "The Jews are always the most obedient deists, especially those who, like little Simson, were born in the free city of Frankfurt. In political matters their thinking can be as republican as possible; indeed they can roll in filth like sans-culottes; but if religious questions come up, then they remain subservient chamber-servants of their Jehovah, the old fetish, who, however, wants nothing to do with their whole tribe and has been converted to a God-pure spirit."19 The relationship between Heine and Borne was deteriorating badly at this time, as we shall see. But one should not press the point too far. In no other way does Simson resemble the witty, intelligent, and urbane radical, and, furthermore, Heine is not laughing at Simson, despite the bitter ironies of the narration. He regards Simson with affection and sympathy, for all that his allegiance to his God is futile, and the pas­ sage includes one of the eloquent paeans to the Bible Heine never ceased to love and admire. The four volumes of The Salon have always presented difficulties to Heine's editors, starting with Heine himself in his efforts to devise the shape of a collected edition. Even though the Travel Pictures contain lyric sections that need to be located elsewhere, editors have usually managed to keep them together; The Salon spans some nine years, more than twice the time period of the Travel Pictures, and the four volumes are less cohesive, so that modern editors, following Heine himself, have tended to break them up. One circumstance that en­ courages this practice is that Salon II is really half of a larger work,

IV. THE PROMISED LAND the other half of which appeared in a different format. This work is his most ambitious effort of the 1830s and requires separate considera­ tion.

[ 5 ]

De l'Allemagne FOR a number of years, Heine's views on the meaning of Germany in the modern world had been coalescing into a pattern. He now deter­ mined to communicate these insights in a reasoned exposition ad­ dressed in the first instance to a French audience but intended as well to clarify within Germany itself the true intellectual situation that the governments and their allies were endeavoring to suppress. He had come to understand it as his "office," as he put it in the Preface to Conditions in Vrance, to mediate between French and German cultures and therefore to contribute to peace among the peoples by opposing the war-mongering ruling class.1 The result was the books now known as On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany {Xur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland) and The Ro­ mantic School (Die Romantische Schule). Since their publication his­ tory is exceptionally complicated, it will be helpful to stress that they were conceived as two parts of a single work; they never appeared as one in German, though they did in French, bearing the title De ΓAllemagne, and for the sake of convenience the whole enterprise will be so referred to here. This title is an explicit allusion to Madame de Stael's famous book, published in 1810, for Heine's work is conceived as an anti-Stael and, indeed, imitates her format. Her De l'Allemagne has four parts: the first on geography and customs, the second on literature and art, the third on philosophy and morals, and the fourth on religion and "I'enthousiasme." Heine had no need to replicate the first part, for Germany was no longer such unknown territory as it may have been at the turn of the century, and for ideological reasons he reversed the sequence of religion and philosophy, but otherwise he retained Stael's structure. Heine was fairly rude about Madame de Stael. In a set of anecdotes written late in life he presents her as a jabbering, pushy female get­ ting on the nerves of German luminaries with her relentless interro­ gation. 2 He did not credit her with much power of observation or independence of judgment, but came to regard her as a willing mouth-

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piece of the Romantics, employing their reactionary obscurantism in a campaign against Napoleon and the Revolution, for no other reason, as he claimed, than that Napoleon had rebuffed her sexual advances. It goes without saying that he was unfair to Madame de Stael and her book,3 which was of considerable historical importance in making Western nations better aware of the extraordinary literary and philo­ sophical events taking place in Germany. He makes her out to be more illiberal and obscurantist than she was in fact. But he felt that her book continued to shape an image of Germany that seemed to him quite wrong. It was an image of a Romantic, introverted land, resistant to revolution and the turmoil of modern civilization, poetically dreaming and religiously intact—"la patrie de la pensee," in a phrase, conflated with one coined by others, that circulated as "the nation of poets and thinkers." For Heine this was precisely the facade that the oppressors and their intellectual allies were trying to maintain; Germany's poten­ tial meaning for the world was, for him, quite different. The significance of Heine's work for Germany was deeper than an opposition to Madame de Stael. For its strongest challenge was its es­ sentially negative perception of the German past. In this Heine resem­ bled Enlightenment and rationalist thinkers in Western countries who tended to see the past as superstitious, obscurantist, and full of atrocity. German idealism, Romanticism, and even liberalism, by contrast, were much more pious about history and strove to reconcile the past with the present, the traditional with the modern, preserved structure with progressive mind, an inclination that exerted much resistance to po­ litical and social progress and became a major problem of subsequent German history.4 In De FAllemagne Heine therefore ran his familiar risk of appearing un-German. But his standpoint was still more com­ plex. For him not only was the Romantic the past, and therefore in dire need of supersession; the past was Romantic, the lost realm of poesy. Thus his rational allegiances, his inability to identify with any of the philosophical, ideological, or religious doctrines of the past or any effort to restore them, were somewhat at war with his allegiance to poesy and a sense of homelessness in an emerging utilitarian and philistine present. In The Book of Le Grand, Heine had ascribed to himself a dichotomy between fool (by which he meant Romantic or even poet) and rationalist, which put him between two stools in his time. 5 This split was indeed very deep-seated in him and robs De VAllemagne of some of its coherence as a manifesto, while at the same time making of it the most detailed map of the landscape of his mind. The second part of the work, The Romantic School, was written and began to appear first, from March to May 1833, as Etat actuel de

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la litterature en Allemagne in UEurope litteraire, a new journal in which Heine took a lively interest but which failed soon after. The work was then published in two parts as On the History of More Recent Belles Lettres in Germany (Zur Geschichte der neueren schdnen Literatur in Deutschland) by Heideloff und Campe in Paris in April and July 1833. This was also the first work of Heine's to appear in English translation in the United States.6 Now came the first half of the work, as De IjAllemagne depuis Luther in three parts in the Revue des Deux Mondes in March, November, and December 1834. A conclusion, entitled The Future Revolution of Germany (Die zukiinftige Revolution Deutschlands), appeared in a new German dissi­ dent journal published in Paris, Der Geachtete (The Outlaw), at the beginning of January 1835, and the whole work, with its final title, as Salon Il in the middle of that month. It led to another public attack on Campe by Heine over censorship.7 Heine claimed that the censor­ ship made it appear more anti-religious and less "patriotic-democratic" than it was. He could not restore the lacunae in the second edition of 1852 because he believed the manuscript had been lost in a fire, but it has since been found.8 Campe did not much like The Romantic School and resisted it for a while, especially as he was peeved that Heine had first published it with the Paris Campe; who would buy a second version? But finally he brought it out under its final title, expanded and updated, in No­ vember 1835 with the imprint 1836. Meanwhile, in April, the two volumes of De ΓAllemagne, dedicated to Enfantin, had been published by Eugene Renduel in Paris, who contracted handsomely with Heine for them and was beginning to produce a collected edition of his works in French. These multiple publications annoyed Campe,9 but Heine was making a bit of money on them. The intent of Religion and Philosophy is to extract the "academic secret" of German philosophy from its hermetic incomprehensibility and expose it in a language accessible to the common people, to make visible, as Heine keeps stressing, the social significance of philosophy. "The people hunger for knowledge and will thank me for the piece of intellectual bread that I honestly share with them."10 The "secret" is the overthrow of traditional religion and its supersession by a pantheism that takes full account of the material needs and desires of man. The scheme has numerous Saint-Simonian features. Heine offers an interpretation of the history of Christianity in which the Greek element is early displaced by a dualistic Persian Manichaeism of Indian origin, inimical to the senses and the claims of the material world. Christianity then demonized the ancient gods, which lived an under-

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ground existence in popular consciousness in the folk legends of Ger­ many, distorting pantheism into horror. Pantheism remained, however, "Germany's secret religion" 11 and reemerged in German Naturphilosophie. The Reformation is seen dialectically: Protestantism was, of course, a spiritualist revival, but Luther himself was a complex mix­ ture of the sensual and the spiritual, and willy-nilly released free thinking, the critical application of philosophy to religion, as well as the activist application of literature to politics and public concerns. From the Enlightenment on, philosophy replaces religion in the evo­ lution of mankind—here we are clearly in the realm of Hegelianism— and Heine traces the Spinozist tradition in German thought through Mendelssohn and Lessing to Goethe as its harvester, and finally to Kant, who makes the personal God untenable, though he could not admit it. Here Heine invented a tale that has even found its way into Kant biographies, claiming that Kant reacknowledged religion in the Cri­ tique of Practical Reason because he could not bear the sight of his servant's misery at the loss of his God. This story is, of course, apoc­ ryphal and bears no relation to what Kant really thought; but in a larger sense it allegorizes the tendency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the dominant classes, though they may have grown skep­ tical themselves, to support religion as an ideological discipline for the lower classes. Heine then turns to Fichte, whose biography interests him more than his philosophy. He quotes at length from Fichte's diaries describing his early sufferings and recounts his dismissal from the University of Jen a on a charge of atheism, in which Goethe acquiesced not so much out of objection to Fichte's doctrines but be­ cause he thought them, and Fichte's manner of defending them, dis­ ruptive of social peace and quiet. For Heine this illustrates the misery of an intellectual trapped in a caste-ridden and reactionary society. He then goes on to discuss Schelling more briefly, and though he calls Hegel "the greatest philosopher produced by Germany since Leib­ niz,"12 he devotes only a few phrases to him. The point of all this is to argue the revolutionary potential of Ger­ man thought, even though it is now illogically inhibited by censorship and the repression of the universities, the fortresses of freedom and Protestantism. In short: "A new order of things is taking shape; the mind makes inventions that further the welfare of matter; through the thriving of industry and through philosophy, spiritualism is being dis­ credited in public opinion; the third estate is rising; and what the age feels and thinks and needs and wants is enunciated, and that is the material of modern literature."13 Like Hegel, Heine argued that the developments in modern German thought had, in the long run, greater

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implications for the future than the revolutionary upheavals of the French. To hyperbolize the point, he closes with a thundering pro­ phetic peroration, warning the French that the resuscitation of the primordial Germanic pantheism is a force that will "fill the world with horror and admiration" when no longer restrained by piety and idealism. "Thor with his giant hammer will finally leap forth and smash the Gothic cathedrals. . . . Thought precedes the deed like lightning the thunder. . . . The German thunder is, to be sure, also a German, is therefore not very adroit and rolls up somewhat slowly; but it will come"; and he warns the French to stand aside for their own safety and not interfere when this apocalypse at last occurs.14 In modern times this passage has been misapplied as a prophecy of Nazism; as more recent commentators have seen, that is quite wrong. Heine is never unambiguous when he speaks the language of terrorism, for he himself feared the forces that injustice and oppression seemed to him to be generating; rather like Freud, he sensed a connection of civilization, culture, and morality with repression, and therefore he regularly perceived the ultimate revolution as the unleashing of a chaotic, destructive, and bloody vandalism. The passage, with its ec­ centric association of what Madame de Stael had perceived as the unworldly idealism of German speculation with the potential un­ leashing of a primitive Germanic beserk fury is one long double en­ tendre, but in its context it is positively meant, drawing the political and social sum of the dismantling of Christianity that Heine read as the underground implication of the trammelled development of Ger­ man thought. The Romantic School links up with this fundamentally religious reading of the sociology of culture; in fact there is much overlap be­ tween the two parts of De ΓAllemagne. It begins with a definition of Romanticism as "nothing other than the reawakening of the poesy of the Middle Ages." "This poesy," he goes on, "had proceeded from Christianity, it was a passionflower sprung from the blood of Christ."15 He recapitulates his view of Catholicism as a system of material re­ pression, devised as a consolation for inhibited gratification, and in­ terprets the Romantic movement analogously as an other-worldly sur­ rogate for German political despair at the domination of Napoleon, flowing from thence into a reactionary stream. Against it he sets a revolutionary Enlightenment tradition in literature, originating in Lessing and including his hero Voss, who plays a role here quite dis­ proportionate to his importance in literary history because he had denounced the conversion to Catholicism of the Sturm-und-Drang writer Friedrich Stolberg (1750-1819) as treason to the cause of free-

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dom. The line of argument naturally obliges Heine to wrestle once more with the problem of Goethe. He weaves a complex critical fab­ ric, of which one main thread is admiration for Goethe's anti-Roman­ tic, non-Christian, worldly standpoint, while another is criticism of the sterile elevation of his art: Goethe is presented as a god in his awesomeness and remoteness, overshadowing Schiller, yet less committed to the imperatives of the age, an epochal pantheist, yet somehow too much of one, for his pantheism has led to ethical indifference. "But that is just the error," Heine writes, calling Saint-Simonianism as his witness; "not everything is God, but God is everything; God manifests Himself not in all things to the same degree, rather He manifests Him­ self in various degrees in the various things, and everything carries in itself the urge to achieve a higher degree of godliness; and that is the great law of progress in nature."16 Thus Heine salvages the ethical imperative of intellectual and creative work while, of course, making his philosophical terms completely arbitrary and manipulable. Considering that this is a book on the Romantic School, Heine spends quite a lot of time with Goethe. He discusses Faust, whom he mistakenly equates with an associate of Gutenberg named Fust, thus bringing the figure into connection with the great emancipatory art of printing; it was a splendid juxtaposition for his purposes, though by the time he wrote the historical commentary to his own Faust he was obliged to reject it as untenable.17 He makes a special point of praising the sensual poetry of the West-Eastern Divan as against the bizarre, spiritualist India of the Romantics, and finally heroizes Goethe by comparing him with a Greek god and Napoleon. Only then does Heine get to the Romantics proper. He begins with Friedrich Schlegel, then performs an act of intellectual parricide against August WilheIm Schlegel, who, it will be remembered, encouraged Heine a dozen years before and earned his gratitude. But, perhaps because Schlegel was the chief resource for and companion of Madame de Stael, Heine found it necessary to denigrate him here, giving a sarcastic account of his elegant vanity as a lecturer and of the conjugal disaster in his private life. He then deals one after another with Tieck, Schelling, and E.T.A. Hoffmann; Brentano and Arnim; Jean Paul; and the later Romantics Zacharias Werner, Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, and Ludwig Uhland. It seems to me that The Romantic School is less successful than Religion and Philosophy, and for the perhaps odd reason that the latter work is more abstract. Heine's philosophical construction of history may be open to many detailed objections, as are all such grandiose schemata dreamed up in the synthesizing imagination from Vico to

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Toynbee. The grasp of philosophical doctrines is primitive, as many reviewers noted with scorn, and much of it seems, in fact, to have been drawn from the school textbooks of his boyhood.18 But the work has sweep and logic, a persistent focus on the involvement of human consciousness with historical evolution, and an unerring allegiance to emancipation from irrational doctrines that cripple human potential. More than fifty years later Friedrich Engels wrote of the hidden rev­ olutionary potential of German philosophy that "what neither the government nor the liberals saw was seen at least by one man as early as 1833, and his name was Heinrich Heine."19 When Heine gets down to cases in The Romantic School, the results are less satisfactory. Like many major writers, Heine was an erratic and self-oriented literary critic. Sharp-witted apergus and passages of genuine perception, such as his defense of Kleist and his analysis of Tieck's mentality and ca­ reer, alternate with inattentive reading and a tendency to move too quickly from superficial analysis and cursory judgment to a gross characterization locating the writer in the polemical scheme. Some of the discussion, especially that of medieval literature, looks cribbed, and it is not clear that Heine has all the works he discusses well in mind; in several places his criticism suggests strongly that he opened the books in question and read or reread only the first few pages. But it is the untenability of his main thesis that is most damaging. Heine was, to be sure, not alone in identifying Romanticism with a Christian revival. Jean Paul had done the same in 1804 when he wrote: "The origin and character of all modern poetry can so easily be de­ duced from Christianity that romantic poetry could just as well be called Christian."20 But this kind of outlook cannot capture the epochal modernity of Romanticism: the newly sensitized self-awareness, the expanded imagination, the greatly increased depth of world, history, and, indeed, science, a matter on which Heine has nothing to say ex­ cept to scoff at Goethe's researches as distractions from the great issues of the day. Because his category is deficient, Heine cannot sus­ tain its employment consistently. He does not succeed in relating all the literary phenomena he treats to it, and he keeps making exceptions: E.T.A. Hoffmann, whom he greatly admired in his student days, be­ cause he was not associated with the Schlegels and his narration is rooted in reality; Jean Paul because of his focus on the present; Uhland because he laid poetry aside for political activity; Chamisso because he now seemed to be turning to a sympathy with the younger genera­ tion of writers. All of these, of course, in any rational discourse of literary history, are Romantics. Heine was so hypnotized by his thesis that he asserted in one place that Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis,

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Werner, Werner's editor Schutz, and the philosophers Wilhelm Carove and Adam Miiller were all converts to Catholicism.21 Of these seven, the assertion is true of only three: Schlegel, Werner (who be­ came a priest), and Miiller. Indeed, I suspect Heine may be largely responsible for the constantly encountered misconception that there was a stampede of conversion to Catholicism among the German Ro­ mantic writers. No such thing occurred. Friedrich Schlegel was the only major Romantic to do so, and August Wilhelm, as Heine neglects to mention, turned away from the temptation and publicly criticized his brother for it; Brentano was born a Catholic and returned to the Church after having become alienated from it, becoming, as Heine put it, a "corresponding member of Catholic propaganda";22 and Eichendorff was all his life a faithful Catholic who, incidentally, held the aestheticizing religiosity of the other Romantics in scant regard. That is all, though Tieck and Novalis flirted with Catholicism. The Chris­ tian and medieval revival that is a component of Romanticism is much too complicated a process to be captured with Heine's blunt catego­ ries; in fact the suspicious reactionary Eichendorff understood it bet­ ter. From one point of view, Heine was here going through the per­ fectly normal process by which one literary generation finds it neces­ sary to liquidate its predecessor before it can feel free on its own ground. "In literature as in the forests of the North American savages the fathers are killed by the sons as soon as they become old and weak."23 It is no doubt consistent with that kind of action that he reflects as little as possible on his own intimate involvement with Romanticism, which emerges in his positive judgments on the imag­ inative force of the works he discusses, wrung from his own artistic sensibility. He was, furthermore, motivated by a worthy purpose. The Romantic order of mind was, in his time, aligned with reactionary politics and obscurantist doctrine and, furthermore, as he observed the emergence of French Romanticism, he thought he detected the importation of this ideological alignment into France, the very for­ tress of rationality and progress. For this he blamed Madame de Stael and thought it needful to obviate her influence. Heine was right to think that, in his time, in literature as well as in ideology, it was im­ portant to take an anti-Romantic stance. But he became one of the fountainheads of the interpretation, eventually flowing into Marxism, that makes of Romanticism a reactionary and aberrant episode in the history of progress and enlightenment, a viewpoint that renders the history of the Western consciousness unintelligible. The Romantics, Heine wrote, "endangered the freedom and happiness of my fatherr95

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land."24 One can understand why he thought it necessary to say this, but, measured against the size and weight of the Romantic component of modern consciousness, it seems like a feeble and petty judgment. De PAllemagne has left another questionable legacy that is too often uncritically accepted. That is the notion of the end of the Kunstperiode, the "epoch of art," that Heine had been elaborating since his re­ view of Menzel's literary history in 1828. The idea that the passing of the Age of Goethe would bring a shift in orientation away from a pursuit of aesthetic perfection to public commitment and activism was widespread in the 1830s. It was systematically set out by Hegel in his Aesthetics: "Thought and reflection have outstripped fine art. . . . The beautiful days of Greek art like the golden age of the late Middle Ages are past. . . . In all these respects art is and remains in respect of its highest determination something gone for us."25 Goethe, too, in the last letter of his life, spoke of the impending extinction of his mode of art and thought.26 Young writers and academics, many energized by the 1830 Revolution, called vigorously for a new activist orientation in creative work, and from time to time the end of litera­ ture was proclaimed. Heine went a step farther and, following his by now unacknowledged model Ludwig Borne, saw the cultivation of the arts as a circus organized to distract and anesthetize the people. In The Romantic School he cites the Roman historian Justinus to this effect: "When Cyrus had quieted the revolt of the Lydians, he was able to tame their stubborn, freedom-addicted spirit only by ordering them to pursue fine arts and other merry things. Henceforth nothing more was heard of Lydian rebellions, but Lydian restaurateurs, pimps, and artists became all the more famous."27 It is perhaps because all this bears some resemblance to a mood of the 1960s and early 1970s that so much weight has been given to it recently, claiming Heine as a prophetic voice. But, in historical retro­ spect, there are two serious objections to the idea of the "end of the Kunstperiode": the first is that there was no Kunstperiode, and the second that it did not come to an end. By this I mean first of all that Heine and his contemporaries for their own purposes greatly exag­ gerated the unworldliness and irrelevance of the Classical-Romantic age, which was in close dialectical relationship with current events and profoundly concerned with the question of how modern man ought to live; and, secondly, that then and later only literature that took itself seriously as art has had any enduring life. There is some­ thing a little absurd in presenting Goethe, who played a larger role in practical political life than any other writer in the history of Ger­ man literature, and who maintained until his dying day the most alert

IV. THE PROMISED LAND attentiveness to what was going on in the world, as an exemplar of ivory-tower aloofness. The problem was, of course, that he did not read the imperatives of the time in the same way as the younger ac­ tivist intelligentsia. They, in turn, wrote much that appeared to scorn aesthetic considerations, but hardly any of it, excepting Heine's and, independently of his, Georg Biichner's, is anything but dead lumber occasionally shifted around by literary historians. One need only imag­ ine it translated into English and attracting any readership whatsover to test this proposition. Thus the "end of the Kunstperiode" was a mood and a program, not a prophecy or a long-term turning point in the history of litera­ ture. But, in its own moment, it was a significant and, indeed, neces­ sary concept for focusing intellectual energies against the oppression and injustices of the time. In this context, Heine's De FAllemagne was a work of great significance and influence. Despite its hasty judg­ ments, its hyperboles, its philosophical dilettantism, and its rather rig­ id metahistorical scheme, it was a vigorous contribution to a needful cultural debate inhibited on all sides by the most artificial and desper­ ate measures of an obsolete political and social order. Its force is in­ creased by Heine's by now inimitable expressive and compositional skill, his sure wit and fierce anger in symphony with a rhetoric of commitment to human emancipation. He was becoming the best living German writer, as indeed he himself believed;28 only Biichner, then hardly noticed and soon to die at the age of twenty-three, and the diametrically different and at that time obscure Eduard Morike can be compared with him in stature at that moment. Heine's application of artistic genius to articulate insurgency was beginning to make him appear to some as a major enemy of the existing order.

Mathilde WE HAVE now brought Heine up to his mid-thirties, and it may have struck the reader that we have had little to say about women in his life. This is because up to now there has been relatively little to report, at least with any confidence, since the elusive unrequited passion or passions of his youth. In his student days there is some off-hand brag­ ging about a vulgar sexual escapade; Heine seems to be showing off a little here, but that was not his habit.1 There are hints of some whor-

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ing in Hamburg and of minor liaisons in North Sea resorts and in England, but no more. In Paris this aspect of his life seems to have changed some. As usual, he was very reticent about the details of his private life, but the testimony of acquaintances and some indirect evi­ dence in his writing suggest that he had a series of casual sexual en­ counters with Parisian grisettes and women of blithe virtue. His broth­ er Max gave him stuffy medical advice to restrict his excessive sexual activity.2 Nowhere is there any indication of a serious liaison with a woman who could be spiritually and emotionally important to him and, before 1834, no indication of a serious liaison of any kind. It appears to me that Heine's aggressive "sensualism" is fairly closely related to inhibitions and inadequacies in the sexual part of his life. He seems always to have remained somewhat maladroit and lacking in ordinary attractiveness. He was a small man; his passport from Eng­ land gives his height as five feet, two inches.3 Contemporary observers usually described his appearance as unprepossessing. But, as is often pointed out, the primary sex organ is located in the head. The overall mediocrity of his love life is doubtless owing to his incapacity for intimacy, for genuine involvement with another self on more or less equal terms. One of the most thoughtful literary historians ever to write on this period remarked of Heine's relations with women that they were "either exaggeratedly cordial and courteous or exaggerat­ edly cold, spiteful, and indifferent; but neither is altogether seriously meant, because for neither is he internally free enough. Therefore Heine is not in his element in love or friendship, but in society."4 It is perhaps worth noting that, except for the stretches of boarding with his family, up to this time Heine had never lived with anyone. There is no record that he had a roommate as a student or that he ever shared his quarters during his bachelor years. Except for the first leg of his journey to Italy with Max, and an 1831 vacation trip to Boulogne in the company of Michael Beer and a journalist named Hermann Franck, he had always travelled alone. He was not ungregarious— episodes of genuine solitude, as in Potsdam or Wandsbek, were inter­ ludes, and he usually had much company and numerous acquaintances —but at the center of his way of life was an inner sanctum empty but for himself. In addition, his "sensualism" was shadowed by a puritani­ cal hangover that he was never able to shake off. This often imperfectly perceived inner inhibition emerges, if some­ what subtly, in an extraordinary group of verses he wrote in the early 1830s, to which he eventually gave the title Variae (Verschiedene). They began to appear in 1833 in a Berlin periodical appropriately en­ titled Der Freimiithige (The Candid Man); they were included in

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Salon I that December, and then, eleven years later, much revised and reorganized, in New Poems, where they caused, as we shall see, diffi­ culty for the publication of the volume. The Variae are various wom­ en; each group of poems is headed by a girl's name, or, in one case, two names, mother and daughter. They all deal with short-lived sex­ ual encounters and, after lyrical beginnings, most of them concentrate on the carnal aspects of the relationships. The poet makes a point of being coarse and cynical; the very title of the group, with its implica­ tion of disposable human beings and disposable relationships, looks at first sight to be a concentrate of cynicism. The Variae are another of Heine's frontal attacks on his public. German, like English society, was on the threshold of the Victorian age. Sexual tabus were growing stronger rather than weaker. In the middle-class public, sexual license had long been regarded as a char­ acteristic vice of the aristocracy, while sexual discipline and respect for feminine purity were associated with bourgeois virtue. In driving so roughly across the grain of these tabus, Heine was running his fa­ miliar risk of being perceived, not as a radical emancipator, but as temperamentally an aristocrat, and the resistance he generated was by no means restricted to the conservative public. But he wanted to tear the smug veil away from the increasingly institutionalized sexual dou­ ble standard and to admit to poetry an aspect of life against which idealistic aesthetics attempted to raise a barrier. In a sense he was con­ tinuing that part of the program of the Book of Songs that he de­ scribed as the introduction of everyday society into poetry, but now at the level of the demi-monde. It would be an error to overestimate the prudishness of his audience. If his erotic poems had been more joyful and expansive, like Goethe's Roman Elegies, of which the Variae are in an attenuated sense a travesty, they would have been well received by at least the more refined part of the public. It was their sourness that was perceived as prurient exploitation, although that certainly is not their meaning. Rather they express, in an ambi­ ence of urban vulgarity not yet admissible to poetry, a virtually tragic experience of the debasement of a liberating vision within mundane social reality. The point is that the inhibition and repressiveness that yield prurience were firmly lodged in Heine himself, and for that very reason his voice was more truthful in these matters than many others on either side of the sexual issue. The poignancy of impossible perma­ nence yields, in flashes, some of Heine's most penetrating and biting lyrics, giving voice to the bitter discrepancy between an emotional Utopia of communion adequate to the most delicate poetic imagination and the reality of incongruent selves savaging and escaping one an-

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other. Some have wanted to see in these poems an expression of the reification of human relations in capitalist society; they might be taken that way as an abstract symptom, but that does not seem to me to be their main point, which readers have perennially had difficulty grasping. The Variae are a prominent example of the way Heine's texts have been employed to buttress a preconceived image. By those disposed to think ill of him, they have been taken as evidence of anything from unmannerliness to degeneracy. By some they have been taken as vulgar boasting, although it is evident that the poems cannot be di­ rectly autobiographical, for they were reshuffled and altered in their several publications. Now that sexual libertinage is seen as positive and emancipatory, the same misreading is given a reverse valuation: Heine is praised as a liberator. In fact there is little liberation to be read out of these poems. Several of the episodes peak in gaiety and sensual ex­ citement, and the seventh poem of the most ambitious of the cycles, Seraphine, is one of the most explicit of Heine's Saint-Simonian utter­ ances, proclaiming the church of the third testament, the end of the body-soul dualism, and the presence of God in all things, including "our kisses."5 But Seraphine, like most of the cycles, ends in satiety, betrayal, and loss, and the final impact of the Variae is one of ungratifying impermanence and the ultimate futility of these flimsy en­ counters. There is a need to become more attentive to Heine's lan­ guage when he ventures upon sexual ground. His affectedly cynical salaciousness belies the emancipatory pose, for it is merely a reversal of inhibition. In the prurient scene surrounding the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the woman is referred to as a "Dutch Messalina,"6 hardly the language of a man committed to sexual freedom as a new morality, despite the Bacchantic excitement he associates with liber­ tinage. This conflicted tone emerges repeatedly in the Variae: in Yolande and Marie, No. 4: "Yet, when I enjoy my victory, / The best of me is lacking. / Is it the vanished, sweet / Stupid youthful asininity?"; in Angelique, No. 9, the sensual carnival ends with Ash Wednesday and the poet draws a cross on the girl's forehead, saying: "Woman, consider that you are dust"; in Hortense, No. 5: "Old is the text! It is the words / Of Solomon: woman is bitter. / Faithless is she to her friend/ As she is faithless to her husband!" 7 Numerous other exam­ ples could be adduced to show that for Heine sexuality remained demonic and anarchic, fascinating, like the threatening proletariat, but low and barbaric. As in other areas, he can see the cost of repression and protest against it, but he cannot fix permanently on a humane Utopia of full liberation.

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Heine's erotic life has been a great deal more frustrating to his critics and biographers than it probably was to him. It has been exas­ perating that a man of such live creativity and emotional range should not have experienced a great passion worth reporting on, and exas­ peration has been the mother of invention. The chief candidate for the grand amour of this time of his life became George Sand. Heine became acquainted with her, at her request, in November 1834 through Franz Liszt.8 They got along splendidly and for quite some time they maintained affectionate relations. There are many similarities and cu­ rious parallels in the course of their lives and opinions, though not in their forms of writing. She, too, was uncertain of the day of her birth, and it is a piquant coincidence that one of her ancestors was assas­ sinated at the instigation of a Countess Platen. Whether they may have engaged in an episode of actual love-making no one can know. Given Sand's habits, it is not impossible, although her biographers do not list Heine among her regiment of lovers and it is not easy to see when he might have been wedged into the chronology of them. In his notes to her he treated her with extravagant compliment, though it is hard to know if these are not just further examples of his customary bach­ elor's rhetoric. The most strangely expressed of these looks as though he might have been appealing for a rendezvous, and, in the next one, accepting a dinner invitation, he assured her that he was "cured, ter­ ribly cured," and no longer "amoureux," but it is not clear what he meant.9 For her part, in 1841 Sand made a few general remarks in her diary on Heine's character as a lover: "II est tendre, affectueux, devoue, romanesque en amour, faible meme et capable de subir la domination illimitee d'une femme."10 But as these comments are made in the con­ text of a characterization of his personal style and manners, it is not clear that they reflect an intimacy.11 Heine praised her several times in his writings, but in later years, when he had become less kindly dis­ posed to her, he gave an account of her beauty and graces more realis­ tic than flattering, denying any acquaintance with her bosom.12 But to erect on these tantalizing hints a colorful edifice of passion, or to lament the failure of a union between them, is greatly to misperceive Heine. Sand became a good deal more radical in her alle­ giances and activism than he, and it is said that he once called her a "redstocking."13 But there was more to their incompatibility than mat­ ters of opinion. The close friend of his last years, Alfred Meissner, wrote that he "had a true horror of learned, strong-minded women, of the bluestocking and the intellectual female."14 This is perhaps over­ stated; Heine did not dislike the social company of intellectually alive women. But it is certain that he could not have lived with one success-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

fully; he could not have borne the challenge and competition, the need to share intimacy on even terms. A liaison with George Sand would have ended in cataclysm, and fortunately neither of them was fool enough to attempt it. In fact, at the time of the early flourishing of their relationship, he was in the toils of a different kind of passion that, while it did not do much for his self-esteem, better suited his character. While the Variae cannot be read as a kind of indecorous diary, there is no reason to think that they do not in some degree reflect Heine's habits in Paris, and indeed one must hope so, for a sequence of rela­ tively unstressful sexual experiences must have been healthy for him. But now he was to get himself caught. Sometime in the fall of 1834 he made the acquaintance of a nineteen-year-old shop girl of Belgian parentage named Crescence Eugenie Mirat, perhaps just another in a sequence of such casual encounters; there is a tradition that he actu­ ally bought her from her aunt.15 But there was no disposing of her, like "Angelique," "Seraphine," and the rest of the Variae·, he was in­ flamed. He was also furious at himself, and struggled, for he saw this passion as a disgusting recidivism into his lower self. To Campe he wrote on July 2, 1835: "I, a fool, thought the time of passion was over for me, I could nevermore be ravished into the maelstrom of raving humanity, I was equal to the eternal gods in calm, composure, and moderation—and behold! I raged again like a human being, and indeed like a young human being"; to Heinrich Laube he wrote on September 27: "I am condemned to love the lowest and most foolish things"; and a long time later, on August 17, 1838, he wrote to George Sand of "cet aveuglement moral dont je jouis depuis quatre ans et que vous connaissez."16 If any other man in literature has spoken of his innamorata in this fashion, I do not know who it might be. Heine fled. He sought solace on the estate of Cristina, Principessa di Belgiojoso-Trivulzio (1808-1871). She was one of the more colorful figures on the Parisian scene. Unhappily married and living apart from her husband, she devoted herself, with courage and considerable in­ tellectual resources, to the cause of Italian independence. She was not without her own oddities, although many of the lurid tales about her appear to be hoaxes and canards born of misogyny.17 Heine once found it necessary to certify that he was not in love with her, though he may have been, a little;18 but he appreciated her as a fellow revolu­ tionary, addressed gallantries to her, eloquently admiring her famous pallid beauty, and tried to find a haven from his passion in her com­ pany. To her he wrote in despair: "J'ai oublie ma qualite de Dieu; j'ai compromis ma divinite, je suis descendu dans la fange des passions

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

humaines, et j'ai de la peine a me relever."19 It did not work. He went on to the seashore at Boulogne until the end of the year; it did not work. The companion of the rest of his life had obtruded upon him at last. For a reason we do not know, Heine called her Mathilde. He found "Crescence Eugenie" too much of a mouthful for his German tongue; her name, he said, "hurt my throat."20 The name Mathilde occurs in Heine's family; he had also given it to a very different female figure, the sarcastically free-thinking and intellectual Lady Mathilde of the Lucca pieces. Perhaps, in a wry and bitter parody beyond her com­ prehension, he named her after the seraphic, redeeming beloved in Novalis' quintessentially Romantic novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. There is both internal and external evidence that he also called her "Juliette";21 in his letters to her he addressed her as "Nonotte." This renomination is quite expressive of his lack of interest in her real self and of his abortive Pygmalion project with her. Mathilde was barely literate and not much acquainted with refined etiquette; in 1839 and 1840 Heine sent her off to a kind of finishing school in an effort to polish her a little. During the first of these absences he seems to have installed a pair of grisettes in his flat, an adventure that nearly got him into a duel.22 He almost always spoke of her in a curious amalgam of condescension and love. To his mother he complained, with a Yiddish term, that she was a Verbrengerin, a spendthrift. He preferred to re­ gard her as frail in character and incompetent in life, and he was watchfully jealous; but Mathilde came from peasant stock and was probably more robust and self-reliant than he gave her credit for. Their grotesque courtship, with Heine flying in all directions to es­ cape her and denouncing himself for his susceptibility, rather suggests that she determinedly set her cap for him, partly, no doubt, because she genuinely liked him, but no doubt partly because, from her im­ poverished vantage point, his precarious position in life looked rela­ tively secure. Few people who knew Mathilde seem to have admired her very much, though some of his friends were very civil to her for his sake, and the most loyal of them regarded her with tolerant affection. All comment on her attractiveness; in her portraits she does not appear stunningly beautiful, but unquestionably she possessed a magnetic vi­ vacity that entranced Heine as well as others; she was sensual and buxom, and in time she became quite portly, a feature of her person upon which he regularly remarked. But she was common and earthbound; she had no cultural interests or intellectual curiosity; her do­ mestic skills seem also to have been unremarkable, and her manners

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

to Heine's visitors were sometimes quite rough. If acquaintances looked down on her—Marx, for instance, was quite rude about her after Heine's death—23 the critics and biographers have been rabid. How could such a man become bound to such a woman, so far be­ neath his level, when he could have and should have associated himself with, say, George Sand? Even Goethe's in fact quite similar marriage did not arouse posterity's offense so keenly. This only demonstrates how little Heine was understood for so long. Mathilde is precisely what one ought to have predicted for him. One of his wisest biographers called their relationship a "marriage of two children."24 It would be more exact to say that he joined the child in himself to her, while his adult self stayed out of the affair. There are some amusing eye-witness accounts of how they romped and squabbled with one another like kittens.25 In this domestic uproar he worked off some of his high-strung energy, calling her his "house­ hold Vesuvius,"26 while he complained of her and laughed at her be­ hind her back. But he kept his inner creative self isolated from her, as he did from most others. She knew no German and was thus effec­ tively cut off from the realm of his self-realization, just as she was an uncomprehending bystander to many of his other personal relations. Heine said of her that she had no notion that he was a famous writer and intimated that she did not know he was of Jewish birth.27 She was amusing, supportive, and comforting, and in her own capricious way she was loyal through thick and thin, for better or worse, all of which she had plenty to experience. But she did not have to be re­ garded as a partner. It is very doubtful that Heine could have sustained an enduring relationship that obliged him to share and reveal his full self. Heine lost the battle against what he regarded as his worse self and, after wriggling piteously on the hook, settled in with Mathilde in 1836. He married her several years later, under peculiar circumstances yet to be related, but they lived effectively as husband and wife and were so treated by others. Oddly, his sex life seems to have declined completely soon after he formed this liaison, perhaps owing to the deterioration of his health. Late in life he stated that at the time of his marriage he knew that "conceiving children is not my specialty,"28 and when he was only forty-six he wrote to his sister that he had not slept with his wife for years.29 Seven years earlier he complained of having to sleep in the same bed with her in hot weather.30 Might this account for his persistent jealousy, even mistrust of her? But for all that he did not take her altogether seriously, she became an anchor of responsibility in his life. He was very concerned for her welfare and

IV. THE PROMISED LAND her future, and his struggle for financial self-sufficiency acquired an aim. (She survived him by twenty-seven years, dying on the anniversary of his death, February 17, 1883; she had had no difficulty in maintain­ ing herself, in part by disposing of his manuscripts advantageously.) Heine did indeed feel a primitive but strong affection for her, and she, in turn provided him, if not exactly with domestic tranquillity, at least with a reasonably stable and nurturing environment. It was well for Heine that he made this shelter for himself when he did. Bad times had come upon him.

m

The Ban of 1835 FROM the Revolution of 1830 until the middle of the decade, the ten­ sion between the oppositional intelligentsia in Germany and Metternich's authoritarian system intensified toward a crisis. In May 1832 there was a mass rally of 30,000 German liberals in the town of Hambach in the Bavarian Palatinate. The following month the Federal Diet issued decrees forbidding political organizations and public celebra­ tions of any kind. The decrees put new restrictions on writings pub­ lished abroad, a measure Heine thought primarily aimed at him.1 In June 1833 a central office for political investigation was established at Frankfurt. In December 1834 Metternich arranged for a secret law requiring all the German states to tighten censorship restrictions against the spread of democratic opinions.2 As a natural reaction to this pressure, there emerged a group of impatient and obstreperous younger writers for whom the models of Ludwig Borne and Heinrich Heine meant much; Heine himself considered the Travel Pictures the prototype for their writing.3 This group is known to literary history as "Young Germany." The term became attached to them almost by accident. There was in Switzerland a group of genuine radical exiles that called itself Young Germany, and Giuseppe Mazzini's Italian inde­ pendence movement was known as "Giovine d'ltalia"; the term occurs more or less in passing a couple of times in the writers' correspond­ ence with one another, sent in apparent insouciance of the circum­ stance that the Prussian postal service was not so much interested in delivering the mail as in reading it. It is easy to see that they were not a conspiracy or even a closely knit group, although some of them began to grow closer to one another in 1835 in an effort to found an 2 °5

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

oppositional periodical to be called the Deutsche Revue, to which Heine was invited to contribute.4 But they were quite independent men and, indeed, in the course of time they exhibited quite as much an inclination to quarrel with one another as with the German govern­ ments. Young Germany has been given a variety of definitions, the most expansive encompassing the whole oppositional generation ranging from the genuinely radical Berlin wit Adolf Glassbrenner (1810-1876) to the young Friedrich Engels, the more specific narrowing the term to groups including five or six to a dozen individuals. While remem­ bering that the mood and spirit they represented was not restricted to a handful of persons, we may for our purposes confine our atten­ tion to four central figures: Ludolf Wienbarg (1802-1872), Theodor Mundt (1808-1861), Heinrich Laube (1806-1884), and Karl Gutzkow (1811-1878). Wienbarg was a fiercely liberal nationalist who in 1832 obtained a position at the University of Kiel, then a Danish institution, to teach Danish literature. But he did not do so, for, though technically a sub­ ject of Denmark, having been born in Altona, he abominated all things Danish and delivered a rousing set of lectures later entitled Aesthetic Campaigns (Asthetische Feldzuge, 1834), drawing activist implications from the German aesthetic and literary tradition. Perhaps at Campe's suggestion, the book was dedicated to "Young Germany, not the old"; it proclaimed Heine as the model of militant activist prose.5 For this he was dismissed despite vigorous student demonstrations. Mundt, like Wienbarg, was basically of a scholarly rather than a literary tempera­ ment, though he published a novel entitled Madonna (1835), which includes an effective demonstration of a woman's liberation from re­ ligious superstition and oppression, and along the way gives a learned, sympathetic account of Casanova. Mundt aspired to a teaching posi­ tion at the University of Berlin, but on the day of his inaugural lec­ ture in 1835, the doors of the hall were locked by the rector, the reac­ tionary Norwegian Romantic Henrich Steffens, and it was to be seven years before he was able to take those last few steps to his career goal, after which he eventually became a significant literary historian and critic. Laube was a former student fencing champion and fraternity mem­ ber who carried his manly freshness into the world of literature and journalism, and he became the object of a particularly concentrated witch-hunt. According to the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, student fra­ ternity membership was punishable by six years of fortress imprison-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

ment and leadership by death. In 1830 Frederick William III had am­ nestied all former fraternity members, contingent upon their future good behavior; it was a kind of general parole that could be rescinded in the event of any subsequent misdemeanor. While the authorities combed Laube's works for evidence of literary transgressions that might permit the reinstatement of the charges for which he had been amnestied, he sat without charge for eight months in a Berlin jail in 1833-1834, much of it in solitary confinement without light or com­ panionship, treatment which nearly unhinged his mind.6 He was even­ tually sentenced to six years, later commuted to a year and a half of house arrest, but he had a good scare. Gutzkow had grown up in the stables of the Berlin court, where his father was a horse-trainer, but he had been enabled to go the university. Like most poor students of the time, he had been obliged to study theology, for which he had even less aptitude than Heine had for the law. In the early 1830s, an­ nouncing that "the necessity of the politicization of our literature is undeniable,"7 he dashed off one aggressive work after another, until he succeeded in devising one that ignited the powder keg at last. Although Heine met Mundt in Paris in 1837 and Mundt wrote him a couple of letters, they were not close and did not in reality much admire one another; Mundt, despite his troubles, was a man of basically conventional allegiances and he wrote much negative criticism of Heine's works. Heine made Wienbarg's acquaintance in Hamburg in 1829; they had more in common, but in later years he dropped into obscurity and they had little to do with one another. Laube, on the other hand, became one of Heine's closer friends, and they remained in contact for many years. This is interesting, for Laube was one of the least radical of all the Young Germans, and by 1848 he had landed to the right of center. Laube and Heine did not always agree, espe­ cially on politics, over which they had a serious breach for a time after 1848, but he liked Heine and took him seriously, and he was a good man to know, not only because of his forthright and hearty temperament, but also because, despite his grueling experiences in the 1830s, he reached considerable prominence as a writer, as editor of the Xeitung fur die elegante Welt, a moribund daily that he rejuve­ nated in 1833, and eventually in the influential position of manager of the Vienna Burgtheater. At the outset they certainly had much in common; Laube wrote Heine that "theological studies have completely estranged me from so-called Christianity," and his views at that time bore a clear resemblance to Heine's Saint-Simonian enthusiasms.8 He wrote several admiring reviews of Heine's works, and in 1840 Heine

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

dedicated The Rabbi of Bacherach to him, possibly, it seems to me, in acknowledgment of Laube's pronounced friendliness to the Jewish people. Gutzkow was the most remarkable of these men, and he played the least pleasant role in Heine's life. He and Heine never met personally, though he knew Heine's sister quite well. Of all the Young Germans he had the greatest intellectual force and the strongest literary gift. Clawing his way out of poverty and obscurity, he wrote desperately and unremittingly all his life in pursuit of survival and success. The result was not negligible; he produced some successful dramas and a number of interesting prose works, including, at mid-century, a vast experimental novel, The Knights of the Spirit (Die Ritter vom Geiste, 1855), that tried to give a cross-section of the whole of society from top to bottom. But he never made it to the first literary rank, and there was something quite strange about his character. He became in­ sane towards the end of his life, and indeed he seemed somewhat un­ balanced through much of it, owing, perhaps, to his difficult origins and his fierce struggles. Gutzkow was an ambitious and choleric man who quarrelled with nearly everyone in the literary world; in the long run he hated them all and, unsurprisingly, many of them hated him. His temper and his manner of dealing with people make Heine's seem almost amiable by comparison. In a few weeks in 1835, Gutzkow dashed off an eccentric novel en­ titled Wally the Skeptic (Wally die Ziveifierin).9 This was conceived as a substitute for a project of a different kind. Gutzkow had wanted to publish the papers of the eighteenth-century free-thinker Reimarus, some of which had got Lessing into a major theological quarrel a half century before. He offered the project to Campe, who thought it still too risky and turned it down. In its stead the novel became the vehicle for some fairly aggressive meditations on Christianity, while the plot, with strangely chilly, strangulated eroticism, probes the cynical social conventions of love and marriage, and edges toward a concept of free love. In its oddest and most notorious episode, Wally, in imitation of a scene from a medieval epic, shows herself nude to her friend on the day she is to marry another. The book by no means exhibits Gutzkow at his most impressive; it is very badly written and rather adolescent in tone. Nor is it to be thought of as a peak achievement of the move­ ment. It was, in fact, immediately attacked within the Young German camp—for example, by Mundt as a clumsy and shallow imitation of Heine.10 But it caused a great uproar; one police spy comically re­ ported to Vienna that even eighty-year-old men were lusting after the book.11 At this time the German governments were becoming es-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

pecially touchy, as there had been outbreaks of popular restlessness during 1835, including a riot against the police in Berlin on the king's birthday.12 They had been looking for a way to crack down on the young literati in a way that would not be strictly political and thus increase the writers' solidarity and standing with the public. Wally the Skeptic offered an opportunity to shift the attack onto grounds of prurience and blasphemy, thus splitting the allegiances of the middle-class public. In this the governments were greatly assisted by Wolfgang Men­ zel, who mounted a violent attack on the book in his influential Stutt­ gart Literatur-Blatt (Literary Sheet). Menzel, it will be remembered, had published in 1828 a liberal history of German literature, which Heine had reviewed sympathetically and with much agreement while objecting to the harsh treatment of Goethe; Heine had maintained in­ termittent contact with the "pope of literature," as Menzel was known, over the years, despite well-founded misgivings. For his part, Menzel wrote critical but not unfriendly reviews of Heine and conciliatory personal letters; in 1833 he protested vigorously against an anti-Semitic attack on Heine and Borne.13 Even after the 1835 crisis, Menzel's re­ views of Heine, while more critical, were not always intemperate or annihilating. But his own views had changed toward a conservative nationalism with an anti-Semitic tinge—in 1836 he revised his literary history in an anti-Semitic direction—and his attack on Gutzkow im­ plied an anathema upon the whole literary opposition. Menzel's rather abrupt leap rightward has always been a little puzzling. It has some­ times been ascribed to literary competition; Gutzkow, who at one time worked for Menzel, had been setting himself up independently as an editor and critic. But this explanation does not seem very satis­ fying. Whatever the reason, the fact is that Menzel's shift was arche­ typal for a development in the liberal bourgeoisie, which was split­ ting into a national liberal, potentially conservative majority, and a democratic liberal minority with a small radical or republican segment. Thus Menzel became at that crucial juncture a prominent spokesman for the part of the public that would never become recon­ ciled with Heine.14 Then and later it was widely believed that Menzel had been the instigator of the government action that followed. We know today that this cannot be quite right; a ban on Young Germany was in preparation before his articles began to appear, and Heine's own Religion and Philosophy was one of the ban's main motives.15 But he was invaluable in providing an independent public voice in harmony with the government policy. Campe's sharp eye immediately saw what he was doing and that a real war was developing.16 In op-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

positional circles he became notorious as the "denunciator," and he was regarded by Heine and the others with great bitterness. On November 14, 1835, Prussia issued a ban against all the writings of the Young Germans. This became the model for a decree of the Federal German Assembly of December 10, to which Heine's name was added on Metternich's special insistence. The document was noth­ ing if not frank: "Whereas in Germany in recent times, and finally under the ap­ pellation of "young Germany" or "young literature," a literary school has formed whose efforts openly tend to attack the Chris­ tian religion in the most insolent way, to denigrate existing social relations, and to destroy all decency and morality, in literary works accessible to all classes of people, therefore the German Federal Assembly, considering that it is urgently necessary to bring a halt at once through the cooperation of all federated governments to these efforts that undermine the foundations of all lawful order . . . has agreed to the following measures." The measures number three. The printing, publication, and distribu­ tion of works by Heine, Gutzkow, Laube, Wienbarg, and Mundt shall be inhibited in every possible way. Book dealers and publishers shall be given a special warning that they will revoke the protection of the Federation (i.e., the right to exist) if they do not cooperate. Then, for good measure: "The government of the Free City of Hamburg is called upon to communicate an appropriate warning especially to the book dealership of Hoffmann und Campe, which predominantly pub­ lishes and distributes writings of the above kind."17 This clause earned Campe a prompt invitation to an audience with the Hamburg police.18 One can sometimes read that the importance and effect of this ex­ traordinary document should not be overestimated. It is true that, given the splintered condition of Germany and the relative ineffi­ ciency of the nineteenth-century police state, it was not easy to en­ force. The writers kept writing and publishing, more or less, and Campe was not a man to be beaten by a piece of paper. Gutzkow spent only two months in jail for Wally the Skeptic. Prussia's own bureau­ cracy discovered by February 1836 that the ban on all works, even future ones, was illegal, and it was modified to apply only to works that had not passed the Prussian censorship. But the king did not like this, and at his insistence a special pre-cen'sorship was devised for the five writers, from which all but Heine (on the grounds that he lived outside Germany) were in 1842 allowed to free themselves through a loyalty oath; Mundt and Laube signed, Wienbarg did not, and Gutz-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

kow, after a long and stubborn negotiation, maneuvered the govern­ ment into accepting a non-committal formulation.19 But one should not underestimate the effect, either. Enforcement was strict. In Saxony, the center of the book trade, all past and future writings of Heine not printed under Saxon censorship were ordered confiscated, with a stiff fine for selling or even retaining any copy; in Prussia the third violation resulted in the shutdown of the book deal­ er.20 The major effect, however, and one that may have been intended, was to strike at the solidarity of the group and encourage an attitude of sauve qui peut. This was eminently successful. All the Young Ger­ mans vigorously denied that they were Young Germans, that there was any such thing as Young Germany, or that they had anything to do with or even liked or admired any of the others; the ban set off an unseemly squabbling and, with some, even more unseemly asseverations of loyalty and moderation. It had psychological effects as well. Laube had already been frightened by his prison experience. Gutzkow, while in jail, began to despair of the efficacy of an activist literature. Mundt made every concession and appeal he could think of to get back into Prussia's good graces and resume his academic career. Wienbarg be­ came practically an outlaw, whose appearance in a tavern would cause the other patrons to seek the safety of their homes; since he also be­ came an alcoholic, he drifted off the public stage and eked out his long life as a minor local polemicist and journalist. By the end of 1838 Young Germany had to ail intents and purposes ceased to exist. The first round of the struggle between the dissident writers and the gov­ ernments went to the governments, as it so often does. It should be remembered in assessing this episode, which has re­ ceived much scholarly attention in recent years, that the Young Ger­ mans on the whole, despite the assertive blood-and-thunder of some of their manifestoes, were not profoundly radical, nor were their purposes explicitly political. On the political spectrum they were decisively overtaken on the left by Young Hegelians and socialists; particularly Engels, whose origins were in the Young German atmos­ phere, soon came to take a caustic view of the group. Fundamentally they were seeking opportunities of utterance for what appeared to them the modern ideas and perspectives of the time and, not inciden­ tally, to carve out a space for their own literary or academic careers. The literary uproar was a surrogate for inhibited public discussion and citizen activity. This was clearly seen by Mundt, who wrote in a history of contemporary literature in 1842: "People have stressed the predominantly democratic element in recent German literature, and this circumstance, whether founded or unfounded, is largely the rea-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND son why our literature stands more than ever isolated and without encouragement, in a country in which all the same the best forces of life are driven exclusively into literature without any other outlet of energy."21 It was one of the classic conflicts, ever again repeated in the modern world, between the urge to freedom of expression and an authoritarian, repressive, regressive regime so weak on its own merits that it cannot afford to allow that freedom. This is the main historical point, which is a great deal more important than the details of the confusions and compromises in the minds of the Young Ger­ mans themselves. It is one of the depressing paradoxes of our contem­ porary world that the topic of Young Germany has often been taken up by persons committed to doctrines that are in no way friendly to freedom of expression.

[83

Struggling with the Ban THAT the Federal decree was not trivial or without effect can easily be seen in Heine's and Campe's convoluted attempts to deal with it, which kept them perturbed throughout 1836 and much of 1837. In retrospect the not easily discouraged Campe called 1836 his worst year of the last ten: "There is now in Germany no struggle with the des­ pots; no, there is nothing but hammer—we all are the anvil on which they are hammering with raw brutality."1 That situation was not to get appreciably better for years on end, although Campe with stub­ born effort forced the release of Heine's earlier texts in some places. Heine's initial reaction was very peculiar. He wrote to Campe on January 12, 1836, that if he was on a proscription list, "only de­ marches from my side will be required to release me," adding naively: "in any case there will be nothing in my next book that could be po­ litically or religiously disagreeable,"2 an example of his continuous underestimation of the feeling against him. Even earlier he had exhib­ ited this pattern of wishful thinking, which greatly exasperated Campe: "You think the governments have a good opinion of you?" he had written even before the ban. "The devil they do."3 Heine exacerbated his annoyance by taking the position that the ban was all Campe's fault for publishing other offensive writers; there was no reason for the governments to pursue the harmless, moderate Heine with his "monarchical principles."4 This was a reply to actual documents sent

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by Campe proving that printers had refused to take on Heine's works.5 Campe took the ban more seriously, but floundered for a while; in general he gave confusing advice, recommending defiance in one letter and accommodation in the next. On January 12 he suggested that Heine undertake something against the ban; a week later he had changed his mind and advised him not to.6 But Heine decided to try something. He wrote a letter to the Federal Assembly, dated January 28, placing it in the Allgemeine Zeitung and several other newspapers, including a French one. In it he complains of having been condemned without a hearing and asks for the opportunity to defend himself in person or in print, like Martin Luther at Worms. He denies any irre­ ligious or immoral "whim," but asserts that his works have proceeded from a "genuine religious and moral synthesis," and he concludes by saying that he will always obey the laws of his fatherland and will honor, in the Federal Assembly, the "highest authorities of a beloved homeland."7 It is hard to know what Heine thought he was doing with this mis­ sive. For the moment it looks as though the circumstances had pushed him into a kind of Dadaism. It appears a little less peculiar when one considers that the other Young Germans made similar appeals; Gutzkow, for example, wrote a convoluted exculpatory letter in April to the Austrian ambassador to the Federal Diet.8 Yet can Heine have been serious when he wrote to Campe on February 4 that the Assembly would melt into tears at "my childlike syrupy submissive letter"?9 But there is other evidence that Heine continued to hope that he could beg tolerance from the authorities with a posture of moderation and good intentions. While we do not have the original letter, it seems that in June he wrote directly to Metternich, appealing to the mag­ nanimity of the powerful to release him from his misery. In any case, the Prussian ambassador to Vienna reported to Frederick William III that Metternich had told him he had received a letter from the "fameux Heine, renfermant la soumission la plus complette de ce de­ testable ecrivain."10 Thce is no way to know to what extent the ambassador's report might have been colored by his own scorn for the "detestable writer," but months later Heine persisted in asserting that Metternich harbored a potential sympathy for him and would provide him relief if he could make his moderation and harmlessness clear.11 In this he was, needless to say, quite wrong. It is possible, however, that Heine's thinking was clouded by a Saint-Simonian notion of converting the rulers of the world to the emancipatory doctrine, an argument prominent in Enfantin's long let­ ter to him. It was just at this time that he had it published, and it has

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been convincingly argued that he did so to supply evidence for his good will toward the rulers and to show that he was by no means irreligious but was propagating an acceptable doctrine, even if not the official one.12 If so, it is but a further example of Heine's intransitive mind, his inability to apprehend accurately the objective realities of his life. He pursued the illusion with pathological insistence. "I am gaining the trust of the statesmen," he wrote to Campe in 1837, "who doubtless see that my revolutionary spirit is not aimed at the activity of the vulgar crowd, but at the conversion of the most highly placed persons"; and in another letter of the same time: "my effort is not politically revolutionary, but more philosophical, in which not the form of society but its tendency is illuminated."13 When Heine and Campe finally put their heads together, they thought harder and came to understand the situation better. They saw that the weakness of the ban lay, paradoxically, in its Draconic ex­ cess. If it was calculated to split the opposition, then they would split the aggressors by laying before them a work that could not by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as seditious, blasphemous, or indecent.14 This work was to be Salon 111. Heine even proposed that the book should be called The Quiet Book or Fairy Tales (Marchen) in order to stress its harmlessness,15 suggestions that were fortunately ignored. But they did not have an easy time with this project, or with one another. Heine was not suited to writing potboilers, and in his effort to do so he began at last to understand what had been done to him. He complained piteously that he had to destroy most of what his pen produced and groaned: "what good is it to write, if it is not to be printed?"16 He got into another tangle with Campe by insisting that the manuscript should under no circumstances be submitted to Prussian censorship. Campe had done so, and Heine obliged him to withdraw it. He took the opportunity to publish another vigorous protest against the new censorship regulations and Campe's accommo­ dation to them, taking this time the line that censorship falsified the balance of his views in an excessively irreligious direction by suppress­ ing their political meaning, and that the measures illegally denied him the possibility of earning a living at the writer's trade.17 This last ob­ jection, though carefully argued, was irrelevant insofar as this was precisely the goal of the policy; the question of its legality was purely a public debating point. Furthermore, what Heine had supplied, pri­ marily a fragmentary novel in two parts entitled Florentine Nights (Florentinische Nachte), was not sufficient to bring it over the magic length of twenty signatures, and Campe did not think it was very good anyway.18 The book languished as Heine worked to expand an

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essay entitled Elemental Spirits (Elementargeister) to fill it out. Even this did not reach 320 pages, and a preface was necessary. But prefaces brought out Heine's aggressiveness, and the whole project went into a different phase. Heine decided that the appropriate thing to do was to attempt a direct personal attack on Wolfgang Menzel. Its intention was to be so insulting that it would draw Menzel int^ a duel or, failing that, to show that his cowardice was inconsonant with his newly acquired Germanic-nationalist pugnacity. Here, too, Heine developed his own version of a general Young German tactic; Wienbarg and, a little later, Borne also published fierce polemics against Menzel, and Gutzkow, as he informed the sympathetic Georg Biichner, tried without success to provoke Menzel into a duel. 19 Heine sought to compose a text that no man of honor could allow to remain unavenged; he ac­ cuses Menzel of dishonor, of jealousy of his literary betters, of cow­ ardice, of a Mongoloid appearance that belies his German nationalism, of treason in time of crisis, of unchivalrous treatment of women and writers in trouble, of hypocrisy in politics, and above all, again, of cowardice. It was not all billingsgate; he deflected Menzel's anti-Semitism with one of his repudiations of Jewishness: "people accused of opposition to deism can have no sympathy for the synagogue; one does not turn to the over-faded charms of the mother when the aging daughter no longer pleases,"20 and he analyzes anti-French nationalism as a duplicitous mask for maintaining repression and reaction in Ger­ many by mobilizing the obsolete affects of the Wars of Liberation. The long preface was censored out of Salon III, which after all these tribulations finally appeared in July 1837, so Heine had it published separately and simultaneously as a pamphlet entitled On the Denunci­ ator (Vber den Denunzianten). He wanted it to appear cheaply and therefore waived any honorarium. At the same time he set in motion the most extraordinary press campaign, smuggling anonymous articles, as though by another hand, into newspapers in order to give the im­ pression that Menzel's honor and standing had been damaged by re­ fusing the challenge; one article pretends in a particularly scurrilous manner to defend Menzel in a stupid way. 21 Heine also tried, fruit­ lessly, to separate Menzel from his publisher Cotta. 22 It need hardly be said that this attack, far from driving Menzel into a corner, allowed him to climb on a high horse of superior dignity and to disdain the challenge as well as its author. This was unfortunate, for in Menzel's long subsequent career based on his new principles he was a baleful and coarsening influence on the German literary scene. The episode teaches us, more clearly than it did Heine, how desperate his position

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was becoming and how little leverage he really had. It inspired, how­ ever, a most curious and moving moment in his relationship with Campe. Genuinely worried about the prospect of a duel—although Heine in these years seemed to get involved in a duelling affair every six months or so—Campe offered to fight with Menzel in Heine's stead.23 Nothing came of this, fortunately, but the gesture illustrates an underlying bond between the two men at a time when they were continuously at loggerheads with one another. They quarrelled vigor­ ously over the censorship issue, and Heine kept complaining that Campe underpaid him and he constantly threatened to defect to other publishers. Florentine Nights, the harmless novel fragment that Heine devised for Salon III, is, not accidentally, the weakest of all his major works. His creativity and sense of purpose were constricted, and he fell back on an attempt at commonplace writing, for which he was not equipped. He tried to set a couple of novellas in a Gothic-Romantic-erotic frame, narrated to a languid girl moribund with consumption, and spiced with a little allegorical satire. For a narrative persona he regressed to the long since surmounted self of the Book of Songs and The Book of Le Grand, in the final text named Maximilian but in an earlier concept transparently called "Signor Enriko." Some of the work is self-pla­ giarized and much of it is dull. It has only one memorable passage, an extraordinary set of colorful, dramatic, and ultimately cosmic visions inspired by a concert of Niccolo Paganini. Heine had caught sight of Paganini in 1830—much in the Florentine Nights goes back to experi­ ences of some years before—and he here makes use of the Satanic aura that Paganini, as a public relations stunt, allowed to be built around him. The music calls forth visions in which beauty and terror are con­ joined. It is another of those striking passages in which Heine's aes­ thetics are adumbrated in connection with a non-literary art. To bring the volume up to its required length, Heine added the es­ say on Elemental Spirits. He had already published a French version of its first part in De VAllemagne in 1835; the expanded text appeared in a second edition in 1855, in fact quite a bit longer than the German one, with numerous additional examples of legends and folk poetry. Much of the essay is directly copied or adapted from scholarly sources. It is not really a major work, though it was doubtless interesting to certain readers in France, and it exhibits a not unimportant facet of Heine's imagination. His growing interest in German folklore and legendary materials in his Paris years is a telling symptom of his need to maintain a bond with his homeland and especially with its popular traditions, which he always regarded as one wellspring of his creativ-

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

ity. But he was concerned also to fit the folkloric material into his own philosophical scheme of history. He sees these tales as relicts of the struggle of early Christianity with ancient pagan belief, of the spiritualist repression of natural religion and human drives. The ter­ minology, however, has now switched from "spiritualism" and "sen­ sualism" to "Nazarenism" and "Hellenism." For he here spins out the idea already developed in Religion and Philosophy of the Christian demonization of pagan deities that could not be made to disappear, such as the transformation of Venus into a symbol of delusory beauty and sinful temptation. He presents some of these stories as expressions of a ghostly, death-shadowed longing for the sensuality of antiquity, thus making of sensualism a historical undercurrent flowing out of the high dignity of Classical antiquity, preserved among the people against the dominant ideology. Here one sees as clearly as anywhere what Heine meant by the subsumption of political under religious consid­ erations as the true revolutionary issue. Heine illustrated this linkage by including the medieval poem of "Tannhauser," with its theme of spiritualist repudiation of "Frau Ve­ nus," and then adding a parodistic version of his own, here said to be by another hand. With it for the second time he provided the inspi­ ration for a Wagner opera. Later it was not inappropriately added to the Variae, for it makes a kind of bridge between that quasi-sensualist verse and the later political poetry, but it is a bridge that does not quite seem to touch at either end, and the result is of some interest, as the poem is strongly autobiographical. Tannhauser in the Venus Mountain becomes cloyed and satiated with incessant love and escapes out into the world in search of "bitternesses," as he puts it.24 Yet his obsession with Venus accompanies him, and he confronts the Pope, demanding in a passionate tirade release from his erotic torment. But the Pope has no magic against Venus, the most powerful of the devils, and he turns Tannhauser away. He therefore flees back to the sweet domesticity of Venus in her mountain, reciting to her satirical political observations he has made while passing through Germany. It is of incidental interest that Heine blunts the political point of the original medieval poem, which condemns the Pope. Prominent in the poem are two of Heine's personal stresses: his malaise at his erotic bond with Mathilde, and the strain between private existence and public, political commitment. The poem is very uneasy, marked by flight in two dif­ ferent directions, each ending in dissatisfaction, and it is clearly one of Heine's most pensive meditations on his own condition. It shows, too, that he could not after all, even under duress, suppress his political and public concerns. In any case the effort at harmlessness was futile.

IV. THE PROMISED LAND Three months after the appearance of Salon III Campe reported its confiscation in Prussia and Bavaria.25 Another project completed at the same time is deserving of mention. A Stuttgart publisher named Adolf Hvass offered him a thousand francs for an introduction to a German translation of Don Quixote—Heine was often able to earn more, page for page, from such occasional writ­ ings than from his major works. It was a congenial task, for he was accustomed to refer to Don Quixote frequently in his writings and to identify with its spirit. The book appeared in November 1837. Heine begins by quoting a passage from The City of Lucca in which he had asserted that Don Quixote was the first book he ever read, and he dis­ cusses it at length, comparing himself with both Don Quixote and Cervantes as examples of unjust misfortune and suffering. The essay turned into another of his ruminations on the poetic dignity and the conflict between poesy and politics. "The true poet is the true hero," he writes; but society is republican in its nature, constantly concerned to repress and ostracize the outstanding personality, forcing him back into the "loneliness of his thoughts." "The true democrat writes like the people, sincerely simply and badly," while a writer of good style is condemned as an aristocrat.26 It will be remembered that Heine had been proclaiming the end of the "epoch of art" and the need for lit­ erature to turn to activist purposes. But now in a striking passage it appears that this task will be only temporary, and poetry will reassert itself when it is accomplished: "Now the peoples have all too much political business; but when this is once taken care of, we Germans, British, Spanish, French, Italians, we will all go out into the green forest and sing, and the nightingale shall be judge. I am convinced that in this contest the song of Wolfgang Goethe will win the prize."27 Since Heine goes on to name Goethe with Shakespeare and Cervantes as the classic writers of the three genres of literature, one sees how persistently Goethe remained the icon of the poetic pole of his split consciousness.

C9J Struggling with the Purse IN THE second half of the 1830s Heine had to contend with other diffi­ culties and tensions beyond the immediate consequences of the Fed­ eral ban. For one thing, his health began to give him trouble; in retro-

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spect, we recognize the unmistakable harbingers of the catastrophe that was to befall his physical being. In the fall of 1836 he became very ill with jaundice on a trip to Amiens, Marseilles, and Aix, which inter­ dicted a planned journey to Italy. In the summer of 1837 he began to complain of signs of paralysis in his left hand. Then came eye trouble, which made him fear he was going blind; his condition improved in the fall, but worsened in the winter and again in the spring of 1838. In May his doctor forbade him to read and write, which naturally hin­ dered his work; his eyes were still bad in the summer and he began dictating his writings, which he did not like, as it interfered with his style.1 In July 1839 he wrote in a letter: "de nouveau je souffre de ces eblouissements qui font vaciller ϋ ma vue tous Ies objets et Ieur pretent une couleur moitie grisatre moitie argentine; cela me rend bien triste."2 That sounds a little like incipient glaucoma but is probably one of the signals of the secret debilitation in his body. The symptoms returned in March 1841. Then there was money. Heine's complaints about his finances form a constant obbligato in his correspondence of these years. But he was hardly without resources. He did not supply Campe with a major work between the summer of 1837, when Salon III came out, and 1840, but the third editions of both the Book of Songs and of Travel Pictures I appeared during that stretch and he was regularly able to draw on his account with Campe. The answer is perhaps a little suggested by the occasional claim, among all the complaints, that Heine was flush. This indicates that money management was not his strong point and that, like many of the rest of us, he felt ebullient when his purse was full and grouchy when, somehow or other, it had leaked out. Still, his finances become ever more puzzling the more closely one studies them. His total income was vastly greater than that of a workingman, and probably larger than that of most civil servants and professional people. But he never owned a home, or a carriage, or a horse. He never kept a servant, though his wife acquired a companion named Pauline Rogue, whom Heine probably supported. He had hard­ ly any vices. Like many neurasthenic people he disliked stimulants; he drank very temperately when at all and did not smoke. He does not appear to have gambled after the instructive episode on Norderney.* Doubtless his erotic affairs cost him something, but nothing in the record suggests that they were of a particularly luxurious sort. Whether ttLudwig Borne includes among his collected calumnies of Heine a report that he was gambling heavily in 1831 (Samtliche Schriften, 5:19). I doubt this, for gambling is a conspicuous vice, and if it were true we would have more evidence of it, for example in the reports of police spies.

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MathiIde was as careless and spendthrift as he claimed, I regard as far from certain. Heine did not acquire expensive objects; he does not even seem to have been, beyond his immediate needs and interests, much of an owner of books. In fact we rarely observe him specifically buying anything. Yet the money melted away. Perhaps his poverty was partly subjective. One suspects that he may have been a little galled at the sight of some huge literary fortunes being made in France. In 1835 Balzac had contracted with a group of publishers for a 50,000-franc advance plus 1,500 francs a month or half the profits for works as yet unwritten. In a single year Alexandre Dumas signed contracts totalling 214,000 francs, and the best-selling Eugene Sue was guaranteed 100,000 francs a year for fifteen years by a newspaper. Not all writers, of course, did as well. Heine's friend, the tragic Gerard de Nerval, esti­ mated that he earned no more than 1,800 francs a year from all his writings.3 In January 1837 Heine told Campe he had somehow got 20,000 francs in debt.4 How this happened is completely unclear, and perhaps he just made it up to gain sympathy and account for the hole in his pocket. In any case, one of his schemes to patch the hole was to offer to other publishers a collected edition of his works. This bit of extor­ tion was successful, for he did receive positive replies from two Stutt­ gart publishers,5 and Campe came around after a bitter negotiation and not without loquacious complaints of Heine's disloyalty and breach of contract, for he believed he had the rights in the first place. He con­ tracted for a collected edition for a sum of 20,000 francs, 5,000 to be paid at once and 15,000 in installments over the next two and a half years.6 Apparently not wanting to be beaten hands down in the poormouth competition, he told Heine that to raise this money he had had to take a mortgage on his house.7 Thus the wolf was repelled from Heine's door temporarily and a modicum of harmony was restored between author and publisher. Alas, the collected edition turned into a bone of contention gnawed over for years and years. The matter is very complicated and it is hard to tell who was more at fault. At the time of the contract both men realized that the project would not be possible until the censor­ ship restrictions were relaxed; Campe warily obtained from Heine a declaration making this point, although he did not publish it.8 With his typical insouciance Heine soon decided, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that the censorship was relaxing by itself and pressed Campe for publication.9 Campe declared himself willing if Heine could, as he claimed, gain Prussia's good will;10 of course Heine could

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not. Shortly after Campe's firm was banned in Prussia in 1841, Heine asked him if he would like to begin with it then; Campe found this suggestion ironic.11 In 1843 Heine wanted Campe to get going, but Campe thought his public reputation too weak.12 In 1846 Campe wanted Heine to get going; Heine agreed, but stalled.13 Campe nagged and complained that he had several times sent Heine sets of his works for editing purposes.14 Finally, in November 1846, Heine sent a de­ tailed plan for an edition in nineteen volumes.15 Then Campe began to stall. In January 1847 his whole firm was banned in Austria and the Prussian censorship was getting worse; he hoped for a revolution that would bring better times.16 Heine did not accept this; he accused Campe of waiting for his death for advertising purposes.17 After the revolution did occur in 1848, Heine submitted a second plan,18 but at this time Campe had broken off relations with him and did not answer any letters. Heine submitted a third, quite elaborate plan in 1852,19 but by this time the counterrevolutionary censorship had again fallen upon Heine's works, and Campe stalled. The upshot was that an authorized collected edition never appeared during Heine's lifetime. It was eventually accomplished by a man who had been eight years old when the contract between Heine and Campe was signed. This was the young liberal Adolf Strodtmann (18291879), Heine's first biographer, who had been involved with a Phila­ delphia pirate of an unauthorized edition, and began to bring out the authorized one for Hoffmann und Campe in 1861; it was not com­ pleted until 1866, with supplementary volumes in 1868 and 1884. It was an edition with many deficiencies, but it sold well. By the time it was completed, however, not only Heine but also Campe and Strodtmann were dead. Heine had a curious habit of trying to obtain or earn money in al­ most any other way than the one at all times open to him: writing more books for Campe. Several times he tried to become involved in journalistic projects; these efforts particularly preoccupied him in 1838, when he tried to found a German newspaper in Paris, for which he claimed he had found "through superhuman eloquence an ass" will­ ing to invest 150,000 francs.20 We need not go into the details of this quite elaborate project, for it stood or fell on Prussia's willingness to permit the publication's importation. This simply could not be ob­ tained, even though Heine sent signals to the Prussian court via Varnhagen of his monarchical principles, his dislike of democratic and con­ stitutional movements, and his sympathy with Prussia's side in her quarrel with the Catholic Church in the Rhineland.21 Even Campe,

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who usually scoffed at Heine's pipe dreams of this kind, was for a moment taken in by them and allowed that it would be nice if he could achieve a reconciliation with Prussia.22 That left Uncle Salomon's riches. Heine was now nearly forty years old but he could not emancipate himself from that fortune. Their re­ lations had been deteriorating for some time. In the fall of 1836 he wrote Salomon a reproachful letter. It is not preserved, but it must have contained the phrase that echoed in their relationship for years: "The best thing about you is that you bear my name."23 In July 1837 Heine tried to induce his friend Detmold to publish "that I have turned to my uncle in vain (that is not true), that you had heard how merci­ lessly he had withdrawn all help from me (that is also not true)," in the hope that such admittedly false rumors would frighten Salomon into doing something.24 Detmold alerted Maximilian Heine, who hap­ pened to be in Hamburg at the time, and he advised his brother to write in a conciliating way to his uncle. The consequence was the strange letter of September 1, 1837, adverted to earlier, in which he re­ asserts his affection for his uncle, complains of his oppressed and per­ secuted condition, and makes a veiled threat with the power of his pen (above, pp. 28-29); Max thought it unwise and intercepted it.25 Heine then turned to Giacomo Meyerbeer with the same idea he had pro­ posed to Detmold.26 Meyerbeer was at this time a lion on the musical and operatic scene, and his roar seems to have been enhanced by his personal wealth, which enabled him to finance claques and—it was believed—critical good will. Meyerbeer had begun to cultivate Heine shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1831 with opera tickets, dinner in­ vitations, and a proposal to set some of his poems to music.27 Heine's relations with him, to which we shall have occasion to return, have a murky aspect and were eventually to turn sour, but in the late 1830s they were on good terms and, probably because Meyerbeer belonged to a Jewish moneyed aristocracy that could deal with Salomon Heine on even terms, the impasse was indeed breached to Heine's benefit, and with more civil means than those he had proposed. Meyerbeer was able to report to Heine on September 23, 1838, that he had induced Salomon to grant his nephew an allowance of 4,000 francs annually, beginning in January 1839.28 This was a significant breakthrough, which secured a substantial fraction of Heine's income until his uncle's death in 1844. But there was more. Cousin Carl had already sent 2,000 francs in July 1838.29 This was to help with moving expenses; Heine lived all his life in relatively ordinary furnished apart­ ments, which usually irritated him for one reason or another, so that he changed them fairly frequently. In October 1838 Salomon on a

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visit to Paris sent another 2,000 francs as a gift.30 At this time Heine was on good terms with Carl Heine because he had helped to mediate Carl's marriage with Cecile-Charlotte Furtado (1821-1898), daughter of a wealthy Sephardic banking family in Paris. The scholarship of gossip has not neglected to construct a passionate liaison between Heine and Cecile, who was a teenager when he first became acquainted with her. He himself claimed later to Detmold that he was once her "lover,"31 but this is certainly not to be taken literally. Later Heine believed that Cecile and her family had intrigued against him with his uncle; there is no. evidence for this, and the truth appears rather to be that Heine first tried to exploit the relationship and later became quite aggressive against the Furtados and their relatives, the Foulds.32 On March 24, 1840, Heine wrote to Cecile asking her to induce Salo­ mon to pay him what he rather ungratefully refers to as the "faible somme" several years in advance.33 Salomon, not surprisingly, declined in an exceedingly grouchy letter34 and continued to pay it quarterly. In the course of time Heine found another source of income that helped him out but was eventually to cause much embarrassment to him and many difficulties to his biographers. After the Revolution of 1848 a short-lived but explosive periodical entitled Revue retrospective ou Archives secretes du dernier gouvernement 1830-1848 published a compendium of secret documents of the July Monarchy. It turned out that, on the budget of the foreign ministry, under the heading of "Service extraordinaire," among the recipients of secret stipends, had been the "publiciste" or "ecrivain allemand" or "homme de lettres" Heine in the amount of 4,800 francs annually.35 This revelation was exceedingly painful. From the mid-thirties rumors of obscure origin had been circulating that Heine was in the pay of the French govern­ ment. For years he had been trying to maintain his claims to genuine progressive spokesmanship, while fending off radical charges of apos­ tasy. A whole strategy of his life was damaged by this revelation, and he responded to it at once with a public explanation. He denied that the state pension had in any way compromised his views, declaring that it was one of numerous acts of generosity of the French govern­ ment toward exiles seeking freedom. The pension made up for the loss of income incurred by the Federal decree of 1835. Guizot, Heine says, was pleased to continue the pension after an interview in No­ vember 1840, the first and last time Heine ever spoke to him.36 Although the documents published in the Revue retrospective go back only to the fall of 1840, for a long time it has been believed that the pension began in 1836. Heine's explanation connects it with the ban of 1835, and the statement that Guizot continued it implies strong-

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Iy that it was granted by the other leading politician of the July Mon­ archy, Adolphe Thiers, whom Heine elsewhere describes as solicitous of his welfare37 and who was chairman of the ministerial council and foreign minister from February to August 1836. But the most recent opinion, supported by material in Guizot's own archives, is that it be­ gan in 1840, when Thiers was again chief minister from March to Oc­ tober. Heine is careful to say that Guizot required no services from him; he does not mention Thiers, who undoubtedly arranged the pen­ sion.38 It is very doubtful that Thiers did not have something in mind be­ sides charity when he made this arrangement. Under the same head­ ing of "Service extraordinaire" are a number of men who did write to the advantage of the French government and were compensated for doing so. Heine's stipend, roughly equal to the annual salary of a French university professor, was too large to be a mere gratuity; oth­ ers, who were supported on humane grounds, such as the blind and paralyzed historian Augustin Thierry, whom Heine mentions in this connection,39 received much less. Heine had just renewed his contact with the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, to which Thiers had previ­ ously had close connections, and indeed in his first articles he spoke very admiringly of Thiers' person and statesmanlike gifts, if not un­ critically of his policies, although a comparison with the partisan Pari­ sian press of the time shows that he generally supported them.40 It is not clear how well Heine knew Thiers, who was almost exactly the same age and who was intimate with Heine's friend, the historian Francis Mignet (1796-1884). It should be remembered that, though he was more liberal than his persistent rival Guizot, Thiers was hardly a radical democrat. He was a violent nationalist, a quality Heine abhorred not only in his German contemporaries but also when it was turned against Germany. Thiers vigorously crushed in­ surrections against Louis-Philippe from both right and left, and it was he who as president of the Third Republic in 1871 unleashed the cen­ tral atrocity in the martyrology of the radical left, the liquidation of the Paris Commune. Heine did ultimately conclude that Thiers was without a sense for the "ideal needs of mankind" and the "great social institutions."41 It looks very much as if someone got wind of the secret pension at the time. Insinuations that he was writing in the Allgemeine Xeitung as an agent of Thiers appeared in a French newspaper in 1840, planted by Heine's German enemies in Paris. He published a notice defending himself and repeated the defense to Campe.42 There is too much guess­ work involved to judge this matter with certainty. One would need

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to know some details of how the arrangement came about in the first place, but this is wholly obscure. It does seem that the original motiva­ tion cannot have been as innocent as Heine makes out, and such a con­ nection must necessarily have put his much vaunted political inde­ pendence under some strain. On the other hand, Heine's reportage does not show him unduly attached to French policies and purposes. To a remark in the Allgemeine Zeitung that he was paid not so much for what he wrote as for what he did not write, he riposted that the Allgemeine Xeitung knew perfectly well, not so much from what it printed of his as from what it did not print, that he was not a "servile writer."43 This seems fair, and Heine appears truthful when he indi­ cates that he exchanged no favors with Guizot, though from time to time he praised him personally as he did Thiers in articles for the Allgemeine Zeitung, passages that in the book version after the Revo­ lution he tended to delete. It has been argued recently that with the pension Heine achieved the equivalent of what he had sought as a young man: a government position without official obligations.44 In such matters he always felt his insecure situation obliged him to walk a complicated path, taking as much as he could get while yielding as little of what mattered to him as possible. It is doubtless in the nature of things that this path occasionally took him and his reputation into cloudy territory.

C 10 H Shakespeare's Maidens and Ladies AN INTERESTING opportunity to earn some money for a change pre­

sented itself in the spring of 1838. A French publisher, Henri-Louis Delloye, was bringing out a volume of handsome English steel engrav­ ings by various artists illustrating female characters in Shakespeare's plays.1 He wanted to produce a German edition as well with a com­ mentary by a major writer. At first Heine was not especially enthusi­ astic. His eyes were bothering him, and the project meant that he would somehow have to review Shakespeare and to read some criti­ cism. But after a while, though he never held the work in any great regard, the project caught his fancy and he wrote more than he had contracted for. It was not a bad deal, for Delloye paid him altogether 4,000 francs. 2 Shakespeare's Maidens and Ladies (Shakespeares Madchen und Frauen) appeared in Paris in October 1838 with the imprint

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1839. Heine tried to get Campe to take the book under his imprint, but he declined, and it was put out by Brockhaus und Avenarius in Leip­ zig, though Campe took some copies in commission, which sold well.3 Heine fully shared the fascination with Shakespeare characteristic of Romantic and post-Romantic Germans. In fact the Germans virtu­ ally attempted to kidnap Shakespeare out of English literary history and to naturalize him as a force in their own; and Heine's relentless antipathy to the English impelled him to a contribution to this process. At the outset of his introductory remarks he expresses his regret that Shakespeare had been an Englishman, belonging to "the most repulsive people that God in His wrath has created"; and later he implies that German historians were unjustly prejudiced in favor of England by their admiration for Shakespeare.4 One sees that Heine, although he clearly did some research—he refers not only to the familiar German Romantic critics but also to Hazlitt, admiringly, and Samuel Johnson, rudely—nevertheless took the portraits as occasions to discuss concerns of his own and matters of current relevance. Helen in Troilus and Cressida makes him think of Goethe's Faust·, Virgilia in Coriolanus causes him to draw parallels between Roman and modern aristocracy; Portia in Julius Caesar arouses his predilection for autocrats who serve the people and destroy the aristocracy; and under the heading of Queen Margaret in Henry VI, whom he incidentally compares to Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied, he praises Schiller for purifying Joan of Arc from Shakespeare's English prejudice and goes on to treat the sociological environment of Shakespeare's plays: the industrial back­ ground of the Hundred Years War and the end of poetic chivalry at Crecy. Not unexpectedly, Heine fits Shakespeare into his scheme of spiritualism versus sensualism as a "worldly gospel";5 he presents the Puritan reaction against the theater as a logical example of spirit­ ualism and, always mindful of his two-front war against reactionaries and radicals, parallels the repressiveness of the Puritans with that of modern republicans: "May Apollo and the eternal Muses preserve us from their rule."6 The idiosyncratic limitations of Heine's literary criticism appear in this work; for example, he dismisses Shakespeare's language as unoriginal, derivative of the style of his times, for no other reason than to denigrate the brilliant German translation of the now despised A. W. Schlegel, and he makes fun of Tieck's Shake­ speare studies for no other reason than his membership in the despised Romantic School, even though Elizabethan scholarship was one of Tieck's major intellectual achievements.7 Heine comments on the tragedies and histories only; he had already written so much more than he had contracted for that, when he got

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to the comedies, he contented himself for the most part with apposite passages from the plays, so that the book has a rather unsatisfying assymetry. He made an exception, however, of The Merchant of Ven­ ice, which he counted among the tragedies by the device of focussing upon the character of Shvlock. He presents Shylock as a tragic victim of the shallow and greedy protagonists, including his own daughter, who betrays him by defecting to the dominant culture. Heine ex­ pands the discussion into a general meditation on the Jewish situation, beginning with a curious and rather daring comparison of the Jews with the ancient Germans as peoples of both a chaste and abstract character. He continues by quoting from what he says is a private letter. This "letter" has been variously ascribed to Eduard Gans and Rahel Varnhagen.8 But my impression of the style is that it was writ­ ten by Heine, and he uses the device to distance himself from its, in truth, disquieting view that derives the hatred of Christians for Jews from a justified resentment against money men, distorted by the false consciousness of religious motives; the basic instinct of the people, cheated of the pleasures of life, is always right. Today the opposition to the Jews has become openly economic, though people do not con­ sider that the Jews were forced into mercantile professions.9 Heine frequently ran risks with this kind of attitude. In later years he nearly published a dialogue poem parodying a greedy and sly Jew purchasing a Christian son-in-law at a reduced rate, which could have been penned by any anti-Semite with a modicum of wit.10 In Lutezia he used care­ less language about the inexorable greed and miserliness of Jews (he meant rich Jews, but he does not differentiate clearly).11 The argu­ ment that Heine was only attacking the inhumanity of capitalism can­ not, I think, make us comfortable with this aspect of his habits, any more than we should be comfortable with the similar arguments in Marx's essay On the Jewish Question six years later, which might con­ ceivably owe something to Heine. Under the heading of Portia, however, Heine takes a different tack; he speaks of poor Jews that he claims to have seen on Yom Kippur in Venice (this is not possible; Heine was in Venice from around No­ vember 29 to about December 4, 1828, while Yom Kippur fell on September 6 of that year), and among whom he seeks for Shylock's countenance. He compares their staring, unsteady, cunning, and imbecilic expressions with those of patients he had seen in a madhouse; like the lunatics, the Jews are obsessed wtih an idee fixe for which they have suffered centuries of martyrdom, though it is yet nothing com­ pared to the wave of persecution that will befall them with the victory of pantheism. The passage is deeply ambiguous, even more so than the

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peroration to Religion and Philosophy, for here Heine cannot escape his sympathetic involvement with the doomed spiritualist cause in its Jewish form, and the half of the book devoted to tragedy ends with Shylock's heartrending sob over the loss of his daughter.12 Appended to the work is a little essay on Shakespeare's reputation in France, which Heine sees as newly impelled by the "literary revo­ lution"; nevertheless he doubts that Shakespeare is really accessible to the French, who have "sucked in too much social falsity with their nurse's milk that they could have much taste for or even understand the poet who breaths the truth of nature with every word."13 There follows one of Heine's few critical passages on French literature; he treats Hugo, Dumas, and his friends Vigny and Musset in a tone that is, on the whole, dismissive. The palm for the deepest understanding of Shakespeare is awarded, interestingly, to the powerful politician Guizot, from whose sixteen-year-old book on the subject Heine quotes at length.14 Paradoxically, although Campe did not care to figure as the pub­ lisher of Shakespeare"1s Maidens and Ladies, it was in some respects the kind of book he had been urging Heine to write all along, one that would not savage his public or lead to a kind of clash with the author­ ities that author and publisher were bound to lose. Even though the work contains many acerbic social and political observations, it passed the censorship in Leipzig, a circumstance that Heine perversely turned against Campe,15 though it would seem rather to support Campe's as­ sessment of what he ought to have tried to do. It was well received by critics and sold briskly despite a hefty price of eight talers. But Heine was not impressed. So far as he was concerned, the book was a potboiler—much of it was stuffed with material copied from other sources—and potboilers were not his vocation. "I am damned little fit for a hack writer," he wrote to Campe in connection with the intro­ duction to Don Quixote.16 In truth he rejected more opportunities of this kind than he took, for projects were constantly being proposed to him. Fighting was what he wanted now, and he got himself into a good fight very soon after.

[11] Swabians and Other Enemies AT THE beginning of 1838 there appeared in a new Stuttgart periodi­ cal, the Deutsche Viertel-Jahrsschrift (German Quarterly), a long and 228

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devastating critique by a Swabian poet, Gustav Pfizer (1807-1890), which elaborated the terms of the conservative disparagement of Heine that had been taking shape. Pfizer complained first of all of failures of composition and stylistic impurity in Heine's texts, "hovering be­ tween prose and poesy." He saw the device of the fictive persona, but found it objectionable: "Heine, with the vanity that is a fundamental feature of his literary character, obtrudes everywhere in his writings with his personality, whether the real one or one only invented and ideal or idealized, so much, that if one ignored it one would, as it were, rob one's self of the key to understanding his efforts." Heine "endeav­ ors to make his not exactly charming personality noticeable and deco­ rate it with all conceivable arts of dress and cosmetics of complacent self-love." He complains of Heine's effort to treat in a light and pop­ ular manner "what deeply and precisely thinking men have thought about their life long." "Indeed, the French have never been so insulting­ ly mocked as here by their guest and protector Heine, when he tells of the philosophical movement in Germany in such a silly and joking manner as a nursemaid might prepare the history of the Thirty Years War or the French Revolution for a four-year-old child."1 Heine was very sensitive to criticism. Although he often asserted that he cared nothing about it, he also often pleaded with his friends in Germany to inform him of what was being said about him in print and in public. No doubt quite naturally, the closer the criticism cut to the bone, the more it vexed him. Commonplace reactionary and anti-Semitic rant did not upset him unduly, but an analysis like Pfizer's, exaggeratedly focussing on his vulnerable places and challenging the structure of values in which his self resided, drove him on the de­ fensive. Blunt Campe said of it that it contained "much that is bitter and also much that is true against you."2 Furthermore, because the attack emanated from Stuttgart, Heine detected in it the influence of Menzel. Pfizer was one of what had become known as the Swabian school of poets, a group that saw itself in descent from Schiller and Ludwig Uhland, but in fact represented the evolution of Romanticism to a harmless and domesticated Biedermeier, at once idealizing and trivializing middle-class values and emotions. None of these writers, including Pfizer, is at all remembered today. This confrontation, though it may not have had the epochal signifi­ cance Heine ascribed to it, was more than a literary squabble, and it had a certain complexity. The more closely one looks at it, the clearer it becomes that the key figure in it was not Pfizer but a minor poet of some accomplishment, Gustav Schwab (1792-1850). Schwab had written a perceptive and generally admiring review of the Book of Songs in 1828, though his resistance to Heine's libertinism is evident

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in it,3 and even after the war was over, in 1843, he included a segment of The Harz Journey in an anthology of German prose.4 Heine had praised Schwab in The Romantic School and even in his polemic he acknowledged him as the most accomplished of the Swabians.5 But something had happened the year before that Heine found very dis­ agreeable. Schwab co-edited a literary almanach with Adelbert Chamisso. The aging Romantic Chamisso, who was conciliatory toward the younger generation, had agreed to his publisher's suggestion to use Heine's portrait as a frontispiece to the 1837 volume, whereupon Schwab, willing to be tolerant of Heine up to a point but not prepared to see so damaged a soul imaged in a sacred hall of literature, osten­ tatiously withdrew his association with the almanach.6 Heine never forgot this. When Schwab wrote some friendly verses on Heine a couple of years later, it caused him to remark: "in this fallen world one cannot even rely on one's enemies!" and in an unpublished poem entitled "Testament" he wrote: "An exact likeness of my ass / I leave to the Swabian School; I know / You didn't want to have my face, / Now you can gratify yourself on its opposite."7 In addition, Heine's reaction looks like another episode of his discipleship to Goethe. In a letter to his composer friend Zelter in 1831 Goethe had commented wryly and humorously on the stultifying tedium of a volume of poems Pfizer had sent him and made some dismissive observations on Uhland's Swabian successors.8 It is more than likely that Heine knew of this passage from Gutzkow, who had quoted it at length in 1835 in an uppity review of Goethe's correspondence with Zelter entitled Goethe, Uhland, and Prometheus.9 Heine doubtless felt secure in Goethe's foot­ steps; the precedent reinforced his sense of pursuing a historically and aesthetically worthwhile line of argument. Heine entitled his counterattack The Swabian Mirror (Der Schwabenspiegel), a parodistic echo of the famous thirteenth-century com­ pendium of law, The Saxon Mirror. He had harsh words for the weak­ nesses of the Swabian poets: their harmless domesticity, their obsoles­ cence and irrelevance. He took pains to dissociate the Swabian School from the great Swabians of recent memory who had contributed so much to German intellectual life—Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, David Friedrich Strauss—and made a point of short-circuiting the ideologi­ cal contrast Heine: Uhland by asserting his regard for Uhland's po­ etry, which the literary historian studying Heine will certainly ac­ knowledge as sincere. He also made some disparaging remarks about Eduard Morike. But it is doubtful that Heine knew much more than his name, for with any attentive reading he must have seen that Mo­ rike, one of the finest of German poets, did not belong in this context.

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Campe, alerted by his associates, induced Heine to replace Morike's name with asterisks, thus sparing him a gaffe.10 As for Pfizer, Heine raked over his essay, charging him with distortions and quotations out of context, and warning him that he was on the road to the gallows for forgery. He took the opportunity to renew his insults to Menzel, charging him once again with cowardice for avoiding a duel, again sending up his Germanic nationalism by alleging that his appearance was Mongoloid, and inventing ludicrous tales of the public humiliation suffered by Menzel for refusing his challenge. The Sivabian Mirror was originally conceived as an epilogue to a new volume of collected poems, where it would indeed have had some relevance in exhibiting a qualitative and ideological disjunction be­ tween Heine as a poet and his contemporaries. But, for a reason to which we shall come presently, that project was shelved, and Heine decided to publish it separately. It appeared in November 1838 in the first (and only) volume of a new periodical of Campe's, the Jahrbuch der Literatur (Yearbook of Literature). Once again Heine and Campe got at loggerheads over the censorship; Campe had it censored against Heine's explicit prohibition, and when Heine saw the published ver­ sion, he complained bitterly in a public notice that it had been mu­ tilated.11 We do not have the original text and cannot estimate how serious the alterations were; the published version is acerbic enough. Campe defended himself in a published notice of his own against Heine's charge of complicity with the censorship.12 In fact, so far as we can see, Campe himself altered a Heine text on only one occasion, the second edition of the Book of Songs, and Heine did not notice the changes until it came time for the third edition.13 Once again he took the quarrel to the public, this time with a long open letter to Campe entitled Writer's Troubles (Schriftstellernothen), which he published in April 1839 in Laube's Zeitung fiir die elegante Welt (it too was censored). Heine reviewed the history of the dispute, praising his own long-suffering forbearance and fairness while accusing Campe of dis­ loyalty and deceit. He quoted at length from Campe's private letters, including some disparaging remarks on one of Campe's own associates, a rather obsequious minor literary man named Ludwig Wihl (18061882), whom Heine did not like out of annoyance at what he consid­ ered to be Wihl's biographical indiscretions concerning himself. He called into question Campe's competence, courage, and loyalty, obvi­ ously trying to strike at the most sensitive values of his character. Campe was getting mighty sick of this tactic. He tried hard to remain diplomatic: "We are friends and understand one another," he wrote wearily; "why this junk?"14 He continued to take the position that the

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censorship was not to be evaded, whatever Heine in his Parisian refuge might imagine, and the only hope of defending against confiscations and bannings was to submit manuscripts to prior censorship. More­ over, Heine's conduct was beginning to abrade seriously on the human relations between the two men. Finally, in a tone more solemn and bitter than customary, Campe warned him that, if this went on, he would strike back and wreck his reputation in Germany, and he even hinted a threat of a duel.15 It made little impression. The relationship was further exacerbated by Heine's resentment of Campe's associates; in fact he privately admitted that Campe was in­ nocent of his public accusations and blamed Wihl and Gutzkow in­ stead.16 Wihl was a nonentity and the fuss with him was a tempest in a teapot, disposed of by Heine in a parody, in parallel columns and in the name of Campe's dog, of Wihl's replique,17 but Karl Gutzkow was another matter. Campe had acquired Gutzkow along with his periodi­ cal, the Telegraph fur Deutschland, and he seems also to have func­ tioned as an in-house lector and adviser. Heine at first welcomed this, saying correctly that Gutzkow was "the greatest talent that has emerged since the July Revolution."18 But increasingly he came to re­ gard Gutzkow, who had been writing fairly disrespectful reviews of his works, as an enemy lodged in his own publisher's house, and he raged about him in his letters, ignoring Campe's repeated assertions that he was misjudging Gutzkow. But Heine smelled a competitor and a threat to his own position, and he was leery of Gutzkow's notorious poi­ son pen; in 1839 Heine and Laube conspired to strike at him with "Gutzkowyads,"19 but nothing came of it. In the preceding year an incident occurred that probably wrecked any further potential for alliance be­ tween the two fellow dissidents. Gutzkow advised against the publica­ tion of what Heine then thought of as a second volume of jthef Book of Songs, with which Campe was having censorship trouble. Gutz­ kow's problem was with the Variae, and he wrote Heine on August 6, 1838, that the public would never tolerate such poems and that the book would ruin his damaged reputation beyond repair (even though the poems had almost all been published previously).20 This may seem a little odd from a man who, some three years before, had spent several weeks in jail on what was essentially a charge of pornography and blasphemy; but the incident illustrates well the growing estrangement between Heine and even the most liberal of his contemporaries, who were evolving toward some workable relationship with their public and society. Heine replied to Gutzkow in an icily polite letter of August 23, 1838, in which he takes a very high ground. He sets himself above the

IV. THE PROMISED LAND prejudices of common taste and his poems alongside Petronius' Satyricon and Goethe's Roman Elegies. "The question here is not the moral requirements of some married bourgeois in a corner of Germany, but the autonomy of art. My slogan remains: art is the purpose of art, as love is the purpose of love and even life itself is the purpose of life"21 —actually a view of Goethe's that, in The Romantic School, Heine had held against him.22 This often-quoted statement represents, of course, only a fraction of Heine's position. The autonomist argument is em­ ployed instrumentally against the repressiveness of a common moral­ ity inimical to the sensual emancipation Heine wished to associate with true poesy and art; since this view was part of his emancipatory pro­ gram, it is not really in contradiction with his activist claims for liter­ ature, although it cannot be certainly said that he made the two sides of the issue fully congruent and consistent. Furthermore, it is possible that Gutzkow unwittingly touched Heine's hidden puritanical chord. He wrote to Campe rather surprisingly on August 18 that the book meant nothing to him, even though Campe was prepared to go for­ ward with it despite Gutzkow's advice, and five months later he as­ serted his willingness to excise all the poems that might cause offense.23 However, the volume continued to have censorship troubles and the project was laid aside for several years. There was another indication that Heine was on a collision course with Gutzkow that was in turn symptomatic of a collision course with the public. On August 26, 1838, Campe informed him that Gutzkow was preparing a biography of Ludwig Borne, who had died the pre­ ceding year.24 Heine had had in his mind for some time writing some­ thing about Borne, and for a number of reasons he determined to do so now. The result was a book that would for a time make the public forget all about skirmishes with homosexual poets, Swabian versifiers, and a stubborn publisher.

C12 3

Heine uOver'''' Borne LUDWIG BORNE had been in Paris, with interruptions, since three months after the 1830 Revolution. He had come to appear as a leading spokesman of the thousands, at times tens of thousands, of German emigres in Paris, many of them artisans and workingmen. He was by now strongly committed to republican principles and the hope of

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democratic revolution in Germany. He was sharply critical of the July Monarchy and continued to direct his wit and invective against the atrocious conditions in Germany. Although he was, with the excep­ tion of Heine, the most prominent dissident of the time, he was not included in the ban of 1835. Some observers have been puzzled by this and have thought it might have been owing to the fact that Wolfgang Menzel continued to respect him—Borne agreed with Menzel on the subject of Gutzkow's Wally—but this is to overestimate Menzel's in­ fluence on that event. The reason is probably that there was no way Borne could have been plausibly charged with libertinism and sacri­ lege. He was very moral indeed and did not attack religion; instead he became interested in the Catholic proto-socialism of the radical priest Felicite-Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), whose Paroles (Pun croyant (1834) he translated into German. Borne's challenge was strictly political and the governments seemed to want to avoid a direct confrontation on that ground. His middle-class public could not be split on moral and religious grounds, for he was regarded with admi­ ration and respect. The authorities contented themselves with banning his books as they appeared and prosecuting Campe for them. Borne and Heine had got along well in 1827, and echoes of Borne can be found scattered in Heine's pre-Parisian works. There was much to bind them together, for they were in very similar situations as writ­ ers and their fundamental views overlapped to a large extent. If Borne had read Heine's revolutionary, even Jacobin, utterances of the end of 1830, as he very likely did, he must certainly have thought of him as an ally, and he must have been utterly amazed by the Heine he en­ countered in Paris. He had looked forward to an exciting collabora­ tion and proposed shared journalistic ventures that, although they surely would have been banned into contemporary oblivion by the German authorities, might have become world classics of satire, wit, and incendiary political discourse. But, to his surprise and chagrin, he found that Heine in Paris really wanted nothing to do with him.1 He must have taken Heine's repudiation of republicanism at the end of French Painters as a public repudiation of him; a reviewer of The Salon immediately interpreted it as such.2 Campe had grown weary of the radical language of Borne's Letters from Paris, for which he was prosecuted, and, perhaps indiscreetly, communicated his feelings to Heine.3 Still, he later expressed his regret that Heine and Borne were not getting along.4 Heine's aloofness even from causes that one would have thought close to his heart is exhibited by an episode early in 1832. Johann Georg Wirth (1798-1848), a genuine activist and radical in Zweibriicken, 2 34

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whom Heine had praised as such in Conditions in France,5 was deter­ mined to mount a campaign for freedom of the press by uniting all oppositional writers and publications. Heine tolerated that his name was mentioned in this connection, apparently without his permission, and he contributed a few francs, but he otherwise never was associated with the venture or wrote anything for Wirth.6 According to an Austrian police report, Heine held a meeting of several radical authors in December 1833 with the purpose of entrusting the pamphlets of Wirth's conspiracy to "more practical pens" than those of the artisans and workingmen, an initiative probably directed against Borne.7 Wirth's efforts were harshly suppressed by the Bavarian government. Heine told Cotta that he was embarrassed to be mentioned in this con­ nection, as it did not comport with his monarchical principles, adding that revolution in Germany was inevitable "because it is there in the idea, and the Germans have never given up an idea."8 Heine scorned what modern observers refer to as the "petty-bour­ geois radicalism" of the German workingmen in Paris with whom Borne was associated, his sensibilities offended equally by their neoJacobin rhetoric and their aura of tobacco smoke, which he abhorred. He associated all movements of this kind with constriction and repres­ sion rather than expansion and emancipation; he saw in them a reduc­ tive egalitarianism condemning all men to the same "Spartan black soup"9 rather than a release into the sensual pleasures of the gods and the privileged few. He sensed in the neo-Jacobinism of Borne and his associates a Robespierrean puritanical analogue to Christian repression, reacting instinctively to Borne's admiration for Robespierre and the Christianized radicalism that emerged in the interest in Lamennais, that "terrible priest," as Heine, in his abhorrence of anything with the slightest taint of Catholicism, called him.10 By his own account he flaunted at Borne a posture of aestheticism and dandyism in order to an­ noy him; he told him, for example, that his first pilgrimage upon ar­ riving in Paris was not to a shrine of political revolution, but to the Bibliotheque Royale to see the Manesse Manuscript, the gorgeous fourteenth-century compendium of German medieval poetry.11 Borne's own private remarks on Heine show that he was very irritated by his ragging and his affected cynicism. This conduct broke Borne's heart. He was by nature a conciliatory and courteous man, but Heine got under his skin, and exasperation made him petty. He began to put together a catalogue of resentments against Heine in letters to Jeanette Wohl (1783-1861), a bosom friend whom he had not been able to win for himself but who remained for many years his ally and encourager. These letters show that Borne

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was unhappy not only with Heine but with himself; he felt that he had been maneuvered against his will from a position of alli­ ance into one of competition and jealousy. Heine sensed this and hy­ perbolized it, ascribing Borne's criticisms of him "to the small jealousy that the small drum-master feels toward big drum-major: he envied me the big plume that so boldly exults into the air, my richly em­ broidered uniform on which there was more silver than he, the little drum-master, could pay for with his whole fortune, the skill with which I balanced the big baton, the loving glances thrown to me by the young girls and which I return perhaps with some coquetry!"12 Borne was voluble and convivial, and it could not long have re­ mained hidden from Heine in the gossipy German community in Paris that Borne was mounting a subterranean campaign against him, just the kind of conspiracy that he was inclined to see all around him and that worried him unremittingly. In print Borne was a little more circumspect, but his frequent thrusts were well aimed. In a review in French of De PAllemagne, he said that Heine maintained a set of mouseholes in his opinions; if one tried to pin him to one, he escaped down the hole and peeped out of another.13 Unlike other figures in the polemical context of the time, who had to fend off attacks from only one direction, Heine, he said, had two backs and was thrashed from the radical as well as from the aristocratic side.14 Borne was quite perceptive about this, for Heine frequently was impelled to his most radical utterances as a defense strategy against the radicals themselves. Of the French translation of the uncensored Preface to Conditions in France he wrote to Varnhagen: "With it I have neutralized scoundrels like Borne and company." He had taken up radical positions, he said, as a defense against the "demagogues."15 Despite Heine's revolutionary claims on his own behalf, Borne wrote, he was a hindrance to the pro­ gressive movement, getting in the way "like a boy chasing butterflies on the battlefield."16 He pinned Heine into the very aestheticist and elitist pattern that Heine himself claimed to have escaped in his up­ rising against Goethe and the Romantic School. Heine, for his part, had to feel that Borne was becoming a focus of the atmosphere of disapproval of himself and a challenge to what he regarded as his own truly revolutionary position. After Borne's death in February 1837 he was well aware that there was a time-bomb ticking away somewhere, and he prepared a defensive declaration, but did not publish it.17 The feeling may have been intensified by the news that Gutzkow was plan­ ning a Borne biography. Heine began work on his book in the spring of 1839.18 Heinrich Laube had come to Paris for an extended stay, and Heine showed him

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

the manuscript. Laube was worried by what he saw, and his mind was not put at ease by what he perceived as a persistent flippancy on Heine's part. "What do I have to do with Borne," Heine is reported to have said to another friend; "I am a poet," and to Laube's objections that the essay was too negative and unfair, he is supposed to have re­ plied: "But is it not beautifully expressed?"19 Laube's several accounts of this episode, written many years later, are not wholly consistent with one another, but it seems that he urged on Heine a positive state­ ment of his own position, a "mountain" that would balance his criti­ cism of Borne.20 On this advice Heine wrote during the winter of 1840 what was to be Book π of the work, a set of letters alleged to have been written from Helgoland before and after the Revolution of 1830. These "letters" have been the source of much confusion. Later the literary forger Friedrich Steinmann printed a version of one of them as an authentic letter to himself, and to this day one finds them referred to as statements of 1830. There is no evidence that Heine in 1830 had any connection with Steinmann; in 1843 he was obliged to make a public protest against Steinmann's publications allegedly about him and stated that they had had no connection for more than eight­ een years.21 The dating of the letters, which does not correspond to the actual weekdays in 1830, allusions that can belong only to the late 1830s, and a comparison with Heine's actual response to the Revolu­ tion suggest strongly that they were composed in 1839-1840. It is pos­ sible that Heine drew upon some memoir or diary material from 1830, as he told Campe; if so, it was probably written not on Helgoland but in the following fall. Some passages in the text seem to point to the Helgoland visit of 1829.22 As was more easily noted by a contemporary critic, the great literary historian Karl Goedeke,23 than by later schol­ ars, the "letters from Helgoland" are not letters at all but a meditation carefully composed in hindsight with the purpose of establishing the poet's superior prophetic vision into the events of the world and to claim immediate revolutionary enthusiasm. In February 1840 Heine began a difficult negotiation with a sudden­ ly coy Campe over the book. Heine offered it, not directly, but via his mother, for 2,000 marks banco;* otherwise he would have it pub­ lished by Laube. Campe refused. Heine, as he often did, worked hard at selling his book to his publisher. "The eagerness and curiosity with which the book is awaited," he wrote on February 18, as though Campe were not a perfectly accurate judge of such things, "alarms me * The mark banco was not a form of currency but a unit employed in Ham­ burg for credit transactions. It was equal to one-half taler or approximately two French francs.

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a little. . . . I believe my Borne will be acknowledged as the best work I have written." 24 Campe, clearly preoccupied with quite contrary worries, countered by offering a thousand marks banco for the first printing and a thousand for a second, should there be one, not neglect­ ing to mention that Gutzkow's biography was in the press or to drop a hint about Jeanette Wohl, the repository of Borne's strictures on Heine. 25 Heine writhed and argued, but Campe held the line, and Heine grudgingly agreed, adding his customary futile demand that the book not be censored. Then Campe made a queer blunder, one so uncharacteristic of him that one wonders whether it was a blunder and not a conscious or subliminal act of rancor, especially as he usually exhibited taste and wisdom in the matter of titles. When Heine sent the manuscript in April, he gave the title as Life of Ludwig Borne by Heinrich Heine. A couple of weeks later he sent the much better devised title: Ludwig Borne, A Memorial by H. Heine (Ludwig Borne, eine Denkschrift von H. Heine). 26 But Campe instead titled the book Heinrich Heine ilber Ludwig Borne, later asserting blandly that Heine's correction had come too late to be considered, that he had got the title from Heine's mother, that there was no title on the manuscript (there was), rather elaborate explanations that suggest he was aware of his error. 27 The preposition iiber means both "about" or "concerning" and "over" or "above," and this embarrassing pun, reinforced by the demonstrative placement of Heine's name over Borne's on the title page, highlighted the book's supercilious effect, as Heine recognized with chagrin. 28 Borne is the strangest book Heine ever wrote, and one of the most complex. It demands a careful and attentive reading of a sort it has only seldom received. 29 At the time and later it was perceived as a scurrilous lampoon, an almost incomprehensibly impudent display of egotistical arrogance and elitist disdain. Today it is defended as a state­ ment of higher revolutionary vision ideologically superior to Borne's sentimental moralism and archaic, petty-bourgeois neo-Jacobinism, and as an insight into Germany's unreadiness for revolution. Both re­ sponses are deaf to the conflicting voices within the book, to the un­ resolved antinomies in Heine's own consciousness that are only super­ ficially veiled by an exceptionally urbane and confident style (admired not only by Heine himself but by many others, including Thomas Mann). 30 One of the oddities of the work is the mingling and interinvolvement of the two positions that are supposedly to stand in con­ trast. In places Heine borrows Borne's voice, while in others he puts in Borne's mouth opinions that were clearly his own. Some alleged conversations seem to have been adapted from Borne's writings. In

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

Book ν he quotes at length, without much effort at refutation, one of the most precise of Borne's published critiques of him. In some places he praises Borne's honesty, his patriotism, his uncompromising enmity to Heine's own aristocratic and reactionary enemies, including the unforgettable Menzel, whom Borne had savaged in his last book, Men­ zel the French-Eater (Menzel der Franzosenfresser), while elsewhere he describes Borne's radicalism as childish and even insane. Rather than repelling Borne's criticisms of aestheticism and elitism, Heine seems to go out of his way to acknowledge them. "For beauty and genius," he writes, "there will be no place in the commonwealth of our new puritans, and both will be blighted and oppressed even more grievously than under the older regime. For beauty and genius are also a kind of monarchy, and they do not fit into a society in which everyone in the ill-feeling of his own mediocrity tries to de­ value all higher giftedness down to his banal level."31 Although Heine had himself attacked Goethe for indifferent aestheticism and producing works cold like statues, he criticizes Borne for failing to comprehend "the objective freedom, the Goethean manner. . . . He was like the child who, without sensing the glowing meaning of a Greek statue, only touches the marble forms and complains of the coldness."32 As for the working classes with which Borne associated, Heine found them narrow and slovenly; he claimed to be amazed that someone with Borne's genteel upbringing could "roll about in plebeian filth."33 At one political meeting, Heine recalls, "a deformed, bowlegged journey­ man shoemaker appeared and claimed that all men are equal. I was not a little angry at this impertinence. It was the first and last time that I attended the popular meeting."34 Borne had said that if a king were to shake his hand, he would sterilize it in the fire, to which Heine re­ plied: "If the people were to shake my hand I would wash it after­ wards."35 Heine's reasoning in all these matters is formed around his familiar dichotomy of Nazarenism and Hellenism, which are now for him ahistorical anthropological categories. His concern is to present Borne's radicalism, along with the spirit of his allies among the com­ mon people, as puritanical, iconoclastic, terrorist, and repressive, as against his own higher, more inclusive, and more expansive poet's vi­ sion. But he exaggerated Borne's "Nazarenism" and he underestimated his own, as appears in a deplorable passage where he descends to per­ sonalities. Borne's friend, "the so-called Madame Wohl," an "ambig­ uous lady,"36 had married a merchant named Salomon Strauss (17951866), and for a time all three lived in the same house in Paris. Heine professed to be shocked and disgusted at this menage a trois, in which

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

either Strauss was a cuckold or Borne contemptible in his inhibited sexuality; for good measure, Heine included some remarks on Jeanette Wohl's repulsive ugliness. During the aftermath he realized that he had been wrong to do this; in 1846 he publicly acknowledged Jeanette Wohl's honor and with bland disingenousness apologized on the grounds that he had been misinformed about her character.37 By such dubious means Heine meant to exhibit his own purity, one of the defensive themes that course through the book. Toward the end he offers to Borne in the grave his hand: "See how beautiful it is and pure. It was never soiled, by the handshake of the mob as little as by the dirty gold of the enemies of the people."38 Throughout the book Heine's claims for himself are assertive rather than argumentative and they merely deny, they do not engage, the objections made against him. "I am the son of the revolution and reach again for my charmed weapons," he exclaims in Book 11. "Flowers! Flowers! I will crown my head for the fight to the death. And the lyre, too, hand me the lyre, that I may sing battle songs."39 He claims that the "aristocratic party in Germany" knew that "the moderation of my language is much more dangerous to it than Borne's berserk fury."40 There is little evi­ dence that this was true, and the reports of spies concerning Heine at this time give a different impression.41 In Book 1 he explains why he could not take Borne's hand: "I carried on board my ship the gods of the future," and later he remarks that he had advanced so far beyond the radicals that they could no longer see him and thought he had fallen behind.42 Such arguments can have reference only to the doc­ trine of Hellenism, but they meet the political charges against Heine only obliquely. Indeed, it seemed at the time as though Heine had perversely pil­ loried himself. No other book of his generated so much outrage so immediately. It was published officially at the beginning of August 1840; Campe, obviously wary of confiscations, had freighted it earlier so that it would become available on exactly the same day in Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Leipzig; he had maneuvered it through the censorship with what may have been a bribe.43 Within days Heine heard from Campe and Laube of negative reactions.44 Campe had pro­ fessed to like the book, though he feared, to Heine's delight, that the subsequent additions to the manuscript that he had not seen might put him in jail,45 but as the indignation mounted he appeared to share it. Campe had got on bad terms with Gutzkow, as who did not, and held up his Borne biography, which had been completed by November 1839, apparently for Heine's sake. If so, the tactic backfired. Until the last moment Gutzkow had believed that Heine's book would be an

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

admiring one, doubtless because he could not conceive otherwise.46 When Heine's book appeared first, it gave Gutzkow an opportunity to write a bitterly angry criticism, first published in the Telegraph (that is, in Campe's own house, infuriating Heine), then as an introduction to his book. In October Jeanette Strauss-Wohl published a maliciously edited selection of Borne's comments on Heine in his private letters. The preface of this compendium struck a tone that was ever more in­ sistently heard among liberal Germans in the 1840s: "Now may Herr H. Heine continue to bring his jokes into play, overestimate his fleet­ ing lyrical talent, celebrate the fates of peoples and kings in unprin­ cipled stylistic exercises, admire his Apollonian beauty, and dream of placing on his own head the crown that the fatherland does not offer him. Only let him, an exposed traitor, no longer sneak with his doubt­ ing eye into the camp of the free."47 Nothing that Heine had ever done up to now, or that had been done to him, isolated him so profoundly from his public as Borne, as Campe in letter after letter reiterated. Even the heretofore loyal Laube could not review it with unqualified praise and shared much of the general hor­ ror.48 The young Friedrich Engels wrote that it was "the most worth­ less thing ever written in the German language."49 Borne was an icon of integrity and dedicated political purpose, widely admired even by those who disagreed with him. Heine's chronic poor judgment of the sensibilities of other people, his indifference to the manners of civilized discourse, and the unresolved complexities of his own allegiance turned the book into a boomerang. For some time it looked as though his reputation might never recover from this debacle. How far Heine withdrew into his own beleaguered sense of self is sufficiently evident in his perfectly serious remark to Campe: "All arrows bounce off the golden armor I wear."50 Of course they did not; they stuck in him as though he were a new Saint Sebastian. He tried to ascribe all the out­ rage solely to the machinations of Gutzkow, whom he planned to drive into a duel,51 and for months accused a protesting Campe of being in cahoots with Gutzkow. The aftermath of Borne affected Heine's private life as well. Salo­ mon Strauss, outraged at his contumely of his wife, placed in newspa­ pers paid inserts disguised as news articles asserting that he had boxed Heine's ears on the street; he claimed to have eyewitnesses, but Heine extracted from them admissions that they knew of the matter only by hearsay. He in turn responded with inserts of his own calling Strauss a liar.52 In the nineteenth century this sort of thing constituted the preliminaries to a duel, and indeed Campe left-handedly goaded him onto this course: "In general the legend is widespread that you are

IV. THE PROMISED LAND cowardly; I admit, courage may not be your strongest side, but how much cowardice does it take not to show one's self ready under such circumstances?"53 The affair became a gigantic public scandal involv­ ing all sorts of people on both sides, including the Jewish reformer Gabriel Riesser (1806-1863), who tried officiously to inject himself by challenging Heine to a duel himself,54 and Richard Wagner, who owed Heine a favor and wrote an article defending him against Strauss.55 The opponents backed and filled; Strauss tried to switch to swords, but Heine insisted on pistols; they met finally on September 7, 1841, and Heine was nicked in the hip. It was, thank goodness, his last duel, though he came close to another three years later.56 He fully appreciated that he might be killed in this affair and, in order to protect Mathilde from the consequences of that eventuality, he married her, in a Catholic church on August 31 (which later gave rise to rumors, which he was obliged to deny, that he had become Catholic) and in a civil ceremony the following day. Such were the weird and unhappy circumstances that made Heine a married man. Uncle Salomon, for his part, was avuncularly pleased at the mar­ riage and promptly raised Heine's allowance from 4,000 to 4,800 francs a year.

C 13 3 The Salon IV AT THE beginning of 1840 Heine had again taken up his reportage for the Allgemeine Zeitung·, this time he was to continue for three and a half years, with occasional submissions later. Since these articles were to form the basis for one of Heine's most important books, we shall return to them when we come to speak of it. The great Cotta was now dead, and Heine was dealing with his son, Johann Georg (1796-1863), who was less liberal than his father but who had inherited the readi­ ness to employ Heine whenever possible; in fact he had urged him to rejoin the Allgemeine Zeitung as long ago as 1836.1 He saw to it, against Kolb's advice, that Heine, with twenty francs for small items and 200 francs a sheet for larger ones, was by far the highest paid correspondent of the paper, though Heine wanted more.2 By now he was an experienced observer of Paris. His attention was drawn not only to archetypal singular events, but ranged broadly over the political, social, and cultural life of the capital. Like many reporters, he had grown rather blase about the way the world turns, expecting relatively

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

little of human affairs and therefore seldom becoming either disap­ pointed or excited. But in February 1840 a disgusting event occurred that touched him on several sensitive spots simultaneously and aroused him to high passion. In Damascus an old monk had been found mysteriously murdered, and a charge was brought that the Jews had killed him in order to use his blood for ritual purposes. A violent persecution of the Jewish com­ munity ensued. It was a truly dreadful episode, in which Jews were tortured into converting to Islam and bearing false witness to this crazy accusation, and Jew was set against Jew in the Middle East.3 The French government, preoccupied with imperialist maneuvers in the area and seeking political peace with the Catholic party in France, was unwilling to protest the affair. Her own consul in Damascus supported the blood charge, and even some correspondents of the Allgemeine Zeitung did so also. Heine's reaction was understandably intense. At the bottom of it lay, of course, his persistent, subliminal Jew­ ish feeling, which drove him to some remarks about the ethical purity symbolized in Jewish doctrine.4 In addition, the atavism of the event was horrifying. One read of such things in medieval chronicles, but in the nineteenth century? Was this the state of the progress of the hu­ man race? And what of France, the wellspring of enlightenment in human affairs? The Austrian consul in Damascus, who obviously dis­ believed the whole thing, wrote reports that exposed the taintedness of the evidence and protesting the atrocities.5 Was reactionary Austria to be the defender of human decency and reason, while the great land of revolution anemically temporized? Furthermore, had the rich Jews in the French parliament so forgotten their own people, were they so bound to the capitalist class rule of the July Monarchy, that they re­ mained silent before such an atrocity?6 (In this Heine was mistaken; the Jewish financiers in the Chamber of Deputies did attack the gov­ ernment on the matter, and he made an apology, which the Allgemeine Zeitung did not print.)7 Among other things, Heine's outbursts in this matter showed that he was not in any way bound by his pension to the policy of Thiers's government. Heine's instantaneous reaction to the affair expresesd itself in an­ other way. On May 7 the report of the Austrian consul appeared in the Paris newspapers. On the same day Heine drafted an article on the subject and wrote to Kolb about it.8 On the following day he an­ nounced to Campe a new work of current relevance.9 This was The Rabbi of Bacherach; the shocking recrudescence of medieval obscu­ rantism and persecution brought that work immediately to mind. It had not been wholly forgotten; in March 1837 he had written to H3

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

Campe that he had found his original draft;10 but it took the affair of the Damascene Jews to put him back to work on it. However, sixteen years had gone by since the days of the Verein in Berlin and the first work on the Rabbi·, Heine was not able to recover the original thrust and tone. The decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s was his most irreligious phase. Jewish culture was now for him less pathetic in its suffering than comic in its futility, and the Jewish figures who ap­ pear in the Frankfurt scene are clownish, cowardly, and jabbering, causing Rabbi Abraham to observe of the ghetto: "How poorly guarded is Israel! False friends watch at your gates from without, and within your watchmen are foolishness and fear!"11 In the fragmentary third chapter Heine introduces a character he had thought about in 1824, Isaak Abarbanel, an urbane, emancipated, and apparently bap­ tized Jew from Spain. He is another of the elegant Sephardic figures who are among Heine's own personae. This character rags the ghetto Jews, flirts with a conceited lady, and delivers passionate encomia on Jewish cuisine, the one "sensualist" element of Jewish culture Heine was always prepared to acknowledge. The rabbi calls him a pagan, while Abarbanel regards the Jews as repressive Nazarenes. He brings some cheer and amusement into the text, but its back is broken and the narration cannot go forward. Yet the Rabbi has always retained a fascination for at least its more tolerant Jewish readers, and the cir­ cumstances of its publication show that it is connected to the deep substratum of Heine's Jewish feeling. The resuscitation of the Rabbi also unblocked the long dormant project of a fourth Salon volume. Along with a few poems, it provided enough text to match the other work Heine had always intended to include in it: Concerning the French Stage (Ober die franzosische Biihne). It had been originally written in 1837 and had appeared in December of that year in a Cotta publication, the Allgemeine TheaterRevue (General Theater Review); segments had also appeared in French translation. They took the form of letters to August LewaId (1792-1871), the editor of the journal, at that time a very liberal actor and theater personality who was one of Heine's friendliest epistolary confidantes; he was the cousin of another of Heine's friends, Fanny Lewald (1811-1889), an author of social and feminist novels in the spirit of George Sand. The epistolary form made it easy for him to work in matters of personal concern, as was his wont. Despite familiar pirouettes at the beginning, the overall mood is rather glum, as the work was still in the shadow of the Federal ban of 1835—Heine wryly abjures politics and religion and begs the Federal Assembly to be re­ leased from Young Germany.12

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His primary concern, however, is an exercise in literary sociology. He ventures some comparative observations on the French, the Ger­ man, and the English stage; indeed, he briefly conceived a plan to travel to England in order to write a similar work on the English theater, but he was obliged to give it up.13 He asks why the Germans have so little original comedy compared to the French who, he thinks, are not an especially cheerful people.14 He relates French domestic com­ edy with its theme of adultery to the decay of religion and morality in France and the conflict with the institutions of the past, observing that in French society the adulterous wife is tolerated but the loving unmarried girl is not. Tragedy, on the other hand, has yielded to the poetically elevated naturalism of Dumas and Hugo. What Heine has to say about contemporary French playwrights is listless, though he does defend Hugo against ideological criticism. The discussion exhib­ its both Heine's anti-realistic instinct and that side of his allegiances committed to the autonomy of art, which should "serve as a hand­ maiden neither to religion, nor to politics; it is its own final purpose, like the world itself," and he argues against the political partisanship of French realism, which disturbs the aesthetic effect and generates a republican anti-artistic aspect like that of the English Puritans in Crom­ well's time.15 In fact, he exhibits a curiously anachronistic Classicism here, which is perhaps related to his depression in the wake of the ban; he takes a stand against bourgeois realism in the theater and for verse and declamation: "At least let the stage never be a banal repeti­ tion of life, and let it show life in a certain distinguished ennoble­ ment."16 Such a passage could have been found in German aesthetics a half century eariler. Heine also comments on the commercial manipulation of audiences, especially on the nineteenth-century equivalent of modern television canned laughter, the particular kind of claqueur called the chatouilleur, hired to laugh in the audience. He shows more respect for music and opera, and he deals at some length with Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt, Chopin, and especially Meyerbeer, whose Les Huguenots he praised effusively, as did many others at the time. Modern scholarship has de­ nied that Meyerbeer corrupted the theater or employed Heine as a paid literary claqueur.17 The appearance of the matter is that Heine was anxious to function as Meyerbeer's press-agent. But Meyerbeer did not need him for that role, which was fully filled by his selfless and loyal friend Alexandre Gouin (1792-1872). Heine several times tried to dis­ credit Gouin to Meyerbeer, apparently in the hope of displacing him, but with this he was not likely to have the least success. It is clear, at any rate, not only that Meyerbeer did favors for Heine, but that Heine H5

IV. THE PROMISED LAND

performed services for him involving money. In 1835 he asked for a loan from Meyerbeer to bribe a threatening journalist, and in 1842 he obtained money to intervene on Meyerbeer's behalf with French jour­ nalists in a way that looks like a bribe, though it is possible that Heine, not Meyerbeer, initiated these moves.18 When Heine later, for various reasons, became estranged from Mey­ erbeer, he altered his published opinions post hoc, in part to bring pressure on him, making constant allusions to his management of his "fame, this equally artificial and expensive machine" and claiming that his only interest in his friends was: "How can I use you as an adver­ tisement for my renown."19 In some late verse he referred to Meyer­ beer's previously admired music as colicky and hemorrhoidal and lam­ pooned the premier of Le Prophete.20 The relationship is very hard for the biographer to judge, for there was an element of friendly affinity in it; but there was also one of mutual exploitation. It is true that Meyerbeer gave Heine some cause for offense; for one thing, he never made good on his promise to set some of Heine's poems nor did he give them back, and Heine objected to Meyerbeer's accommodation to the Prussian court,21 but in his shifts of attitude there was also a self-serving purpose. Salon IV appeared at the beginning of November 1840. Swallowed up by the fire and smoke of the aftermath of Borne, it was very little noticed. Heine needed to place himself on new ground, and through­ out the first half of the 1840s he struggled to find it.

V THE RADICAL PHASE Paris—Hamburg—Paris Hamburg—Paris 1840-1847

Gratifications and Pressures HEINE'S life in the eventful 1840s was not all squabble and radicaliza-

tion. He associated with Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Wagner, Gautier, and Balzac. He had become a personality of weight in European culture; one significant piece of evidence of this recognizable in retrospect was Schumann's presentation to him of settings of his poems in May 1840.1 One of his most curious connections at this time was with the Paris branch of the mighty house of Rothschild. Heine admired Baroness Betty personally, who in turn wrote him notes of exquisite courtesy and sympathy, and he profoundly admired Baron James's fabulous wealth. Not surprisingly, numerous anecdotes grew up around this re­ lationship. A characteristic one was passed on by Strodtmann. Baron James asked Heine why the wine they were drinking was called "Lacrimae Christi." "Just translate it," Heine is said to have answered; "Christ weeps when rich Jews drink such wine while so many poor people suffer hunger and thirst."2 It matters little if the anecdote is apocryphal, for Heine's writings are full of barbs at the Rothschild wealth and power. Once he referred to Baron James as "Herr von Shylock in Paris."3 In another place, humorous praise of Rothschild slips into irony as he speaks of the unhappiness of the rich, who, according to the words of the "divine com­ munist," will as soon get into heaven as a camel will pass through the eye of a needle; the solution of the great "camel problem," Heine goes on, is one of the philanthropic questions of our time, for if the rich had more hope of heaven they might become less greedy and hard­ hearted on earth.4 Drawing attention to his own intimacy with Roth­ schild, Heine claims to have seen a stock market speculator bowing to Rothschild's chamber pot, so great a god has he become.5 In a more serious vein he argued that Rothschild's huge financial power was one of the moving forces of history and contributed to the breakdown of the old order.6 The Talmud, Heine once wrote, was the Jews' bulwark against Rome; who needs it now, when every three months the Papal nuncio brings James de Rothschild the interest payments on a loan?7 In a bitter passage of the Baths of Lucca that he did not publish, Heine praises the Rothschilds for preventing revolution by propping up the finances of the European regimes; religion is no longer powerful enough to keep the peoples in stupid passivity, and finance capital, the new 2 49

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religion, fulfills this role; thus Rome is dying from the "Jewish poi­ son."8 None of this seems to have bothered the Rothschilds, who remained Heine's friendly patrons; and Heine made it publicly clear that his relations with them were quite "famillionaire."9 Cheerfully he sent Baroness Rothschild a copy of Borne, which contains some of his se­ verest strictures against them, with effusive compliments and an ur­ bane apology.10 Furthermore, Heine, like other literary men of the time, demanded and obtained substantial sums from Rothschild; on several occasions he made Heine a gift of railroad stocks or govern­ ment bonds, or the interest on them, which netted him thousands of francs. Apart from his Parisian connections, Heine was becoming a sight for visitors to see. In time this role as tourist attraction became oner­ ous to him, as all sorts of dubious characters washed up at his threshold, and it came to the point that he tried to keep his address secret and instructed Mathilde to deny he was at home to any German visitor. The correspondence to Heine over the years exhibits an increasing flood of letters of introduction penned for all sorts of visitors by his acquaintances, and this practice, common in the nineteenth century, developed rather into a plague for him. But the late 1830s and early 1840s brought him a number of interesting callers, who provided him not only with company but with fresh perspectives that helped to counter his constant danger of growing out of touch. Most of the younger generation of oppositional writers and poets turned up at one time or another. But more famous personalities began to appear as well. Hans Christian Andersen came by in 1843.11 They had met ten years before, but had not quite hit it off;12 this time they got along better, and Andersen dedicated some verses to him.13 Both of the lead­ ing playwrights in the German language payed visits, Franz Grillparzer in the spring of 1836, and Friedrich Hebbel in September 1843, bearing a letter of introduction from Campe, who was his publisher. Hebbel's enthusiasm for Heine, like Grillparzer's, cooled in the course of time. But, while Grillparzer's relationship to Heine had been rather tangential, Hebbel's was significant for a while. In 1841 Hebbel had written a thoughtful and admiring review of the fourth edition of the Book of Songs, and in Paris they had long discussions on his tragedy Judith, which made a great impression on Heine and may in fact have been influenced by Heine's description of Horace Vernet's painting of that subject in French Painters.14 Hebbel, whose ego was at least as huge and restless as Heine's, made much of this recognition. However, these were not Heine's closest associations, which tended

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to be with less eminent people. One constant figure in his entourage was Alexandre Weill (1811-1899), an Alsatian Jew who lived an ex­ ceedingly busy literary life in both the German and French cultures. Heine certainly did not regard him as any great genius, and their rela­ tionship underwent episodes of strain, though he forced himself to a preface to Weill's Alsatian village tales in 1847,15 and Weill, with his extensive literary and journalistic connections, was sometimes useful in fronting for Heine in polemical campaigns. He was a vivacious and comic man, bubbling with Jewish stories and Yiddish or pseudo-Yid­ dish patter; he published over the years numerous lively and gossipy memoirs of Heine, culminating in a book that over long stretches is quite unbelievable.16 Another person with whom Heine remained on a cheerful social footing for many years was Caroline Jaubert (18031883), the celibate wife of a lawyer twenty-four years her senior; he became an attorney general and was named the executor of Heine's last will. She was the mistress of a cheerful and much-frequented salon, which Heine must often have visited. She was not pretty, but was famous for her petite hands and feet, which Heine frequently compli­ mented in his notes to her; she in turn showed him great sympathy during his last years of suffering. She was the kind of amiable and unthreatening person with whom he could have his easiest relation­ ships, and clearly he liked her very much. Heine's troubles, however, did not desist. He continued to com­ plain of his health, of recurrent eye trouble, migraine headaches, and facial paralysis. In the spring of 1843 he wrote to his brother Max, now his medical confidante, of numbness on the left side of his body and pressure in his forehead.17 As persistent as the pressure in his head was the mounting pressure from the German governments. At the be­ ginning of 1842 the special censorship on Young Germany was lifted subject to a loyalty oath, but the option was made available only to those writers residing in Germany, a measure obviously directed against Heine. At almost the same moment, in December 1841, Prussia banned all the products of Hoffmann und Campe. This was a severe blow to Campe, but it infuriated Heine even more, contributing to his intensifying radical mood. "I advise," he wrote to Campe on February 28, 1842, "open war with Prussia to the death. . . . I have carried my moderation to the most disquieting degree. . . . I scorn the ordinary demagogues and their doings are repugnant to me because they were always untimely; but I would offer my hand now to the shabbiest agitator when it is a matter of avenging the Prussians' infamous per­ fidies and settling their hash. . . . What can be done from my side will be done."18 Doubtless this sounded to Campe like rodomontade;19 he

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was determined to fight what he called "the war between the House of Hohenzollern and Hoffmann und Campe" with his own means.20 But he was concerned, for his options were limited. Privately Heine took the opportunity to look around for a new publisher.21 Then a different kind of disaster impinged from a wholly unexpected quarter. On May 5, 1842, fire broke out in the old part of Hamburg. It rapidly got out of control and raged for three days and nights, destroying a substantial part of the city and making 20,000 people homeless. When Heine heard the news, his first thought was naturally of his mother. She had escaped, but was completely burned out. A French newspaper made much of the fact that, in her letter to him, she apologized for not being able to prepay the postage because the post office had burned down.22 Campe's establishment, too, was de­ stroyed; unlike Betty Heine, he had the good fortune to be insured with a company not bankrupted by the disaster, though he had diffi­ culty collecting. And the ill wind blew some good after all. The Ham­ burg fire aroused sympathy all over Europe, and Prussia was among those who came to the city's aid. During the disaster Prussia had loaned troops to keep order and army engineers to help with the explosives necessary to contain the fire; afterwards she cast about for other meas­ ures of relief, and among them, perhaps oddly, was the lifting of the ban on Hoffmann und Campe in June. Although this stroke of fortune relieved Campe's momentary beleaguerment, it did Heine no appreciable good. Until the 1848 Revolution every one of his works was banned in Prussia upon its appearance and in most other German states as well. Even Denmark, at Prussian insistence, banned his New Poems in 1844. By the end of that year his voluntary exile had become an involuntary one. In September the Prussian government ordered the arrest of Heine, along with Karl Marx and his associates, at the Prussian border, and in December the order was reiterated against Heine personally.23 It was renewed sub­ sequently "every year," as Heine put it, "at the holy Christmas sea­ son, when the cheerful little lights sparkle on the Christmas trees."24 He was being driven off that carefully delienated ground of higher revolutionary vision that he had tried to mark out in Borne. On the one hand, he began to feel grief at his separation from his homeland; on the other, he found himself harassed into a gingerly alliance with his fellow radical writers from whom he thus far had endeavored to remain aloof. Two poems published simultaneously in August 1843 in Laube's newspaper expressed these feelings. One, entitled "Night Thoughts" (Nachtgedanken), is an utterance of longing for his moth­ er; the bulk of it has been forgotten by most people, but its opening

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lines are often cited: "If I think of Germany in the night, / Then I am robbed of my sleep." 25 The other, entitled "Life's Journey" (Lebensfahrt), originally written for Hans Christian Andersen,26 employs the ancient topos of life as a sea voyage. In it the poet mourns a happier time when he shared his vessel with dear friends who have perished in the fatherland; now he has boarded a new ship with new comrades, but their song and laughter give no joy; twice the line occurs: "How far is home! my heart how heavy!"27 We must now turn to this heavyhearted, fundamentally unwanted camaraderie into which Heine found himself driven;

Political Poetry AROUND 1840 the strategy of oppositional writing in Germany changed rather abruptly. The Young German movement had been dissipated, not only by the Federal ban and the interpersonal repulsions of its members. Its prose writing, despite government nervousness about its accessibility to "all classes of people," was too abstruse, turgid, and ec­ centric to reach beyond a narrow and esoteric fraction of the edu­ cated public. What was needed was a genuinely accessible genre of community-forming force, one that would not only give expression to the feelings and attitudes of a large portion of the public, but that could be easily understood, communicated, and shared. This genre was verse—not the finely crafted, difficult poetry of a Platen or a Morike, or the elevated, sardonic ironies of Heine, but foursquare verse, free for the most part of artistic experimentation, instead filling familiar forms with radical content in order to be hospitable to the literary horizon of the general public. German pre-revolutionary political poetry does not begin all at once in 1840; its history reaches well back into the preceding decade. The Austrian Count Anton Alexander von Auersperg, who wrote un­ der the pen name of Anastasius Griin (1806-1876), had caused a considerable stir with his Walks of a Viennese Poet (Spaziergange eines Wiener Poeten, 1831) and Rubble (Schutt, 1836), poem cycles urbanely castigating Metternichian oppression. Griin found an imita­ tor in Franz Dingelstedt (1814-1881), who published Walks of a Kassel Poet in 1838 and followed it in 1840 with another volume of politi­ cal verse, Songs of a Cosmopolitan Night-Watchman (Lieder eines

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kosmopolitischen Nachtwachters), which Campe published. There had been a considerable amount of often anonymous radical verse trans­ mitted orally among students and the common people. But after 1840 political poetry became much more prominent on the German scene and personalities sprang into view that had not been visible before. Campe himself was surprised at the development and said that he was receiving "hundreds" of manuscripts of this kind.1 There is a tempta­ tion to associate this atmospheric change with the most obvious politi­ cal juncture of 1840, the death of Frederick William III and the ac­ cession of Frederick William IV to the Prussian throne in June. Frederick William III had been king for as long as most people then living could remember, indeed for about a month longer than Heine himself had been alive. Though held in some regard for his stolid virtuousness, for the younger generation his name was indissolubly linked with the reactionary alliance of Prussia, Austria, and Russia, with the unfulfilled promise of a constitution, and with the system of censor­ ship and intellectual oppression, which indeed he personally instigated and vigorously prosecuted. Perhaps his now forty-five-year-old son offered some hope. Frederick William IV was culturally and intellec­ tually brighter than his father; he had numerous connections to the literary world; and it was believed, as it so often is of crown princes, that he was of a more liberal temperament. In this the younger gen­ eration was to be disappointed; he turned out, in his own way, to be one of the worst of all the Prussian kings. His mind was awake and even imaginative, but unstable; he became mentally incapacitated be­ fore the end of his reign. His main literary connections were with the Romantics, and he permitted a reactionary camarilla at court to play upon his Romantic notions of kingship by divine right—a style that his common-sensical father had explicitly abandoned—in guiding his well-intentioned, conscientious, but backward and often incompetent policies, and, although there was a short thaw in 1840-1842, when the censorship and witch-hunting were relaxed, it was not long before he clamped down again in the familiar manner. Even so, that moment when it was possible to believe that a new era had dawned over Prus­ sia's very throne, to hope that a monarch had appeared who might be a king of the people and thus a friend of the people's self-appointed literary spokesmen, was probably the impetus for the proliferation of a public, political poetry. In the same year of 1840 there was a certain amount of French saber-rattling on the Rhine, reviving the patriotic mode of verse born in the Wars of Liberation, which to some extent contaminated the progressive mood with nationalism. Three names stand out particularly in a good-sized crowd. August

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Heinrich Hoffmann (1798-1874), who called himself "von Fallersleben" after his home town to distinguish himself from all the other Hoffmanns around, was a philologist and medievalist who was dis­ missed from his Breslau professorship in 1842 for his ironically titled Unpolitical Songs (Unpolitische Lieder), published by Campe. He became for a time the beatnik poet of nineteenth-century Germany, travelling from tavern to tavern with his guitar and his simple and humorous but biting songs, often set to familiar folk melodies. It was he who, on the island of Helgoland in 1841, wrote "The Song of the Germans" (Das Lied der Deutschen), beginning: "Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles." Campe happened to be vacationing there at the time, and Hoffmann showed him the poem. Though not usually a fast man on the draw with his purse, Campe paid four louis d'ors for it on the spot, pointedly had it set to the Haydn melody from the Emperor Quartet that served as an Austrian national anthem, and dis­ tributed it as a broadside all over Germany. It was banned everywhere, but its fame endured until it became, under a Social Democratic gov­ ernment, the German national anthem in 1922. Not everyone remem­ bers today that this problematic piece of nationalistic rhetoric, the first two stanzas of which are no longer sung in modern Germany, was in its time a subversive poem. Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810-1876) began as a commercial clerk in Barmen, not far from where the young Friedrich Engels was growing up among the textile mills; to Engels he was an inspirational figure proving that a member of the merchant class could pursue a literary career. In the late 1830s he made a name for himself as a poet of exotic North African desert themes, and in 1841 he was awarded a pension by Frederick William IV. But he became increasingly disaf­ fected politically and in 1844, to general astonishment, he threw up the pension. From then on his verse became increasingly radical and he was a prominent literary spokesman during and after the Revolu­ tion of 1848. His political poetry is not built on the folksong model; it is learned, allegorical, long-lined verse, sometimes powerful in its rhetorical utterance but unmusical and often lead-footed. Freiligrath, who was no fool, said of himself in 1837: "Bombast, rhetoric—that is my strong point";2 it continued to be so in his radical phase. In the conflict between the dissidents and the authorities he was an important figure. In 1848 he was arrested and put on trial in Darmstadt for one of his poems, but he was acquitted under the pressure of a large public demonstration outside the courtroom. He had become associated with Marx's Nene Rheinische Zeitung (New Rhenish Newspaper), and in his English exile he served as Marx's banker, although in time he re-

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belled against Marx's demands for subordination and broke with him. As a translator he became a significant mediator of English and Ameri­ can literature to the Germans, while his daughter translated German poetry, including Heine's, into English. In the 1860s he returned to Germany, supported by a large sum that had been raised by public subscription, sufficient evidence of his standing and reputation. The most gifted of these poets was the lapsed theologian Georg Herwegh (1817-1875), who found a middle way between Hoffmann's folksiness and Freiligrath's learnedness. His verse is conventional in form, but often full of travestied literary and Biblical allusion, aimed precisely at the consciousness of the largest part of the literate middle class. Heine once remarked that when the time came in Germany for political revolution, the language of freedom would be Biblical.3 No one realized this with more precision than Herwegh. He is much surer than his contemporaries in diction and poetic compression, and his uncompromising rhetoric is of uncommon effectiveness. It was, in fact, his verse replique, published in Marx's first paper, the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Newspaper), to a poem in which Freiligrath attempted to defend the poet's neutrality above political strife that helped to move Freiligrath to his more radical position. Herwegh's Poems of a Living Man (Gedichte eines Lebendigen, 1841 and 1843) made him for a brief time the most celebrated writer in Germany. He was feted and banqueted in town after town, and this sudden fame went a little to his head, for he attempted to exploit Frederick William IVs puta­ tive liberality by presenting himself in person as the loyal opposition. The upshot of that was that a periodical he was attempting to found was banned, and some people, including Heine, laughed at him for his simple-mindedness. Later, in 1849, he got into a worse scrape; he tried to invade Germany from France at the head of a few hundred German exiles. The troop was, of course, badly defeated in its first skirmish, and Herwegh was alleged to have conducted himself unvalorously on the occasion; while it is not certain that he did, his rep­ utation suffered from the debacle for a long time. In later years, how­ ever, he became associated with the Social Democratic movement and wrote political verse on its behalf, the only writer of his generation to do so. Heine observed these developments with a jaundiced eye. When one surveys his complex response to the political poetry of the 1840s, it is hard to escape the feeling that he found his own eminence as a revolutionary spokesman threatened by these men, especially as their symbiosis with the public at large was much greater than his. He did not want to be associated with the radical poets any more than he had

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wanted to be associated with Borne. In the Letters on the French Stage he had written that he had been forced to take part in the struggles of the time, then ruminated: "But I don't know how I should express myself; my feelings al­ ways retained a certain seclusion from the feelings of others; I knew how they felt, but I felt quite different, and as stoutly as my battle-steed romped and as mercilessly as I beat my enemies with my sword, still I was never gripped by the fever or the joy or the fear of battle; my inner calm afterwards struck me as eerie; I noticed that my thoughts sojourned elsewhere, while I laid about in the densest throng of partisan warfare, and I felt sometimes like Ogier the Dane, who fought against the Saracens while sleep­ walking."4 In fact, Heine's best personal relations with the political poets over the years were with the mildest and most aristocratic of them, Grun and Dingelstedt. The latter even went over to the other side, acquiring eventually the title of court councillor; Heine teased him about it in verse but did not seem to resent it much.5 Hoffmann von Fallersleben, whom Heine had known slightly as a student in Bonn and Berlin, he came to abominate; he took Hoffmann as a symptom of the destruc­ tion of poesy by democracy, a process in which he considered political poetry to be a transitional phenomenon,6 and he kept insisting to Campe that it was Hoffmann, not he, who was responsible for the banning of the firm and he urged Campe to get rid of him. Campe professed not to admire Hoffmann, either, but it was he, not Heine, who appealed to the public. Campe claimed, perhaps with some exag­ geration, to have sold in one year thirty copies of Borne as against 12,000 of Hoffmann's Unpolitical Songs.1 Heine became acquainted with Herwegh in Paris and at first accorded him some ironic respect; he wrote Herwegh a poem calling him the "iron lark," at the same time dismissing his aspirations as Utopian and hopeless.8 But his admira­ tion turned to scorn after Herwegh's abortive confrontation with the King of Prussia, and in several acid poems he presented Herwegh as a dull-witted Swabian attempting to play the role of Schiller's Marquis Posa before Philip of Spain.9 It is said that even Marx, who certainly had no inhibitions against personal lampooning, tried to prevent the publication of Heine's cruelest verses against Herwegh.10 His rather different reaction to Freiligrath will be mentioned in another connec­ tion. Heine's dismissals of these writers are almost always couched in aesthetic terms; they were bad poets, so far as he was concerned, and

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with that he had no patience. Just because "the great progressive ideas of mankind are constantly present in their most magnificent clarity and greatness to the mind of the poet," he wrote in the preface to Atta Troll, "he is all the more irresistibly overcome by hilarity when he sees how coarsely, crudely, and awkwardly those ideas can be con­ ceived by his obtuse contemporaries."11 In one of his articles in the Allgemeine Xeitung he argued that the highest thing in art is "selfaware freedom of the spirit" that should manifest itself "in the treat­ ment, in the form, by no means in the subject" and "artists who choose freedom itself and emancipation for their subject are usually of lim­ ited, shackled spirit, truly unfree"; after quoting verses directed against political poetry that he says are by Goethe but are not, Heine went on: "The truly great poets have always grasped the great interests of the day otherwise than in rhymed newspaper articles and worried lit­ tle when the slavish crowd, whose crudeness disgusts them, reproaches them with elitism."12 In addition, he suspected the political poets of ideological complicities, especially with the German nationalism he so relentlessly opposed. "Sutler-women of freedom," he called them, and "washerwomen of Christian-Germanic nationalism."13 Except in regard to Hoffmann, Heine was not fair about this, but it is true that they were revolutionary patriots in a sense that Heine, oriented as he was on a complete sensualist transformation of soicety on a cosmo­ politan basis, was not. Yet he met the challenge also by writing politi­ cal verse of his own in the 1840s that shared many themes and attitudes with his despised contemporaries. If one reads the corpus of political verse of the time chronologically, one can see a little more clearly how Heine fitted into it and how he differed from the others. The political poetry of the 1840s describes a kind of wave pattern between exhortation and satire that can be correlated to changes in the political atmosphere. The exhortations to communal action appear when the situation seems to embody some hope, as in the months im­ mediately following the accession of Frederick William IV; the tone changes to bitter satire and denunciation as these hopes turn sour. The difference is already observable between the two volumes of Herwegh's Poems of a Living Man of 1841 and 1843. Through the bleak mid-forties satirical attack remains the dominant mode, until the Rev­ olution of 1848 again raises hopes, and the enthusiastic marching songs and high rhetorical calls to action reappear, giving way again to de­ nunciation, satire, and bitterness with the failure of the Revolution and the victory of its enemies; by 1850 or 1851 the whole mode of political poetry has almost entirely died away. Heine is not located on this curve. With very few exceptions, his

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mode throughout the episode is satirical attack. He lampoons the King of Prussia and the King of Bavaria; he excoriates the German people for its political torpor and servility; he flays the greed and cruelty of the dominant classes and the wealthy. On the one hand, this stance exhibits his clear-sighted resistance to illusions and doomed enthusiams. For one thing, he had never invested any confidence in the Prus­ sian crown prince, whom he mistrusted and scorned. On the other, however, when one reads the pattern of Heine's contemporaries, one can see that the satirical mode correlates with a sense of defeat and futility, and thus it appears that the element of hopefulness was absent from his political poetry from the outset. Also absent from it, for the most part, is the communal first-person-plural utterance; the word "we" occurs normally in contexts satirizing the German people. Other­ wise the stance is first-person-singular, adverting to the higher view­ point and deeper insight of the poet's imagination and his constrained dangerous potential. Heine may have had an instinct that the kind of popular movement projected by his contemporaries contained an af­ firmative potential for a compromising alliance of classes such as in fact occurred in Germany after the failed Revolution of 1848. His negative stance, which is one of the strengths of his verse, as it avoids pomposity and flat statement, thus retaining aesthetic qualities of irony and paradox, was also not without appeal to some radicals and prole­ tarians. Heine was told in 1846 that German workers in Paris were learning his poems by heart and that they were replacing Herwegh's in popularity.14 In later times his verse acquired a use value for social­ ist and communist movements. But these are superficial and selective responses, if historically significant ones. Read carefully, his political poems run a risk of lapsing into despair. There are a few exceptions to these generalizations, and it is doubt­ less not an accident that one of them is by far the most renowned of his political poems. In June 1844 the desperately suffering weavers in the Silesian town of Peterswaldau rose up in a revolt against the mill owner that could be quelled only after some days with the aid of troops. It was the first modern working-class uprising in Germany, and it received some resonance from earlier revolts of French weavers in Lyons. Both events generated a substantial literary response—the Ger­ man rebellion, of course, became the subject of Gerhart Hauptmann's famous drama of 1892, The Weavers—but Heine's poem was the most effective of his time. "The Silesian Weavers" (Die Schlesischen Web­ er) is a song of the weavers themselves; the poet stays out of the poem, although Heine's familiar rhythmic skill and compact terseness served him well here. So did his characteristic negativity: the weavers make

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no speeches about brotherhood and freedom, no laments of the suffer­ ing; they curse God, king, and fatherland—the motto of the Prussian militia—and threaten "old Germany" with the shroud they are weav­ ing for it. By removing his poetic persona from the center of the poem, Heine for once created an activist work of wide resonance; at the risk of confiscation and arrest, the poem was carried around by German workers for decades. Campe, who never dared to publish the poem, not even after 1848, told Heine that in February 1847 a Berlin citizen was jailed for reading it aloud.15 Freiligrath sent him a message the same year that it was read as an "opening benediction" at meetings of the German West End Communist Society in London.16 Friedrich Engels translated it into English and published it on De­ cember 13, 1844, in the New Moral World under the heading: "Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany," with the remark: "Henry Heine, the most eminent of all living German poets, has joined our ranks."17 Engels was mistaken about this in the long run. Heine was not a man to join anything. Other observers have been misled in the same way by failing to note that "The Silesian Weavers" is not typical of Heine's political poetry, but is a boundary phenomenon; on the whole the activist Heine was not a "poet of the people," for all his allusions to the "folk" in his writings, but a poet against the people's enemies. But the pressures exerted against him in the 1840s drove him for a time into radical alliances, and he understood perfectly well that this was a shift of roles; he wrote to Kolb on April 12, 1844: "From a denounced renegade I have suddenly become again a savior of the fatherland," and in 1846 he remarked to Varnhagen that his turn to the radical cause was "apostasy to myself."18 He published a number of his political poems, including "The Silesian Weavers," in the radi­ cal periodical Vorwarts! (Forward!), which had been founded in Par­ is in 1844, financed, oddly, by Meyerbeer. It had started out by at­ tacking Heine rather fiercely, but then it was taken over by the most uncompromising of the German radicals in Paris. One of them was a twenty-five-year-old doctor of philosophy, Karl Heinrich Marx.

P3 Karl Marx HEINE'S relationship with Marx is difficult for the biographer to man­

age for two reasons. First of all, it has, especially in recent years, been

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blown up way out of proportion; at times Heine has been maneuvered into the role of John the Baptist to Marx's Christ. Secondly, as is so often the case with important questions in Heine's life, there is an annoying deficiency of evidence and information. We have only one letter of Heine to Marx and three of Marx to him, though certainly there were more—Marx once indicated that he had two letters from Heine in his possession—and there is also a letter from Marx to Campe of October 7, 1844, with a message to Heine acknowledging receipt of his poems.1 We do not know just how or when they met. Marx moved to Paris in October 1843; the best current guess is that they became acquainted sometime in December, probably through the Left Hegelian Arnold Ruge (1802-1880); Heine's first mention of Marx is in a letter to Ruge of January 7, 1844.2 Marx was expelled from Paris in January 1845 at the instigation of the Prussian government and moved to Brussels. For three months of this period, Heine, as we shall see, was absent on the second of his visits home; the personal relation­ ship lasted, therefore, for only some ten or eleven months. Details are almost wholly wanting, apart from a couple of second-hand anecdotes that, as usual, must be regarded with caution. One relates that Heine, finding Marx's baby daughter Jenny in convulsions, saved her life by preparing a bath for her and caring for her himself.3 No one knows if this is true; if it is, one can be sure that Marx would have been grateful. It will not do to underestimate the relationship, either. For one thing, it does have an inescapable epochal dimension. Heine was the most eminent literary personality with whom Marx had any associa­ tion, while Marx, in turn, was the most significant historical figure of Heine's acquaintance. Perhaps it has loomed so large in our perception of Heine because of the relative dearth of such genuinely distinguished contacts in his life. But it occurred furthermore at a crucial juncture in the lives of both men, one with some common determinants in the rising level of repression in Germany. Earlier in 1843 Marx had been driven from the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung by the censor­ ship. He was beginning to feel the inadequacy of purely philosophical responses or of liberal activism to the situation of the time and was turning his attention to the study of political economy. It was just at this time that the life-long friendship with Engels began. Heine, as we have seen, had found himself increasingly driven to a radical role and to "new companions." It is useful to bear in mind that Heine was twenty years older than Marx and the more experienced man, though Marx had doubtless al­ ready begun to overtake him intellectually. Heine had been observing

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public and social affairs in France for a long time and in all probability had something to teach Marx about them. Marx's mind was a fantastic filing cabinet that apparently retained everything he ever read, and echoes of Heine are not hard to find in his early writings. Tο take the best-known example: Heine's characterization of religion in Borne as "spiritual opium" soothing the wounds of deprived mankind turns up in Marx's Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, written during the connection with Heine, as "the sigh of the op­ pressed creature . . . the opium of the people."4 Moreover, Heine was by now a very famous man. Marx had a life-long habit of trying to draw prominent men of letters into his orbit, relationships that usually ended badly sooner or later. In any case, one thing clear from the evi­ dence is that the relationship, while it lasted, was warm and friendly to a degree not common in the lives of either man. Heine made Marx a present of the proof sheets of Germany, A Winter's Tale, remarking that "we need, after all, few tokens to understand one another," and when Marx was obliged to leave Paris, he wrote that he wished he could pack up Heine and take him along.5 No matter how much exegesis has been strained to this end, the harmony of Marx and Heine is not to be found in a shared doctrinal outlook. There are, of course, points of similarity in their critiques of political tyranny, social inequality, and economic deprivation, but most of them belong to the wider context of the opposition to which both belonged, though one can, if one likes, comb Heine's works for nuances that bring him closer than his contemporaries to Marx on some matters. The association with Marx doubtless encouraged Heine to sharpen his polemical tone still further. But it is difficult to detect any new ideas or perspectives that Heine might have obtained from Marx. His view of politics and society had long been fixed around the foci of hatred of aristocracy and orthodox religion and the vision of human emancipation through the overcoming of spiritualist repression. Even in the work most closely associated with Marx—Germany, A Winter's Tale—nothing new accrues to these familiar themes; only the satirical and denunciatory rhetoric reaches a new height of skill and force. Between Heine's poetic vision of a sensualist emancipation of man and Marx's logical, rigorously materialistic analysis of political econ­ omy and the historical location of capitalism there was a nascent in­ congruence that became more visible as the two men developed along divergent paths. It seems to me that what linked them was rather a shared uncompromising radicality of temperament, a negativity that made both men instinctively resistant to alliances and viewpoints that

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detected any positive potential in the existing situation, any strength on which to build for the future in the contemporary order of society. In a sense, both Heine and Marx wrote off the bourgeoisie as a class even before it had properly constituted itself in Germany, though for rather different reasons. They were equally sensitive to the patriotic element in the German opposition as a potential for a historical com­ promise with the ruling order, and both shunned it. They were not reformers but haters, and this was very likely their most fundamental bond with one another. Moreover, Heine had become very isolated in consequence of Borne. Much of the public was up in arms against him, while he did not much like or admire what he saw of the radicals. In Marx he found a young man of obviously superior format who liked and admired him a good deal. Marx in fact offered to write a defense of Borne, though he did not do so.6 But the example of Marx could not relieve Heine's isolation in the long run. Having rejected every aspect of the existing order, Marx found the leverage for hope and activism outside the social order, in the industrial proletariat. This Heine was unable to do. He never grasped Marx's historical vision or his profoundly revolutionary trans­ figuration of Hegel's philosophy, which Heine persisted in seeing as a matter of the deification of mortal man. In fact it is doubtful that Heine ever read much of Marx's mature writing; his preserved per­ sonal library contains only a copy of The Holy Family of 1845, uncut except for the first forty pages.7 His mood in these matters shifted about, making him, particularly in this regard, a malleable object of selective quotation by various interested parties. The instability of his views derived from his fundamental dilemma as a "tribune of the people" who nevertheless made no pretense of intimacy with or even allegiance to the lower classes. He made a studied point of his aloof­ ness from the working and artisan classes in Borne, and later he de­ scribed an encounter with the radical Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871), who repelled Heine by not removing his cap in his presence and ap­ palled him with a habit of rubbing the lacerations left by his prison manacles.8 In a rather condescending account of the socialist Louis Blanc (1811-1882) Heine made the famous remark: "It is true that we are all brothers, but I am the big brother, and you are the little broth­ ers, and I am entitled to a more substantial portion."9 While his whole identity was bound up with his sense of himself as a poet, he feared that the poetic dignity was obsolescent in the face of this accumulating raw force in society. The question of political power and its distribu­ tion was never an integrated component of his thinking, as it came to be in Marx's. Fundamentally, and quite logically from his sensualist

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principles, Heine derived the threat of revolution from hunger and deprivation, and he believed that civilization could defend itself only by relieving these intensfying miseries. But, unlike the "true Socialists" and other reformist or meliorist contemporaries, he could detect no likelihood that this would happen short of a social Armageddon. Thus Heine's outlook on the future in the latter part of his life became in­ creasingly glum. This, too, clearly distinguished him from Marx and Engels. On the other hand, he did circulate at least on the periphery of so­ cialist circles. We have a report that he attended a solemn ceremony in 1847 on the anniversary of Fourier's death and he was evidently acquainted with Proudhon.10 However, his most cordial radical con­ nection was with Marx's quondam literary associate Georg Weerth (1822-1856), a robust satirist who shared Heine's skillfully slashing wit but none of his inner complexity and tension. From various points of his wanderings, as far away as Venezuela and Brazil, Weerth wrote some of the wittiest and most entertaining letters Heine ever received; certainly they must have brought some cheer to his melancholy last years. On account of the dearth of such figures in German letters, the glib but artless Weerth has recently been immoderately overpraised by contemporary literary historians. They will not be found to mention the fact emerging clearly from his correspondence with Heine that, once in the New World, he promptly acquired the purest racist and colonialist attitudes.11 After Marx was expelled from France at the beginning of 1845, he played no further important role in Heine's life, although a sporadic contact was maintained. Efforts to induce Heine to support the Deutsche Briisseler Xeitung (German Brussels Newspaper), with which Marx became associated, met with no response.12 Engels visited Heine occasionally, and Marx, able to return temporarily to Paris after the 1848 Revolution, called on him a couple of times.13 Marx kept him­ self informed on Heine through Hermann Ewerbeck (1806-1860), the Communist League representative in Paris, and through one of Heine's last secretaries, Richard Reinhardt (1829-1898), who corresponded with Marx and the Communist League. Marx's admiration for Heine endured for some time; quotations from Heine's political verse and witty sallies appear repeatedly in his writings, usually in lampooning and vituperative contexts.14 Engels, who, unlike Marx, had at first taken Borne's side against Heine, came around to the opposite opinion, praising Heine as an ally and sometimes playing him off polemically against the Young Germans and the "true Socialists."

V. THE RADICAL PHASE Toward the end of Heine's life their attitude became less friendly, although their public allusions to him remained respectful and sup­ portive. Heine was to criticize Marx specifically in the preface to the second edition of Religion and Philosophy of 1852,15 and an untrue implication in 1855 that Marx had defended him against having been suborned by the French pension angered Marx at "the old dog" with his "bad conscience."16 He hooted with scorn at the religious confes­ sion in Heine's last will,17 as indeed a younger Heine might have done in a similar case, and he spread slanderous gossip about Heine's wid­ ow.18 Later, in 1866, Engels was reminded of Heine while reading Horace, "au fond an equally common dog in politics" who pretended to oppose tyranny while "crawling up Augustus' rear end."19 Need­ less to say, these comments are today rarely referred to by those seek­ ing to bathe Heine in Marx's aureole. Marx and Engels might quote Heine's barbs, but it is certain their ultimate judgment was not that Heine had been their ally or forerunner.

Journeys Home AT THIS time, after an absence of a dozen years, Heine made two visits to Hamburg. His reasons were several. First of all, he longed to see his aging mother. Not only did he care deeply about her; she was for him a poignant focus of his general underlying homesickness for Ger­ many. Secondly, he wanted to confer with Campe, who, in fact, had been urging such a visit for quite some time. Campe, echoing a criti­ cism of Heine widespread in these years, persistently complained that he no longer understood conditions in Germany and needed to inform himself first-hand. Heine, for his part, desired to get on a better foot­ ing with Campe. Contrary to his usual pattern, he got along better with Campe face to face than in correspondence, perhaps owing to the force of Campe's personality and his skills at persuasion and sales­ manship, which were much remarked upon by other contemporaries. In any case, when they did meet, old friendship superseded old antag­ onism. Thirdly, there were signs that Uncle Salomon was failing. This was a circumstance of no little interest, and it was particularly in the forefront of Heine's mind during the second visit. He wished to present himself to the patriarch, counteract the intrigues against

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him he always envisioned in Salomon's entourage, and effect a dutiful reconciliation that would survive beyond the grave and especially in the old Croesus' will. He would undoubtedly have undertaken such a trip—after all, no very great distance—much sooner if it had not been fraught with con­ siderable risk. He had justified fears of being arrested, especially in Prussia. But the need had become greater than the risk. On his first journey he travelled quickly and inconspicuously, spending as little time as possible on Prussian territory. He left on October 21, 1843, travel­ ling via Brussels and Bremen to arrive in Hamburg on the twentyninth. Apart from the pleasure of a reunion with his mother, sister, and friends, this journey was a great success in a business way. He and Campe not only kissed and made up; they negotiated a contract that that pleased and relieved Heine greatly. The agreement concerning the collected edition made in 1837 was valid for eleven years, so the new contract was drawn to go into force in 1848. But Heine gained some advantage by negotiating it in ad­ vance. Campe's rights to the collected edition were renewed without prejudice to any new works Heine might yet write, but Campe was given first right of refusal to any such new works, thus seemingly putting an end to Heine's flirting and threatening with other publish­ ers. Campe was also granted the posthumous rights. He agreed to pay, beginning in 1848, an annuity of 1,200 marks banco that was to be continued to Heine's widow until her death, should she survive him. Should Heine die before 1848, the annuity to the widow was to begin at once. Until 1848 Campe agreed to pay two hundred marks banco annually "as a special gratuity." In a final article Campe agreed to pay for poems that had previously appeared in periodicals and some new poems, among them Atta Troll, an additional 1,200 marks banco.1 With this agreement Heine had achieved, apart from what seemed for the moment a truce with Campe, a long-standing desideratum: some regularity in his income from his publisher. The 1,200 marks banco, equal to about 2,400 francs, were not sufficient to meet his standard of living, but they provided a permanent and dependable base, and they met another worry that had come increasingly to pre­ occupy him: they secured Mathilde's welfare for the future. As it turned out, the firm of Hoffmann und Campe paid the annuity for a full thirty-five years until Mathilde's death. Heine wrote to his wife of this achievement with the greatest of satisfaction.2 His letters to Mathilde during this visit, twelve in the space of forty-four days, give us an interesting insight into the tone he took with her. They are full of asseverations of love and longing, along with jealous admonitions to

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behave herself, to stay home, and to occupy herself with useful pas­ times: "j'espere que tu es sage et raisonnable. Je te supplie de ne pas trop te montrer en public"; "N'oublie pas que mon oeil est toujours fixe sur toi; je sais tout ce que tu fais, et ce que je ne sais pas apresent je Ie saurai plus tard"; "Tiens-toi coi dans ton trou autant que possible, travaille, etudie, ennuie-toi honnetement, file de la laine, comme cette bonne Lucrece que tu as vue a TOdeon."3 He urges her to write reg­ ularly, though she did so only once, and to study German so that he might bring her with him the next time, which she doubtless did not do at all. There is no reliable evidence that his fat, complacent wife had given him the slightest ground for his persistent jealousy, but he had once and for all set it into his head that she was both seductive and naively helpless in Babylon on the Seine—"Paris, ce terrible gouffre"4—and that, being French, she was frivolous and fickle; it was per­ haps a form of courtship and compliment. At the same time one sees a bit of the domestic manners he allowed himself toward her; he writes how happy he would have been to see her at a dance at his Uncle Henry's, "t'y voir tournoyer avec ton gros derriere!"5 Heine left Hamburg on December 7 and returned via Hanover, Biickeburg (the seat of his paternal ancestors), Minden, Paderborn, Miinster, Hagen, Cologne, and Aachen—the route that, roughly in reverse order, he was to immortalize in Germany, A Winter's Tale. On the fourteenth he was in Brussels and two days later back in Paris. Seven months later, with Uncle Salomon on his mind, he made the trip again, this time by boat in order to avoid Prussian soil. He left Le Havre on July 20, 1844, an^ arrived in Hamburg two days later. In order to exhibit himself as an orderly married man, he took Mathilde with him. This experiment was not a success. Although she was re­ ceived pleasantly by the immediate family, she was a little gauche among the parvenus; she had, naturally, learned no German; and she felt ill at ease and homesick. With the excuse that her mother was ill, she returned to Paris by herself after two weeks, after which the series of loving, worried, and fussing letters every three or four days began again: "conduis toi comme )e Ie desir [sic], prouve moi que tu es digne de tout ce que je sens pour toi."6 Heine tried to nurse his standing with the failing old man, though they got into an argument and Salomon struck him with his stick.7 That was not a particularly good omen, but Heine persisted in believ­ ing that he was achieving his end. Meanwhile he had written Germany, A Winter's Tale, and he was able for once to look over Campe's shoul­ der as the work was printed. Still, he was unwelcome in Germany and he began to feel uneasy. He wrote to Marx on September 21 that he

V. THE RADICAL PHASE had received a "hint from higher up" to leave,8 and he did so on Octo­ ber io, returning via Amsterdam and Brussels and arriving in Paris on October 16. Heine had seen his homeland, or indeed any country other than France, for the last time.

in A Winter's Tale and A Midsummer Night's Dream THE major work that was in general the product of Heine's radicalization in the 1840s and in particular of the first journey home, Ger­ many, A Wintefs Tale (Deutschland. Ein Wintermarchen) has been elevated in recent years to the highest canonical standing. In East Ger­ man schools it occupies a position second only to Goethe's Faust, and in some quarters of Western criticism it has come to be regarded as classic as well. One consequence of this has been a tendency to ignore the circumstance that the work is linked in antithetical symmetry to another one that less comfortably serves the role Heine has lately been obliged to play. This work is Atta Troll, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstrawn). But to suppress the one at the expense of the other is not only to amputate Heine; it evades the ef­ fort to understand his own central dilemma. That the works are related to one another is at once evident. Their Shakespearean subtitles establish their antithetical connection. In their final form they came to be nearly the same length, around 2,000 lines, making them Heine's longest and most ambitious poems. Both were ultimately composed in twenty-seven "capita." Both have a mock-epic character and the form that Heine ascribed to the Winter's Tale of "versified travel pictures."1 Both engage the problem of political po­ etry, but from opposite vectors. Atta Troll pursues the critique of radical literature from the high aesthetic ground and is therefore, in a sense, a verse pendant to Borne. In his preface Heine resumes the stance of that book, pointing out in defense of his political relevance that he is in enforced exile while his liberal enemies have become assimilated to existing society. But, while he accuses the political poets of vague­ ness and irrelevance, Heine reverts to the theme of the outstanding genius beleaguered by resentful mediocrities.2 The Winter's Tale is his ultimate expansion of the effort to meet the challenge of political po-

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etry by composing his own and defeating his competitors on their own ground. Thus Heine acted out and exhibited in creative play his own complicated role in this episode of literary history. If it was his pur­ pose to make that role a commanding one over his contemporaries, it must be conceded in retrospect that he succeeded. Atta Troll is the older poem in conception and the longer in gene­ sis; in fact, chronologically it surrounds the Winter's Tale. In his pref­ ace Heine says that he began it in the late fall of 1841, although we do not hear of it in his letters for the first time until a year later,3 and it was early 1843 before sections of it began to appear in Laube's Zeitung fiir die elegante Welt. Laube insisted on moderating what he considered to be Heine's vulgarities and abusiveness, saying, as his cor­ respondents so often did, that he did not understand Germany any more, "that underlying the current national style there is something very dignifiedly moral, which expresses itself annihilatingly against French frivolities."4 It is not heard of again until June 1844, when Heine told Campe of his intention to expand it; he repeated this in November as the Winter's Tale was beginning to appear in the VorrWarts/5 A year later Campe reminded him of it and he promised to get busy.6 He did get busy in 1846, and Campe was able to publish the finished work in January 1847. Even for Heine, a notoriously slow worker, that is an uncommonly long genesis. During this time he had, as we shall see, some very disagreeable interruptions, but one reason for the hiatus is his own excursion into the domain of political poetry, which made the critique in Atta Troll somewhat anomalous; the sig­ nificant thing is that he recurred to it. Atta Troll is composed in the supplest of Heine's verse forms, unrhymed trochaic tetrameter; the American reader may think of Long­ fellow's Hiawatha. Its lilting velocity is intermittently braked by Heine's favorite trick in this meter, the substitution of a heavy spondee for a trochee at the end of a line. Its setting is the Pyrenees, the land­ scape of the Song of Roland, where he had vacationed in the fall of 1841, when the poem was probably first conceived, if not begun. Its genre is the animal fable, which might have been suggested to him when there began to appear in the preceding year a series of satires by several hands, including Heine's acquaintances Balzac, Musset, George Sand, and Jules Janin, illustrated by Grandville, in which the animals in the Jardin des Plantes revolt, a captive bear is forced to dance but escapes, and a giraffe accuses men of falsely appropriating the hides of animals. Curiously, Heine never mentions Grandville, but it has been argued that his marvelous caricatures of social types as animals, which have been given renewed life in this country by the

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New York Review of Books, must have appealed to Heine's sense of the grotesque and have generated parallels in his images; it cannot be proved, but it is not implausible.7 The dancing bear, however, is an image of his own, which Heine had first used years before in North Sea III to satirize the manners of the Hanoverian nobility.8 In the bear Atta Troll he compressed, not without a certain incon­ gruity, all of his current antipathies. The bear is a humorless, pompous, puritanical radical and leveller who escapes from his captivity and in the forest preaches the resentful rebellion of the oppressed animals against the alleged "rights" of man; he proposes an egalitarian order of society in which privilege shall not be related to competence or merit. He is naively religious and tiresomely moral; in a quasi-Feuerbachian ursimorphism, he projects as God a great Polar Bear in the sky. Above all, the dancing bear is an aesthetic oxymoron. Clumsy, shaggy, and smelly, he nevertheless holds himself in high regard as an artist. Thus Heine struck with a very blunt instrument at what he perceived as the uncouth lumpishness of the political poets. He also exhibited how much in his own mind he ascribed to them a tendency to national chauvinism and religious atavism. There is, however, much curious double entendre in the poem. On the one hand, the spoofing of Atta Troll's revolutionary rodomontade against the "arch aristocrats" of human beings seems to express Heine's elitist side; the "rights of man" against which the bear fulminates are certainly Heine's firmest Enlightenment allegiance. The poet asserts that he belongs to this privileged human race that is better than the other mammals and that he will always defend human rights.9 But, on the other hand, the voice of the oppressed from the lower depths of society speaks clearly out of the poem, an aspect that corresponds to Heine's earnest warnings about the dangerous condition of the prole­ tariat. The bear attacks property as theft and the exploitative cash nexus in modern human relations in Caput 10, a vigorous passage that some people today are fond of lifting out of context. Thus Heine man­ aged to appropriate both voices while maintaining a subtle inner ten­ sion in the poem. Another oddity is the ragging of the political poet, Ferdinand Freiligrath. A rather outre image in one of Freiligrath's early poems of a black Moor coming out of his tent like a black moon from behind a white cloud struck Heine's funny-bone, and he set it as the motto of the poem, ringing a number of highly comic changes on it. However, this image belongs to Freiligrath's exotic, pre-political verse. His conversion to radicalism took place during the genesis of Atta Troll, and in his preface Heine generously acknowledges this shift and apologizes to Freiligrath.10 This is a little peculiar, for Freiligrath,

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with his lumbering cadences, resembles a dancing bear as much as any of the political poets, so that Heine's posture on this whole matter seems insecure. Once again we see that poetry and politics remained incongruent categories in Heine's mind. In fact he did not misestimate Freiligrath's political rhetoric, the style of which he criticizes severely in an unpublished fragment as clumsy and prosaic.11 Even more telling is that at the end of his life Heine praised Freiligrath to the French, not as a political poet but as a "talent de premier ordre, coloriste puis­ sant et doue d'une grande originalite."12 As for Freiligrath, he did not, like some of his fellows, exaggerate his poetic dignity and he took the ragging in good spirit. Heine flicked at him a couple of times in the Winter's Tale as well, and Freiligrath wrote to a friend: "although I catch a couple of blows in the opuscula, reading them I almost fell under the table laughing."13 The poet-narrator sets out to slay the beast. He does not do the actual hunting himself, but employs for this purpose a rather Gothic set of characters who need not concern us here." It is, however, odd that the ammunition employed against the bear is obtained from this inferior realm of Romanticism. Tagging along, the narrator experi­ ences a sequence of dreams and visions, and witnesses a number of symbolic vignettes and allegorical scenes reminiscent of the Travel Pictures. The most significant of these, the actual Midsummer Night's dream of the poem, has become known as the Wild Hunt; it is an allegorized vision of the sources of Heine's imagination, seen careening through the sky in a world beyond. The riders include the flawed muses of Heine's three main cultural traditions:15 of Classical antiquity, Diana, whose inhuman chastity is punished in the afterworld by unslakeable lust; of Romanticism, the pretty but unreachable Fairy Abunde, exiled by the Nazarenes; and of Judaism, the sensually amoral Herodias, tossing the severed head of her beloved John the Baptist up and down on a platter. Here Heine created a figure who, as Salome, had a considerable subsequent history in French literature.16 The poet chooses Herodias, bidding her throw away the "blockhead" and take him instead. This part of the passage is especially interesting, for in it Heine moves the Jewish tradition out of the category of "Nazarenism," where he had located it in Borne, into that of sensualism and acknowledges an allegiance to it that looks forward to subsequent developments of his mind. In Caput 27, the peroration to the poem, which is an epistle to Varnhagen, Heine calls it "the last / Free forest song of Romanti­ cism."17 Clearly he meant the poem to confront the prosaic utilitarian­ ism of politically committed poetry with the values of "poesy" to

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which he was bound, but, despite its high comedy and pugnaciousness, there is an elegiac quality to it. The lurking split in Heine's mind be­ tween poesy and the exigencies of reality becomes visible once more. Real poetry is in exile, like the figures of the Wild Hunt, a denizen of an imaginary realm; as he says in the poem's closing lines, the narrator has no ears for the poetry of the present, gabbling like the geese who saved the Capitol in Rome. Poesy is a value, but it is threatened by ir­ relevance: in Caput 3 Heine picks up a theme from Borne: "Fantasti­ cally / Purposeless is my song. Yes, purposeless / Like love, like life, /Like the Creator with the Creation!"18 In a manuscript variant he asserts that he will pursue high political aims, but in prose, while verse is the vehicle of freedom and gaiety.19 That these expressions of aes­ thetic autonomy and the worry about the relevance of poetry to the pressing interests of mankind should emerge in a poem full of political relevance and allusion merely underscores how intractable the problem remained for Heine. Nevertheless, he plunged directly into it with the Winter's Tale, which was written almost midway in the genesis of Atta Troll, and very quickly, in about six weeks at the beginning of 1844. It was pub­ lished almost simultaneously in three different formats the same year: in New Poems in September, as a separate publication in two printings by Campe in October, and in installments in the Paris Vorwarts! in October and November. Heine wanted Marx to accompany the latter version with an introduction of his own, but for one reason or another he chose not to do so.20 This multiple publication was a device to steal a march on the censorship; Campe was very worried about the effect the poem would have.21 There was no hope that this work would get by, and it did not; the confiscations and bans from one end of Ger­ many to the other and even in Denmark began within a matter of days. But it was in demand; at the end of December, the editor of the Vorixsixrts! Heinrich Bornstein, pirated yet another printing in Paris with the false place of publication "New York." While the urbane and elegant Atta Troll is composed in artistic Spanish trochees, the more popular and blunt Winter's Tale employs the familiar German folksong stanza with the second and fourth lines rhymed. The verse is rough and the style colloquial, with sometimes outlandishly comic rhymes, snapping with witty thrusts and fierce blows against medieval relics and obscurantist restorations in German life. Taking Heine's 1843 route from Hamburg to Paris in reverse or­ der, it recounts a journey into Germany, commenting acerbically and with studied disrespect for the ruling institutions on conditions in the backward, tyrannized country. Because Heine held strictly to the

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travel format, he was not able to maintain the same level of interest in all parts of the poem; some passages are forced or uninventive, and, despite the poem's high standing today, substantial segments of it tend to be ignored. But other parts are unforgettable: the crossing into Germany, when the narrator comments at the border inspection that "My head is a twittering bird's nest / Of confiscatable books" (Caput 2)22 and observes in Aachen a Prussian soldier standing erect as if he had swallowed the stick he had been beaten with (Caput 3); or the scene in Cologne, where the poet envisions a lictor following him about as the deed corresponding to his words, destroying what the poet has anathemetized, thus imaging a powerful wish-dream of the activist writer (Caput 6). The lictor smashes the relics of the Three Wise Men in the Cologne Cathedral, a prominent CatholicRomantic symbol (Caput 7). The cathedral had stood unfinished since the sixteenth century, and the resumption of construction was a favor­ ite project of Frederick William IV. Heine presents it as a fortress of obscurantism that ought instead to be turned into a stable, though it is not without interest that he was a member of a Paris committee collecting money for the cathedral project.23 It was hoped that the liberals participating in this campaign would "give it a different mean­ ing than the intended one," as one of the organizers wrote to Heine.24 In what is perhaps the most famous scene, the narrator confronts the legendary Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the Kyffhauser Mountain, catches him up on the last century or so of history, which in the nar­ rator's account consists largely of the guillotining of kings and nobles, and then dismisses him as a political symbol (Caput 14-17), thus at­ tacking a popular literary focal point of Romantic nationalism that was just then undergoing a hypertrophic renaissance. Many poets, in­ cluding Freiligrath and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, wrote Barbarossa poems, and later Heine's quondam student acquaintance Karl Simrock wrote one to celebrate the founding of the German Reich in 1871.25 Heine's opposition to the aspirations and symbols of German national­ ism was becoming a very serious problem of his relationship to his public, as Laube had indicated to him in his editorial doubts about Atta Troll. This was especially the case in the early 1840s when France, in order to distract attention from internal difficulties, directed some threats toward the Rhenish provinces, instigating a wave of German protest. Since Heine was long identified as an ally of France, he was dangerously isolated by this development, especially as in Caput 5 of the Winter's Tale he has the personified Rhine river express a longing for the return of the French. In the preface to the poem Heine tried to meet this difficulty in his

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customary way by occupying the ground of his opponents with claims of a superior, wider, and more progressive vision. If the Germans will hoist the black, red, and gold flag of nationalism "on the heights of German thought" (by which Heine obviously meant the emancipa­ tory implications of German philosophy argued in Religion and Phi­ losophy), "I will give my best heart's blood for it." Of course he is a friend of the French as he is of all humanity, but he would never cede the Rhineland to France "for the quite simple reason that the Rhine be­ longs to me. . . . I am the free Rhine's much freer son." When the Germans have drawn the true consequences of their own philosophy, "when we redeem the god who dwells on earth in man from his deg­ radation, when we become God's saviours, when we reestablish the impoverished people, disinherited of happiness and scorned genius and desecrated beauty, in their dignity . . . , all Europe, the whole world— the whole world will become German! Of this mission and universal role of Germany I often dream when wandering under the oaks. That is my patriotism."26 This aggrandizement of terms of German nation­ alism for the cosmopolitan and progressive cause is very clever and perhaps appealing to modern ears; whether it would have rung true in the ears of Heine's contemporaries is another matter. It is a gesture toward solidarity that exhibits his isolation. When trying to sell the poem to Campe, Heine made very strong claims for it (later, as was his custom, he became more diffident about it). His assertion that it would "have the value of a classical work"27 is often quoted, especially in the East. He furthermore made it quite explicit that he meant the poem to overshadow and displace contem­ porary political poetry. He wrote that it would "breathe a higher poli­ tics than the well-known political squabble-rhymes," and expressed the hope that it would kill off "prosaic bombastic tendentious poetry."28 By "higher politics" he meant, as usual, his sensualist doctrine, but more significant is his evident purpose of using the great poem to cap the flow of political verse and drive his competitors from the field. The careful reader can detect in the Winter's Tale also a certain double entendre, this time concerning political commitment. At one point the narrator encounters a pack of wolves in the forest, meant to symbolize the radicals; he comments that there are times when one must "howl with the wolves" and he delivers a pompous agitatory speech in the style of Atta Troll.29 Caput 26 closes with a very odd scene in which the narrator is taken up by a street-walker who turns out to be Hammonia, the goddess of Hamburg. After swearing him to secrecy, she permits him a vision of Germany's future in the chamber-pot she has inherited from her father Charlemagne. We are not told specifically

V. THE RADICAL PHASE what he sees, but apparently it is a vision of revolution, and it over­ whelms the narrator with its stink. Thus there emerges a very ambigu­ ous note that is not easy to interpret, but it appears that after all the furious revolutionary demolitions of the Winter's Tale, a trace of Heine's burgeoning historical pessimism, his own sense of being out­ side the revolution and potentially its victim, supervenes. But he ends on an upbeat; in the concluding caput he compares himself to Aris­ tophanes and then, with references to Dante, he warns the kings of the eternal damnation to which poets can condemn them. The Winter's Tale marks the peak of Heine's radical phase. He con­ tinued to write cutting political verse with decreasing frequency up to and after the Revolution of 1848, but other, more personal, concerns came to preoccupy most of his attention. As he had wished to do, he succeeded in establishing himself, especially for posterity, as the most powerful voice in the literary opposition of the time. However, it seems to me that his outstanding quality does not lie, as is so often argued today, in his ideological superiority to his contemporaries. It lies partly in the sheer margin of talent; Heine was now, with few near competitors, the major writer in the German language. He had once quipped that Goethe could have written Schiller and all his works; he had now essayed a largely successful demonstration that he could write the political poets and their works. But Heine's real strength lies in complexity, in the multiplicity of voice that arises out of the dilemmas and paradoxes of his order of commitment and provides this often un­ promising mode of writing with aesthetic texture. Single-mindedness and simple-mindedness can generate effective and necessary rhetorical utterance in political literature; Georg Weerth is an example. As lit­ erature such writing is peripheral. It is because Heine was insecure and torn in his political commitments, because his allegiances were con­ flicted and his roles uncomfortable, because the problem of politics was also for him a problem of the self, that he succeeded in making poetry out of politics to a degree that others could not.

New Poems THE inclusion of the Winter's Tale made the publication of Neiv Poems (Neue Gedichte) possible, for it brought the book over the twenty signatures necessary to free it from the pre-censorship; not

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that it did any good, for the book was confiscated and banned with a greater suddenness than any other of his works, and in every German state, even Hamburg. It will be recalled that Karl Gutzkow had inter­ dicted the publication of a second volume of Heine's poetry in 1838. The project had lain fallow since then, but now seemed an appropri­ ate time to carry it out, and it appeared in September 1844. In view of the fact that Heine had often asserted that his lyrical period was at an end and that prose, not poetry, was the appropriate vehicle for the expression of modern concerns, the quantity of poetry that had ac­ cumulated since the Book of Songs may be somewhat surprising. The contemporary state of poetry and Heine's attitude toward it are illus­ trated by a comical episode that occurred in 1837. Gutzkow had be­ come concerned about the deteriorating condition of poetry and he talked Campe into letting him announce in the Telegraph (November 30, 1837) a competition for the best poem submitted, offering as a prize a golden quill. Heine laughed at this and sent Campe four lines declaring that the songbird is dead, no more to be awakened, and concluding with the recommendation to "stick the golden quill in your ass."1 As it turned out, the submissions were not edifying, and Campe in exasperation proposed declaring Heine's verses the winner. (Actually the sum was contributed to a fund for a Lessing monu­ ment.)2 Yet, despite this frequently reiterated declaration of the demise of poetry, Heine's lyrical corpus had been growing. Because of its temporal and stylistic span, New Poems is a less inte­ grated book than either the Book of Songs or the later collections, and it is perhaps for this reason the least noticed of them. But it contains much of value, and some modern critics have usefully redirected at­ tention to it.3 The volume opens with the Neiv Spring cycle of 18301831. These poems are to a considerable degree a reprise of the man­ ner of Lyrical Intermezzo and Homecoming, but with a higher polish and greater distance. One difference is that it is not so much unre­ quited love that is the cause of the poet's lament, but love itself, its distracting emotional uproar, and the intrinsic knowledge of its impermanence. Like their predecessors, these poems have often been set to music. With them Heine closed the book on the style of love poetry that made him famous. The second section is made up of the pesky Variae that had so worried Gutzkow; and indeed they did not sit well with the public, then or later. Campe wrote: "the German cannot en­ dure such whore and chamber-pot stories. He always parades his Schil­ ler, who did not commit such sins, which he therefore won't tolerate either."4 The third section was entitled Romances (Romanzen), a term in Heine's usage synonymous with "ballads," that is, pithy narra-

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tives of love, adventure, and tragedy, highly compressed and artistic descendents of the familiar folk-genre. Ballad poetry is the most stable genre in Heine's writing; he wrote it intermittently all his life, and it exhibits less change in character than his other kinds of writing, al­ though there are some shifts of theme; that of unrequited love, for example, fades in importance with time, and the late theme of the victory of the worse man over the better becomes more prominent. Heine's ballads can be somewhat slight, though a few are quite fine and almost all are skillfully executed. They show Heine the poet in the securest command of his resources. They range about in ancient and modern archetypes, capturing his perspectives with exceptional compression, and projecting numerous self-images of the poetic per­ sona: king and knight, executioner and pariah. The last section of the book, before the Winter's Tale, is a selection of political verse, including seven of the poems that appeared in the Vorwarts! but also several older poems of more personal satirical im­ port. This section was entitled Poems of the Times (Zeitgedichte), a term that still carries with it a distinction from poetry proper, thought to be transcendent of immediate time and place. But one should not make too much of Heine's employment of it, for the term had existed as a designation for verse on political and public themes for more than a decade.5 In addition, Heine inserted in the Variae a number of poems of a miscellaneous sort, the most impressive of which is "Tannhauser." Despite the bans, New Poems had some initial success, and Campe printed a second edition two months later in November 1844. In a preface Heine pretended to be surprised at this and to have warned Campe against too large an edition, on the grounds that "my popular­ ity has very much receded, that I have been surpassed by younger poets of the day, and that altogether I belong only to the past." (Natu­ rally he had said no such thing.) But Campe looked at his account books, "and the man triumphed completely over the worries of my modesty and he is producing a second edition of New Poems in double quantity."6 This ironic praise of Campe is, of course, another of his complaints against excessively large editions. Actually the second print­ ing was smaller than the first. After that the book languished. A third edition did not become necessary until December 1851 with the im­ print 1852. Heine made some changes in this edition. He added a couple of cycles to the Variae and a new section, entitled Xur Ollea (meaning something like "potpourri"), which consists largely of castoffs from Romanzero and is not very important. However, since a few of the poems in the volume go back as far as the 1820s, the third edi­ tion spans nearly thirty years of his lyrical career. Heine also removed

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the Winter's Tale from the book, as Campe then intended to publish it separately with Atta Troll in a fourth volume of poems,7 and he replaced it with, of all things, his youthful tragedy William Ratcliff; his quixotic attachment to that work remained unbroken. In a preface he not only called it "a significant document in the trial record of my poetic life," but claimed it spoke clearly of the great "soup question" of modern times, which the visionary poet had been able to see.8

Ul The Inheritance Feud SALOMON HEINE died on December 23, 1844. Heine sent his tearful con­ dolences via his sister, along with the broad hint that he would be "unforgettably described" in his memoirs, and remarking with studied nonchalance: "Concerning his last dispositions I have long since been without worry; he said enough to me about it or intimated it clearly,"1 which belongs in an anthology of Famous Last Words. The following day Cousin Carl wrote to tell him how it really was. Uncle Salomon left Heine, like his brothers, 8,000 marks banco; since "you have never understood how to handle capital," Carl proposed to keep the sum and pay 4 percent interest on it. The annual allowance was not to be con­ tinued, but Carl offered to give 2,000 francs a year, not as an obliga­ tion, but as it suited him: "never in your life have you any claim to make on it." If Heine were to demand the 8,000 marks, the 2,000 francs would not be paid at all. He then warned against writing anything dis­ respectful concerning Salomon Heine.2 When Heine received this letter, it put him into a state of panic and rage dwarfing anything seen in his life before. The ensuing uproar that he created under the eyes of all Europe preoccupied him for al­ most two full years. His health deteriorated at once, a fact that he re­ peatedly turned to accusatory purpose, while at other times stressing his unbroken spirit: "my toes are itching," he wrote to his brother Gustav, "and God have mercy on the rear end they hit next."3 He was determined on one point: he would have for life the allowance of 4,800 francs annually that he had been receiving from his uncle since his marriage. He felt himself that a virtually pathological stubbornness had been aroused in him. "Unfortunately," he wrote to Campe, "my will is as rigid as that of a madman—that is in my nature. Perhaps I shall end up in the madhouse."4 He succeeded at last, but at terrible cost.

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From start to finish the difficulty was that he just did not have enough leverage. At first he thought of going to law, but challenging a legal and explicit will on the grounds of alleged oral undertakings was natu­ rally a hopeless proposition. To be sure, this aspect of the matter is not entirely clear. In his own last will Heine asserted that his allowance was the income of a large sum that Salomon had intended to give to him; in a draft to the will he claimed that his uncle had explicitly promised to do this.5 There is no solid evidence that this was Salomon's understanding. On the con­ trary, in 1838, after having granted the allowance, he warned his neph­ ew to try to save money, for "I shall not live forever."6 In 1839 Heine told an acquaintance that his uncle would take care of him in his will,7 and during the feud Meyerbeer, with what appears in retrospect an ill-considered effort to be helpful, certified to Heine that he thought he had heard Salomon say something of the sort.8 Heine tried to build a sturdier edifice than this weak foundation would bear. Furthermore, it is more than likely that he deluded himself with his contention that Salomon had intended to continue the allowance but had been tricked out of doing so by his conniving entourage. It is true that Salomon's attorney was Heine's old enemy Gabriel Riesser. But everything we know about the man suggests that he was capable of doing his own thinking on such a matter, and that the result of his will, putting his nephew into his son's power, was pretty much what had been intended. Heine was left, therefore, with his only weapon, his pen. But it was precisely the fear of that weapon that had motivated the family's pol­ icy, so that his employment of it was likely to justify them in their own eyes and harden their position. Before getting into the details of his campaign, it may be remarked that Carl Heine's policy was exceedingly foolish. First of all, Heine succeeded in maneuvering him into an appearance of miserliness, when it is quite apparent that, from his side, money cannot have been the issue. Carl was said at the time to have personally inherited fifteen million francs,9 and that may be a low figure. With such a sum it is idle to speak of "purchasing power"; it was the capital of a family business. But in present-day terms an estimate in the neighborhood of fifty million dollars would not be far off. Heine was requiring an an­ nual charge on that fortune of a little over three-hundredths of one percent—pin money. Salomon Heine had left the executors of his will the income of 30,000 marks and gratuities to his employees ranging up to 40,000 marks.10 The issue was the protection of the family's reputa­ tion. But it is hard to see what Heine could have done to blacken it for posterity more than Carl himself did. The chilly impudence of

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his letters in the matter is quite stunning when one considers that they were addressed, by a man whose chief accomplishment in life was to have been born to a rich father, to a man who was his cousin, twelve years his senior, and one of the most eminent literary figures in the world, a man, furthermore, who in 1831 had risked his life to nurse Carl through cholera and later had mediated his marriage. In fact he had not always appeared to be Heine's enemy; his earlier letters had been friendly and respectful and even exhibited shared viewpoints on some matters. Suppose he had taken the opposite tack and regarded it as an honor to be the friendly patron of Heinrich Heine? It is possi­ ble, though not certain, that some of Heine's long-standing grudge against his uncle would have found its way into print, and quite likely that he would have leaned further on Carl's purse, but what of it? Carl would have come down to posterity as a benefactor of culture. Instead, the streak of stubbornness he shared with his cousin and the unsympathetic resentment of the capitalist parvenu toward the obstrep­ erously rebellious poet prevented this, and so he left himself to posterity as a mean-spirited boor. For the truth is quite different. Carl eventually gave Heine much more than the sum of the annual allowance, though Heine sometimes complained of his manner in doing so, occasionally had to maneuver to obtain it, and had some of his requests refused. But it is on the record that, on a visit to Paris in 1848, Carl gave him an extra 3,000 francs and that he paid 5,000 francs of his cousin's debts in 1849; that he gave him 10,000 francs in 1851 and again in 1853, which in fact may have been the regular annual amount during Heine's last years.11 Nor was he without sympathy; in 1850 he visited Heine in Paris and, touched by his sad physical condition, urged him to move to Hamburg, where he would have better care.12 But posterity retains nothing of this; in truth Carl won the battle but in the long run lost the war. In the short run, however, Heine was losing the war. He rejected Carl's proposal at once and sent his letter to Campe for safekeeping, with the threat of a battle to the death in the court of public opinion.13 His complex battle strategy had essentially two prongs. On the one hand, he endeavored by various means to mobilize a show of public abhorrence of the family's action; on the other, he communicated in­ directly to Carl his readiness for a reconciliation and his promise never to write anything injurious to the memory of Salomon Heine and his family, though he balked at the notion that the family had a right of censorship over his writing. These two prongs were, for the reasons described, less complementary than at cross-purposes, especially as Heine made it unmistakably clear that the continuation of the allow-

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ance was the central issue as far as he was concerned, and it is perhaps owing to this strategic weakness that the resolution of the affair took so long. He did sense that a direct polemical campaign of his own would not be his most effective tactic; he endeavored, therefore, to involve as many other people as possible in his cause. He began with his old friend Detmold, whom he asked to attack Carl Heine and Adolf Halle, Cousin Therese's husband. Heine re­ garded him—perhaps unfairly, for the record shows only friendly ges­ tures toward Heine—as a major intriguer against his interests; one sus­ pects a resentment left over from the ancient love catastrophes. In his letter to Detmold he made it quite clear that he intended to exploit the sentimental aspect of the affair: "Public opinion is easily won for the poet—against millionaires."14 Detmold complied promptly in a Cologne newspaper.15 At the same time Detmold was to convey truce terms to Carl.16 Heine's next step was to announce to Carl a draft for the whole 8,000 marks. This drew out Carl's tactical response, which was to make a show of generosity without committing himself. In April he paid out the sum, minus 5 percent inheritance tax, and in February 1846 he met a further draft for 3,000 francs with the curt advice that he would protest any further demands of that kind.17 But in fact he added another thousand, thus, as Heine recognized, tacitly paying the allowance for 1845.18 Heine had meanwhile given Campe a power of attorney to act in his behalf.19 Campe was to be one of his main conduits of the combination of threat and willingness to negoti­ ate the main issue, the restoration of the allowance. Heine's next step was to try to direct a kind of journalistic theater. He turned to a more powerful ally than Detmold: Heinrich Laube. "Now I must induce fear in my family through the press, at least to secure my pension," he wrote on February 1, 1845.20 He composed an attack upon the family and a pompous defense against the attack, which he asked Laube to publish anonymously. Laube did so in a Leip­ zig newspaper.21 Heine placed a similar article via Weill in an influen­ tial critical journal, Die Grenzboten (The Border Messengers), in March.22 Next he turned to Meyerbeer. But he did not relish interven­ ing in the affair and advised Heine to accept Carl's demands.23 He also refused Heine a loan of a thousand francs.24 Heine thereupon re­ nounced his friendship—not quite irrevocably, as it turned out—mak­ ing pointed reference to the favors he had done Meyerbeer in the past.25 As Heine began to run into obstacles of this kind, his hurt deep­ ened. To Campe he wrote: "they have transgressed against my genius with outrageous infamy," and to Varnhagen he spoke of betrayal in the bosom of his family: "the creeping mediocrity, which waited

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twenty years, bitterly envious of genius, has finally reached its hour of victory."26 Here one sees the theme of the victory of the worse man over the better emerging out of this experience. Meyerbeer, inciden­ tally, importuned by mutual acquaintances, relented later on and did try to intercede with Carl, but unsuccessfully.27 Carl rebuffed him stubbornly, as he had Prince Piickler-Muskau, whom Heine had set upon him several months before.28 These interventions only made Carl angrier and escalated his bitterness against his cousin's conduct. Meanwhile Heine had drawn into his schemes an entirely new per­ son whom he had recently met. This was the young future socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). In fact it was the litigious and belligerent Lassalle who urged Heine to resume the struggle. Today we see him as an erratic and vain personality whose actual service to the working-class movement has come under a cloud of doubt. Heine's ardor for him cooled later on, but in his discouraged mood at the be­ ginning of 1846 Lassalle appeared to him as a young paladin, freer of the emotional atavisms of the past than he himself, typical of a new race of men, as he wrote to Varnhagen in a letter of introduction, "that wants pleasure and to assert itself in the visible. . . . The thou­ sand-year empire of Romanticism is at an end, and I myself was its last and abdicated fable-king."29 To Lassalle's father he wrote: "in this nineteen-year-old youth I see the messiah of the century."30 Since Lassalle was on his way to Berlin, Heine asked his help in another of his concerns. He wished to consult a prominent physician in Berlin about his eye trouble, and he asked Lassalle to deliver a letter to Alexander von Humboldt appealing for safe-conduct to the Prussian capital.31 Humboldt replied sympathetically to Heine but could not achieve this; Heine was regarded as guilty of the crime of lese-majeste—he had, after all, written poems lampooning Frederick William IV—and the police intended to arrest him if he were to appear in Berlin.32 It is not surprising that Heine was at this time in contact with Varnhagen, upon whose friendship he was wont to draw at bitter times in his life. Always the conciliator and voice of moderation, Varnhagen over the years had regularly advised Heine to make peace with Uncle Salomon, and he continued to advise peace with Carl. But Heine wanted more than that, and he devised a plan to forge and publish an insulting letter against himself allegedly written by someone in Carl's entourage, to which Varnhagen would reply on Heine's behalf.33 This was too much for Varnhagen, who flatly refused, eloquently begging him to use better judgment.34 Heine actually did compose such a doc­ ument, ascribed to a "Dr. H." (Halle?), and submitted it to a Cologne newspaper in February 1846, withdrawing it again at the beginning

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of March.35 It is an eerie pastiche of all the familiar attacks on his ego­ tism, persistent self-praise, frivolity, unreliability, and lack of charac­ ter.36 It shows how intently Heine studied the attacks of his enemies, for all his assertions that he ignored them, and it seems to me that there is something psychologically weird in the exactness of the mimicry. How strange a man our hero really was appears in a remark to Campe just at this time: "Oh, how I thank heaven that I am not like my enemies. I am wholly without venom and guile. My heart knows only the most sacred wrath of the gods."37 Heine then turned to Lassalle with the same proposition he had made to Varnhagen.38 But Heine and Lassalle had got into an ironic diffi­ culty with one another. Lassalle had an affair of his own for which he required publicistic assistance. He had become connected with a Countess Hatzfeld, who was deeply involved in litigation, and he was charged with complicity in the theft of some papers by her friends. He, too, was engaged in a press campaign, directed against the count­ ess' husband and family, which he wished Heine to join. If there was a quid pro quo in this, Heine could not see it. He wrote Lassalle that the affair belonged more in a novel of Eugene Sue than to his own concerns.39 His attitude apparently was that Lassalle's affair was a personal squabble, while his own was a high campaign of genius against philistine wealth. Lassalle thought his own feud not so dissimi­ lar and in the fall of 1846 urged Heine to support him; Heine's refusal infuriated him, and he denounced Heine's ingratitude and selfishness.40 Heine also evaded an appeal for support from one of Lassalle's accom­ plices, Moses Mendelssohn's grandson Arnold, who found himself a penniless fugitive in Paris; Heine lent him 400 francs but would not allow himself to become involved.41 Arnold Mendelssohn was later given a suspended sentence of five years in prison and expelled from Germany.42 Perhaps it was wise, if ungenerous, of Heine to stay out of this affair. By now he had evidently run out of resources. His campaign had not brought Carl to his knees, and there was nothing left but direct negotiation. Sometime in June 1846 he wrote Carl, promising to ac­ commodate himself to his wishes and to write nothing harmful to the memory of Salomon Heine. Carl replied on July 6, offering a recon­ ciliation if Heine would express regret for what he had written "about my splendid father," and sending him a thousand francs.43 What passed between them in the following months we do not know, but by autumn Carl had agreed to restore the allowance; he visited Heine in Paris in February 1847 and promised to continue half of it to his widow.44 He had obtained what he needed, but it was a bitter conclu-

V. THE RADICAL PHASE

sion to the long struggle. It filled him with enduring hatred for his cousin, regardless of the sums he was later given, and he wrote in a poem, in reference to the family's claim of censorship over his per­ sonal memoirs, that they would cut the tongue out of his corpse.45 One consequence of the agreement was that Heine burned most of his mother's and sister's letters, and he continued to burn his sister's letters on receipt in years afterward.46 He was convinced that the family had struck a mortal blow at his health. At the same time it is possible, as Heine himself thought, that the grievous state of his health and the reports that circulated about it had contributed to bringing Carl part way round. He was suffering increasing paralysis and episodes of blindness. In the summer of 1845 he tried sulfur baths at Montmorency, but became bedridden for a couple of weeks. In general, his occasional efforts to cure himself at spas seem to have had harmful consequences, and he suspected, no doubt rightly, that spas were the recourse of physicians at the end of their art.47 In May of 1846 he turned worse again, and in the Pyrenees he suffered paralysis of his speech organs, difficulty in chewing and swallowing, and fainting fits. He began to think seriously that he was dying. In July 1846 he wrote to Weill that his will to life was intact, but that he had episodes of "gloomy melancholy"; and in September he gave it as his opinion to Campe "that I am no more to be saved, but that I perhaps can last a while, one or at most two years, in melan­ choly agony."48 He wrote that if Laube came to Paris he might well find his friend, like Mercutio, "a very grave man."49 Others had the same impression; Engels wrote to the Communist Correspondence Committee after a visit in 1846: "it makes a highly disagreeable im­ pression to see such a splendid fellow dying bit by bit."50 Rumors began to circulate in Gemany that Heine was insane or dead; he was obliged to deny the first publicly.51 In August 1846 Laube composed an obituary on him,52 though he did not publish it when he realized the rumor was not true, but several premature obituaries did appear, releasing a wave of sympathy that redounded somewhat to Heine's benefit. Medical advice came to him in the mail from strangers; even Franz Grillparzer had a friend recommend an Austrian spa.53 Heine had drafted a will in 1843, with Maximilian Heine as his ex­ ecutor, recommending Mathilde to Uncle Salomon's generosity.54 Salo­ mon's death obliged him to make a new one, which is dated September 27, 1846. After lamenting his poverty, which Heine ascribes to his integrity, he declares Mathilde, naturally, his universal heir; now ap­ points his personal physician, Dr. Sichel, and the historian Mignet his executors, and Detmold and Laube as editors of his collected edition.

V. THE RADICAL PHASE He requests the simplest possible burial in Montmartre Cemetery, in Catholic ground—"although I belong to the Lutheran Protestant re­ ligion (at least officially)"—so that his wife might be buried next to him, and then bids a sad farewell to his mother and siblings, and to his "German homeland—land of enigmas and pain" he calls: "become bright and happy." He thanks the French for their hospitality. In Feb­ ruary 1847, following his reconciliation with his cousin, he added a lachrymose and suspiciously fawning codicil acknowledging this and praising Carl's "whole noble spirit" and loving character, in which he so resembled his father. These remarks, it is fair to say, are prevarica­ tions; Heine permitted himself them in so solemn a document doubt­ less with the idea of protecting his widow's income.55 Anyway, this was not to be his last will.

M

Heine as Capitalist HEINE had other troubles during the period of the inheritance feud. On January 25, 1845, t^c French minister of the interior, under Prus­ sian pressure, ordered his expulsion from the country, along with Marx, Bakunin, and others associated with the Vorwarts! Heine could not be legally expelled because, having been born under French occu­ pation, he had a right of residence in France, and the order could not be implemented in his case. But the episode demonstrated that French hospitality to political refugees was no longer a wholly reliable bul­ wark against Prussian power. Heine's health problems were naturally causing his living costs to mount, and his need drew him into a classic nineteenth-century debacle. For several years Heine had been acquainted with a speculator named Ferdinand Friedland (1810-1872), whom he jokingly called "Calmonius," after—he said—Frederick the Great's court Jew, though no such person is known to history. He was Lassalle's brother-in-law, and Heine's susceptibility to him may in part be owing to the charm his pretty wife, Lassalle's sister Friederike, exerted on him. At any rate, in February 1846 Friedland induced Heine to invest 12,500 francs for twenty-five shares of a firm called "Iris," which had a plan for financing gaslights in Prague. He hoped for substantial profits from this venture and was encouraged in these expectations by Friedland, who promised to triple his investment.1 But when the director of Iris, one

V. THE RADICAL PHASE

Chappon, turned up in September, offering Heine a commission of 20,000 francs if he could get Rothschild to prop up the company, he began to suspect he had lost his investment.2 As he put it later to his brother Gustav, he felt he had wound up "with twenty-five ass-wipes in my hands."3 In historical retrospect it is difficult to judge the soundness of either Friedland or his proposition. It was not unreasonable on the face of it; urban gas lighting had been known in England for more than twenty years, and the Prague installation was actually accomplished. It seems clear that Friedland had no profit from Heine or the project; he even spent some time in debtors' prison in the wake of it.4 But the actual affair was much too complicated for Heine's limited business understanding (or, for that matter, my own). Apparently he was led to believe that the Iris company was directly associated with the gas company, but this was not the case; it was a separate speculative enter­ prise. Like other writers of his time—one thinks of Balzac—Heine had no real understanding of affairs of capital, which he tended to regard as a realm of magic rather than one of judgment and competence, and therefore it was unwise of him, with his modest resources, to engage in this kind of speculation. He did not seem to understand that invest­ ment carries with it the risk of loss; instead, he insisted on his right to the principal and interest even though the venture had failed. This insistence drove Heine to an excruciating polemical campaign that dragged on for several years. He blamed Lassalle for having mis­ led him, although Lassalle claimed he had advised Heine against the investment.5 He tried to get Lassalle's father to bring suit against Friedland, but he required 200 francs to meet the legal fees, which Heine refused to pay.6 He tried to use his pen and that of his friends in his familiar manner; he needled Friedland in his writings repeatedly, and had his Bohemian friend Alfred Meissner (1822-1885) attack him in print.7 In 1851 he plugged in his brother Gustav to pursue the matter from Vienna. The upshot of this campaign, which can only be much abridged here, was that Heine obtained 5,000 francs through Gustav in 1851, and in 1854 Friedland offered another 5,000 in five yearly install­ ments.8 Heine accepted, even though he still wanted the full amount.9 Just how much he got back altogether is not clear, since he died a little over a year after receiving the pre-dated drafts. Mathilde may have inherited the rest. We might anticipate here for a moment to remark that not all of Heine's capitalist adventures were ill-starred. In later years he en­ gaged in modest but active stock-market speculation from his sick-bed, and he seems to have succeeded rather well in riding the wave of

V. THE RADICAL PHASE prosperity of the French Second Empire. It is not possible to follow all his investment transactions, but some preserved correspondence with his banker gives an idea of it. For example, on December 26, 1851, Heine bought five Paris-Strasbourg railroad shares at 385 and twenty at 390. He sold them on January 8, 1852, at 488.75; this yielded a profit, after commissions, of 2,409.65 francs. On the same day he pur­ chased thirty shares of the Le Havre railroad at 306.25; he sold them five days later, against his banker's advice, at 250, a loss, again after commissions, of 1,778.20 francs. So far he had made on a capital some­ what in excess of 10,000 francs 631.45 francs in some twenty days. But then on February 11 he bought twenty more Paris-Strasbourg shares at 468.75, twenty francs a share less than what he had sold them for.10 At first these transactions look like those of a typical amateur specu­ lator, popping in and out of the market and stubbornly refusing ad­ vice. Heine's banker pointed out to him that the Le Havre shares had gone up fifty francs the day after he sold them. But if we take a closer look we will get a different impression. By May 1853 the Paris-Strasbourg shares were approaching 950. Heine sold them when they passed that point.11 The profit on a little over 8,000 francs after commissions amounted to 10,638.85 in a year and a half. He bought ten of the shares back at nearly the same price, and ten of the Paris-Rouen rail­ road at 1,080—etc., etc.12 The point is that Heine was now operating with more than 20,000 francs of capital without having added anything to it. These transactions continued to within three weeks of his death. However, this is just a sidelight on the future. The little successes can hardly have compensated Heine for the sufferings of his last years. Furthermore, regardless of how pressed he felt himself to be, he never drew on that capital, suggesting that he thought of it as insurance for Mathilde's future. From where he sat in the late 1840s, it looked as though the luck of his life had turned exceedingly bad, as indeed it had.

Heine's Faust THE inheritance feud and Heine's physical distress greatly depressed his productivity. A plan to write a new work analyzing the true meaning of Germany in the face of persistent French misunderstandings deriv­ ing from Madame de Stael collapsed after a couple of fragments now known as the Letters on Germany (Briefe uber Deutschland).1 What

V. THE RADICAL PHASE

has been retained suggests that the loss may not have been great; the fragments are waspish, snide, self-regarding, and repetitious of motifs from De ΓAllemagne and the aftermath of the ban on Young Germany. The only new notes are a claim that communism is now carrying out the program of sensual emancipation prophesied in De VAllemagne and several anecdotes about Hegel, passages probably reflecting the peak of the radical phase and the association with Marx in 1844. With the exception of the completion of Atta Troll, Heine managed only one significant work during this period; it was an interesting one, how­ ever, that is deserving of more attention than it has commonly re­ ceived. He joined that long sequence of German writers from Lessing to Thomas Mann who have written a Faust. One senses in this enterprise, naturally, another exhibit of Heine's oblique competitiveness with Goethe. We will recall the tale that he tweaked Goethe in 1824 with a threat of writing his own Faust. Plans for such a work appear in the record of conversations with a friend, Eduard Wedekind (1805-1885), in that same year; they are of a na­ ture, however, that suggests Heine was teasing him, although in the 1820s he hinted also to Moser and Varnhagen that he was considering a Faust.2 None of these plans, real or imaginary, has any relevance to the eventual Der Doktor Faust. In the precis of current opinion on the Faust legend and its historical background that he prefaced to the work, he gracefully acknowledged Goethe's unassailable preeminence in the sequence: "Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob, but Jacob begat Judah, in whose hands the sceptre will eternally remain."3 At the same time, like many of his contemporaries, he had no regard for or understanding of the great second part of the work and considered the Helen act its only worthwhile aspect.4 Heine's Faust shows less preoccupation with Goethe than with some of his own most intense personal concerns, even though it came into being almost accidentally. It is a ballet scenario, and it was commis­ sioned in 1846 by the director of Her Majesty's Theatre in London, Benjamin Lumley (1811-1875). This had come about in the following way: a Slavic legend about the "Willis," ghosts of brides who have died before their wedding day, which Heine had recounted in his es­ say on Elemental Spirits,5 had been turned by Adolphe Adam, with the help of Gautier and others as librettists, into the ballet Giselle in 1841; it was a great success and has, of course, retained a place in the ballet repertoire until the present day. Lumley thought Heine might have other profitable ideas of that sort and invited him to submit them. Heine did not feel himself in very good condition for such work, but

V. THE RADICAL PHASE

he saw a chance to earn some much needed money and set himself to try. He actually composed two scenarios. The other, the work of two morning hours, was entitled The Goddess Diana (Die Gottin Diana)·* Lumley paid 2,000 francs for it and hoped to produce it, though noth­ ing came of it. Although Faust could not be performed either, for reasons that will become evident, Lumley paid another 6,000 francs for it,7 a further example of Heine's substantial earnings with more or less occasional works. For a time he had pipe dreams of earning enor­ mous sums with Faust, and this induced him to take a particularly high­ handed tone with Campe. There had been dance pantomimes of Faust in the seventeenth cen­ tury; one had recently been described in a current work on folklore appearing in installments that Heine avidly studied: Johann Scheible's The Cloister (Das Kloster).8 But this was only an incidental impetus; Heine's experiment grew out of his fascination with the dance, which interested him as the only pagan art form that had not been coopted into the service of Christianity. He consequently was not interested in social dancing, and he did not much admire contemporary ballet, which he found, like French tragedy, too disciplined and ascetic, a fossil remnant of a Classicism otherwise made obsolete by the Revolu­ tion. Rather, he saw dance essentially as a Dionysiac, sensualist rem­ nant of pagan culture. He sensed this remnant in the popular Parisian cancan, which, he once reported, the police were on the watch to re­ press, and he went on to describe the atmosphere of popular dance halls as a veritable witches' sabbath, a cauldron of anarchy and Satanic amorality threatening to flood the rest of society.9 Thus this aspect of the dance is linked to the threatened breakdown of inhibitions in the common people, and Heine's general attitude to the Dionysiac is a familiar combination of fascination and fear, similar to his view of the subterranean proletariat. This aspect of the dance is evident even in the lesser of the scenarios, The Goddess Diana, in which, after a Bacchic festival with Diana, the knight-protagonist is killed by the legendary Eckart, loyal to the Nazarene ideology of repression. But he is revived, partly by Apollo and fully by Bacchus, a symbol of the revivification of human life through pagan sensualism. However, the knight lives on in the unreal literary locale of the Venus Mountain, the ultimate dissatisfactions of which we remember from "Tannhauser." In the essay Heine was later to join to The Goddess Diana, entitled The Gods in Exile (Die Gotter im Exil), the hidden suppressed deities perform "the joyful dance of pa­ ganism, the cancan of the world of antiquity . . . , completely without

V. THE RADICAL PHASE

hypocritical clothing, completely without the intervention of the serjeants-de-ville of a spiritualist morality, completely with unbounded madness of the old days, exulting, raving, jubilating: Evoe Bacche!"10 In Faust the Dionysiac, orgiastic element is more strongly stressed, but it is also more strongly shifted in the direction of a destructive demoniacal evil, as it is associated with the she-devil Mephistophela. It is she who deludes Faust with a magic whose shallowness is transparent to the reader, though not to Faust; she who teaches Faust to dance, helping him to become a vain fop; she who holds out the promise of rejuvenation and the winning of an illusory Helen; she who conducts him to a highly picturesque Witches' Sabbath, a depraved court, and into the serene world of Classical Greece, which the pursuing witch from the Christian world destroys. Faust finally seeks peace of mind and domesticity in an environment much resembling the Dutch paint­ ing Heine so much admired, but at that point Mephistophela collects his soul and drags him off to Hell. It will be observed that Heine altogether abandons the benign uni­ verse and optimistic, humanistic import of Goethe's Faust. In this re­ gard his work not only returns to the original force of the legend, a point he stressed in his commentary,11 but significantly resembles al­ most all the post-Goethean Fausts, including Mann's; Goethe's Faust is the aberration in the sequence, an important point that has been insuf­ ficiently noted. One may wonder why Heine, the alleged partisan of progressive humanism and sensual emancipation, should have done this, especially as in his commentary he presents the "historical" Faust as a modern, sensualist rebel against repression and irrational faith.12 Fi­ delity to the legend cannot explain it, for, while it is a product of Heine's continuing interest in folkloric materials, it is not merely a dramatization of the original Faust-book but has many original fea­ tures, and its atmosphere of terror and erotic anarchy is boldly con­ spicuous. The fact is that Der Doktor Faust comes from deeper places in his imagination and feeling than his dualistic construct of sensualism and spiritualism. As in the Wild Hunt of Atta Troll, much of the prob­ lematic turmoil of Heine's indebtedness to cultural tradition comes to expression in it. As in the Variae, and indeed more explicitly than in that relatively minor verse, the clash of sensualism with the fear of uninhibited amoral anarchy, the deep worry that the alternative to re­ pression might be a mindlessness at once insipid and demoniacal, per­ vades the work. And one senses more personal feelings: about women in the figure of Mephistophela with her malevolent, fraudulent prom­ ises, and about himself in the figure of Faust, a maladroit gull of his own desires and an ultimately doomed Schlemthl.

V. THE RADICAL PHASE

Lumley must have blinked several times when he saw this submis­ sion. He had had hopes for it and even advertised it.13 Apart from the scenario's formidable technical requirements, with its metamorphoses of beasts into men and the transformation of Helen's entourage into a group of white-sheeted skeletons, it was not exactly suited to a the­ ater occasionally attended by Queen Victoria. In his memoirs Lumley wrote courteously and regretfully that "it was found, unfortunately, impracticable in respect of its 'situations' and scenic effects for stage purposes."14 Heine, with his penchant for conspiracy theories, preferred to blame the outcome on the machinations of the ballet master and the monopolization of the public's attention by Jenny Lind.15 In 1847 Laube gave him some hope of a production in Leipzig, and Heine let it be known through the Allgemeine Xeitung that it would be produced with the leading dancers of the day,16 but nothing came of it. In 1850 he tried to induce Laube to produce it in Vienna, but that was not possible.17 It is said to have influenced Gounod's Faust a decade later, but hardly with any resemblance in spirit. It has had a history in our own century, however; ballet versions were attempted in Prague in 1926 and in Sydney, Australia, in 1941, and in 1948 it became an in­ spiration for Werner Egk's ballet Abraxas.18 Except for a French translation printed secretly in April 1847 to secure the copyright, Der Doktor Faust was not published right away; Heine offered it to Campe, but got no reply.19 It finally ap­ peared in two editions, simultaneously with Romanzero, in October and December 1851. It was decorated with an ornate paper cover ex­ hibiting a ram—the form taken by Satan in the Witches' Sabbath—a ballet dancer, and a nude female figure. The nude annoyed Heine greatly and he complained to Campe about it,20 one more piece of evidence against those who make Heine an enthusiast of unbridled eroticism. Campe did not express to Heine exceptionally high hopes for the work, but they were high enough that he secretly made a second printing without informing him.21 But apparently the initial interest did not last; Hoffmann und Campe sat on the remainder until well into this century. An effort was made to dispose of it in 1917 by putting it out as a bibliophile item in a cassette with an essay by the prominent literary scholar Oskar Walzel. Heine's Faust has been much neglected by literary history and criticism. It is an inappropriate fate for a work that is not only among his most imaginative, but one of those most resonant of later themes of nineteenth-century literature.

VI THE MATTRESS-GRAVE Paris 1848-1856

Prostration HEINE'S conclusive physical collapse occurred in May 1848. In his own account he relates that it took place in the Louvre before the Venus de Milo, who gazed at him with wistful sympathy as if to say: "Can't you see I have no arms and can't help?"1 This is probably one of Heine's self-allegorizations, but it underscores his enforced abandon­ ment of Hellenism. As we have seen, his illness did not come upon him all at once. Its gathering symptoms can be traced back for many years; they grew dangerous in 1845 and 1846, and still worse in 1847. He wrote to Princess Belgiojoso on September 20, 1847, from Montmo­ rency that his feet, legs, and lower torso were paralyzed and that he was unable to walk.2 He got his locomotion back for a while, but in February, March, and April 1848 he lived in a hospital. After mid-May Heine was never to walk again; his legs, as he wrote to Campe, felt like cotton.3 He was on his deathbed and he knew it. But he also sus­ pected, rightly, that it would be a long dying, although it was prob­ ably just as well that he could not then imagine that the agony of his "mattress-grave"4 would endure almost a full eight years. Nineteenth-century diseases are often difficult to diagnose in retro­ spect, and the diagnosis of Heine's is not absolutely certain. The mod­ ern consensus is that he suffered from a venereal disease of the spinal cord, although an effort has been made to identify it as acute inter­ mittent porphyria.5 Various allusions show that Heine thought it was venereal. The paralysis would shift from one part of his body to an­ other, go intermittently into remission, then return. One of its worst features was its attack on his eyes, or the paralysis of the eyelids, which interfered with his reading in the most frustrating way, as he had to hold his eye open with his fingers. After becoming bedridden, he suffered great pain from spinal cramps and contractions that some­ times rolled him into a ball for days on end. Contemplation of his sad condition and the barbarous treatment of it is liable to make one be­ lieve that there has been some progress in the last hundred years, at least in medicine. The spas and baths at which he tried to treat himself did him no good whatever. His physicians, who ranged from charla­ tans to experts, squabbled over him, and he had no real confidence in them. Mathilde drove off one of the best of them, Leopold Wertheim (1810-1890); she gave him a black eye for criticizing her care of her husband.6 Heine said Mathilde chased them all away but one, a Hun2 95

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

garian named David Gruby (1810-1898), who had, however, a good reputation.7 Wounds were kept open on his spine in order to drip morphine directly into them. It all sounds very ancient, but it was not so long ago. One has the impression that Heine's disease was of the sort that might have been curable or suppressible by modern antibiotics. Considering his usually less than stoic manner in coping with the setbacks of life, Heine bore this affliction with unexpected courage. Indeed, he surprised himself; he wrote to Laube on January 25, 1850, of "the most dreadful hopelessness with an accompaniment of moral tortures, which I nevertheless . . . bear with a calm of which I would never have thought myself capable."8 He did complain grievously to all and sundry—except to his mother, whom he tried to misdirect for a while with vague reports on his "eye trouble"—but he had every right to do so. It was a tragic development for a man so committed to life as he felt himself to be; he wrote to his brother Max: "Even if I don't die right away, still life is lost to me forever and yet I love life with such ardent passion. For me there is no more beautiful mountain top to climb, no women's lips to kiss, not even a good beef roast in the company of cheerfully feasting guests; my lips are lamed like my feet, my eating tools are lamed as well as my excretory organs. I can neither chew nor crap; I am fed like a bird. This non-life is not to be borne."9 Often he yearned for release: "To be sure I wish myself death, and it would certainly be a blessing to me, as I can only expect mo­ mentary relief from pain, but otherwise would have to vegetate as an unhappy cripple."10 In these incredible agonies with such hopeless prospects, suicide would have been unsurprising and even reasonable. But the thought did not really occur; Heine waited out his suffering, a tormented but curious observer of its amazing dimensions. His mind and spirit remained intact, as he repeatedly stressed. It is remarkable that there was so little flagging of his intellect and rela­ tively little of his creativity to almost his last hour, especially as he took substantial doses of opiates. It is clear that the drugs did not affect his mind very much. They frequently made him foggy; he once re­ marked to Campe that "I have at this moment so much opium in my body that I hardly know what I am dictating," and to Max he wrote that he lived "in a desolate narcosis,"11 but that he complained shows that he resisted the effects. Like many invalids he had trouble sleeping and he spent nights in a half-dozing state during which he composed poems to be dictated in the morning. But there is nothing hallucinatory or irrational about his late writing; it retains to the end the structural clarity and control that was always his hallmark even in his most vi­ sionary and dreamy passages. The very poem he entitled "Morphine"

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

is of almost Classical symmetry, built on the ancient image of Sleep and Death as brothers.12 With appropriate caution, I would venture the surmise that Heine had a marginal psychological dividend from his suffering. There had always been a masochistic streak in him, and even in his feistiest years a sense of the omnipresence of death and an association of it with life, especially highly refined and poetic life, crop up in his writings. Long years before he had had Almansor say: "The very worst illness is life."13 When contemplating the Italians he observed, "only the sick human being is a human being"; even an animal can become human through suffering.14 In The City of Lucca he exclaimed: "Life is a sickness, the world a lazaret!" and death is life's physician. 15 In Reli­ gion and Philosophy he associated such sentiments with the asceticism of Christian culture, but they ran deeper in his psyche, and later in that work he remarked: "I belong myself to this sick old world, and the poet rightly says: scoffing at one's crutches does not enable one to walk any better. I am the sickest of you all and the more pitiable, since I know what health is."16 In one of those passages that reflect his own voice more than Borne's, Heine has Borne complain that he is growing too healthy, which is weakening his intellectual gifts. 17 In The Romantic School he had asked whether poesy is not the product of sickness, as the pearl is the product of the oyster, and in Atta Troll the components of the imagination are defined as "dream and death and madness." 18 So it is by no means a new tone when, in his late Songs of Creation (Schopfungslieder), a parodistic parallel of God's creativ­ ity with the poet's, sickness is said to be the cause of God's own crea­ tion, and creation its cure.19 But by now suffering had an objective ground; Heine really was as ill-used by life as he had often claimed to be, and more. Perhaps it was this disposition that helped him to wring so much survival out of his life's catastrophe. It had, furthermore, another dividend: it aroused widespread sym­ pathy in the public, which helped to neutralize some of the antago­ nism Heine had built up since 1840. His vistors were stunned by the magnitude of his suffering and with persistent regularity published accounts of it. Sometimes the sympathy degenerated into a gossipy sentimentality that at length got on his nerves. Always anxious to con­ trol his public image, he especially worried that reports of his indi­ gence and a plan he had got wind of to take up a public subscription for him would not sit well with Cousin Carl, and in April 1849 he felt obliged to publish a Correction (Berichtigung) in which, with some private bitterness, he described his situation in palliative terms and praised Carl's generosity in order to nip this excrescence of public

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

opinion.20 In fact he was chronically short of money; in 1855 he wrote to Gustav Heine that his annual living costs in his illness ran to 24,000 francs, while he had only some 12,000 from Germany.21 Heine was par­ ticularly anxious not to be a worry to his mother. In March 1850 he re­ turned uncashed a draft for a thousand francs she had sent him, and though not long afterward he asked for it back, he had already for­ mally renounced any claim to her estate upon her death in favor of his sister.22 On November 13, 1851, Heine made what was to be his official will, this time in French, in legal form with witnesses.23 Mathilde, of course, remained the universal legatee, with cordial expressions of his love and gratitude. The rest is rather verbose, rehearsing both obliquely and directly the disappointing history of his wealthy relatives' support, with elaborate and certainly perfidious praise of Carl's generosity in the main clauses and needles in the subordinate clauses; a German draft to this passage is more explicit and accusatory.24 He requested Carl to pay the full pension, rather than half of it, to his widow. He left his papers to his sister's son, Ludwig von Embden (1826-1904), but this was not the disposition that was made of them, as Mathilde and her financial adviser Henri Julia (1813-1890) kept control of them, haggling over them for years with Campe and others, even at one point trying to sell them to the Austrian or Prussian government for the purpose of suppression.25 Heine tried to order the collected edi­ tion, now appointing as supervisor his old friend Christiani, but with instructions to yield to Campe in all things; he laid particular stress on excluding any text not certainly ascribable to him. He asked for burial without clergy but begged pardon for his blasphemies. He con­ cludes the document with a reaffirmation of his commitment to friend­ ship between Germany and France and his opposition to the enemies of democracy. His executor is now Caroline Jaubert's husband. Near the end of his life Heine began to draft a new will, in which he directed that his agreements with his publisher be respected, even though, as he broadly hinted, Campe had taken advantage of him.26 But this will was never executed; the instrument of November 1851 remained the effective one.

C 2]

The Revolution of 1848 HEINE'S collapse occurred nearly simultaneously with the revolution

that broke out in France on February 22, 1848, and spread to Germany 298

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the following month. The confluence of the disruption and uproar of the Revolution with his own grave personal troubles made his response to it muddled and hard to follow. He lost money in the collapse of a bank, and he was dismayed at the multiplication of his discomforts; in fact, on the second day of the Revolution, when he was returning to the hospital from a visit to his home, Heine got entangled in the street fighting among the barricades.1 His first comments were quite nega­ tive. To his mother he wrote on March 30: "The spectacle has re­ duced me physically and morally very much. I am more discouraged than I ever was," and two weeks later he wrote to one of his closer friends of the latter part of his life, the Bohemian liberal author Alfred Meissner: "You know that I was no republican and will not be aston­ ished that I have not become one. What the world is now doing and hoping is wholly alien to my heart. . . . I would gladly flee from the frightening uproar of public life into the eternal spring of poesy and of eternal things."2 In fact, from June to September he lived in the quieter outskirts of Paris, in Passy near the Bois de Boulogne. His mood was not brightened by the appearance just at this time of the Revue re­ trospective with the exposure of his French government pension. In March Heine dashed off three articles to the Allgemeine Zeitung. Only the first was printed; in it he expressed his fear and exasperation at the uproar, but also praise for the workers, who risked their lives even though, being irreligious, they expected no reward in heaven, and refrained from all plundering. This he followed with a critical but courteous valedictory to the deposed King Louis-Philippe, now packed off, at the age of seventy-four, to what he knew would be his last exile. The second article continues the eulogy of Louis-Philippe, then turns to great praise of the new hero of the day, Lamartine, an evalu­ ation that Heine was soon to abandon. In the third he wrote: "The Revolution needs new men, and they must be dug out of the lowest layers of the social ground";3 he praised the Provisional Government. Events soon overtook these judgments and Heine asked Kolb in May to return the unpublished, obsolete articles.4 For a while Heine could not seem to find the appropriate posture. On May 27 he wrote to his mother, somewhat unexpectedly in the circumstances but more in keeping with what might have been ex­ pected of him: "it is just my illness that perhaps protects me from mortal dangers to which I would be exposed if I could plunge madly and healthily into the daily struggles."5 But in July he wrote to Campe: "About the current events I say nothing; it is universal anarchy, worldhuggermugger of God's madness made manifest. The Old Man will have to be locked up if this goes on—it is the fault of the atheists; they have driven Him crazy."6 This, however, was after the reactionary 2 99

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forces had already begun to roll back the Revolution and generals like Windischgratz in Prague and Cavaignac in Paris had quelled popular revolt with bullets. Heine's confusion abated as the situation worsened; in his political verse he rejoined the pattern of his contemporaries that has been described earlier. Like them, he was impatient with the Na­ tional Assembly in Frankfurt, and when it appointed the mild-mannered Austrian Archduke Johann as Reichsverweser, whatever that was, he penned a satirical poem, "John Lackland" (Hans ohne Land), not neglecting to advert scornfully to Johann's mesalliance with a postmaster's daughter, which is just what had touched middle-class hearts about him. Heine was revolted by the offer of the imperial crown to the King of Prussia, whom he savaged in several poems. He even experimented with a vision of polite guillotining of German monarchs, but he did not try to publish it.8 As the reactionary retrenchment grew more profound, Heine could settle back into his familiar oppositional posture. In the summer of 1849 he read with sympathy the poems of the Hungarian revolutionary Sandor Petofi (1823-1849), who had fallen in the losing cause and whose poems in German translation were dedicated to Heine.9 In the fall Heine wrote a poem, simply entitled "In October 1849," in which he hears from afar noises that could be either the firecrackers of the Goethe centennial or the shooting of friends.10 A year later Heinrich Laube put their relationship under strain with his book The First Ger­ man Parliament. Laube had located himself, as he put it, in "the center with an inclination to the right,"11 and Heine sharply criticized the book to him. This is not surprising; the book is nationalistic, pugna­ ciously conservative and anti-democratic, and in places Romantically obscurantist. They argued back and forth quite angrily over it and their friendship almost, but not quite, caved in. In another letter Heine called Laube's book "treason to the cause of reason and truth."12 This letter was addressed to someone who has been gradually com­ ing back into view in the preceding pages: Gustav Heine. It is a little odd that Heine now began to confide in him this way, for Gustav had long been in harmony with the Austrian government and the brothers had grown far apart politically. It was Heine's beleaguered heart, I think, that drew him back into intimacy with his brother. Gustav, in­ deed, was anxious to be friendly and serviceable, and Heine drew him into his quarrels with Laube, Lassalle, and Friedland, and later with Campe. In the long run, Gustav's clumsiness was to make Heine regret his interventions. But, gauche though he may have been, it must be said that he exhibited great good will toward Heine in these last years. In the Friedland affair he was of real assistance. He had grown quite

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wealthy and in 1850 he offered to meet the costs of his brother's ill­ ness and volunteered an annual allowance of 1,600 to 2,000 francs.13 Despite his pressing needs, Heine, with a perhaps wise instinct, hesi­ tated to accept the offer, but Gustav sent 400 francs anyway and Heine appears to have been comforted by this potential reserve.14 As for France, Heine's position was delicate. For all the embarrass­ ment the revelation of his government pension had caused, he would have liked to see it continued, and he made motions to this end both to the Provisional Government and under the presidency of Louis Napoleon, though to no avail.15 He came to despise the Provisional Government and its head, the poet Lamartine, who had cancelled the pension. Louis Napoleon's emergence at first impelled a brief recrudes­ cence of Heine's Napoleonic feeling, which he communicated to the Napoleonic admirer Kolb, and shortly after Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat he sent through Reinhardt a message to Marx that it might be a progressive event.16 But promptly after the coup d'etat, Louis Na­ poleon intensified the fierce persecution of the liberal and socialist opposition that began during his presidency, and before long Heine began to share the same amazement at such a ninny obtaining such a political victory that inspired Marx's famous epigram in the brilliant opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire about history repeat­ ing itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. (Marx, incidentally, regularly referred to Louis Napoleon as "Crapiilinski," a figure in Heine's satiri­ cal poem on the Polish exiles, "Two Knights" [Zwei Ritter].)17 Two months after the coup d'etat Heine wrote to Kolb, in a passage that says much about his own political traditions: "The beautiful ideas of political decency, lawfulness, civil virtue, freedom, and equality, the rosy dawn dreams of the eighteenth century, for which our fathers so heroically died, and which we dreamed after them, no less addicted to martyrdom—there they now lie at our feet, trampled, smashed."18 His final retrospect on the February Revolution appeared in his Con­ fessions: it was an event "when the wisdom of the cleverest was ruined and the elect of imbecility were raised to leadership. The last became the first; the bottom came topmost, things as well as thoughts were overthrown; it was truly the topsy-turvy world."19 On the whole it must be said that Heine's perception of the 1848 Revolution was not especially sharp. One could not obtain from his observations any clear idea of the complicated and dismaying sequence of events in France from February 1848 to the coup d'etat of Decem­ ber 1851, not to speak of the development in Germany. This was in part owing, of course, to his preoccupation with his own disasters and his enforced isolation from events. But it was also owing to his lack

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

of political location. He could not approve of the fierceness with which the common people were again put down, but neither could he ally himself with the radical proletariat and the republican or socialist movements. He joked a couple of times that communism had now succeeded, for everyone was destitute and therefore economically equal, and women were held in common, though the husbands did not know it yet.20 But Heine's more fundamental limitation was his tendency to read the situation with the categories of yesteryear. Per­ sistently he saw the struggle as one against reactionary nationalists, who he constantly claimed, in the 1840s and again after 1848, were in power in Germany. He wrote bitter verses on the emergence of na­ tionalism in the revolutionary movement, and to a French publisher he interpreted the defeat of the Revolution as the victory of "les Teutomanes."21 This is a good example of the way in which his percep­ tions were often narrowed by the inflexibility of his categories. The blanket opposition to nationalist sentiment seems more relevant to our own time than to the situation in his, and made his role as a tribune of the people impossible to sustain; furthermore, it was the liberal nation­ alists who were losing the fight in the 1848 Revolution and who were decisively checkmated in August when Prussia usurped the initiative in foreign policy from the National Assembly by making a separate peace with Denmark in the Treaty of Malmo.

[ 3 ]

Breach with Campe HEINE'S miseries at this time were compounded by another misfortune

that was not trivial. The bond with Julius Campe, frayed by two dec­ ades of bickering, snapped. Somewhat oddly, it was not Heine, with his constant threats of defection, who made the breach, but Campe, who had maintained an exasperated loyalty through it all. In April 1848 the most loquacious of letter-writers suddenly fell silent; Heine wrote him a dozen times, sometimes quite mournfully, but Campe, though he met his obligations to Heine punctually, wrote not a word of reply for three full years. Why he suddenly decided to sulk in his tent at precisely this moment has been rather a puzzle. He said little about it to others, except that he was tired of Heine's manners.1 One can sometimes read that he was motivated by a personal resentment.

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

Campe had for years wanted Heine to be godfather to his long-awaited son and heir.2 Heine was touched by this, as the offer was made in the midst of one of their fusses over censorship.3 When Julius Heinrich Wilhelm Campe was finally born in February 1846, the proud father formally requested Heine to be godfather as a token of the link of his firm with him for future generations, and Heine accepted at once, though he was uncertain whether his rapidly deteriorating health would allow him to travel to Hamburg.4 The fifty-four-year-old new father idolized the baby and reported a year later that one of his first words had been "Heine."5 He hoped that Heine might come to Hamburg for the christening and for this reason postponed it for two years, finally holding it by proxy in February 1848. His announcement of this to Heine does have a peevish undertone, especially as someone had started a rumor that he had refused the honor.6 To Georg Weerth, who was trying to mediate a reconciliation, he gave this annoyance as one of the reasons for the breach.7 But it is hard to believe that a man of such strong public concern would have behaved so drastically over a private vexation; furthermore, the announcement of the chris­ tening is the penultimate, not the last, letter before he fell silent. Heine, for his part, was certainly not insensible of the honor. Later he wrote several satirical animal fables in verse to amuse "our crown prince, the young tsarevitch, my future publisher."8 The reason must lie elsewhere. One of the most immediate results of the 1848 Revolution was the collapse of the censorship regulations in one German state after an­ other. On March 3 the rattled Federal Diet permitted any state to abolish the censorship and introduce freedom of the press. Hamburg did so on March 8, Austria on March 15, and Prussia on March 18.9 All his life Campe had been waiting for this moment; it was as though a quarter-century of frustrated energy burst out of him all at once. This was the time, he thought, for the long-delayed collected edition and the reissue of some of Heine's earlier works. He was in a hurry about it; with his accurate nose for the realities of such things, he may have suspected, rightly, that the moment might not last forever. But Heine was dilatory as usual; he raised difficulties and blamed Campe for them; he was too sick to edit the collected edition himself. On April 18, Campe sent what turned out to be an ultimatum; he wanted answers to his questions now.10 When he did not get them now, he fell silent. When one reads this correspondence, one can see that Campe and Heine were talking at cross-purposes. Heine did have objections to raise against Campe, especially in the matter of the collected edition.

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

He was too sick to edit it himself efficiently at that moment; he could hardly see to read, for one thing. On June 7 he did get around at least to sending a new plan for the edition, but that was not quick enough to suit Campe.11 If Campe had been in less of a hurry, they might have thrashed these differences out. It must have been the accumulated pres­ sure of past exasperation that made Campe's patience snap at this mo­ ment; that Heine should persist in his endless waffling at this, the most exciting moment in Campe's life, seems to have broken the back of his friendship for him. Furthermore, he seems not to have fully believed Heine's account of his health. This is odd, as his condition became public knowledge all over Europe. But Campe had grown cynical listening to similar laments for many years, and he often suspected, sometimes rightly, that they were a tactic in Heine's skirmishing with him. It is unimaginable that the news that, this time, he was wrong, should not have eventually penetrated his ears. But he had made up his mind to be angry, and, being a stubborn man, he stayed angry. Throughout most of the long war between Campe and Heine it is possible to be sympathetic to the publisher's side of things and to see that, with such an author, he had a tiger by the tail. This time, how­ ever, he blundered, morally and humanly. He set Heine adrift just at the moment of his greatest suffering and isolation. A man who had put up with what he had for twenty-one years could have put up with a little more of it at this juncture. If he had not broken the relation­ ship in 1839, when Heine's conduct had brought him to the edge of challenging him to a duel, he need not have done so now. He allowed the past to control the present, which was not his wont and was just the wrong thing to do in this new situation. Heine grieved, though he did not say so. But one of the curious features of his pleading letters during the hiatus is that he keeps finding exculpatory reasons for Campe's silence—this from a man who previously had been willing to ascribe every sort of wicked motivation to his publisher's actions. In­ stead of making peremptory demands, he appeals for Campe's counsel. Privately he suspected that Campe was trying to grind him down for pecuniary reasons, but that is unlikely. Still, if Heine learned anything from this experience about how much he really needed Campe, it was not evident after the relationship was restored, when he resumed his pattern of squabbling and recriminating as vigorously as ever. For his part, Campe, as we shall see, remained difficult to deal with during Heine's last years. Some of the adhesive, the fraternal substratum be­ neath all the combat, had crumbled out of their "marriage," and it could not all be put back in.

The "Return" HEINE'S collapse had another consequence that set the public agog and

created an uncomfortable problem for posterity. His religious views underwent a significant change. People became aware that he was repudiating his former philosophical allegiances and acknowledging a personal God. This development has become known as Heine's "re­ turn," the literal meaning of the Hebrew word for repentance, t'shuvah. It is not, however, altogether easy to say to what he returned, as he did not come out of a particularly religious framework in the first place. The touchstone of Heine's transformation was the sacred book of his fathers, but it cannot exactly be said that he "returned" to the Bible, for he had always spoken of it with awe and love, and Biblical allusions pervade his writings. He is supposed to have said that "I have not returned to Judaism, since I never left it,"1 but that cannot be taken literally. On the one hand, despite certain blasphemies and dis­ respectful utterances, his subliminal Jewish allegiance never wholly atrophied, as it did in some other "emancipated" Jews of the time; on the other, he was constantly concerned to stress that his new stand­ point was not denominational, although he now acknowledged the great Jewish tradition to which he belonged and half-apologized for his anti-Jewish remarks of the past.2 This was all the more necessary in order to defend himself against religious partisans eager to proclaim that a repentant apostate had been born again. While Campe's egre­ gious associate Ludwig Wihl praised his "return to the old Jehovah," Princess Belgiojoso produced a priest named Caron who undertook the profitless task of conducting him to Catholicism.3 Heine presented the change as a repudiation of former atheism. But this was a point on which he had always been especially elusive, and the tendency in some modern criticism to speak admiringly of him as an atheist violates the complexity of the matter. It is true that in the context of his polemics against institutionalized religion, he could em­ ploy atheistic gestures. To Moser he had written at the time of the Verein: "I fear the old gentleman has lost His head, and Ie petit juif d'Amsterdam [Spinoza] would be right to whisper in His ear: entre nous, Monsieur, vous n'existez pas"; in a passage he later struck out of North Sea III he refers to Spinoza as "my comrade in unbelief."4 In The Book of Le Grand he spoke with equal scorn of the "neo-

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

Roman tritheism or even our Jewish monoidolatry."5 It is well known that Heine adumbrated the Nietzschean idea of the death of God: in Homecoming the lines occur: "Deceased is the Lord God above / And below the Devil is dead," and he concluded the second book of Reli­ gion and Philosophy with the famous words: "Do you hear the bell ringing? Kneel—the sacrament is being brought to a dying God."6 But it is equally clear that Heine vigorously resisted being regarded as an atheist, for he was constantly concerned to stress the divine sub­ stance and the religious implications of his views. He recurs to this standpoint in the preface to the first version of The Romantic School·, he objected to the interpretation of his Saint-Simonian views by "Jun­ kers and priests" as atheistic: "I do not belong to the atheists who deny; I affirm. . . . The beginning and end of all things is in God."7 In Con­ cerning the French Stage he derived atheism from French materialism, which he repudiated as a doctrine leading to hard-hearted sentimen­ tality.8 He refused to deny the existence of God, who was "always the beginning and end of all my thoughts," and dismissed Fichte's atheism as absurd.9 Even in his most anti-religious work, The City of Lucca, he wrote: "Even if I do not pay much homage to anthropomorphism, nevertheless I believe in the splendor of God."10 Today one can often read that such statements were devices to mis­ direct the censorship and perhaps the public from his "esoteric" mean­ ing. But this is irresponsible manipulation that distracts attention from the actual nature of Heine's idiosyncratic and somewhat illogical views. Owing both to his allegiance to visionary poesy and to his persistent moral concern, he never abandoned some form of transcendental ori­ entation, for all that his pantheism and sensualism were grounded as a matter of priority and polemical stance in immanence and secularism. In all his dualistic thinking about spiritualism and sensualism, Hellen­ ism and Nazarenism, there is an underlying pressure toward synthesis: "I am accused of having no religion," he wrote in an unpublished frag­ ment of The Book of Le Grand. "No, I have them all," a statement in which there is an echo of both Goethe and Schiller.11 In 1848 he made within his existing intellectual boundaries a shift of location—a rather drastic one, to be sure. In a defensive letter to Laube, who remained strongly committed to a secular position, he minimized the differ­ ence; there had been "no great change at all in my religious way of feeling, and the only inner event. . . consists in a February Revolution also in my religious views and thoughts, where I replace an earlier principle, which previously left me rather indifferent, with a new one, to which I am also not too fanatically attached. Namely . . . I have given up the Hegelian god or rather the Hegelian godlessness and

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

brought out again in its place the dogma of a true personal God, Who is outside of nature and the human mind."12 This repudiation of Hegel is one of the odder aspects of the "re­ turn," for Heine loads upon him a doctrine, contaminated by SaintSimonianism, of hyperbolic atheism and deification of man, thereby making Hegel into something of a straw man. Heine returned to this argument several times. In the preface to the 1852 edition of Religion and Philosophy he asserted that "everything in this book that has ref­ erence to the great question of God is as false as it is imprudent." God cannot be done in by "spider-webby Berlin dialectics." Heine's as­ sumed divinity has been humbled like Nebuchadnezzar's, and he pre­ dicts the same fate for the Young Hegelians: "not only good Ruge, but also my much more obdurate friend Marx . . . , these godless selfgods."13 He sent a message to Marx via Reinhardt calling attention to this passage.14 Now it must be said that to dismiss Marx for allegedly having made a Hegelian deity out of mortal man is grotesquely irrele­ vant to Marx's thought. It shows that Heine paid no real attention to it and that he located both Marx and Hegel in categories of his own peculiar devising. He did not abandon his sardonic and flippant habits of discourse when discussing the "return," and his lack of solemnity has made some observers doubt his sincerity. The Goncourt brothers put into circu­ lation the often quoted mot in reply to Mathilde's prayer that God might forgive him: "il me pardonnera; c'est son metier."15 But when one follows the evolution of Heine's religious feeling in his private letters, one can see that the transformation was a genuine one, if sometimes rather oddly expressed. He was sincerest about the motivation: it was his own need for a personal Being to Whom he could relate in his af­ fliction. "The God of the pantheists," he wrote in Romanzero, "I could not use. This poor dreamy being is woven and grown together with the world, imprisoned in it, as it were, and yawns at you, without will or power. . . . When one requires a God who is able to help—and that is the main thing—then one must assume His personality, His tran­ scendence, and His sacred attributes, perfect goodness, perfect wisdom, perfect justice, etc."16 Absolutists will wince at that "etc." and find the statement ill-reasoned and subjectively opportunistic; true faith should be independent of circumstances. But Heine was not in the least con­ cerned with the objective truth of theological claims; he was crying out a need. As early as September 1848 he associated his physical suf­ ferings with "des pensees religieuses."17 Heine quite clearly saw the negative side of this connection. To his brother Max he wrote on December 3: "There has arisen in me a spirit

3°7

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of lacrimosity and dolorousness that is foreign to my innermost nature and that particularly worries me as an eerie phenomenon. You should not be surprised if some fine morning my muse appears to you as a pious old woman." He is writing poems, he continues, directed to the "God of our fathers."18 To Mignet he wrote: "j'ai deserte 1'atheisme allemand, et je suis a la veille de rentrer dans Ie giron des croyances Ies plus banales," and to Lassalle's father almost verbatim: "sick of all atheistic philosophy, I have returned to the humble faith of the com­ mon man."19 It is evident from Heine's wry language that he perceived his "return" as a defeat. It is especially ironic that he had written in Religion and Philosophy: "So many free-thinkers are converted on their deathbeds—but make no fuss about it! These conversion stories belong at best to pathology and would yield poor witness for your cause. In the end they prove only that it was not possible for you to convert those free-thinkers so long as they went about with healthy senses under God's open sky and were completely in command of their reason."20 Well, by 1849 that is the way it had come to be with Heine. "I am no longer a divine biped; I am no longer the 'freest German after Goethe,' as Ruge called me in healthier days; I am no longer the great pagan no. 2 who was compared to the vine-wreathed Dionysus, while my colleague no. 1 was given the title of a Grandducal Weimarian Jupiter; I am no longer a zestful, somewhat corpulent Hellene smiling down on gloomy Nazarenes—I am now only a mortally ill Jew, an emaciated image of misery, an unhappy man!"21 Heine felt he had to defend himself in this matter on two fronts. He did not want it thought that his religious "regression" had affected his rationality, made him pious, or was in any way associated with institutional religion. On the other hand, he was concerned to stress that the "return" did not imply a political apostasy: "I persisted in the same democratic principles to which my earliest youth paid homage and for which I have burned ever more flamingly."22 That is not, how­ ever, quite the way it was. We know that religious beliefs are not easily separable from general ideological patterns, and in Heine's case it be­ comes clear that his repudiation of what he was pleased to call "athe­ ism" was associated with his fear of the unbridled chaos of the subcivilized proletariat. He said so quite explicitly in his Confessions: "I saw . . . that atheism had formed a more or less secret alliance with the most horribly naked, quite fig-leafless, communal communism. . . . I am oppressed . . . by the secret anxiety of the artist and the scholar, who see our whole modern civilization, the toilsome achievement of so many centuries, the fruit of the most noble labors of our predeces­ sors, threatened by the victory of communism."23 That there was no

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great change in Heine's political views is perhaps true; but the reli­ gious change is associated with a shift of emphasis in which the everpresent fear of a social force without values or civilized restraints be­ comes more pronounced. And we see that Heine had not become quite so humble and common as some of his remarks might suggest; he may indeed have cast off an allegedly Hegelian self-divinity, but his self-conscious dignity as poet remained intact, and it was from the height of that dignity as well as from the depths of his physical pros­ tration that he associated with God. Furthermore, it soon became evident that his relationship with God was not only that of a suffering supplicant in need of succor, but acquired an adversary aspect as well. To Laube he wrote: "I lie twisted up day and night in pain, and if I believe in a God, sometimes I don't believe in a good God. The hand of this great tormentor of animals lies heavily on me."24 At times Heine was able to see his suffering as a punishment for his sins; to Max he wrote: "Our fathers were stout people: they humbled themselves before God and were therefore so stubborn and defiant to men, to the earthly powers; I, on the other hand, I defied Heaven insolently and was humble and crawling before men—and therefore I now lie on the ground like a crushed worm. Praise and honor to God in the highest!"25 But that kind of confession was aberrational. Rather, he acknowledged his God in order to quarrel with Him over the injustice of the world, taking his own case as par­ adigmatic. "Yes," he wrote in the Confessions, "the lye of scorn that the Master pours over me is horrible, and grimly cruel is His jest. Humbly I confess His superiority, and I bow down to Him in the dust. But even if I lack such creative power of the highest degree, still eternal reason flashes in my spirit, and I may even call God's jest be­ fore reason's forum and subject it to a respectful criticism. And there I take the liberty of uttering the submissive hint: methinks that cruel jest with which the Master afflicts his poor pupil is being dragged out somewhat too long; it has lasted now more than six years, which is becoming downright boring."26 In a posthumously published poem Heine accused God of illogic in creating "the best of humorists" and then robbing him of his good cheer; and he threatened to turn Catho­ lic if his suffering went on much longer.27 There are many utterances like these, and there is, of course, a ten­ sion with blasphemy in them. Indeed, in a sense it is the acknowledg­ ment of God that makes blasphemy possible and allows Heine to bring his charges against the condition of the world before the highest court. It is also part of his constant double entendre in the matter, which has baffled some readers but is by now what we should have expected of

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE him. It appears in almost comic form in a posthumous fragment that must date from around this time, in which he asks God for the joy of seeing "six or seven of my enemies" hanged on the trees outside his window: "yes, one must forgive one's enemies but not before they are hanged—conciliation, love, mercy."28 Another of these fragments illustrates how uninjured his self-regard remained: "God will forgive me the foolishness that I uttered about Him, as I will forgive my op­ ponents the foolishness they wrote against me, although they stood spiritually as far beneath me as I stand beneath You, oh my God!"29 In the postscript to Romanzero he tells us soulfully how his conversion has made him at peace with his fellow man, and as an illustration of this contrition he repeats his witty insults against his ancient butt Massmann. He acknowledges immortality, remarking that, when one believes in God, it is something thrown in free like the butcher's soup bone, and he adds some less than serious Swedenborgian visions of the afterlife, which exactly resembles this life. He tells us that he has burned poems containing even halfway risque references to God—"It is better that the verses burn than the versifex"—yet it is just the play on the edge of blasphemy that gives his late writing some of its pi­ quancy.30 He repeats several times, incidentally, his claim of having burned writings inappropriate to his new convictions, including a book on Hegel.31 It is hard to know how to judge this—I have earlier given it as my opinion that I do not believe in the book on Hegel—but Heine reiterated it so often that there might be something to it. If so, it would be further evidence for the fundamental sincerity of the "re­ turn," for Heine always husbanded his slender oeuvre carefully, and such an auto-da-fe would have been a genuine sacrifice on the altar of his convictions.

Ul Romanzero IT WAS the prospect of a new book of poems—"the third pillar of my lyrical fame"—1 that lured Campe out of his three-year sulk. This may seem a little opportunistic of him, but all he had ever basically wanted of Heine was that he should write books—poetical and literary ones, if possible—and Heine had not provided him with a major new work since Atta Troll in 1847. Campe came to Paris in person in mid-July 1851, where the long overdue reconciliation was celebrated. The main

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thing was that Campe was able to see with his own eyes that Heine had not exaggerated his physical wretchedness, and a decent degree of sympathy was at last extracted from him, though it is not clear that he grasped the case fully. In 1852 he gave way to wholly unreal fan­ tasies that Heine might completely recover, and not until 1855 did he become convinced on a visit that Heine was moribund.2 Campe was pleased and excited at the new work and rather grabbed it away from Heine, who, after the first flush of enthusiasm, suffered his customary misgivings: to his mother he wrote that the book was very weak, written with "lamed strength."3 He felt that his condition and the state of his eyesight had not permitted him to give the work the me­ ticulous revision that he applied to all his poetry, that the collection was unfinished and rough. It is true that there are a few poems in the book below Heine's best standard, and there is some roughness, though that is a part of the aesthetic effect. He wrote furiously on the text in September, corresponding with Campe almost every day, and Campe for once had occasion to praise his industry.4 Campe was right to press for publication although, as in the past, his impatience caused wrangles. It was apparently Campe who suggested the title RomanzeroJi It is a nice title, with zip. But it is perhaps a little misleading, suggesting that the book is more balladesque and perhaps even more Romantic than it is; the title had been used before for collections of ballad verse in Germany, France, and Spain. The volume does contain narrative verse, but not in imitation of quaint folk-poetry; even though Heine claimed in his postscript that "the romance tone predominates in it,"6 Komanzero is a decidedly post-Romantic, mid-nineteenth-century compendium of sophisticated poetry, as the world at large came to recognize in time. Despite certain unevennesses, it is more coherent in tone than Neiv Poems and even the Book of Songs. In it Heine's own experience of defeat and suffering radiates into a vision of life and his­ tory. Cruelty pervades human relations and God's justice is bafflingly out of phase with human hopes and virtues; here emerges in various permutations the theme of the victory of the worse man over the better, which is not a perverse accident, but the will of an inscrutable and inimical transcendence, as well as the consequence of the systematic jealousies of lesser men. Yet in the ingenuity, color, and pungency of the poetry itself there is resistance; in voicing the lament and defiance of the flayed creature, the poet speaks out for humanity. There is something of Prometheus bound in his posture, although the outlook is not heroic. Nor is it all unrelieved bleakness; in fact Romanzero opens with two of his funniest late poems: "Rhampsenit," a ribald tale

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taken from Herodotus relating how a crime wave is stanched by mak­ ing the thief king; and "The White Elephant" (Der ινείβε Elefant), a comic fantasy of the hopelessly Wertherian love of a Siamese ele­ phant for a celebrated Parisian beauty.7 Romanzero is divided into three parts. The first is called Histories (Historien), another word for the narrative ballad or romance. In them, as often in the late poetry, Heine's familiar compression has re­ laxed in some cases into a more discursive, occasionally even rambling manner, although there are some very sharply focused poems as well. Many of them deal with the tragedies of kings, heroes, and poets—the doomed better men of Heine's late vision; and the section ends with a long, cruel poem entitled "Vitzliputzli" about the treacherous defeat of the trusting Aztecs by Cortes' conquistadors and the planned re­ venge of the grotesque Aztec god, who will haunt Europe. The second section is entitled, after Jeremiah, Lamentations. In it poems that re­ semble those of the Histories alternate with more satirical verses. It is prefaced by "Forest Solitude" (Waldeinsamkeit), a poem that restates Heine's longing for a home in the Romantic-poetic landscape of folk­ lore and magic, but from which he has been exiled, a time when the sky was hung with violins and elves danced about him and he himself wore the victor's laurel, now stolen from him.8 The voice of personal lament emerges fully at the end in a group of twenty short poems en­ titled Lazarus, in which the poet's suffering generates both hard ques­ tions about God's apparent indifference to the evil in the world, and sardonic, often indecorous, glosses on life and his own bitter exile from it. The title of the third section, Hebrew Melodies (Hebraische Melodien), is drawn from Byron, but the poems have otherwise nothing to do with his. In this section the complex, antithetical facets of Heine's revived Jewish feeling come to expression. It contains three, by his standards, long poems. The first and most compact of them is entitled "Princess Sabbath" (Prinzessin Sabbath), which with distanced and ironic sympathy captures the transformation of the poor, servile work­ aday Jew into a prince on the Sabbath. The second and longest, "Jehuda ben Halevy," is one of Heine's most extraordinary creations. Principally it is about the medieval Sephardic poet Jehuda ha-Levi, who is presented as a troubador whose beloved is Jerusalem; both Heine's fascination with the golden age of Spanish Jewry and his image of the poetic genius as a figure of virtually royal dignity, an­ swerable only to God and not to the people, are strongly engaged in the poem. But it is full of complex digressions, ranging back and forth

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between past and present, pathos and satire, Jewish tragedy and Jew­ ish resistance, historical perspectives and private domestic gossip—all turning in one way or another on the doom and glory of the poetic vocation. Heine called this great poem of 896 lines a fragment, but what we have is complete enough. The third poem, "Disputation," is about just that: it narrates one of the sinister medieval public disputa­ tions between a Christian and a Jew, which, as Heine doubtless knew from his extensive reading in Jewish history, generally ended in disas­ ter for the Jew if he stubbornly resisted the unquestionable truth of Christian doctrine. Here, however, Heine turns the scene into fiercely comic anti-clerical satire; the priest and the rabbi are equally irrational, intolerant, bombastic, and superstitious; the poem is riddled with rude jokes about the Trinity and circumcision. After their hours of futile and sweaty debate, the pretty French queen observing the scene can only remark that they both "stink"—the final word of Romanzero. Thus Heine made it unmistakably clear that his "return"—of which he gave the first elaborated public account in the postscript to the book—was not a matter of backsliding into traditional doctrines. Campe was greatly impressed by Romanzero. Georg Weerth re­ lated to Heine how Campe read aloud triumphantly from the proofs to crowds of people in his shop.9 He praised Heine cordially, though Heine pretended not to notice. He paid 6,000 marks banco for it, the most he had given for any of Heine's works.10 After the first flush of enthusiasm, certain difficulties emerged. Heine had originally wanted to include Der Doktor Faust in the book, but Campe, on the grounds that its obscenities would make the volume unsaleable to ladies, op­ posed this, and it was decided to bring the ballet out simultaneously as a separate publication.11 This made the book a little short, and Heine was obliged to deliver eleven additional poems, which he did not much like. Campe then tried to stretch the volume out by printing the third section with four four-line stanzas instead of five to a page, but Heine, who was always sensitive about the appearance of his books, objected firmly to the "typographical lockjaw" that looked like a "half-clipped poodle,"12 and got his way. The fair-copy manuscript was delivered to Campe in Hamburg by Gustav Heine, whose ham-fisted manners cre­ ated some strain. Nevertheless, the publication process moved with considerable dispatch; Romanzero appeared in mid-September 1851. For this work Campe threw himself into an exceptionally energetic promotional campaign. He arranged for prepublication announce­ ments, planted tantalizing articles, and wrote 250 letters in his own hand to booksellers all around Germany.13 The campaign made Heine

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nervous; he complained to Kolb that Campe was flogging the book in a way that would generate a reaction against it "even if I were a Homer or Shakespeare."14 In his promotional zeal, Campe achieved a historical innovation: he invented the illustrated book jacket.15 Romanzero was the first book to have one. Richard Georg Spiller von Hauenschild (1825-1855), a young, literate, and intelligent artist soon to die young, and a great admirer of Heine, who had perpetrated the frontispiece to Der Doktor Faust that Heine found offensive (he apologized for it), devised a design with a butterfly and flowers that twined around to the back of the jacket.16 At first this campaign worked splendidly. Campe printed four editions in four months totalling 21,000 copies, an exceedingly high number; the fourth was a gilt-edged miniature.17 However, after the first, partly orchestrated success, sales soon became less brisk. Romanzero was banned in Austria, in Prussia, where the con­ fiscated copies were ordered destroyed, and elsewhere.18 Heine tried to get Gustav to publish a notice in Vienna to the effect that the ban was not directed against his harmless self, but against Campe, "who published so many malevolent writings against Austria."19 A couple of months later Heine tried to get Campe to state untruthfully that the Prussian ban was a canard.20 These were just more of his efforts to rearrange reality to suit his own notion of things. A negative reaction began to show up in reviews that found the work offensive and ob­ scene. One episode exhibits the problem pointedly. While Heine had taken care to arrange for an enthusiastic review by an acquaintance, Oskar Peschel, in the Allgemeine Zeitung, even it was hesitant and nervous at the impure tone.21 Peschel not long afterward turned harsh­ ly against Heine and denounced his Confessions.22 Campe, for once, had been ahead of the taste of his public. He himself scorned the public prudery, though naturally it worried him also. But although a fifth edition did not become necessary for another eight years, he had rea­ son to be satisfied with the 15,000 copies his campaign had sold.23 It is apparent that the harsh and pessimistic tone of Romanzero was too modern for German ears at that time. No doubt the title, Heine's earlier poetry, now thriving in the German art-song, and Campe's own campaign led the public to expect something rather different. For a long time Romanzero was received with more sympathy and under­ standing in Western countries than in Germany. But critics with more mature sensibilities have come to see that it is indeed the third pillar of Heine's lyrical fame, and many regard it as the high point of his poetic achievement, outdistancing even the Book of Songs in force and depth.

Miscellaneous Writings ALTHOUGH Heine constantly stressed that his mind remained clear, his illness nevertheless inhibited his creativity simply because it was so physically difficult for him to work. Therefore the two years or so following upon Romanzero were one of the fallowest periods of his career. His only original published works in all of 1852 were the pref­ ace to the second edition of Religion and Philosophy and a little anon­ ymous encomium on the medical skills and writings of his brother Max, which appeared in the Allgemeine Xeitung in August. It was an act of gratitude for Max's care of him in Paris, as well as an effort to inform the public of his own difficult situation and motivate Max to help him with Campe and the family. With this purpose, however, Heine had a little misfortune. He concluded his essay with the sen­ tence: "For thirty years I have been serving the goddess of freedom loyally and sincerely, and all that I have earned in her service is con­ sumption of the spinal cord."1 Someone at the Allgemeine Zeitung, obviously guessing a venereal origin of Heine's illness, maliciously added: "Of that the goddess of freedom is probably innocent."2 This was more than an ungracious needle; it was a symptom of the wide­ spread weariness with Heine's persistent self-approbation. At times Heine's suffering grew so grievous that he longed to be done with life. In the fall of 1852 he expressed the hope to Gustav that he would not live through the winter, and at the beginning of the following spring, which always seems to have been a bad season for his well-being, he wrote to Kolb that "I ask God daily to grant me my final release."3 Nevertheless, he had an ambitious project in hand. He wanted to publish in book form his articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung from 1840 to 1843 as well as the occasional pieces he had submitted through 1848. He thought this would make an interesting and instruc­ tive book on the July Monarchy, and furthermore he wanted to restore the articles to their original uncensored state and include those, espe­ cially the ones dealing with the strength of the communist movement, that Kolb had not seen fit to print. He therefore wrote Kolb on April 21, 1851, asking for the return of all his articles from 1840 to 1848.4 It took him nearly a year to get them, after much dunning, and he never got them all. He tried to borrow the 1840-1842 volumes of the Allgemeine Zeitung from the Bibliotheque Royale, and on being in-

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formed by the librarian that they could not be lent, sent an associate, possibly his secretary Reinhardt, to work on them there.5 With this work, however, Heine got into the most difficult and protracted negotiation with Campe of his whole career. When Heine first mentioned a book on the July Monarchy, Campe was interested, but he did not want old newspaper articles unless they were com­ pletely revised and brought up to date. There was economic distress in Germany at the time, and Campe was having his difficulties, or so he said. He reminded Heine that his earlier work of this kind, Condi­ tions in France, had not sold well.6 When Heine asked 6,000 marks banco for the book, which he had not yet begun,7 Campe did not bother with a counter-offer. At one point, I think not without a cer­ tain malice toward Heine's stubborn indifference to business consid­ erations, he endorsed an idea that Heine publish it himself by sub­ scription.8 Round and round they went, with Heine employing his usual tactic of threatening to defect to Cotta or other publishers; Campe shook their contract at him but made no move to accept the book.9 Eventually he offered 1,000 talers, a third of Heine's price.10 Since both of Heine's brothers happened to be in Hamburg at this time, Heine plugged them into the negotiation. Max was to plead with Campe, while Gustav was to scare him with a fake letter threatening to publish the work himself. Heine made this plan even though he was by no means unaware of Gustav's maladroitness and Campe's growing allergy to him; in fact he tried to whipsaw the situation further by setting Gustav on Campe while disowning his brother to him.11 Campe, of course, spotted the conspiracy at once. Gustav annoyed him greatly by telling him that a contract was a necktie that could be put on any way one wished.12 The only upshot of all this was that Max and Gustav had a yelling fight with one another in the pres­ ence of the family.13 Heine cannot be said to be without blame for this discord, for while he would complain to Max about Gustav's clumsy conduct, he would complain to Gustav about Max's selfishness.14 This last seems unfair; Max may not have been a very vivacious person, and his disingenuous memoirs and mistreatment of papers after Heine's death are repugnant, but he was very sympathetic to his brother's suf­ fering, wrote him loving letters, and was generous with money and medical advice. In fact, after this episode there is no more preserved correspondence from Heine to Max, although Max wrote a friendly letter in 1853. retrospect it seems clear that Heine would have been as well off if he had kept both his brothers out of it. In the summer of 1853 Heine renewed the pressure in his customary way: he mobilized another acquaintance, the music publisher Michael

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Schloss (1832-1891), to write a letter pretending that he had a gener­ ous offer from a "significant publisher" in Cologne to take the work at a "hearty honorarium."15 But Campe was not moved by these tac­ tics, and the reason is clear: he simply was not convinced of the time­ liness and interest of the book Heine proposed. One go-between in the negotiation was Campe's attorney, Alphons Trittau, who visited Heine in Paris. But his advice was hardly reassuring; he wrote Campe that "Heine as a political writer is a zero, long since surpassed and without understanding of the actual inner core of our time in regard to politics. I am convinced that [the Allgemeine Xeitung articles] have no enduring value, but were only ephemeral fodder for that jour­ nal of Austria."16 Something like this was Campe's feeling as well. Meanwhile Heine had been pursuing a compromise with a series of suggestions: he had accumulated some poems in the meantime; he had several short pieces in hand; he offered a revised version of Shake­ speare's Maidens and Ladies, a suggestion that was dropped.17 He fur­ thermore stressed that he was adding much new material to the old articles. Campe was not very impressed; the book looked to him at first like "scraps from the wastebasket," and he worried that it would be the "Russian campaign" of Heine's fame.18 Heine sent manuscript; Campe continued to stall, and finally offered 6,000 marks banco in two installments, 4,000 for the first edition and 2,000 for the second, for the simple reason, as he soon admitted, that he did not think there ever would be a second edition.19 Heine insisted on his price and Campe at last agreed, but by this time for three volumes of twentyone signatures each.20 He also demanded, and got, an apology for some of the insults and accusations Heine allowed himself during the nego­ tiation.21 The three volumes, entitled Miscellaneous Writings (Vermischte Schriften), finally appeared in October 1854. One can understand Campe's reasoning, though he seems to have underestimated the long-term value of Heine's reportage. But the work was not one of his most skilled products, for the result was a publi­ cation ungainly in its disproportion. The first volume really is made up of "miscellaneous writings"; Heine originally wanted to call them Opuscula, but Campe vetoed that. 22 It contains Confessions (Gestandnisse); twenty-three Poems 1853 and 1854 (Gedichte 1853 und 1854); an essay, The Gods in Exile; the ballet scenario The Goddess Diana·, and a ten-year-old little essay, Ludwig Marcus: Recollections (Ludivig Marcus. DenkrWorte). Much of this is directly or obliquely autobio­ graphical, and Heine must have feared that not all of it would be pleas­ ant reading for his mother, for he explicitly instructed Campe not to give her a copy of Volume 1, although he had no objection to having

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it given to his sister and Cousin Carl.23 But Volumes n and hi, con­ taining the reportage from the Allgemeine Zeitung along with some retrospective commentary, form a single, large work of quite different weight and significance; this yoking of an ox with a herd of deer does mutual injustice to both parts of Miscellaneous Writings, and modern editors have rightly broken it up into its components. For a long time there was uncertainty about a title for the second part. Heine originally suggested Under the Government of LouisPhilippe of Orleans.24 Campe did not like that, saying, consistently with his worry about the obsolescence of the material, that Louis-Philippe was old hat.25 Heine tried to mollify him by replying that LouisPhilippe is just stage-dressing in the book, which is not quite true, and that its true hero is the "social movement," which is obliquely true.26 By the spring of 1854 t^e matter still had not been settled. Heine pro­ posed several permutations of a title like Parisian Reports,27 but Campe asked him to think up something more interesting, and Heine had an inspiration: he proposed the German spelling of the ancient Roman name for Paris, Lutezia. To this he appended the subtitle: Reports on Politics, Art, and Popular Life (Berichte iiber Politik, Kunst und Volksleben).28 So that was settled satisfactorily. The poems of Volume 1 we shall leave aside for the present and turn briefly to the other pieces. The Confessions Heine understood as a segment of, or prelude to, his memoirs. It contains fictionalized anec­ dotes of his earliest period in Paris, much expanded in the French ver­ sion of 1855. Primarily, however, it is a spiritual autobiography from the perspective he had obtained after 1848, and in large part it is a companion piece to the postscript to Romanzero, for it stresses even more strongly his repudiation of "atheistic" philosophy and its radical social implications. Yet he begins with a fierce polemic, in his best style of lampooning anecdote and slanderous insinuations, against Mad­ ame de Stael, A. W. Schlegel, and the late Romantics, no doubt to un­ derscore that his position toward the German tradition elaborated in De ΓAllemagne had undergone no change, insofar as he continued to see Romanticism as a betrayal of German thought to obscurantism. But his other earlier positions he abjures, and he quotes verbatim most of the 1852 preface to Religion and Philosophy with its warning to Marx. He ends with a comparison of himself with a fifteenth-century cleric he had read about in a chronicle, whose songs were sung throughout Germany while he was cut off from all society by leprosy. The prom­ inent location of the Confessions in the Miscellaneous Writings shad­ ows somewhat the social engagement and the respect, if not sympathy, toward the communist movement found in Lutezia. It is not unimpor-

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tant to note, however, that Heine published both kinds of utterance simultaneously. We do not know just when The Gods in Exile was written; it is possible that it was some years old, for it is related to the ballet The Goddess Diana, and I suspect it may have been conceived around the same time, especially as the commitment to pagan sensualism and its irreligious affect are stronger than they became after 1848. However, the actual writing may have been done in 1853.29 ^ess essay than novella, a fictionalization of the lost cultural tradition of Classical an­ tiquity, its pagan sensuality driven into sad and shabby exile by spirit­ ualist Christianity. The pagan gods go about disguised in the repressive Christian culture and once a year celebrate a voluptuous Bacchanalian orgy. The battered and melancholy, yet still noble Jupiter, in lonely exile on an island in the frozen north, becomes another symbol of the defeat of the better man, and near the end of the work appear the words: "Every greatness on this earth is gnawed by the secret rats."30 Heine makes it clear that he was thinking of himself. The next item deals with Ludwig Markus (1798-1843; Heine wrote "Marcus"), an orientalist and Judaist who had been associated with the Jewish Verein in Berlin and afterwards became professor of German and English in Dijon. Later he lived in Paris on Baroness Rothschild's charity, as Heine carefully notes, and he died insane, a fate Heine at the outset of the essay connects with the exile situation. His affectionate though not very respectful memorial to Markus is of interest because it is the only place where he speaks at any length of the Verein and of his ultimately annihilating judgment on the futility of its activities. He himself ad­ mired the essay as a stylistic exercise; he wrote to Campe: "When you read this memorial, have your wife first give you a pillow and read the work kneeling, for you will not find every day an opportunity to adore such a good style."31 This text has a curious history. Heine submitted it to the Allgemeine Zeitung in April 1844. This was the peak of his radical phase and of his close association with Marx. The little essay in its original form was therefore rather starkly anti-religious and in a polemical gesture against the German nationalists it picks up the idea from Shakespeare's Maidens and Ladies of the spiritualist resemblance of the German and Jewish peoples; it also reiterates the idea introduced there that the anti-Semitism of the common people derives from resentment of Jew­ ish capitalists. This was, as we know, Marx's view, and that Heine may have come to hold it under Marx's influence—or vice versa—is sug­ gested by another passage, the most explicitly Marxian to be found anywhere in Heine's writings and quite in contrast to his usual utter-

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ances on such things: he predicts that nationalism will be destroyed by "that brotherhood of workers in all countries, by that wild army that will wipe out all nationalism in order to pursue a common purpose in all Europe."32 In his final revision of this passage, before deleting it altogether for Miscellaneous Writings, Heine added the words "of the proletariat" after "army"·, and after "Europe," "the realization of the [sacred idea] of true democracy."33 Thus Heine was tempted to a Marxian vocabulary very late in life, then rejected it. Kolb had found some of the original unprintable, despite Heine's claim of self-censor­ ship,34 and he edited the offending passages out. When Heine prepared the text for Miscellaneous Writings he at first restored the suppressed passages. But the argument about the Jews and the Germans reiterated a point made again in the Confessions in the same volume,35 and the prophecy about the proletarian army evidently made him uneasy, so that he deleted both passages. To this day there is no published com­ plete variant edition of the essay.36 Heine's right to his own authorized texts was encountering a much more massive danger at this time. He became the object of widespread pirating, then an exasperating and much discussed problem in the in­ ternational book trade. This was a clear index of the fame he had by now achieved, but it can hardly be said to have been a gratifying one. A prominent example was The Gods in Exile. Heine published it in French in the Revue des Deux Mondes on April i, 1853. As he was seeking a way to publish the German version, a pirated and clumsy retranslation, under the incorrect title The Banned Gods, began to ap­ pear a week later in the Hamburger Nachrichten (Hamburg Neivs) and it came out in book form on April 25 in Berlin. No fewer than four pirated editions of the French version appeared in Brussels in June. From July to September Heine's future biographer and editor Strodtmann pirated the German retranslation in a Philadelphia period­ ical called Die Locomotive. It was about this time that a pirated edition of Heine's collected works began to appear in Amsterdam, and two years later a Philadelphia publisher named John Weik did the same thing for the American market. Campe tried to meet the American competition with a price war, but discovered he could not.37 Thus the first collected editions of Heine's works to appear were unauthorized. The American edition was a sign of his emerging standing in the United States, where, he was informed, lectures on him were in de­ mand. He was impressed to hear this, "an honor that came to no other living poet," he remarked with some exaggeration.38 But the pirating annoyed Heine greatly. When in September 1854 a pirated and excerpted retranslation of Confessions, which had that same month appeared as Les Aveux d'un poete in the Revue des Deux

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE Mondes, was printed in the very Allgemeine Zeitung, with defamatory remarks appended to the text, he exploded and severed all relations with the paper. He demanded that Campe do something about it; Campe at first refused, claiming that no material harm had been done to Miscellaneous Writings, but a few days later he saw the point more clearly and publicly protested against the Allgemeine Xeitung.39 With a related annoyance Heine found no recourse. A French choreogra­ pher had produced a ballet in Berlin called Satanella that Heine was sure had been stolen from Der Doktor Faust. But, although he tried hard to mount a campaign to get his rights recognized, no one else could find the plagiarism sufficiently demonstrable, and nothing could be done. An unpleasant, complicated, and final quarrel with Meyer­ beer, now supervisor of the Berlin opera, grew out of the incident, in which Heine threatened to denounce him in Volume HI of Miscellane­ ous Writings if he did not do something about the matter within three days.40 Meyerbeer did not react, and Heine added several scurrilous passages about him, dated to appear that they had been written in the 1840s.41 Under the heading of the right of an author to his own text, it might be mentioned that Campe was griping about passages in Volume 1 that he thought would be too offensive to national sentiment. He asked Heine to moderate his remarks on General Blucher, who was by now a national monument,42 and he was particularly concerned about a pas­ sage in the Confessions that has become known as the "Waterloo frag­ ment," which exhibits a late recrudescence of Heine's Napoleonic sen­ timent with the familiar denunciation of perfidious Albion, along with a rather unexpected encomium on Napoleon III as a reincarnation of the great man; Heine praises himself for having single-handedly re­ habilitated Napoleon's name and divinity in restoration Germany. The passage also contains one of his friendliest assessments of Louis-Phi­ lippe.43 Campe worried that it was too Francophile for the current at­ mosphere.44 Heine acquiesced and the rather interesting passage was not published in his lifetime.

[7] Lutezia LUTEZIA is a difficult book for the modern reader for two reasons. First of all, despite the fact that it is Heine's biggest work in sheer bulk and certainly one of his most important, it has always been a

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stepchild of Heine editing. The early scholarly editions did little with it. A major modern edition, which offers a crushingly elaborate and pretentious apparatus on other matters, contents itself when it comes to annotating the Lutezia text largely with copying a skeleton apparatus out of an East German edition that appeared fifteen years before.1 The reason is not obscure. Lutezia cannot be satisfactorily annotated by internal evidence, glossing names and events, or by re­ stricting one's historical sources for French history in the 1840s to the writings of Marx and Engels. Anyone can read what Heine perceived and thought, although that requires a certain amount of factual com­ mentary. But what is needed is to set what he perceived and what he did not perceive into a more independent historical understanding of the era, and no one has thus far been willing to do the necessary work. The second difficulty has to do with Heine's extensive revisions for Miscellaneous Writings. In the epistle of dedication to Prince PiicklerMuskau Heine says that he made only stylistic revisions,2 but this is not true. Original articles were conflated into new ones; dates were changed, with the consequence that numerous chronological errors crept into the book. In part this re-editing was a way of meeting Campe's concern that the work would be scraps of yesterday's news­ paper and thus lacking in current interest. Heine was also concerned to repair the depradations of the censorship and Kolb's caution about what was publishable at that time, although that could not be fully accomplished as he never recovered all his original drafts and much of his revision was new material written at the time of Lutezia. In most cases we do not have the fair copies for the Allgemeine Zeitung, only Heine's first drafts; only seven have been found, some fragmentary. There is still much work to be done in sorting out the layers of Heine's manuscript drafts, Kolb's editing, and his own restorations and exten­ sive revisions, along with the numerous changes he made in the French version.3 It is to be hoped that the West German edition currently being prepared in Diisseldorf will accomplish this, but it will be one of its biggest challenges and it will doubtless take some years. Heine's editing had its own interests, chief among them the need to establish the veridical accuracy of the poet's special insight into the "signature of life," the sensitivity to the significant future potential picked out of the clutter of current events. Elsewhere I have called Lutezia a "pa­ limpsest," a text in which the retrospective Heine of the 1850s over­ lays the Heine of the 1840s.4 Lutezia was an important work for Heine, which made Campe's in­ difference to it all the more frustrating. It was not just salesmanship when he wrote to Campe that "the whole reads like a novel, while at

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the same time it is a historical document, and my most pithy style exhibits itself in it," and uLutezia contains an intellectual treasure for the awakeners of political life in Germany. Here there is not just amusement, but also instruction."5 Heine regarded Miscellaneous Writ­ ings with special concern partly because he needed the money urgently but also because he rightly foresaw that it would be the last major publication of his lifetime and he was anxious that it should cap his career in a suitable fashion.6 He was therefore very critical of deficien­ cies in the appearance of the book in proof and of printing delays, and he complained bitterly of its exceptionally high price of six talers, the equivalent today of perhaps as much as eighty or ninety dollars, a price that guaranteed a narrow audience and about which there seems to have been much complaint.7 Like all publishers in such matters, Campe shrugged the complaint off and gave a long explanation why it could not be helped.8 At the same time he printed a large first edi­ tion of 3,500 copies,9 thus assuring that there never would be a second. The French version went through nine editions by 1871, while today the antiquarian value of the only German one is roughly but half again as much as the original selling price. The reviews were for the most part unfriendly, complaining of Heine's egocentricity and persistent self-praise, his personal calumnies, and his irrelevance to contemporary interests. His revolutionary and prophetic claims were taken seriously by no one. To be sure, some of this resistance was owing to the consolidating conservative temper of post-1848 Germany; at the same time, one reviewer castigated his dis­ paraging remarks on the communists.10 The reception in France was better, but mixed. An annihilating French critique was recapitulated in October 1855 in the Allgemeine Zeitung, which by now seemed to have wholly turned against Heine.11 He had begun to live into the negative phase of his nineteenth-century reputation. Lutezia has a greater range than Conditions in France, and not only because it is a larger book covering a longer span of time. In the earlier work Heine attempted to extrapolate symbolic or allegorical meanings from conspicuous public events; his relationship to Paris was still that of a visitor. By the 1840s he was no longer a visitor and his perceptions of the fabric of French life had grown broader, although it is probably still true that his main resources were newspapers and his own attend­ ance at public events. He also got out of Paris from time to time, re­ porting from Brittany in 1840—"a poor land, and the people stupid and dirty"12—from Boulogne in 1842, and from the Pyrenees in 1846, so that he did come to realize that there was a rather different France outside the capital. Politics was no longer the only concern, although

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he had much to say about the stresses between the king and the Cham­ ber of Deputies, the growing power of Frangois Guizot and thus of the conservative wing of the Juste-Milieu, and France's international affairs, especially in the Middle East, in which the horrible episode of the Damascene Jews occupied a prominent place. Heine's judgments on these matters are often colored by his insuperable anti-English prejudice, to which he repeatedly returned in innumerable variations. ''It is certainly a terrible injustice," he wrote in one article, "to con­ demn a whole people," but he went on to indicate that in the case of the English he was prepared to make an exception.13 Like many people of his time, Heine was sensitive to the misery and restlessness of the English working class and recommended that they might begin guillo­ tining some of their oppressors, starting with Wellington.14 Like many people of our time, who are enthusiastic for revolution in other peo­ ple's countries, he did not welcome the prospect as much in the coun­ try in which he was living. Kolb, incidentally, who was an admirer of English institutions, was particularly inclined to use the blue pencil on such passages and once felt obliged to insert in one of Heine's arti­ cles a demurring footnote in which he pointed out how much French thought owed to English and American ideas.15 Heine also devoted much attention to cultural and intellectual mat­ ters, as well as to the common life of the people. He examined social issues such as the struggle of the university for academic freedom against the Church, and prison reform, a subject on which he shows not only a modern spirit, but genuine attentiveness to the various the­ ories of punishment and rehabilitation. He polemicized against the new, Pennsylvanian method of isolating prisoners in cells.16 He tried persistently to analyze the ideological components in the popular con­ sciousness in an effort to assess the future of French society. To this end he occasionally recurs to the focus on symbolic event character­ istic of Conditions in France. The most conspicuous, being the most interesting to him personally, was the contentiousness and apprehen­ sion in the months preceding the return to Paris of Napoleon's re­ mains in January 1841. It served Heine's manner well that, during the procession to the Invalides on a cold and cloudy winter morning, a sunbeam suddenly fell upon the imperial eagle carried before Napole­ on's catafalque. But he added: "The Emperor is dead. With him died the last hero for the old taste, and the new philistine world breathes a sigh of relief, as though rescued from a glittering hobgoblin. Over his grave arises an industrial, bourgeois age that admires quite other heroes, like the virtuous Lafayette or James Watt, the cotton-spin­ ner."17

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Musical events take up much space in Lutezia, for the evident reason that Paris had become a major musical metropolis. The work is con­ sequently a sourcebook for the historian of music interested in this era of the careers of Spontini, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin, Berlioz, Donizetti, Verdi, Jenny Lind, and, to a minor extent, Wagner, along with lesser figures. Heine devoted a separate series of articles exclusively to the concert season of 1844. The focus, however, is more on the events and the personalities than on the music, for which Heine could claim no great competence; at the very beginning of his writing career he admitted that he was a "layman in the musical art."18 His method was less that of criticism than of a kind of sociology of the arts. He sought analogies between artistic phenomena and social forms, and he was very much aware of the extent to which musical life had become commercialized entertainment with its hired claques, paid propaganda, organized fame, and so on. Heine thought he de­ tected the pervasiveness of the cash nexus in painting also; in his ac­ count of the salon of 1843 he spoke of the "pecuniary expression" on the faces of the portrayed figures.19 On the whole, he was not much impressed by the quality of the performing arts in Paris, in which he detected too much empty virtuosity, and a veritable plague of pianoplaying, which frazzled his nerves particularly through his apartment walls, annoyed him greatly.20 He was not very edified by current lit­ erature, either. He included a qualified encomium on his quondam friend George Sand and praised Musset, but he scorned Victor Hugo and pretty much ignored the rest.21 He remarked the growth of tech­ nology and especially of the railroads, which he could see altering tra­ ditional proportions of experience, and he reported on train wrecks as well. This topic, in turn, brought him to the subject of the Jewish financiers, the "Sabbath company"22 behind the railroad projects, es­ pecially Rothschild, who is the object of more or less friendly jibes in a context of criticism of vast capitalist power. This did not, of course, prevent Heine from begging railroad stocks from Rothschild, or Rothschild from giving them.23 When he really went after some­ one, as in the case of a failed banker named August Leo, his wisecracks about Jewishness could get a little drastic.24 In regard to the political posture of Lutezia, especially Heine's stance toward two of his main interests—the character and personality of Louis-Philippe and the potential of the working class movement— there is a rather knotty problem of interpretation, which must be approached with a certain amount of preliminary exposition. Toward Louis-Philippe Heine could be very critical, but also very sympathetic, and he seems to have become increasingly sympathetic as the 1840s

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went on. In Heine's iconology king and poet were spiritual brothers, and this attitude informed much of his ironic view of the citizen-king. "Kings, like great poets," he wrote with a straight face, "cannot de­ fend themselves and must bear lies circulated about them in silent patience."25 The constant abuse and demeaning caricature to which the king was subjected got on Heine's nerves, and he thought it rather too bad that, when forged documents were published to embarrass him, the king could do nothing about it, for his legal immunity meant that he had no recourse against libel.26 When the king's son and heir, the Due d'Orleans, was killed in a carriage accident in July 1842, thus put­ ting the future of the monarchy in doubt, Heine wrote so feelingly of the duke's virtues and the king's grief that Weill felt obliged to chastise him: "Your lachrymose letters on the Duke of Orleans have made a bad impression in Germany."27 However, Heine's worry was about the destabilizing effect of the loss of the king's heir, as LouisPhilippe was nearly sixty-nine years old and the new heir to the throne, his grandson, an infant. Louis-Philippe's persistent pacificism had come to suit Heine better than it had at the time of Conditions in France. In the 1840s France was several times involved in international broils and war enthusiasts tried to push the country to the brink, but the king managed to deflect these dangers. Heine, too, was on the side of peace, partly because he feared that a European war might touch off a general world revolution.28 He did not want it thought in France that he had defamed the July Monarchy in Lutezia, and he sent a copy of Miscellaneous Writings to Guizot personally along with a defense against that charge, remarking: "Dans Ie drame de cette epoque, la posterite ne verra que trois personnages: Louis-Philippe, Mr Thiers et Mr Guizot, et ce sont naturellement Ies trois heros de mon livre"; he wrote a similar letter to Thiers.20 On the subject of proletarian revolution, Heine's position in his Allgemeine Zeitung articles was consistent with his usual one in such mat­ ters. Like many contemporaries, he could see that the condition of the urban working class was growing very bad and he had a profound disdain for the regime of wealth and capital of the July Monarchy. He tried to assert very plainly his conviction that what he had come to call communism—that is, the inchoate, desperate, and destructive pressure building up under the surface of civilization—was a social force of great potential, and that it had a certain logic on its side. It seemed to him that the bourgeoisie was frivolously and dangerously trying to ignore the movement out of existence; in February 1842 Heine quoted a famous remark made shortly before the 1830 Revolu­ tion by a French diplomat: "We are dancing here on a volcano, but we are dancing."30 In an appendix to Lutezia entitled Communism, Phi32 6

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losophy, and Clerisy, part of which had been originally published in Laube's paper in 1843, he compared the communists in their present obscurity and future potential to the early Christians; he declared that they would come to overshadow the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, and that the enemy they were fighting lacked any moral solidity.31 He recurred constantly to this prophecy in the Allgemeine Zeitung articles: "There are in Paris 400,000 rough fists," he wrote in 1841, "that await only the word in order to realize the idea of absolute equality that broods in their rough heads."32 This tone does not suggest that Heine welcomed the prospect, and indeed at the beginning of the same year he wrote to Kolb, in order to cajole him into accepting his articles: "I have great fear of the atrocity of proletarian rule and I confess to you that out of fear I have become a conservative."33 Repeatedly he recurs to the notion that the radicals would level everything exceptional and outstanding in mankind and reduce everyone to the same "Spartan black soup."34 He said he agreed with Guizot that the lower classes are not mature enough to govern and that society needs to be protected against their "imbecilic egalitarian ecstasy" that would "destroy everything beauti­ ful and sublime on this earth and release their iconoclastic fury espe­ cially against art and science."35 The "world revolution," he wrote, will bring "one fatherland, namely the earth, and one faith, namely happiness on earth." But the result would then be "one shepherd and one flock, one free shepherd with an iron crook and one equally shorn, equally bleating herd of human beings. Wild, dismal times are threatening, and the prophet wanting to write a new apocalypse would have to invent quite new beasts, and indeed such terrifying ones that the Johannine animal symbols would only be gentle little doves and cupids by contrast. The gods cover their faces out of sympathy with the children of man, their long-time wards, and perhaps out of apprehension over their own fate. The future smells of knouts, of blood, of godlessness, and of very many beatings. I advise our grandchildren to come into the world with a very thick hide on their backs."36 The most famous of these passages appeared in the preface to the French edition (I translate from the original German draft): "Indeed, it is only with dread and horror that I think of the time when those dark iconoclasts will come to power; with their rough fists they will then smash all the marble images of my beloved world of art, they will shatter all those fantastic trifles that were so dear to the poet; they will chop down my laurel forests and

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plant potatoes in them; the lilies, that neither toiled nor spun and yet were arrayed as King Solomon, will be pulled out of the ground of society if they will not take up the spindle; the roses, the idle brides of the nightingales, will have it no better; the night­ ingales, those useless singers, will be driven away and, alas! my Book of Songs will be used by the grocer for packets into which to pour tobacco or snuff for the old women of the future."37 Now the difficulty is that in his post hoc remarks Heine says that he had moderated his views for what he called the "Augsburg bed of Prokrustes,"38 and implies that he said less than he meant. In his de­ fense on the matter of the French government pension, which he in­ cluded in Lutezia, he declares that he gave up his political articles at the end of 1843 because he could not contend against the influence of Louis-Philippe, who had taken the censor of the Allgemeine Xeitung into the Legion d'honneur. This last appears to be true, although the event occurred near the beginning of the series in 1840, and it is not true, as Heine hyperbolically asserts, that he was unable to publish anything critical of Louis-Philippe's regime.39 The more immediate reason for the cessation of the series was probably the pressure exerted on the paper by a particularly zealous censor in Augsburg, a former police spy, which made Kolb himself nearly despair.40 In that same preface to the French edition cited above, he asserted that he had masked his meaning on account of the censorship; that the reader must distinguish the matter of his meaning from the liberal, evasive, some­ times parabolic manner; that he had always defended the ideas of de­ mocracy and revolution against the miserable bourgeoisie, and above all that it was he who called attention to the potential of the commu­ nists and helped the communists themselves to realize how powerful they were. Following upon the famous passage about communist iconoclasm he goes on to say that there were two voices in him, one poetic, one logical. "The Devil is a logician, says Dante—a terrible syllogism be­ witches me, and if I cannot refute the premise: 'that all men have the right to eat,' then I must accept all its conclusions—I could grow crazy over it, and at the end a desperate magnanimity will take hold of me, when I shall cry out: blessed be the grocer who one day will make packets out of my poems, into which he will pour coffee and snuff for the poor old grannies, who in today's world of injustice must perhaps go without such refreshment— fiat justitia, pereat mundus!"41

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Furthermore, it is true that the intelligent editor Kolb took Heine's articles on communism as masked propaganda for the movement and therefore censored or rejected some of them, and he publicly re­ gretted that Heine could no longer write for the paper because of his radical tendencies.42 These circumstances have been taken as a warrant to treat Heine's earlier disclaimers as a form of slave-language hiding a true revolutionary partisanship that he tried to express between the lines. This will not quite do, however, for three reasons. First of all, it is risky to pick and choose in Heine's text, playing off one assertion against the other and extrapolating a "secret message" or "esoteric meaning" formed by the allegiance of the interpreter. Lutezia must be put into the context of all of Heine's writings on political matters, in which there is a certain complex, if shifting, consistency. It is not possible to see clearly all the revisions made for Lutezia, but what we can see does not prominently suggest the restoration of a hidden revo­ lutionary message, nor do the French texts, free of German censor­ ship, nor do his private letters of the 1840s indicate any such sup­ pressed viewpoint; rather the contrary. When one examines more closely Kolb's editorial interventions, it is not always easy to see clearly the reasons for them—this is a very complex question—and in any case he did not by any means suppress all of Heine's prophecies of the future of communism; the fact is that one that did appear in the Allgemeine Zeitung was excluded from Lutezia.43 A good example of which much has been made is a passage dated July 20, 1842: "Commu­ nism is the secret name of the frightful antagonist which opposes to the contemporary bourgeois regime proletarian rule with all its con­ sequences. It will be a frightful duel. How may it end? The gods and goddesses who can tell the future know. We know only so much: communism, although it is now little spoken of and loiters in hidden garrets on its miserable straw pallet, is still the dismal hero to whom is assigned a great, if only temporary, role in the modern tragedy and who only waits for the cue to enter the stage."44 So the passage reads after some editing by Kolb: he substituted "frightful duel" (furchtbarer Zweikampj) for Heine's "ghastly duel" (schauerlicher Zweikampf)·, "may" (mochte) for "will" (wird); he added the words "dismal" (1diistre) and "if only temporary" (ivenn auch nur voriibergehende).45 Doubtless Kolb was trying to take some of the edge off Heine's prophecy, but it is certainly an exaggeration to claim that it has been suppressed or even very extensively altered in meaning and force. Besides, Heine several times used the word "dismal" himself in refer­ ence to the communists.46

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Secondly, it is well to remember what Borne said about Heine's hav­ ing two backs to be beaten on. He was often at pains to assert his true democratic and revolutionary loyalty. But these terms had an idi­ osyncratic sense for him. Insofar as democracy implies that politi­ cal power shall be exercised by a majority of all the people, Heine was not friendly to the idea, and he does not appear to me to have had any ideas at all on the formal structure of political institu­ tions, except that he disliked parliamentarianism, wanted to see the overthrow of the nobility, and was in an abstract and highly personal sense inclined to monarchism. Heine was a revolutionary in the sense that he had a vision of the emancipation of the human condition from its injurious repressions, but it is very doubtful that he saw any defina­ ble force in his environment genuinely pursuing that aim, except what he may have conceived of as the underlying dynamic of history artic­ ulated by German philosophy. Furthermore, if we take Heine at his word that some of his texts mean something other than what they say, we create philological chaos; the texts escape rational control. If it were really the case, Heine would not have had to couch his fears of the proletariat in such persistently eloquent language. Thirdly, it is necessary to distinguish what Heine was against from what he may have been for. He shared enemies with Marx and other systematic radicals of his time: nationalists, capitalists, religious ob­ scurantists; and he several times made the point that such sympathy with the communists as he may have had was grounded in their poten­ tial for eradicating these forces. He was for a vision of his own, and the synthesizing, ingenious, prophetic, and imaginative poetic subject is very much in evidence in Lutezia as it is in all of Heine's works. Therefore we should try to take Lutezia for what it is: a creative work dealing imaginatively and thoughtfully with crucial political, social, and cultural matters, not a reliable historical document, a scripture, or a cryptogram that we need to decode in order to discover its secret message.

[ 8 3

The Last Poetry VOLUME I of Miscellaneous Writings contained twenty-three Poems

18$3 and 1854. Actually there are thirty-three, for Number 8 consists of eleven short poems related in kind by their title, Zum Lazarus, to

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the Lazarus cycle of Romanzero. Thus by what may or may not be an arcane internal allusion, Heine reverted to his old practice of grouping poems in multiples of eleven. In addition to these, he left a substantial number of uncollected poems at his death, fourteen of which are also connected to the Lazarus theme in manuscript nota­ tions. It is more than likely that, had he lived longer, he would have brought them together in a fourth volume of poetry.1 Such a work was constructed by Strodtmann in a supplementary volume to the col­ lected edition in 1869 under the title of Last Poems (Letzte Gedichte). But it did not link the uncollected poems to the Poems 1853 and 1854, and the final poetry has remained in the shadow of Romanzero·, it has not been generally perceived that there is a fourth "pillar" of Heine's lyrical fame. This is unfortunate, as there are many interesting poems and several quite important ones in the late work. This poetry resembles Romanzero in tone, but there have been some subtle changes. The voice has become more personal and direct; the various fictive and surrogate personae fade away. There is a noticeable diminution of ballad and narrative verse, except for some of the sar­ donic animal fables which were written for Julius Campe, Jr., but with very adult political and social pointes, and the long poem "Bimini." We encounter less of an effort to universalize the poet's situation in historical metonomies and philosophical or religious generalities. One notices the shift in the new Lazarus sequence. It begins with a religious poem in the spirit of Romanzero, putting the ancient questions of Jeremiah and Job about God's responsibility for evil and suffering, and ending: "So we ask constantly / Until with a handful / Of earth our traps are shut—/ But is that an answer?"2 After this, however, the laments become more personal and autobiographical; as in much of the late poetry, we are made to feel Heine's specific situation, sus­ pended between his allegiance to life and his desire to be released from his suffering at last. One symptom of this intense personalization is a recrudescence of old memories, including, rather surprisingly, the old bitterness of early unrequited love. In one of the strangest of these, entitled "The Elective Betrothed" (Die Wahlverlobten), one of the deepest layers of his re­ sentment against the now archetypal beloved who failed him becomes visible: she missed her chance to allow him to raise her up to his level and give her a soul. Now she is dying into dust; poets, however, are not wholly annihilated, but live on the fairyland of poesy. The poem ends: "Farewell eternally, lovely corpse!"3 In this context Heine at last found an opportunity to lash back at the tribe of Salomon in a way that evidently escaped its attention. Number 7 of the collection, enti-

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

tied "Insult Castle" (Ajfrontenburg) is set in the garden of his uncle's house and with transparent allegory blames the breaking of his pride on that household.4 This was, to be sure, the least of what Heine really wanted to say; in unpublished verse he laid a veritable curse on the family; threatened to invade the underworld like Orpheus and spit in Uncle Salomon's face; promised to requite Salomon's refusal to name him at the end by consigning him to oblivion; compared himself to Siegfried assassinated by his own relatives; and predicted that his tongue would be cut out after his death.5 It is not to be thought, however, that this personalization of tone excluded political and social themes. Heine took several political po­ ems into the collection, including his dismissal of the Reichsver r Weser Archduke Johann of Austria and his cruel spoof of Georg Herwegh's audience with Frederick William IV, and adding one demonstrating that his witty virtuosity was still intact, a satire of the authoritarian and repressive measures against dissent in Germany entitled "Recol­ lection from Podunk's Days of Terror" (Erinnerung aus Krahwinkels Schreckenstagen).6 That his fierce comic gift was still intact is illus­ trated by an irrelevant but very funny send-up of Wagner entitled "Young Tomcat Society for Poetry-Music" (Jung-Katerverein fur Poesie-Musik).7 But a new tone emerges that was not very prominent in Heine's earlier writing of this kind: a deep sympathy with the suf­ fering of the exploited human creature. "The Philanthropist" (Der Philanthrop) is a unsubtle cut at the cruelty of the rich toward a poor relation, but in "Recollection of Hammonia" (Erinnerung an Hammonia) the theme is more finely treated. The poem depicts the senti­ mental and superficial charity of Hamburg philistines toward pale, poor orphan children on an outing, and explicitly extends the image to the millions of orphans, that is, the poor classes, wandering the world.8 The masterpiece of Heine's relatively few poems of this type is "The Slave Ship" (Das Sklavenschiff). The topic of slavery was much in the air. In May 1854, around the time the poem was written, France banned slavery in its colonies, while in the United States in March the KansasNebraska Act dismayed anti-slavery opinion, by now widespread in Europe, by repealing the Missouri Compromise and permitting the ex­ tension of slavery. In Heine's poem, the ship's supercargo and the doctor, speaking the naked language of capitalist transformation of the human being into a commodity, worry that the death rate in their cargo of slaves is threatening their profits. For the sake of their health and well-being the slaves are obliged to participate in a dance on deck. Heine creates a grotesque night-piece in which the chained slaves hop

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

about the deck to deedledum music, the puzzled sharks circle the ship, watching for the corpses regularly thrown overboard, and the pious Dutch supercargo prays to God to spare the souls of his stupid charges and his own profits.9 In this extraordinary piece—in my judgment the greatest of Heine's shorter political poems after "The Silesian Weav­ ers"—Heine welds the political indictment together with his own theme of the Dionysiac ambivalence and demonic anarchy of the dance to striking effect. Among Heine's late uncollected poems there are two rather ambi­ tious ones deserving of special mention. The first is "Bimini," a versifi­ cation of the legend of Ponce de Leon in search of the Fountain of Youth. The subject, like several of Heine's, is drawn from Washing­ ton Irving,10 but the poem is mercilessly autobiographical. Ponce de Leon is one of Heine's knight-personae, but his youth and heroism are gone; he is old and decrepit, and his bitterness at the passing of vigor and life dissolves his proud Spanish dignity. He weeps desperate pray­ ers to the Virgin and is ready to trade wealth, fame, and respect for the recovery of youth. He hears of the Fountain of Youth in a song by his ugly servant-woman, and with high expectations voyages off in search of it. The poem is not only a self-portrait of Heine's grievous condition, but is one more questioning meditation on the value and truth of poesy. There is truth in the vision Ponce de Leon obtains from the song, as there is solidity in the vessel the narrator carpenters, as he says, out of trochees, imagination, wit, metaphor, and hyperbole; yet they are a truth and solidity that are, literally, out of this world and do not alter its hard realities. The voyage is quixotic and hopeless, and the healing water that will be found at its end is Lethe, the river of death and oblivion.11 To the very end the dilemma of poesy and real­ ity remained intact; neither allegiance could be subsumed under the other, and, while death may have the ultimate power, the poet's song will protest it and survive both it and him. An even fiercer unresolved dilemma is the theme of what Alfred Meissner originally claimed was Heine's last poem, composed two or three weeks before his death, though in a later memoir he placed it several months earlier, in November 1855.12 Meissner gave it the title by which it is best known: "For the Mouche" (Fiir die Mouche)·, we shall see why before long. In this poem the poet is lying in his sarcoph­ agus, on which are carved images of his Classical and Biblical cultural traditions, while he has a dream of the Romantic passionflower—an image of love and torture—which turns into a vision of the silent and unreachable beloved. There breaks out among the figures on the sar­ cophagus a horrible cacophony of the conflict between Hellenism and

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

Nazarenism. The figures are grouped by incongruities: the proving of Abraham with Lot's drunkenness, the chaste Diana with Hercules spin­ ning in women's clothes. The conflict of beauty and virtue is irrecon­ cilable at last and its shrill uproar is drowned out only by the heehawing of Balaam's ass. As for the prostrate marble statues of defeated Hellenist beauty—one of Heine's recurring images—they are eaten away, with an eerie personal allusion, by time, "the worst syphilis."13 This bitterly vulgar stanza, by the way, could not be printed in the nineteenth century, and an accurate text of the poem did not appear until 1925.14 But, like the rest of the poem, the image is of a terrible sincerity. One wonders whether any other poet has written a last poem that succeeds so remarkably in summarizing the most fundamental and comprehensive motifs of his particular imagination, and has made so scrupulous a judgment on their ultimate recalcitrance and resistance to poetic synthesis. One wonders, too, whether any other poet has, so graphically and in such utter nakedness, driven poetry against his own real, palpable death.* It has been said in modern time that in his late poetry Heine broke a tabu surrounding death and physical dissolution,15 and it is perhaps for this reason that his last works were long denied the atten­ tion they deserve. Meissner, reading some of this poetry at Heine's bedside, justly termed it "a call from the beyond . . . a call of woe as from the shores of Acheron, it is the yearning cry of a shade for sunny life."16 Heine's struggle with death is like his struggle with God: it is a losing struggle, but the loss is not tolerated. He would not go gentle into that good night. He hated death, as much as he had come to need it. He knew that poetry was a weak and vulnerable defense against it, and there are no illusions about some sort of ideal victory, some immortality in the work that is, when one comes down to it, of no detectable use to the poet. "Fame warms our grave," he wrote with bitter sarcasm in the "Epilogue" to Poems 1853 and 1854; "Fool's words! Buffoonery! / Better warmth gives / A milkmaid who, enam­ oured, / Kisses us with thick lips / And smells considerably of ma­ nure."17 And he ends with an allusion to one of his favorite passages in Homer, from Book xi of the Odyssey, where Achilles tells Odysseus in the underworld: "Never try to console me for dying. / I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another / man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, / than be a king over all the per* A modern, example of this rare use of poetry is L. E. Sissman, who succumbed to cancer in 1974 after having for some years recorded his long dying in poetry. See Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman, ed. Peter Davison (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1978).

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE ished dead."18 But Heine wrenched from his wracked dying the only survival there can be. Poetry contributed to his survival at the end of his life as it had in his youth. "Poesy," he is reported to have said to a visitor, "has remained my loyal friend. She is not frightened away by my sickness; she has followed me to the edge of the grave and con­ tends with death for me."19

m The Mysterious Memoirs To CONCLUDE the sequence of puzzles Heine offers his biographer, he left us at his death one more first-class enigma that continues to tan­ talize us to the present day. In 1884 Eduard Engel published in the widely read family magazine Die Gartenlaube (The Bower) a text, which he had purchased from Henri Julia after Mathilde's death, en­ titled Heinrich Heine's Memoirs of his Youth (Heinrich Heine's Me­ moiren uber seine Jugendzeit)·, and then a fuller text, henceforth known simply as Memoirs, in a supplement volume to Hoffmann und Campe's collected edition that same year. It is here that we get Heine's fullest account of his mother and father, his uncle Simon van Geldern and his adventurous great-uncle of the same name, as well as his curious tale of the executioner's daughter, "Red Sefchen." The Memoirs is not a large text; it fills some fifty-five pages in a modern edition. The man­ uscript has clearly been mutilated. After an introduction, recurring to the well-worn fiction of a discourse addressed to a lady, and claiming that the text is a substitute for one destroyed for family and religious reasons and for real memoirs and letters that no one can be allowed to read,1 there is a gap of about twenty-five pages. There is another gap later in a passage that must have dealt with Uncle Salomon's chil­ dren, and the end has been cut away. It has long been believed that the text was censored by Maximilian Heine, but it is possible that some of it was removed for use in the Confessions.2 Now the question is: was there a much larger autobiographical text that was suppressed and destroyed by the family? Or possibly hidden away somewhere? For Heine's memoirs flit like a phantom through almost his entire career. We first began to hear about memoirs when Heine was twenty-five. He predicted to his fellow member of the Jewish Verein, Immanuel Wohlwill, that "when you read my memoirs some day," he would "find a Hamburg gang of people described, of whom I love some, hate

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

several, and despise most."3 Thus there appears right at the outset the theme that courses through the whole issue of the memoirs: the ex­ pose of Heine's personal environment in Hamburg. Except for a few fleeting references during the next couple of years, nothing more is heard of this project. Later Heine implied several times that these pa­ pers had been among those lost in a fire in his mother's house in 1833. However, there are also hints that memoir materials were employed for The Book oj Le Grand and Schnabelewopski. Suddenly the topic crops up again in late 1836 and 1837 in letters to Campe. The impulse, Heine said, was the prospect of the collected edition, for which he proposed an autobiography as an introductory volume. At the time he was dealing with other publishers and de­ scribed this work as "a great important book encompassing the whole of European life along with all real and symbolic figures belonging to it; it is the result of all my peripatetic studies in all countries and situ­ ations."4 To Campe he wrote: "Day and night I occupy myself with my great book, the novel of my life"; he quite firmly promised it and asked for an advance contract sight unseen.5 Campe declined, and Heine continued to speak of it in the following months, but less resolutely. It "will not appear so soon," he wrote to Max on August 5, adding that the work would be full of scandal and knifings.6 It was a month later that he tried to send the warning about the power of his pen directly to Uncle Salomon. In March 1838 he instructed Meyerbeer to let it be known in Hamburg that he was prepared to give an account to the penny of Salomon's gratuities to him in order to dispel the notion that his uncle had been generous.7 But the status of the work itself remains confusing. In December 1837 he indicated to Campe that he had dropped it, but in September 1840 he claimed that he had four vol­ umes for the world to see if he should die.8 The issue came up again during the inheritance feud, when Heine offered a verbal undertaking that he would write nothing against his uncle but refused to grant the family the right of censorship.9 Heine's employment of his alleged memoirs as a threat against his family was surely unwise, for it was a counterproductive way to deal with stubborn and proud people. In addition, his repeated allusion to a work no one up to then had ever seen as a piece in the great chess game raises doubts as to its existence. Contemporaries certainly felt the same way. The novelist Levin Schiicking (1814-1883) got the impres­ sion from the way Heine talked about the memoirs in 1846 that they did not exist, and the poet Wolfgang MuIler von Konigswinter (18161873) concluded around the same time that Heine was just trying to scare people.10 The latter is a hostile witness and his recollections of Heine must be regarded with reserve. But a very friendly witness, the

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

novelist Fanny Lewald, along with her husband Adolf Stahr, had dis­ believed in them as late as 1855 "because he usually spoke of them only jokingly, usually with the addendum that he regarded them as his last weapon; with them he threatened his publishers and his opponents."11 The record continues in this way. In 1847 Meissner got the impres­ sion Heine was working on them, but he would not show them to anyone and closed the portfolio when anyone came into the room; in 1850 he was still talking about them, but now he implied that he had burned a substantial part after his change of heart in 1848, while tell­ ing Meissner that he had completed three volumes.12 In the following year, when Campe, through Gustav Heine, asked to see them, Heine demurred, and in general he gave conflicting impressions to visitors and correspondents; in 1852 he told Campe he had destroyed the greater part of them out of family considerations.13 But in 1850 Heine had threatened to pillory Ferdinand Friedland in the memoirs if he did not make restitution for the losses incurred in the Iris enterprise, and in 1855 he used them in a similar way to induce the banker Emile Pereire to make him a gift of railroad stocks.14 It was Meissner, however, who became the chief witness to the ex­ istence of the memoirs; he claims to have seen a substantial manuscript in a box on his last visit to Heine in August 1854.15 After Heine's death Meissner got a glimpse of his posthumous papers and discovered a pile that he estimated at five to six hundred sheets that Mathilde identified as the memoirs.16 That is not quite as much as it sounds like, for Heine's physical condition obliged him to scrawl broadly in pencil on large sheets of paper; still, it is four times as much as the preserved manu­ script.17 Members of the family, such as Heine's niece Maria Embden, later tried to undermine this evidence,18 but that may have been part of the family policy of suppression. After Heine's death there were a num­ ber of conflicting claims about what had happened to them, but none are completely convincing.19 It is all very murky, but it is possible that this last work was a completely new one, begun from scratch around 1853. The verdict of scholarship is that the manuscript did exist and the bulk of it was destroyed by Maximilian Heine during a visit to Mathilde in 1867.20 The case of the memoirs is a particularly concentrated example of the web of cross-talk and misinformation that so often surrounds Heine's affairs, much of it created by himself and much of the rest apparently generated by a family policy of obfuscation. An additional confusion was contributed by Gustav Heine, who claimed to be in possession of the complete manuscript long after Max is supposed to have destroyed it.21 Heine scholars believe that the complete work, if it ever existed, is lost forever, but in their hearts flickers the fantasy

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE that it might one day turn up in an attic in Paderborn or Cleveland or Buenos Aires; such things have been known to happen. It would be the most exciting event in German literary history since the discovery of the long-lost first version of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in 1910; just as an object it would be worth its weight in diamonds. We should be clear, however, about what we would have if we were to find it. Everything that we can see of Heine's autobiographical reminiscences—from The Harz Journey, The Book of Le Grand and the Italian and English Travel Pictures through Schnabelewopski to the Confessions and the fragment of the Memoirs, along with all the other personal anecdotes and recollections in his writings—indicates to us that the lost work would not have been an orderly, chronological, realistic account. It would be a poetic fiction, a transformation of experience into its imaginative correlatives. Like all of Heine's auto­ biographical tableaux, it would be a sequence of static vignettes illustrating the dualism, the allegiances, the cultural wellsprings, and the postures of the fictive self that were of primary importance to him. The probe would be into the self, rather than into the external world and other selves, and this display of the privileged arbitrariness of the poet's imagination would leave much room for Aristophanic caricature and Dantesque condemnations, a prospect that the dim imagination of the tribe of Salomon doubtless rightly feared. Attentive interpretation of his usage of autobiographical materials can make us confident of this, but there is documentary evidence as well. In 1852 there appeared in John Crockford's London literary journal The Critic a long and in­ teresting interview with Heine in which he is quoted on the subject of his memoirs as follows: "My life has been one of passion, not of action; of emotion, not of achievement—my autobiography will be pictures of inward moods and dreams—of spiritual joys and sorrows, worship, desperations, angelic peace, gay soarings to the heights that overlook creation!"22 However skeptical one may properly be of such documents, this one has captured a truth that is central to the com­ prehension of Heine's self-representation.

Π10]

Last Contacts THE last years in the "mattress-grave" were, for the most part, monot­ onous and sad. The hours crept by at a snail's pace; time became Heine's

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

enemy. The tendency of every Tom, Dick, and Harry from Germany to try to visit him in search of what he always regarded as indiscre­ tions was irritating, and Mathilde guarded the portals against these cu­ riosity-seekers, sometimes rather ferociously. At the same time Heine complained of loneliness. Berlioz reported that when he came to call, Heine cried out: "Quoi Berlioz, vous ne m'avez done pas oublie! toujours original!"1 But we are not to think of him as totally isolated; in his last months he had numerous contacts and callers. As often hap­ pens to famous persons, he received from time to time letters from acquaintances of his boyhood and youth who had long since dropped from view, as well as a certain amount of fan mail and requests for handouts from other hard-up exiles. Campe came for a few days in April 1855, although the visit was not a success, as they were unable to come to agreement on a new contract; one day Heine refused to see him, and Campe came away very angry.2 Laube appeared in Au­ gust; Gustav and Charlotte in the fall. In September Heine was charmed by a visit from Lucie Duff-Gordon (1821-1869), whom he had met when she was a child in Boulogne in 1833 with her mother, Sarah Austin (1793-1867), an admirer and translator of things German and especially of Heine.3 That same month a Cologne men's singing society visited him and sang for him settings of his poems. Surely this must have been a gratifying occasion, and it is curious that Heine makes no mention of it; we know of it only from a newspaper report and later reminiscences.4 Also in that month Anastasius Griin appeared, whom Heine unsuccessfully tried to draw into what was more or less his last typical public quarrel. This unsavory affair involved an Austrian composer named Joseph Dessauer (1798-1876). In a passage added to Lutezia, but supposedly written some years before, Heine accused Dessauer of bragging of an intimate relationship with George Sand.5 Dessauer countered by hav­ ing his friends publish an article claiming that in 1842 Heine demanded 500 francs from him, threatening to denounce him in print if he did not give them.6 He also obtained a letter from George Sand denying Heine's insinuations, which made Heine very angry with her.7 The mild-mannered Griin objected to the use Heine tried to make of him as a witness and said he had been misrepresented.8 Gustav made a scandal out of the matter in Vienna, and Heine pursued it to death's door, when he was barely able to communicate; in fact the affair led to a court case after his death. No one has ever been able to figure out what was really going on here; it had something to do with Heine's view of Dessauer as a creature of Meyerbeer.9 Heine had regular company of another kind. Since he had so much

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

trouble reading and writing, he employed a series of secretaries, some­ times two at a time. Little or nothing is known about most of these men, who cannot have been paid very much if anything; they seem mainly to have been down-at-the-heels literati who did the work as much out of interest and sympathy as for gain. For this role Campe in June 1855 tried to foist upon him Heine's own cousin Hermann David Schiff (1801-1867), who wanted seventy-five to a hundred francs a month.10 He was the author of rather vulgar humoresques on Jewish life, one of which Heine plugged to help him out;11 he was fre­ quently after Heine for one kind of assistance or other. He was a muddlehead who later added his bit to the tradition of misinformation about Heine, and he was not employed. The most energetic of the secretaries was Richard Reinhardt. He introduced himself at the end of 1849 as the translator of Georg Weerth and a friend of Marx and Engels.12 Heine employed him, at first once a week, then more fre­ quently. He not only took dictation but corresponded directly with Campe on Heine's behalf; he also maintained contact with Marx. Rein­ hardt hoped to be compensated for his services by being appointed editor of the posthumous memoirs; this proposal was declined, caus­ ing Reinhardt to charge Heine with ingratitude, whereupon Heine summarily fired him.13 Reinhardt must have been nearly bilingual, for he translated Lutezia into French; he was paid nothing for this and complained that Heine gave him no credit but presented the French versions as his own work.14 Lutece appeared in April 1855, Part °f a growing French edi­ tion published by Michel Levy freres. It had begun in February 1855 with a new edition of De PAllemagne, augmented with Heine's folkloric studies, the introductory essay to the Faust ballet, The Gods in Exile, and the Confessions. In July appeared Poemes et legendes, trans­ lations of both early and late poems, as well as Atta Troll and Ger­ many: A Winter's Tale. Within days of his death Heine was correcting the proofs of the French version of the Travel Pictures. He was thus not without occupation and accomplishments. He also read, or was read to, a great deal. He was constantly ordering books from lendinglibrary catalogues and he exhibited a wide interest in what was going on in the world. To show how alert he still was: in a single request communicated to his mother he asked for, among others, several works of Dickens, including The Pickwick Papers, Gogol's novellas and Dead Souls, Tieck's late novellas, and, oddly, Arnim's arch-Romantic novel of 1817, The Guardians of the Crown.15 This late interest in Arnim is very odd; it is hardly what one would expect, and I can think of no explanation for it. He was also kept busy by his complicated

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE investment transactions, of which his late letters are full, as well as by demands upon the banker Pereire and the Vienna Rothschild, Anselm, for gifts of railroad and bank stocks.16

Camille Selden STILL, the last years could not be a happy time; Heine lived on because he had to. "Quelque moribond qu'on soit," he wrote in a letter, 'Thomme doit faire son devoir de vivant jusqu'au dernier moment."1 Then, in the summer of 1855, something very unexpected happened that gave his life an almost fairy-tale ending. In one of the Lazarus poems he had expressed the desire that he might experience one more gentle love of a woman before he died.2 It must have seemed then like a forlorn hope, like any other, but it indicated a readiness for what was to happen. In the middle of June he was called upon by a young woman who expressed cordial admiration for him. Immediately a warm bond of affection formed between them that contributed more cheer to his last months than he ever could have foreseen. She signed her first letter to him simply "Margareth,"3 but, as she used an unusual seal with the image of a fly, Heine named her the "Mouche." This woman liked to surround herself with a good deal of mystery, and it has taken considerable research to find out who she really was. Her name at birth is still not known. Her legal name was Elise Krinitz; her second letter to Heine was signed "E. K."4 To posterity she is known by her nom de plume Camille Selden, and that is what we might as well call her here. She was born, according to most recent opinion, in Prague in 1828, the illegitimate daughter of a Count Nostitz, and she was adopted by a German family named Krinitz that came to live in Paris.5 She was thus twenty-seven when she came to Heine, though he may have perceived her as younger. In the late 1840s she had been for a time the companion of Heine's friend Meissner; in her curious fashion, she had not told Meissner her name and was known to him only as "Margot." It is not exactly clear what brought her to Heine at that particular moment. Later she related that she was transmitting to him settings of songs she had obtained in Vi­ enna, but in her introductory letter she says nothing about that.6 Ex­ ternal evidence suggests that she was petite but not beautiful; she seems to have been more sentimental than clever, and, despite her somewhat

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

footloose adventures, rather prim in demeanor. On the whole she ap­ pears to have been a rather pure product of Romantic reading; her perception of Heine re-Romanticizes him. No more than anyone else was she allowed access to his full self. There is a sense in which Heine created her role in his life, but she played it to perfection. His great affection for her may in part be owing to this malleability, which he had seldom encountered in other people. Heine addressed six poems to the Mouche. The last of them, the great final reckoning with the components of his imagination, has al­ ready been mentioned. But the others are by no means as solemn. They are wry love poems, beautifully crafted, full of extravagant compli­ ment and adroitly expressed regret that the poet's physical condition prevented the consummation of their love. (Mathilde, needless to say, did not much like this relationship, though she seems to have paid it little attention, and she would have liked it less had she been able to read German.) The poems suggest how much Camille Selden gave him; he called her the "last flower of my lugubrious autumn."7 She brought out, at the rock bottom of his fortunes, the most charming and amiable side of the man; she put his capacity for feeling back into mo­ tion and revivified his creativity; and, perhaps most importantly, she relieved the blank flow of time in his sickroom. Her visits broke time up into manageable units and gave him something to look forward to in the short range. He could fuss at her when she was not prompt or regular; impatience and hope made time much less his enemy. In the nine months of their relationship, he wrote her twenty-five letters and notes, mostly urging her to come again soon. His attraction to her was not purely verbal, as his verses might suggest; at times he seemed to think that he had found, too late, the true love of his life. In a greet­ ing on New Year's Day, 1856, he wrote: "I feel my pain less when I think of your delicacy and the gracefulness of your spirit," and on January 22 he wrote, in English: "My brain is full of madness and my heart is full of sorrow!" and added in German: "Never was a poet more miserable in the fullness of happiness that seems to mock me!"8 She responded with total adoration, the sincerity of which is evident in her emotional and detailed letters to Meissner after Heine's passing.9 But she did not only hold his hand; she made herself useful by reading to him and performing various secretarial services, a role of some im­ portance, since she had materialized directly on the heels of the dis­ missal of Reinhardt. Heine did not entrust her with his German corre­ spondence; actually her German grammar and orthography were a little insecure. In 1858 Camille Selden became the mistress of Hippolyte Taine; she

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE remained with him for ten years until he abandoned her to marry a wealthy girl. He developed her creative faculty, stimulated by her connection with Heine, and guided her into a writing career. She pro­ duced a novel, a feminist study, several works on modern German culture, and a translation of Goethe's Elective Affinities into French. Subsequently she obtained, with persistence, a position as teacher of languages in a girls' school in Rouen, though she had no credentials and her pedagogical skills were suspect. It was there that, to the gen­ eral astonishment of Europe and especially of Meissner, who had com­ pletely lost track of her, she wrote a book that appeared in Paris in 1884 with the title: Les Derniers Jours de H. Heine. It is a thoughtful and appealing book, felicitously if somewhat sentimentally written, and it is one of our major sources for Heine's last months, although at times it is not certain whether what she relates was heard from his own mouth or extracted from his writings, which she evidently knew very well. In it she supplied a French translation of Heine's last poem, in­ cluding the line about the "syphilis of time," which was the first indi­ cation that the text then known was defective.10 She died in 1896 in relative obscurity, but in the consciousness of having been, if briefly, one of the most important persons in the life of Heinrich Heine. And one thing more. Even if Camille Selden's teaching skills aroused the suspicion of her superiors, she did succeed in transmitting her en­ thusiasm for Heine to at least one of her pupils, who became a school­ teacher in her turn, and conveyed that enthusiasm to one of her pupils, now a gracious lady in Paris named Lucienne Netter, whose meticu­ lous researches into Lutezia and the newspapers of the July Monarchy have yielded substantial contributions to contemporary Heine studies. It was not so long ago, after all, and we can see in this strand of trans­ mission one concentrated but emblematic example of Heine's living endurance.

Ci 23

The End DURING 1855 Heine's condition worsened ominously. His vital func­ tions were giving way. In a letter to Alexandre Dumas that was promptly published, he complained of "des crampes de gorge et de poitrine, qui menacent de me suffoquer a tout instant, ne me permettent pas de trop prolonger cette dictee."1 Reinhardt reported to Campe

VI. THE MATTRESS-GRAVE

of episodes of choking.2 To Camille Selden, Heine wrote in July: "I still feel very bad; continuous cramps and vexations. . . . A dead man who thirsts after the most vital pleasures of life! That is terrible."3 In September he reported to Gustav of hemorrhages, mentioned in pass­ ing amidst the pursuit of his complex campaign against Dessauer.4 In the middle of the following February he began to vomit uncontrol­ lably; that was the end. Camille Selden visited him for the last time on Tuesday, February 12, 1856. On the following day she became a little ill herself and can­ celled an engagement. On the next two days Heine was unable to see her—his letter postponing her was probably the last he ever wrote—6 and on Saturday he was so bad that she could not be admitted. That night in her own room, according to her account, she had a powerful vision of a departing soul.6 When she came the following day, Heine was gone. He died at last at five in the morning on February 17, 1856, aged fifty-eight years and two months, having retained his lucid con­ sciousness almost to the last hour. Like all nineteenth-century emi­ nences, he was ascribed last words, and, of course, in several widely different versions; according to what is probably the most reliable source, he was said to have gestured and called out: "Write . . . paper . . . pencil."7 On February 20 he was buried as he had requested, without clergy in a simple ceremony, in Montmartre Cemetery. The funeral was attended by about a hundred persons, including Dumas, Gautier, Mignet, Camille Selden, and Alexandre Weill. His simple headstone was replaced in later years by the Vienna Men's Singing Society with a monument topped by a bust, jammed into that stone necropolis of Parisian notables.

Aftermath

Aftermath I RECALL my visit to that grave on a grey and rainy December after­ noon, a few days after Heine's 169th birthday. It was covered to a depth of three feet with fresh flowers. They were a sign of the en­ durance of his reputation in the world at large, which, unlike that of most writers of the past, has continued nearly independently of aca­ demic study. He has been translated into practically every language of the civilized world, and new translations in many languages appear frequently, as do studies of his extensive influence in numerous litera­ tures and language communities. The French requited his admiration for their nation and its Revolution by virtually nationalizing him. His own policy of arranging for French publication of his writings made him a visible figure from the outset, and indeed he has been almost as widely read in that language as in German, not only in France but elsewhere around the world, for example, in Spanish-speaking coun­ tries. Today the Bibliotheque Nationale is an important repository of manuscript materials, and French scholars are major partners in the current phase of Heine studies, working as co-editors of both the East and the West German critical editions. The British have come to a sim­ ilar result out of the opposite situation: they have requited Heine's persistent disdain for England with continuous attention and growing admiration. "You do not love the English," one of his early translators, John Stores Smith (1828- ca. 1898), wrote to him, "—but I, an Eng­ lishman, love, admire and delight in your writings; love, venerate and sympathize with you yourself."1 There has been a tendency in Eng­ lish-speaking countries, often bewildering to Germans, to rank him second only to Goethe in the German canon. Heine would have been surprised to see his ambition in that respect realized so effectively in a nation he thought devoid of all sensitivity. In fact, much of the most important work on Heine has been written in English by scholars in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Such widespread appropriation of a foreign writer is liable to in­ volve misunderstandings; it is subject to the process that the French literary sociologist Robert Escarpit has called "creative treason."2 One perceptive scholar has chronicled the successive phases of the English "legend" of Heine.3 Such effects are inevitable in reception history un­ til it is brought under control by a literary criticism of methodological integrity. An aspect of Heine that has always appealed to the Englishspeaking world has been his inimitable wit. This is already evident in the early Victorian phase of Heine reception that began to pick up momentum towards the end of his life. In November 1855 Julian Fane

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published in the Saturday Review an article entitled "Heinrich Heine, Poet and Humorist," and a few weeks before Heine's death, at the be­ ginning of January 1856, George Eliot published in the Westminster Review a significant essay, "German Wit: Heinrich Heine."4 This as­ pect makes Heine stand out in a literary canon in which the quality of wit has not been highly valued, and accounts for his being drawn into foreign canons that do appreciate that quality. His infinite comic re­ sourcefulness, his highly developed sense of the absurd, his sardonic explosiveness, are crucial features of his literary quality, and their vi­ brant sting has contributed to keeping his writings imperishably alive. Nevertheless I have tried not to overstress this aspect here. This is partly because it is not an easy subject to deal with in translation. But we must be careful not to do Heine an injustice by reducing him to a comedian. Although his verbal glibness sometimes ran away with him, wit for Heine was fundamentally instrumental rather than a stylistic end. "Wit in isolation," he wrote as a young man, "is worth nothing at all. Wit is tolerable to me only when it rests on a serious founda­ tion."5 While wit flashes and sparkles in many of his works, it is not a primary experience of the biographer who immerses himself in Heine's private communications and relations, in which he emerges as a rather fierce and sometimes savage personality. One of his twentieth-century editors, Oskar Walzel, remarked perceptively that he was not at bot­ tom fragile or decadent, but had "a robust, tough nature of strong, al­ most primitive instincts."6 It seems fairest to try to approach him from his own self-understanding as poet and emancipator. The history of Heine's reputation in Germany has been much more complex and problematic. Perhaps no other writer in the history of literature has been so embattled, decade upon decade, in his own coun­ try. Some parts of the story are altogether grotesque—such as the long farce of the efforts to set up monuments to him in various places, which led to protests, riots, and local government crises.7 When in 1953 the city of Dusseldorf finally managed to erect a memorial to its most famous son, it acquired by gift one of the familiar, pretty, and monot­ onous nudes of Aristide Maillol, titled, with singular inappropriateness, "Harmonie." The ill-managed dispute over the naming of the University of Diisseldorf is a contemporary continuation of this his­ tory.8 Heine's German reputation became involved with the historical agony of the German-Jewish situation. Its source is the frustrated pressure toward national unity, which became contaminated with class-biased conformity and racism. Heine's reputation was whipsawed in this process. His Jewishness was used as a pretext for asserting an

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insuperable incompatibility with German being, a congenital inability to achieve the depth and purity of that exceptional human condition. On the other hand, his internationalism and opposition to German chauvinism, his allegiance to French ideals, his fierce dissidence, and, for that matter, his wit, were used as a pretext for asserting that he was Jewish and foreign, a peripheral and annoying excrescence on the body of German culture. With the rise of political anti-Semitism to­ wards the end of the nineteenth century, this form of rejection became shriller in some quarters, and the Nazis, of course, tried to commit him to oblivion, although it is well known that the "Loreley" poem had become such a permanent possession of the German consciousness that Nazi-sponsored song books were obliged to carry it as "author un­ known." Sometimes it was suggested by way of explanation that the genius of the German language had for some inscrutable reason chosen this unworthy medium to express itself. German Jews, for their part, have sometimes labored over the Heine phenomenon out of their own location in the dilemma. On the one hand, there has occasionally been acceptance of the German nationalist position, resulting in a separation of Heine out of German literature and into an imaginary category of Jewish writers. On the other, German-Jewish assimilationists occa­ sionally behaved as though their posture of patriotism obliged them to cast Heine overboard.9 In the current period of analysis of Germany's traumatic past and the assignment of guilt for it to "bourgeois" culture, much has been written about this history. Compendia of anti-Heineana have been composed as school texts in order to sensitize pupils to the evils of their forefathers.10 Much of this discussion has been necessary and healthy. But in their zeal to indict the bourgeoisie, academic activists have sometimes systematically distorted the true facts of Heine's Ger­ man reputation. The impression these studies can give that there was a monolithic repudiation of Heine in the official culture and a malev­ olent silence in literary scholarship is simply false. Although there were differing waves of intensity, there was always widespread inter­ est in Heine. His works were anthologized and employed as school texts even during his lifetime. In the age of Bismarck and the Empire there developed a steadily growing corpus of Heine scholarship. Some of its impetus doubtless came from Strodtmann's now obsolete but knowledgeable and often perceptive biography. There began the basic philological work of collecting and editing manuscripts, which is harder in Heine's case than with most writers of modern times. Many editions appeared in the Wilhelminian period, including three major critical ones between 1887 and the First World War. Dissertations and

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monographs accumulated steadily. Valuable research and criticism emerged again between the World Wars, much of the best of it by German-Jewish scholars who subsequently lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis or fled into exile. It is misleading and ungrateful to ignore this extensive body of work, first of all because it is the foundation of our current edifice of scholarship and much of it continues to be val­ uable in its own right. But it should also modify some of our current thinking about the complicity of the traditional German university in the atrocities of our century, for almost all this work came out of the official educational establishment. Parallel to the burgeoning of Heine scholarship in the Wilhelminian period was an episode of very sub­ stantial research on the Young German movement and the censorship situation, which also forms the indispensable foundation of everything we now know about those subjects. It seems clear to me that within the "mandarin" university itself there developed a systematic effort to recover the oppositional and dissident traditions in German literature. It may have been a minority phenomenon, but in extent and bulk it cer­ tainly was not a minor one. However, around the time of World War I a new difficulty for Heine's reputation supervened. The advent of the modernist period, with its great intensification of literary depth and complexity, especially in poetry, caused his standing to drop precipitately in the minds of in­ tellectuals and writers. His poetry, which had remained the core of his wider reputation, no longer appeared to pass muster in the age of Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and Stefan George. Antecedents were more likely to be recognized in poets of greater aesthetic subtlety and sym­ bolic complexity: in Holderlin, in Goethe's late work, in Morike, and in Rilke's Swiss predecessor Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Heine had been anthologized and liedered and imitated into cliche; people could no longer hear his own forms of nuance and poetic tension. He was seen as a blight upon poetry because he had created forms that could be easily imitated by anyone who could count four beats and make a rhyme, and thus his example had demeaned the high and difficult pur­ pose of real poetry in the culture. An early symptom of this surfeit is the 19io polemic of the Viennese critic and style fanatic Karl Kraus, Heine and the Consequences (Heine und die Folgen). When read care­ fully, one can see that it is more about the consequences than about Heine, but the distinction is not adequately drawn, and there is an obtuseness in it surprising in a critic with so acute an ear. From the evidence I have seen, I cannot share the opinion that Heine was easily imitable. On the contrary, most imitations exhibit the symptoms of imperceptive reading. His simplicity of form, which

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for him was a discipline, became routine; his complex relation to his emotions became verbal sentimentality; his bitter struggle with the truth value of idealistic commitments became complacent cynicism. Kraus cites some shallow verses from an operetta and claims they could have stood in the Book of Songs;11 under no circumstances could they have, and it is typical of the refusal to read Heine with critical attention that one so sensitive to the nuances of language could pos­ sibly have thought so. Thus it happened that when in 1953 thirty German men of letters, including Thomas Mann, his son Golo, Martin Buber, and Hermann Hesse, were asked to name their favorite poems, none of Heine's was mentioned.12 The rather, slow rehabilitation of Heine in West Germany after World War II is certainly owing to the continued predominance of a modernist, in some degree Neo-Romantic aesthetic rather than to any Faschistoid hangover. The case probably bears some structural re­ semblance to the devaluation of Shelley by the New Criticism. Never­ theless, Heine's low visibility in the literary canon and the ignorance concerning him that was discovered in schools began to be worrisome, especially as he had from the beginning been assigned a prominent position in the cultural politics designed to legitimize the East German regime. In the East editions and studies and public gestures of all kinds proliferated. An initial plan for a cooperative East and West critical edition collapsed under ideological difficulties and fissioned into two. For a time the East German margin in the recognition of Heine served as an effective propaganda weapon against the Federal Republic. How­ ever, that is all changed now. The initiative in Heine scholarship, both qualitatively and quantitatively, has now shifted to the West, while East German Heine studies, despite a continuous verbal assertiveness, have become anemic and rare. The East German critical edition has performed a needful service by re-editing Heine's correspondence, in­ cluding the letters to him. But it is now clear that in nearly every other respect the Diisseldorf edition will be superior to its ill-printed and scantily annotated Weimar counterpart, although it will appear much more slowly, owing to the quantity of labor being invested in it. The revival of Heine studies in the West, although it was set in mo­ tion by an older generation of scholars and experts around i960, came to ride on the wave of student radicalization and the recrudescence of Marxism among young scholars. Thus it was not so much a counterdevelopment to the East German situation as a parallel to it, insofar as it made Heine into a revolutionary paladin, an anti-figure in the cultural canon, a model of dissidence and radical criticism, and a focus for the indictment of the bourgeois class and what today is hopefully

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called "late capitalism." This is not the place to go into the complex details of this development, which has been intimidating by its very massiveness. But it may be remarked that one of its characteristics has been to accept traditional prejudices about Heine, although with re­ versed values. It is agreed with Heine's detractors that he was an un­ patriotic subversive, a propagator of the communist cause, an atheist, a frivolous feuilletonist, and lasciviously obscene; however, these are now seen as positive features. To maintain this view has required very selec­ tive quotation and a drastic shrinkage of Heine's career to the decade or so from De VAllemagne to the Winter's Tale (minus Atta Troll), with carefully limited excursions into the Travel Pictures and Lutezia. Sec­ ondly, the modernist dismissal of Heine's poetry has been accepted under the new auspices of a strong anti-aesthetic and even anti-literary affect. Heine's proclamations of the "end of the epoch of art" appeared to be consonant with the announcements of the "end of literature" in German literary circles of the 1960s, and his frequent repudiations of poetry in favor of an activist prose have been endlessly quoted with­ out taking much notice of the fact that they contradict his own prac­ tice, one of the significant features of which is the constant recurrence to poetry. That the poetic dignity was crucial to his self-understand­ ing has been lost from view, and the late poetry, which outside of Germany increased in prestige even from a modernist standpoint, has been ignored as the maunderings of a sick man. But at the end Heine himself recapitulated the self-image that had sustained him from ado­ lescence: "One is much when one is a poet, and especially when one is a great lyrical poet in Germany, among the people that has sur­ passed all other nations in two things: philosophy and song."13 It is altogether natural that our perspective on our literary heritage should undergo shifts of emphasis corresponding to changing historical and social situations. "The works of the spirit stand eternally firm," wrote Heine apropos of Goethe, "but criticism is changeable; it pro­ ceeds from the views of its own time and has its only significance there, and if it is not itself of artistic value . . . it will be buried with its time."14 But there are aspects of the German attitude toward litera­ ture that may strike the Anglo-American eye as somewhat peculiar. The most radical features of contemporary Heine scholarship retain the most traditional habits of seeing literature as a secular scripture, judged according to its correctness as a philosophical account of the human situation and its reliability as a guide to the conduct of our lives. This German habit has deeply permeated Marxist literary criti­ cism and is one of its most vulnerable weaknesses. If the message em­ bodied in the literary phenomenon cannot be made consonant with

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our current ideas of what is right and good, the work must be ex­ pelled from the canon; if, however, it is too strong, incapable of being dislodged from the heights of human achievement, then a means must be found for making the message serviceable to our own aspirations, even if this means wrenching reinterpretations, suppression of intrac­ table parts of the oeuvre, or abstruse decoding of a secret message tran­ scending the author's own consciousness. That we might appreciate an aesthetic achievement or an intense probe of the imagination into the experience of life from premises that we may not share is not a recognized option in the mainstream of the traditional German re­ sponse to literature, to which the radical and Marxist methodologies are, in this respect, wholly assimilated. The danger is to replace the Heine of history with a more malleable and congenial "Heine" of our own making, and thus to make the full range of his creativity, his experience, and his dilemmas inaccessible. In The SrWabian Mirror, Heine complained about the employment against him of "the well-known trick of putting together mutilated sentences from the most heterogeneous writings of an author in order to impose upon them whatever principle or lack of principle one likes."15 Now this device is at times used to elevate and defend him at all costs. It is true that he was a creative, progressive, and large-souled personality who was in his time the victim of reactionary repression and mean-spirited philistinism, and his subsequent reputation became the victim of repressive, anti-democratic, illiberal, and racist forces. In this regard Heine is one of the cultural heroes of human freedom, in much the same way that the dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are today, whose situation resembles in a more fearsome way that of creative minds in the age of Metternich. But the truth is that Heine made himself vulnerable to the opposition he generated. He alienated a large part of his real, concrete audience, partly intentionally out of a high historical mission that was too little heeded in his own country, but partly out of ill judgment and ethical carelessness. W. H. Auden, in a retrospective preface to one of his volumes of collected poetry, wrote self-critically when he was approximately the age at which Heine died: "In art as in life, bad manners, not to be confused with a deliberate intention to cause offence, are the conse­ quence of an over-concern with one's ego and a lack of consideration for (and knowledge of) others. Readers, like friends, must not be shouted at or treated with brash familiarity. Youth may be forgiven when it is brash or noisy, but this does not mean that brashness and noise are virtues."16 This parallels rather closely what much of Heine's most thoughtful public often felt about him, and while such a judg-

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ment would not exhaust him any more than it exhausts the younger Auden, it is not a matter of ideological obduracy to recognize that he was not a perpetually violated innocent, as he regularly liked to pre­ tend and some short-sighted observers now like to believe, but that in his conduct and manners he bore some responsibility for his adverse relationship with his public and posterity. There was a side of Heine that never fully matured into adulthood, even when he was nearly sixty years old, and it is perhaps most clearly perceived by considering that he could not have afforded a thoughtful self-judgment like Auden's with its sensitivity to the poet's dialogue with other selves. He could say such things as a gesture·, in the preface to the new French edition of De VAllemagne of 1855 he wrote: "J'ai supprime des diatribes emanees autrefois d'une malice juvenile et injuste."17 But it is not true. The tragedy of Heine's reception lies not in the fury of his natural enemies, but in the strain he put upon the loyalty of his allies and friends. His case reminds me a little of that of Norman Mailer; one is continuously dazzled by his stupendous talent and his fiercely indi­ vidualistic, substantial vision; and one may feel one's self on his side in the struggle of mind and imagination against constricted, petty, hu­ man meanness; at the same time his narcissistic antics make it terribly hard for serious people to take him seriously. Sometimes when dis­ putes about Heine generate rumpus and uproar, as they continue to do, it is said that the ability to do this is the mark of a writer still alive among us. Such a feeling derives from the worry that most past litera­ ture survives only in an academic or antiquarian context. But I am not inclined to think that the propensity of a literary phenomenon for setting off irrational and sub-critical strife is much of a criterion for its enduring value in civilization. The reality of work and author be­ comes too rudely subordinated to the purposes of its user. Heine is sliced up, selectively perceived, and opportunistically interpreted be­ cause the whole man and oeuvre will not serve ideologically unambig­ uous campaigns, no matter how virtuous and right-minded they may be. Ultimately Heine was of his own party, and therein lay his strengths as well as his limitations. We are more likely to assess and appreciate the strengths adequately if we abandon the effort to shape him to our own purposes and allow him to be himself in the poetic dignity to which he was so completely committed, measuring his idi­ osyncratic estimate of what constituted a poet's true revolutionary posture against the best standards we have been able to obtain from historical experience without making our judgment on him dependent upon the extent to which he can be made to submit to us.

References

A Note on Text References Where possible, that is, for the Book of Songs, the first of the Travel Pictures, and Borne, reference is made to the current Diisseldorf edi­ tion (DA), which will be definitive when completed. For most of the rest I have opted, after some hesitation, for Ernst Elster's edition of 1887-1890 (E), which, despite its modern inadequacies, remains the critical edition of choice until the Diisseldorf edition is completed. Elster's half-finished second edition of 1925 (Eii) is a substantial im­ provement as far as it goes, but it has become so rare—in the course of a dozen years I have encountered it only once on the antiquarian market and many libraries do not have it—that employing it might be a hindrance to some readers. I refer to it occasionally. The best text of the Memoirs is considered to be that of Erich Loewenthal in Vol­ ume 12 of Heine's Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. G. E. Bogeng (Ham­ burg: Hoifmann und Campe, 1925). However, I have found it also to be defective, with dropped lines of text in one place; after having col­ lated it with E, it seemed most convenient to refer to the latter for the Memoirs also. Where E does not suffice, I have referred to the con­ temporary Hanser edition of Klaus BriegIeb (B), and once in a while, where necessary, to other sources. The reader's convenience might have been as well served by prima­ rily referring to B. It is easily obtainable; with a few exceptions— chiefly the essay on Ludwig Markus and the Memoirs—it contains the best texts we now have, and its order of presentation is well planned. But it is not recommendable to the general reader by reason of its exceedingly peculiar and exasperating commentary. Filling more than 2,700 pages of small print in the seven volumes, it is turgid, sometimes confusing, and hard to use for quick reference. While often failing to provide the most elementary information and in some cases cursory in its annotation, it is packed with disproportionately long argumentative essays along with secondary material reproduced at great length that would properly have belonged in separate monographs rather than in an edition. While the commentary contains much valuable ancillary material, on which I have drawn copiously, it is effectively usable only by someone already knowledgeable about Heine, and even then only with patience and a horrendous expenditure of time. In its clumsiness, opacity, and prolixity, it is a modern caricature of the legendary ex­ cesses of old-fashioned German philology. Furthermore, it is marked by a hagiographic view of Heine that bullies the reader, pre-empting

REFERENCES

rather than aiding judgment, and is animated by a relentless ideologi­ cal bias that I consider profoundly distortive and misleading. All letters from and to Heine are quoted from Volumes 20-27 of the current East German edition (HSA). Since, however, the annotation to it is very cursory, occasional reference is made, with the appropri­ ate caution and skepticism, to the more voluminous though frequently eccentric and injudicious commentary in Friedrich Hirth's edition of the letters (H). With regard to sources about Heine and his environ­ ment, I have tried to refer in most cases to the most easily accessible modern materials, which have been compiled with great industry and conscientiousness. The interested reader will have no difficulty pro­ ceeding from them to the primary sources if he wishes. The following abbreviations are used throughout: B

Heinrich Heine, Samtliche Schrif ten, ed. Klaus Briegleb et al. Mu­ nich: Hanser, 1968-1976. 6 vols, in 7. DA Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke (Diisseldorfer Ausgabe), ed. Manfred Windfuhr et al. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973E Heines samtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Elster. Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, [1887-1890]. 7 vols. E x Heines Werke, ed. Ernst Elster. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Insti­ tut, [1925]. 4 vols, (incomplete). EP Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: The Elusive Poet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Goethe, WA Goethes Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe), ed. at the order of Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony. Weimar: Bohlau, 1887-1912. H Heinrich Heine, Briefe, ed. Friedrich Hirth. Mainz: Kupferberg, 1950-1951. 6 vols. HH Heinrich Heine. HJ Heine-Jahrbueh. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1962 if. HSA Heinrieh Heine Sdkularausgabe, ed. Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstatten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Berlin and Paris: Akademie-Verlag and Editions du CNRS, 1970MEW Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961-1971. Werner Begegnungen mit Heine, in Fortfiihrung von Η. H. Houbens uGespraehe mit Heine," ed. Michael Werner. Hamburg: Hoff­ mann und Campe, 1973. 2 vols.

REFERENCES

The following short titles are used throughout: Borne, Samtliche Sehriften Ludwig Borne, Santtliehe Sehriften, ed. Inge and Peter Rippmann. Diisseldorf, Darmstadt: Melzer, 19641968. 5 vols. Cahier Heine Cahier Heine, ed. Michael Werner. Paris: Presses de l'Ecole Normale Superieure, 1975. Glossy, Literarisehe Geheimberichte Karl Glossy, Literarisehe Geheimberiehte aus dem Vormarz. Jahrbueh der Grillparzer-Gesellsehaft, Vols. 21-23. Vienna: Konegen, 1912. Hirth, Bausteine Friedrich Hirth, Heinrieh Heine: Bausteine zu einer Biographie. Mainz: Kupferberg, 1950. Hirth, Franzosisehe Freunde. Friedrich Hirth, Heinrieh Heine und seine franzosisehen Freunde. Mainz: Kupferberg, 1949. Houben, Verbotene Literatur Heinrieh Hubert Houben, Verbotene Literatur von der klassisehen Zeit bis zur Gegemvart. Berlin: Rowohlt; Bremen: Schunemann, 1924, 1928. Reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1965. 2 vols. Houben, Zeitsehriften Zeitsehriften des Jungen Deutsehlands, ed. Heinrieh Hubert Houben. Berlin: Behr, 1906, 1909. Reprinted Hil­ desheim and New York: Olms, 1970. 2 vols. Kruse, Hamburger Zeit Joseph A. Kruse, Heines Hamburger Zeit. Hamburg: Hoifmann und Campe, 1972. Mendelssohn, Salomon Heine Joseph Mendelssohn, Salomon Heine: Blatter der Wiirdigung und Erinnerung. 3rd ed. Hamburg: Berendsohn, 1845. Six Essays Jeifrey L. Sammons, Six Essays on the Young German Novel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Varnhagen, Literaturkritiken Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Literaturkritiken, mit einem Anhang: Aufsatze zum Saint-Simonismus, ed. Klaus F. Gille. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1977. Wadepuhl, Heine-Studien Walter Wadepuhl, Heine-Studien. Wei­ mar: Arion Verlag, 1956. Ziegler, Julius Campe Edda Ziegler, Julius Campe: Der Verleger Heinrieh Heines. Hamburg: Hoifmann und Campe, 1976.

References Introduction i. Leon Edel, Literary Biography, and ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 37.

REFERENCES, PAGES 218-223 2. Werner 1:193, '953. A. I. Sandor, The Exile of Gods: Interpretation of a Theme, a Theory and a Technique in the Work of Heinrich Heine (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), pp. 166, 174, 181.

PART

I.

ORIGINS

1. The Birth date Riddle 1. Friedrich Steinmann, H. Heine: Denkwiirdigkeiten und Erlebnisse aus meinem Xusammenleben mit ihm (Prague and Leipzig: Kober, 1857), p. 10; notes by Johann Baptist Rousseau, cited by Wadepuhl, Heine-Studien, p. 9; Adolf Strodtmann, H. Heine's Leben und Werke, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Duncker, 1873), 1:677; Hermann Hiiffer, "Heine auf dem Lyzeum und Gymnasium zu Diisseldorf," Hiiffer, Heinrich Heine: Gesammelte Aufsatze, ed. Ernst Elster (Berlin: Bondi, 1906), pp. 267-70; Ernst Elster, "Zu Heines Biographie," Vierteljahrsschrift fur Litteraturgeschichte 4 (1891): 473-74; Philipp F. Veit, "Die Ratsel um Heines Geburt," HJ 1562, pp. 5-25; Ernst Elster, " W a r Heine franzosischer Burger?" Deutsche Rundschau 112 (1902): 224-25. 2. Werner 1:37. 3. Kruse, Hamburger Zeit, p. 23. 4. H 1:203. HSA 20:193 silently corrects to 1797. 5. Werner 1:131. 6. H 4:150-51, 194. 7. E 3:316. 8. H H to Philarete Chasles, 15 Jan. 1835, HSA 21:94. 9. E 4:621; see also E 6:32. 10. Elster, "Zu Heines Biographie," p. 466; Maximilian Heine, Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine und seine Familie (Berlin: Dummler, 1868), p. 7. 11. HSA 23:146. 12. H H to Charlotte Embden, 16 July 1853, HSA 23:289-90. 13. Philipp F. Veit, "Heine's Birth: Illegitimate or Legitimate?" Germanic Review 33 (1958): 276-84. 14. See Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army 1640-194$, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 69. 15. HSA 23:146. 16. H 1:203. 17. DA 1:1167; Walter Wadepuhl, Heine-Studien, p. 38. 18. H H to Friedrich Rassmann, 20 Oct. 1821, HSA 20:43.

2. The Mother's Side 1. E 7:466; H H to Betty Heine, 7 May 1853, HSA 23:283. 2. Adolf Strodtmann, "Die Mutter H . Heine's, nach ihren Jugendbriefen geschildert," Deutsche Rundschau 12 (July-Sept., 1877): 86-100. 3. Werner 1:32 4. E 7:463-65. 5. E 6:69-71. 6. DA 1:116-19. 360

REFERENCES, PAGES 218-223 7. H 1:203; H H to Ferdinand Gustav Kiihne, 7 Apr. 1839, HSA 21:319; W e r ner 1:67-68, 235. 8. H 4:225; Werner 1:436. 9. DA 1:119. 10. E 4:107-13. 11. E 1:319. 12. H H to Betty Heine, 21 Jan. 1850, HSA 23:22. 13. E 7:476. 14. Fritz Heymann, Der Chevalier von Geldern: Eine Chronik der Abenteuer der Juden (Cologne: Metzler, 1963), pp. 245-359; Ludwig Rosenthal, "Neue Einblicke in das Leben und die Personlichkeit von Heines GroBoheim Simon van Geldern (sein "Adressenverzeichnis)," HJ 1973, pp. 154-99; Rosenthal, "Die Beziehungen des 'Chevalier van Geldern' zu regierenden Fiirstenhausern, hohen Staatsbeamten und anderen Standespersonen," HJ 7575, pp. 115-49. 15. E 5:122. 16. E 7:475. 17. E 7:477.

3. The Father's Side 1. E 7:482-83. 2. Gustav Karpeles, Heinrich Heine: Aus seinem Leben und aus seiner TLeit (Leipzig: Titze, 1899), pp. 42-48; H 5:88-90. 3. Ludwig Rosenthal, Heinrich Heine als Jude (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1 973)> PP- 63-644. E 7:487-88. 5. E 7:487. 6. E 7:482. 7. E 7:496. 8. H H to Moses Moser, 23 May 1823, HSA 20:87. 9. H 1:203. 10. DA 1:248-51. 11. Kruse, Hamburger Zeit, p. 70.

4. Uncle Salomon 1. Mendelssohn, Salomon Heine, p. 28. 2. H 5:428. 3. DA 6:569. 4. E 1:309. 5. Mendelssohn, Salomon Heine, pp. 9-10. 6. Julius Faulwasser, Der grope Brand und der Wiederaufbau von Hamburg: Ein Denkmal zu den funfzigjdhrigen Erinnerungstagen des 5. bis 8. Mai 1842 (Hamburg: Meissner, 1892), pp. 41, 67. 7. Werner 1:204. 8. W e r n e r 1:556. 9. Maximilian Heine to H H , 8 Aug., 22 Sept. 1833, HSA 24:201, 208-09. 10. H H to Giacomo Meyerbeer, 6 Apr. 1835, HSA 21:104. 11. £ 1:364-69. 12. Werner 1:220; cf. 2:545. 361

REFERENCES, PAGES 2 84-291 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

HSA 20:283, 341-42. HSA 21:162. Salomon Heine to H H , 3 Oct. 1838, HSA 25:175. HSA 21:228-29. Maximilian Heine to H H , 27 Oct. 1837, HSA 24:94-95. HSA 21:229. H H to Christian Sethe, 20 Nov. 1816, HSA 20:22. 5. The

World

of Heine's

Boyhood

1. D/4 6:188-89. 2. DA 6:183-86. 3. DA 6:31. 4. D/4 6:48. 5. Otto W . Johnston, "Miszelle. Heinrich Heine and the Thirteenth of December," Colloquia Germanica [6] (1972): 196-202. 6. £ 4:65. 7. ZX4: 6:88-89; £ 4:273. 8. DA 6:159-60; 194. 9. E 7:290. 10. See Giorgio Tonelli, Heinrich Heines politische Philosophie (1830-1845) (Hildesheim and N e w York: Olms, 1975). T h e best study of this subject is still Paul Holzhausen, Heinrich Heine und Napoleon I. (Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1903). For the context see Otto W . Johnston, "The Emergence of the Napoleon Cult in German Literature," Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire 52 (1974): 613-25. 6.

Schooling

1. DA 6:222. 2. DA 6:143. 3. E 3:304. Eichendorff's line is "Der Dichter ist das Herz der Welt," in the poem " W o treues Wollen, redlich Streben" in the novel Ahnung und Gegewwart of 1815. Joseph von Eichendorff, Werke, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Hanser, 1959), p. 829. 4. E 3:385. 5. E 3:411. 6. B 2:883. 7. E 2:82-85. 8. Philipp F. Veit, "Fichtenbaum und Palme," Germanic Review 51 (1976): 18, n. 10. 9. DA 6:188. 10. H H to Moser, 25 June 1824, HSA 20:168. 11. E 7:511; DA 11:412. 12. Mendelssohn, Salomon Heine, p. 28. 13. E 4 : 4 5 3 - 5 4 -

14. See Israel Tabak, Judaic Lore in Heine: The Heritage of a Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), pp. 83-92. 15. E 7:479-80. 16. H H to Sethe, 20 Nov. 1816, HSA 20:22. 17. Benedict Spinoza, The Political Works, ed. and tr. A. G. Wernham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 63, 177. 362

REFERENCES, PAGES 218-223

18. E.g., Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Raymond Naves and Julien Benda (Paris: Garnier, 1967), pp. 137, 385. 19. HSA 20:22. 20. DA 1:326-33. 21. E 7:480. 22. DA 6:92. 23. E 7:462. 24. See Wulf Wiilfing, "Skandaloser 'Witz': Untersuchungen zu Heines Rhetorik," in Heinrich Heine: Artistik und Engagement, ed. Wolfgang Kuttenkeuler (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977), p. 46. 25. E 7:461. 26. E 7:490. 27. E 7:492. 28. E 7:490. 29. Maximilian Heine, Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine und seine Familie (Berlin: Diimmler, 1868), pp. 29-30. 30. Ibid., pp. 30-31. 31. Eberhard Galley, "Harry Heine als Benutzer der Landesbibliothek in Diisseldorf," HJ 1971, pp. 30-42. 32. Walter Kanowsky, "Heine als Benutzer der Bibliotheken in Bonn und Gottingen," HJ 7575, pp. 129-53. 33. Eberhard Galley, "Das rote Sefchen und ihr Lied von der Otilje. Em Kapitel Dichtung und Wahrheit in Heines 'Memoiren,'" H J 197;, pp. 77-92.

7. The Great Love Affair(s) 1. H H to Sethe, 6 July, 20 Nov. 1816, HSA 20:17-23. 2. E 7:482; cf. B 6/2:330. 3. E 2:36-37. 4. H H to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, 19 Oct. 1827, HSA 20:301-02. 5. H H to Moser, 11 July, 23 Aug. 1823, HSA 20:104, IQ66. H H to Salomon Heine, 15 Sept. 1828, HSA 20:342. This is a draft; it is therefore not certain the letter was sent. 7. H H to Maximilian Heine, 9 Jan. 1850, HSA 23:20. 8. H H to Betty Heine, 21 June; Therese Halle to H H , 10 Aug. 1853, HSA 23:287; 27:126-27. 9. H H to Karl Immermann, 10 June 1823, HSA 20:92-93. 10. William Rose, The Early Love Poetry of Heinrich Heine: An Inquiry into Poetic Inspiration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 82. 11. B 2:744. 12. Manfred Windfuhr, "Heine und der Petrarkismus," in Heinrich Heine, ed. Helmut Koopmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), pp. 207-31. 13. E 7:381. 14. See EP, pp. 16, 142, 407-08, 410-11.

8. The Businessman 1. Werner 1:32-33. 2. DA 1:1218-26. 3. B 1:800. 363

REFERENCES, PAGES 218-223 4. DA 6:161. 5. See Wilhelm Ochsenbein, Die Aufnahme Lord Byrons in Deutschland und sein Einfluss auf den jungen Heine (Bern: Francke, 1905), pp. 81-113. 6. H H to Rudolf Christiani, 24 May; H H to Moser, 25 June 1824, HSA 20:163; 170. 7. E 7:464. 8. E 4:97, 105-06. 9. DA 1:120-29. 10. Klaus H . S. Schulte, "Das letzte Jahrzehnt von Heinrich Heines Vater in Diisseldorf. Notariatsurkunden iiber Samson Heines Geschafte (1808-1821)," H] 1 914, PP- 105-31. 11. Ibid., pp. 118-19. 12. E 3:401. 13. E 7:467.

PART

II. T H E

STUDENT

POET

1. Bonn 1. Transcript of the hearing in Werner 1:37-38. 2. DA 1:456-58, 512-15. 3. Werner 1:40. 4. H H to Friedrich von Beughem, 15 July 1820; H H to Moser 18 June 1823, HSA 20:26; 98. 5. Werner 1:36. 6. Walter Wadepuhl, "Steinmanns Heinefalschungen," Heine-Studien, pp. 3946. 7. Walter Kanowsky, Vernunft und Geschichte: Heinrich Heines Studium als Grundlegung seiner Welt- und Kunstanschauung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975), pp. 1-113. 8. E 5:279. 9. DA 1:114-15, 438-39. 10. See Werner Welzig, "Heine in deutschen Balladenanthologien," Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift N.S. 27 (1977): 315. 11. Erhard Weidl, "Die zeitgenossische Rezeption des 'Buchs der Lieder,'" HJ 1915, p- 6-

2. The Poetry 1. DA 1:562, 1216-17. 2. DA 1:515-18. 3. E 6:19. 4. E 4:73. 5. Werner 1:147. 6. See the more detailed argument in EP, pp. 26-87. 7. H H to Wilhelm Miiller, 7 June 1826, HSA 20:250. 8. See Nigel Reeves, Heinrich Heine: Poetry and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 37-53. 9. Heine, Samtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel et al. (Leipzig: Insel, 1910-20), 7:475364

REFERENCES, PAGES218-223

10. E 7:174. 11. E 7:220. 12. DA 1:563. 13. E 3:521. 14. H H to Steinmann and Rousseau, 29 Oct. 1820, HSA 20:29. 15. DA 1:141. 16. Walter A. Berendsohn, "Heines 'Buch der Lieder.' Struktur- und Stilstudie," HJ 1962, p. 26. 17. Werner 1:93.

3. Essays and Tragedies 1. E 7:150. 2. E 7:152-70. 3. See Six Essays, pp. 54-59. 4. E 7:171-72. 5. E 7:218. 6. [George Eliot], "German W i t : Heinrich Heine," Westminster and Quarterly Review N.S. 9 (1856): 11. 7. For some reasons for their failure to satisfy, see Tena Kimberly Williams, "Romantic Tragedy: Theory vs. Theater" (diss. Yale University, 1977). 8. E 2:250. 9. H H to Steinmann and Rousseau, 29 Oct. 1820, HSA 20:29. 10. H H to Adolf Mullner, 30 Dec. 1821, HSA 20:47. 11. E 7:167. 12. E 2:259. 13. E 2:323; cf. 522. 14. H H to Steinmann, 4 Feb. 1821, HSA 20:36-37. 15. E 2:247. 16. E

3:375-76-

17. E 2:521-22; H H to Heinrich Laube, 7 Feb. 1850, HSA H H to Immermann, 10 Apr. 1823, HSA 20:77-78.

23:26-27; but cf.

4. Gottingen 1. DA 6:151. 2. D/4 1:113. Cf. H H to von Beughem, 15 July 1820, HSA 20:26. 3. H H to Steinmann and Rousseau, 19 Oct; to von Beughem, 9 Nov. 1820, HSA 20:31; 33. 4. Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship 1770-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 57. 5. E 6:62. 6. H H to Steinmann and Rousseau, 29 Oct. 1820, HSA 20:28-29. 7. DA 1:440; 6:135. 8. H H to Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, 7 Nov. 1820; to Steinmann, 4 Feb. 1821, HSA 20:31-32; 38. 9. Werner 1:49. 10. Eberhard Galley, "Heine und die Burschenschaft. Ein Kapitel aus Heines politischem Werdegang zwischen 1819 und 1830," HJ 1972, pp. 66-95. 11. H 4:125.

365

REFERENCES, PAGES218-223 12. £7:259. 13. Transcript of the hearing Werner 1:44-48.

5. Berlin 1. Walter Kanowsky, Vernunft und Geschichte: Heinrich Heines Studium als Grundlegung seiner Welt- und Kunstanschauung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975), pp. 177-78. 2. DA 6:19. 3. DA 6:192. 4. Kanowsky, Vernunft und Geschichte, pp. 250-307. 5. Georg Lukacs, Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1952), pp. 113-18. 6. £ 6:402. 7. £ 6:411-12. 8. £ 6:428. 9. H H to Immanuel Wohlwill, 7 Apr. 1823, HSA 20:74. 10. E 4:262. 11. E 1:313; 3:381-83. 12. E 1:254-55; 7:327. 13. £ 6:535. 14. See Dolf Sternberger, Heinrich Heine und die Abschaffung der Sunde (Hamburg: Claassen, 1972). pp. 266-67. 15. E 6:47-51. 16. Kanowsky, Vernunft und Geschichte, p. 195. 17. £ 6:46. 18. £ 5:69; B 2:678. 19. B 2:682. 20. A. I. Sandor, The Exile of Gods: Interpretation of a The?ne, a Theory and a Technique in the Works of Heinrich Heine (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), p. 109. 21. £ 5:92. 22. £ 4:14. 23. £ 6:148. 24. £ 5:326. 25. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 24-25. Among the many treatments of the problem, a recommendable, moderately expressed discussion is Manfred Windfuhr, "Heine und Hegel: Rezeptdon und Produktion," Internationaler Heine-Kongrefi Dusseldorf 1972: Referate und Diskussionen, ed. Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973), pp. 261-80. The precise location of Heine in the Young Hegelian context is still an outstanding need of scholarly inquiry. A useful probe is Lucien Calvie, "Heine und die Junghegelianer," ibid., pp. 307-17. T h e persistent scholar will be able to dig out some promising perspectives from Heinz Hengst, Idee und Ideologieverdacht: Revolutionare lmplikationen des deutschen Idealismus irn Kontext der zeitkritischen Prosa Heinrich Heines (Munich: Fink, 1973). The most recent discussion at this writing is Eduard Kriiger, Heine und Hegel: Dichtung, Philosophie und Politik bei Heinrich Heine (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1977); it reverts to the Lukacs tradition. 26. £ 7:296. 366

REFERENCES, PAGES284-291 6. Valuable

Connections

1. DA 6:26, 45; H H to Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz, 9 Mar. 1824, HSA 20:151. 2. H H to Goethe, 29 Dec. 1821, HSA 20:46. 3. See Varnhagen to H H , 17 Apr. 1833, HSA 24:164-66. 4. Sol Liptzin, Germany's Stepchildren (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944), p. 12. 5. H H to Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, 12 Apr. 1823; H H to Varnhagen, 28 Mar. 1833, HSA 20:77; 2 I : 5 ° - 5 I ; 1:565. 6. See Rahel Varnhagen to Friedrich von Gentz, 9 Oct. 1830, Werner 2:489. 7. Konrad Feilchenfeldt, Varnhagen von Ense als Historiker (Amsterdam: Erasmus, 1970), p. 211. 8. Varnhagen, Literaturkritiken, pp. viii, xiv. 9. Ibid., pp. xxiv, 77-84. 10. See Six Essays, pp. 124-50. 11. Benno von Wiese, Karl Immermann: Sein Werk und sein Leben (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1969), p. 244. 12. E 1:2-3. 13. H H to Ernst Christian August Keller, 15 June 1822, HSA 20:55. 14. H H to Immermann, 24 Dec. 1822, HSA 20:59-62. 15. B 1:805-06. 16. H H to Immermann, 14 Jan. 1823, HSA 20:65-66. 17. H H to Heinrich Laube, 9 Sept. 1840, HSA 21:380. 7. Prose

Beginnings

1. H H to Immermann, 24 Dec. 1822, HSA 20:62. 2. DA 6:362; H H to Brockhaus, 1 Feb. 1822, HSA 20:48-49. 3. DA 6:9. 4. DA 6:368-69; H H to August Wilhelm von Schilling, 30 Apr. 1822, and published apology, HSA 20:48-49. 5. DA 6:422. 6. DA see also Ernst Josef Krzywon, Heinrich Heine und Polen: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik der politischen Dichtung zwischen Romantik und Realismus (Cologne and Vienna: Bohlau, 1972), pp. 182-218. 7. DA 1:278-81. 8. E 4:69-70. 9. DA 6:57. 10. See Six Essays, pp. 104-23. 11. E I:353-5512. DA 6:62. 13. DA 6:481-85. 8.

"Root?

1. Minutes in Werner 1:64. 2. Zeitschrift fur die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1 (1823): 19-20. 3. H H to Ferdinand Lassalle, 11 Feb. 1846, HSA 22:194. 4. H H to Moser, 23 May 1823, HSA 20:87. Heine puts the project on the Mississippi. 367

REFERENCES, PAGES

218-223

5. H H to Moser, 27 Sept. 1823, HSA 20:112. 6. H H to Wohlwill, 1 Apr. 1823, HSA 20:71-72. 7. H H to Moser, 23 Aug. 1823, HSA 20:107. 8. Michael Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1794-1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), pp. 163, 168-69. 9. H H to Leopold Zunz, 27 June 1823, HSA 20:102-03; cf. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew, pp. 175-76. 10. Philipp F. Veit, "Heine: T h e Marrano Pose," Monatshefte 66 (1974): 145-56. 11. Werner 1:65-68. 9. T h e R a b b i of Bacherach 1. See Franz Finke, "Zur Datierung des 'Rabbi von Bacherach,'" HJ 196$, pp. 26-32. 2. HSA 20:167. 3. H H to Julius Campe, 17 or 18, 21 July 1840, 21:368, 370; E 4:488. 4. H H to Moser, 25 June 1824, HSA 20:168.

10. Gottingen Again 1. H H to Charlotte and Moritz Embden, 15 Sept.; to Moser, 27 Sept. 1823, HSA 20:110; i n . 2. H H to Moser, 18 June 1823, HSA 20:96. 3. H H to Moser, 30 Sept. 1823, HSA 20:114. 4. E 7:222-23.

11. The Harz Journey and the Meeting with Goethe 1. H H to Goethe, 1 Oct. 1824, HSA 20:175. 2. See DA 6:134, 647-48. 3. E 5:248. 4. Borne, Samtliche Schriften, 2:820. 5. Ibid., p. 819. 6. E 3:503. 7. E 7:256; 5:254. 8. E 7:255. 9. DA 6:146. 10. E 7:254. n . Ibid.; see also DA 6:146-47, E 5:257. 12. H H to Ludwig Robert, 27 Nov. 1823, HSA 20:125. 13. See Ulrich Mache, "Der junge Heine und Goethe. Eine Revision der Auffassung von Heines Verhaltnis zu Goethe vor dem Besuch in Weimar (1824)," HJ 196s, pp. 42-47. 14. H H to Varnhagen, 17 June, to Moser 23 Aug. 1823, HSA 20:94, n o . 15. See Jost Hermand, "Werthers Harzreise," in Hermand, Von Mainz nach Weimar (1793-1919): Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), pp. 129-51, and Hanna Spencer, "Spiel mit Goethes Erbmantel" in Spencer, Dichter, Denker, Journalist: Studien zum Werk Heinrich Heines (Bern: Lang, 1977), pp. 37-51. 16. H H to Moser, 25 Oct. 1824, HSA 20:180. 368

REFERENCES, PAGES 218-223 17. Maximilian Heine, Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine (Berlin: Diimmler, 1868), pp. 122-23. 18. H H to Christiani, 26 May 1825, HSA 20:199-200. 19. H H to Moser, 1 July 1825, USA 20:205. 20. E 5:264-65. 21. Goethe, WA, Section III, Vol. 9:277. 22. H H to Gubitz, 23 Nov. 1825, HSA 20:223. 23. H 4:124. 24. H H to Robert, 4 Mar. 1825, HSA 20:187. 25. DA 6:100. 26. Werner 1:123-25. 27. H H to Friedrich Merckel, 6 Oct. 1826, HSA 20:261. 28. DA 6:555-58.

12. Harry

und seine Familie

Heinrich-* Dr. Heinrich Heine

1. Text HSA 20:193-95. 2. D / l 6:228-29. 3. Documents and baptismal certificate, Werner 1:128-33. 4. EP, p. 303. 5. H H to Moritz Embden, 11 May 1825, HSA 20:196. 6. DA 1:529. 7. £ 6:119. 8. H H to Eduard Gans, May 1826, HSA 20:248. 9. H H to Moser, 14 Dec. 1825, HSA 20:227. 10. See Michael Meyer, The Origins of the Modern few: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1749-1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), pp. 178-79; Monika Richarz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe: Jiidische Studenten und Akademiker in Deutschland, 1638-1848 (Tubingen: Mohr, 1974), pp. 209-10; and Hans Giinther Reissner, Eduard Gans: Ein Leben im Vormarz (Tubingen: Mohr, 1965), pp. 91-92. 11. H H to Moser, 27 Sept. 1823, HSA 20:113. 12. E 7:407. 13. H H to Philarete Chasles, 15 Jan. 1835, HSA 21:95. 14. E 5:227. 15. H H to Moser, 9 Jan. 1826, HSA 20:234. 16. DA 6:581, 134. 17. DA 6:188. 18. HSA 21:120. 19. E 7:528. 20. Text in Franz Finke, "Gustav Hugos Laudatio auf Heine," HJ 1968, pp. 13-14. 21. H H to Moser, 25 Oct. 1824, 22 July 1825, HSA 20:176, 206.

PART

III.

DRIFT

1. The North Sea 1. DA 6:52-53, 471. 2. H . H . Houben, Gutzkow-Funde: schichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts

Beitrage zur Litteratur- und (Berlin: Wolff, 1901), p. vi. 369

Kulturge-

REFERENCES, PAGES 218-2 2 3 3. H H to Varnhagen, 1 May 1827, HSA 20:286. 4. DA 6:72. 5. H H to Joseph Lehmann, 26 May 1826, HSA 20:245. 6. So dated to Moser, 14 Dec. 1825, HSA 20:226. 7. H H to Immermann, 10 Apr. 1823, HSA 20:78-79. 8. H H to Moser, 24 Feb. 1826, HSA 20:236-37. 9. D/4 6:141-42. 10. Kruse, Hamburger Zez'f, pp. 129-30. 11. Varnhagen, Literaturkritiken, p. 38; cf. H H to Varnhagen, 24 Oct. 1826, HSA 20:271. 12. See Gerhard Hoppe, Das Meer in der deutschen Dichtung von Friedrich L. Graf zu Stolberg bis Heinrich Heine (Diss. Marburg, 1929). 13. DA 1:411. 14. DA 1:389. 15. Ibid.

2. Julius Campe 1. Werner 1:136; cf. Ziegler, Julius Campe, p. 99, and Kruse, Hamburger Zeit, p. 224. 2. Campe to H H , 14 Oct. 1834, HSA 24:276. 3. See the family tree in Carl Brinitzer, Das streitbare Leben des Verlegers Julius Campe (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1962), p. 15. 4. See Paul Laveau, "Julius Campe als Briefpartner Heines," Heinrich Heine: Streitbarer Humanist und volksverbundener Dichter, ed. Karl Wolfgang Becker et al. (Weimar: Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstatten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar, [1973]), p. 304. 5. Campe to H H , 15 Dec. 1826, HSA 24:28. 6. Campe to H H , 17 June 1832, HSA 24:131. 7. Campe to H H , 4 Apr. 1847, HSA 26:197-98. 8. Campe to H H , 12 July 1833, HSA 24:188. 9. H H to Campe, 21 Apr. 1854, HSA 23:324, 326; Campe to H H , 5 Apr. 1837, 21 Aug. 1841, 28 Jan. 1854, HSA 25:37, 337; 27:155-56. 10. Ziegler, Julius Campe, p. 176. 11. Ibid., pp. 181-88. 12. Campe to H H , 12 July 1833, HSA 24:188. 13. H H to Campe, 26 July 1835, HSA 21:119. 14. Ziegler, Julius Campe, p. 128; Laveau, "Julius Campe als Briefpartner Heines," p. 313. 15. Campe to H H , 25 June 1833, HSA 24:183. 16. DA 6:201. 17. See Hermann J. Weigand, " H o w Censorship Worked in 1831. Heine's Amusing Bickerings and Baitings Sensationally Documented by an Unpublished Manuscript of the Kohut-Rutra Collection of Heineana," Yale University Library Gazette 10 (1935/36): 17-22. 18. E 2:430. 19. Johannes Scheible to H H , 3 Feb. 1837, HSA 25:23. 20. Campe to H H , 2 Nov. 1832, HSA 24:147. 21. Ziegler, Julius Campe, pp. 287-88. 370

REFERENCES, PAGES 2 18-2 2 3

3. The Breakthrough to Fame 1. See Ziegler, Julius Campe, p. 101, and H H to Moser, 14 Feb. 1826, HSA 20:236. 2. Campe to H H , 15 Dec. 1826, HSA 24:28. 3. H H to Merckel, 16 Nov. 1826; cf. Campe to H H , 12 July 1833, HSA 20:276; 24:187. 4. H H to Varnhagen, 24 Oct. 1826, HSA 20:271. 5. Campe to H H , 12 July 1833, HSA 24:189. 6. Ziegler, Julius Campe, pp. 101-02. 7. Selection of reviews in B 2:723-47. 8. Werner 1:138-39. 9. See DA 6:547-48.

4. Masterpiece: Ideas. The Book of Le Grand 1. H H to Varnhagen, 14 May 1826, HSA 20:242. 2. DA 6:171, 173, 222. 3. H H to Immermann, 14 Oct.; to Moser, 14 Oct.; to Varnhagen, 24 Oct. 1826, HSA 20:264; 267, 271.

5. England 1. DA 6:715. 2. Salomon Heine on one occasion says £ 240, on another £ 200: Salomon Heine to H H , 22 Nov. 1833, 26 Dec. 1843, HSA 24:228, 26:87. HSA 20 K:203 gives £ 200; H 4:150 for some reason gives £ 800, which is most improbable; that was a small fortune at that time. 3. H H to Varnhagen, 19 Oct. 1827, HSA 20:301. 4. Maximilian Heine, Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine und seine Familie (Berlin: Diimmler, 1868), p. 59. HSA 20:441 rightly lists this excerpt under "doubtful." 5. HSA 20 K: 179. 6. H H to Merckel, 23 Apr. 1827, HSA 20:285. 7. DA 6:195. 8. E 7:490. 9. E 6:206. 10. E 6:327. u . E 3:463, 490. 12. E 5:69. 13. E 3:279; similarly on France, E 3:498. 14. See Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 452-54. 15. E 3:497-98. 16. HSA 20:295. 17. E 1:256-61; 2:30-34. 18. See Gerhard Weiss, "Heines Englandaufenthalt (1827)," HJ 1963, p. 28. 6.

Munich

1. H H to Varnhagen, 1 May 1827, HSA 20:287-88; cf. HSA 20 K: 177. 2. Werner 1:160-63.

371

REFERENCES, PAGES 218-223 3. DA 6:82. 4. HSA 20:308. 5. H . H . Houben, Gespräche mit Heine (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1926), pp. 120-21. 6. H H to Campe, 1 Dec. 1827; to Wolfgang Menzel, 12 Jan. 1828, HSA 20:309, 3iJ7. Campe to H H , 26 Dec. 1827, HSA 24:38. 8. E 7:254. 9. H H to Moser, 14 Apr. 1828, HSA 20:329. 10. Johannes Wit, genannt von Dorring, Fragmente aus meinem Leben und meiner Zeit: Aufenthalt in den Gefcingnissen zu Chambery, Turin und Mailand, nebst meiner Flucht aus der Citadelle letzteren Ones (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1827). Subsequently W i t added two more volumes. See Fritz Heymann, "Wit, genannt von Dorring," in Heymann, Der Chevalier von Geldern: Eine Chronik (Cologne: Metzler, 1963), pp. 403-46. 11. H H to Campe, i Dec. 1827; to Varnhagen 12 Feb. enclosed in 1 Apr. 1828, HSA 20:308; 325, 322. 12. H H to Varnhagen, 1 Apr. 1828, HSA 20:322. 13. DA 11:223-24, 909-10. 14. HSA 20:317. 15. H 4:177. 16. W e r n e r 1:169-70. 17. HSA 20:334.

7. Italy 1. Campe to H H , 26 Dec. 1827, 16 Apr. 1828, HSA 24:38, 40. 2. Werner 1:172-73, 176. 3. See Michael Werner, "Heines 'Reise von Miinchen nach Genua' im Lichte ihrer Quellen," HJ 1975, pp. 24-46. 4. E 3:265. 5- E 3:263. 6. E 3:281. 7. H H to Moser, 6 Sept. 1828, HSA 20:341. 8. E 3:273-81. 9. Werner, "Heines 'Reise von Miinchen nach Genua,'" p. 39. 10. See, for example, Bruno Cherubini, "Heine und die Kirchen von Lucca," HJ 1971, pp. 16-19. 11. H H to Eduard von Schenk, 1 Sept. 1828, HSA 23:486, corrected text of 20:339.

8. Count Platen 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

W e r n e r 1:187. B 2:830. H H to Immermann, 24 Feb. 1825; to Menzel, 2 May 1828, HSA 20:185; 331. E 3:220. For other examples of Heine's appreciation of Platen, see EP, p. 173. See Campe to Immermann, 16 Feb., 12 June 1829, H 4:202-03, 211. Text B 2:873-76. B 2:826 (I Corinthians 1:23). For evidence of Platen's non-complicity with

372

REFERENCES, PAGES21 8 - 223

Dollinger, see Manfred Frank, "Heine und Schelling," Internationaler HeineKongrep Düsseldorf 1972: Referate und Diskussionen, ed. Manfred W i n d f u h r (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973), p. 297. 8. E 3:290. 9. E 3:297-98; cf. my article, "Platen's Tulip Image," Monatshefte 52 (i960): 293-301. 10. E 5:381. 11. H H to Immermann, 26 Dec. 1829, HSA 20:373. 12. H H to Varnhagen, 3 Jan. 1830, HSA 20:378. 13. H H to Varnhagen, 3 Jan., 4 Feb., 16 June 1830, HSA 20:377-78, 384-85, 412; to Immermann, 26 Dec. 1829, HSA 20:372. 14. E 3:562. 15. Immermann to H H , 1 Feb. 1830, HSA 24:53. 16. H H to Varnhagen, 28 Feb. 1830, HSA 20:388. 17. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. H . H . Houben, 25th ed. (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1959), p. 554. 18. HSA 20:410; cf. 20 K:258. 19. Varnhagen, Literaturkritiken, pp. 41-43. 20. E 1:408-09. 21. B 2:850. 22. Hans Mayer, "Der Streit zwischen Heine und Platen," in Mayer, Aussenseiter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 207-23.

9. Sensualism and Liberation 1. E 3:394-95. 2. E 4:208. 3. E 3:392, 418. 4. H H to Varnhagen, 12 Feb. 1828, HSA 20:324. 5. Gerhard Weiss, "Heines Englandaufenthalt (1827)," HJ 1963, p. 18. 6. E 3:471. Heine translated f r o m Cobbett's Weekly Political Register of January 19, 1828, Vol. 65, cols. 69-76; the specific source is here identified for the first time. The date shows that the passage was written in "Munich, not in England. T h e diatribe on "The Jews" appeared January 5, cols. 20-24. 7. E 3:460. This is evidently a memory from reading in England; Cobbett put this question in the Weekly Political Register 63 (1827): col. 323. Heine expands rhetorically on Cobbett's phrasing. 8. E 3:492. 9. E 3:501. 10. E 3:505.

10. The Revolution of 1830 1. H H to Friederike Robert, 2 May 1829, HSA 20:359. 2. H H to Merckel, 24, 29 Oct. 1829, HSA 20:365-66. 3. H H to Johann Friedrich von Cotta, 14 Dec. 1829, HSA 20:370-71. 4. H H to Immermann, 25 Apr. 1830, HSA 20:396-410. For the use Immermann made of these suggestions, see E i\i(>i-i"j. 5. DA 11:137. 6. E 5:152.

373

REFERENCES, PAGES218-223 7. H H to Varnhagen, 4 Jan. 1831, HSA 20:428-29. 8. HSA 20 K-.272-, Varnhagen to H H , 9 Jan. 1831, HSA 24:72. 9. HSA 20:422-23. 10. E 5:171; cf. H H to Moritz Embden, 2 Feb. 1823, HSA 20:70. Notes in DA 11:215-17. 11. H H to Varnhagen, 27 June 1831, HSA 21:20-21. 12. E 6:33. 13. £ 6 : 3 4 . 14. H 4:259; see also Hirth, Franzosische Freunde, p. 17. 15. HSA 20:434-35.

PART

IV. T H E

PROMISED

LAND

1. Saint-Simonianism 1. E 5:540. 2. The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition. First Year, 1828-1829, translated with notes and an introduction by Georg G. Iggers (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), p. ix. 3. H H to Varnhagen, mid-May 1832, HSA 21:37. 4. B 2:903; see also H H to Moser, 22 Apr. 1829, HSA 20:355. 5. HSA 20 K:28O. 6. E. M. Butler, The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany: A Study of the Young German Movement (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1926),p. 93. 7. H H to Johann Friedrich von Cotta, 25 Jan. 1832, HSA 21:29. 8. E 4:193. 9. Werner Vordtriede, "Der Berliner Saint-Simonismus," HJ 1975, pp. 108-09. 10. Varnhagen, Literaturkritiken, pp. 111-23. 11. HSA 20:432. 12. DA 6:106-13. 13. See Dolf Sternberger, Heinrich Heine und die Abschaffung der Siinde (Hamburg: Claassen, 1972), pp. 81-82. 14. Butler, The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany, Sternberger, Heinrich Heine und die Abschaffung der Sunde-, Georg G. Iggers, "Heine and the SaintSimonians: A Re-examination," Comparative Literature 10 (1958): 289-308; W i n golf Scherer, "Heinrich Heine und der Saint-Simonismus" (diss. Bonn, 1950). 15. HSA 18:195-96. T h e attribution was suggested by F. H . Eisner, "Ein Aufsatz Heines in 'Le Globe', Februar 1832?" We'vmarer Beitrage 5 (1959): 421-25. Eisner's judgment is highly reliable in such matters. 16. DA 6:351-52. 17. See E 5:527-28; 7:299-300. 18. E 5:103; 4:524-25. 19. E 4:236. 20. E 5:194. 21. E 6:170. 22. Sternberger, Heinrich Heine und die Abschaffung der Siinde, pp. 85-ior. 23. HSA 24:335-48. 24. H H to Laube, 23 Nov. 1835, HSA 21:126.

374

REFERENCES, PAGES 218-223

25. 26. 27. 28.

H H to Campe, 30 Jan. 1836, HSA 21:137; cf. 21 K: 107. H H to Laube, 5 May 1845, HSA 22:169. £ 4:569. H H to Emile Péreire, 9 Jan.; to Michael Chevalier, 18, 24 Feb. 1855, HSA.

23: 405; 413-14, 419-17. 29. £ 7:408. 30. £ 4:223-24. 31. £ 5:328. This view of the end of scarcity flowed, of course, into Marxist doctrine. Engels argued the idea forty years later in very similar terms in his essay On the Housing Question (MEW 18:220-21). 32. £ 4:223-24. 33. HSA 21:37. 34. Rahel Varnhagen to H H , 5 June 1832, HSA 24:128. 35. H H to Laube, 10 July 1833; similarly to Laube, 23 Nov. 1835, HSA 21:56; 125.

2. Heine in Paris 1. H H to Ferdinand Hiller, 24 Oct. 1832, HSA 21:40. 2. £ 5:176. 3. £ 5:26. 4. Hirth, Franzosische Freunde, pp. 104-14. 5. Werner 1:409. 6. B 6/2:263-67, 271-75; £ 1:499-500. 7. See Honore de Balzac to H H , 1844, HSA 26:125, and Hirth, Franzosische Freunde, pp. 69-70. 8. H H to Varnhagen, mid-May 1832, HSA 21:36. 9. Moser to H H , 25 May 1831, HSA 24:84. 10. HSA 21:19. 11. Moser to H H , 22 Oct. 1833, HSA 24:215-17. 12. H H to Moser, 8 Nov. 1836, HSA 21:168-70. 13. H H to Johann Friedrich von Cotta, 31 Oct. 1831, HSA 21:25. 14. Hirth, Bausteine, p. 120. 15. £ 6:388-91. 16. £ 6:248. 17. £ 7:462; 6:391.

3. Foreign Correspondent 1. £ 4:26. 2. £ 4:56. 3. £ 4:26. 4. £ 4:30. 5- E 4:35"3 . , ' ® i88 " i 97> 23°, 233, 288, 297, 306, 3i8, 352 Die Schlesischen Weber, 259-260, 333 Die Stadt Lucca, 36, 77, 140, 147-149, '5 1 , 203, 218, 297, 306 Die Wahlfahrt nach Kevlaar, 39 Die Wahlverlobten, 331 Disputation, 313 l6

415

Index Dreiunddreifiig Gedichte, 98

Lazarus, 312, 331, 341 Lebensfahrt, 253 LebensgruB, 71 Lieder, 64, 125 Ludwig Borne. Eine Denkschrift, 153, 236-242, 246, 250, 252, 257, 262, 263, 268, 271, 272, 297, 384 Ludwig Marcus. Denkworte, 317, 319320 Lutezia, 227, 318, 321-330, 339, 340, 343, 352 Lyrisches Intermezzo, 85, 97, 125, 151, 276

[Einleitung] zu Kahldorf iiber den Adel in Brief en an den Graf en M. von Moltke, 151-152, 154, 174 Einleitung zu Don Quixote, 218, 228 Elementargeister, 215-218, 288 Englische Fragmente, 70, 135, 138, 149150, 169, 174 Erinnerung an Hammonia, 332 Erinnerung aus Krahwinkels Schreckenstagen, 332 Erklarung, 184 Erlauschtes, 227

Memoiren, 38, 39, 42, 43, 50, 335-338 Minnelieder, 64 Morphine, 296-297

Florentinische Nachte, 214, 216 Franzosische Maler, 172-174, 234, 250 Franzosische Zustande, 174-184, 235, 236, 316, 323, 324, 326 Fresko-Sonette an Christian Sethe, 49 Friederike 1, 77 Fur die Mouche, 333-334, 342, 343

Nachtgedanken, 252-253 Neue Gedichte, 232-233, 252, 272, 275278, 311 Neuer Friihling, 151, 276

Gedichte, 64, 81-82, 84 Gedichte 1853 und 1854, 317, 330-334, 396 Gestiindnisse, 16, 301, 308, 309, 314, 317, 32I> 335. 338

Prinzessin Sabbath, 312 Reinigung, 117 Reise von Miinchen nach Genua, 140141. 144- !5°, '69 Reisebilder, 12, 86, 125-126, 134, 162, 185-186, 271, 338, 340, 352; I: 124, 126, 219; II: 28, 87, 118, 126-129, '34, 138, 142; III: 138, 140; IV: 70, 140, 149-150, 154 Rhampsenit, 311-312 Rheinisch-Westfalischer Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1821, 67 Romanzen (Buch der Lieder), 125 Romanzen (Neue Gedichte), 276 Romanzero, 114, 277, 307, 310-315, 318, 331

Hans ohne Land, 300 Hebraische Melodien, 37, 312-313 Historien, 312 Hortense, 200 Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, 30-31, 33, 34, 37, n o , 118, 123, 127-129, 130, 138, 142, 148, 169, 186, 189, 305-306, 336, 338 Im Oktober 1849, 300 Italien, 141-149

Katharina, 132 Kommunismus, Philosophie tend Klerisei, 326-327

Schopfungslieder, 297 Schriftstellernothen, 131 Seegespenst, 117 Seraphine, 200 Shakespeares Mddchen und Frauen, 225-228, 317, 319 Sonette, 125

Lamentationen, 312

Tannhauser, 217, 277, 289

Jehuda ben Halevy, 312-313 Junge Leiden, 125 Jung-Katerverein f u r Poesie-Musik, 332

416

Index Tassos Tod, 66-67 Testament, 230 Tragodien, nebst einem lyrischen Intermezzo, 64,85,105,118 Traum, 87

Waldeinsamkeit, 312 William Ratcliff, 69-70, 278 Wiinnebergiade, ein Heldengedicht in 2 Gesange, 59

Traumbilder, 64, 125

und Marie, 200

Vber den Denunzianten, 215 Vber die franzosische Biihne, 244-245, 257, 306 Veber Polen, 87-89 Vermischte Schriften, 315-333 Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung, 80-81 Verschiedene, 198-200, 217, 232-233, 276, 277, 290 Vitzliputzli, 312

Zeitgedichte, 277 Zum Lazarus, 330-331 Zur Geschichte der neueren schonen Literatur in Deutschland, 190 Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, 164, 165, 2< 188-197, 209> 2I7> >5> 274. 288, 297,306-308,315, 318,352 Zur Ollea, 277 Zwei Ritter, 301

417

Index of Names Adam, Adolphe, 288 Albert I, Prince of Monaco, 26 Ancillon, Friedrich, 184 Andersen, Hans Christian, 169, 250, 263 Antommarchi, Francesco, 130 Aristophanes, 76, 144, 275, 338 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 55, 57 Arnim, Ludwig Achim von, 59, 63, 113, 193, 340 Auden, W . H., 352-353 Auerbach, Isaac Levin, 89 Auersperg, Count Anton Alexander von, see Gran, Anastasius Austin, Sarah, 339

Brentano, Kunigunde, see Savigny, Kunigunde Breza, Eugen von, 87 Brisbane, Albert, 161 Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold, 73, 84, 96 Buber, Martin, 351 Biichner, Georg, 197, 215 Buloz, Francois, 169 Burke, Edmund, 72, 108 Burmeister, Johann Peter, see Lyser, Johann Peter Byron, George Gordon Noel Byron, Baron, 47, 312

Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 285 Balzac, Honore de, 169-170, 220, 249, 269, 286 Basnage de Beauval, Jacques, 93 Bauernschmid, K., 184 Bazard, Armand, 161, 163-164 Beer, Michael, 134-135, 137, 198 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 100 Belgiojoso-Trivulzio, Cristina, Principessa di, 169, 202-203, 295, 305 Bellini, Vincenzo, 169 Bendavid, Lazarus, 89, 91, 93 Benecke, Georg Friedrich, 7 , Berlioz, Hector, ,69, 245, 249, 325, 339 ' Z V Ji Beugnot, Jacques Claude, Comte, 31 Blanc, Louis, 263 Bliicher, Gebhart Leberecht, Field Marshal Prince, 48, 321 Bockh, Philipp August, 76 Borne, Ludwig, 100-101, 133-134, 141, i53, i74, '7 8 , 182, 187, 196, 205, 209, 215, 2i 9 n, 233-242, 264, 297, 330 Bornstein, Heinrich, 272 Bonald, Louis, Vicomte de, 164 Bonaparte, Caroline, Grand Duchess of Berg, Queen of Naples, 31 Bopp, Franz, 76 Braun, Gottlieb, 104 Brentano, Clemens, 59, 63, 75, 113, 193, 195 418

Campe, August, 119 Campe, Burchard, 118 Campe, Friedrich, 119 Campe, Friedrich Napoleon, 182-183, 190 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 118-119 Campe, Julius, 118-125, " 6 , i35> 136, '38. '44. r51. 152, i75. 181-183, 185, l8 7- '9°. 2°6, 208-210, 212-214, 216 2 ' ' 9 ' 2 2 2 ' 226> 22g> 2 2 9' 2 3 ^ 3 4 , 2 37-238, 240-242, 250-252, 254, 255, 2 57. 260, 261, 265-267, 269, 272, 274, 2 0 z8r 2 4 2 ®' ' * ' *9' 29'> 295> 2 6 29 300 3I0 311 9 ' ®" ' " ' ^ 323 3 3 37 3 34 3 4 3 ' V ' J ? ' °' ^ r r Campe, Julius Heinnch Wilhelm, 303, Q CarlylCi Thomas>

^

^

l6g

Caron, Augustin-Pierre-Paul, 305, 392^ Carove, Wilhelm, 195 Casanova de Seingalt, Giovanni GiaC 0 m 0 i I9i 2 o 6

Cavaignac, Louis-Eugene, 300 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 218 Chamisso, Adelbert, 194, 230 Chappon, A., 286 Charles I, King of England, 173 Charles X, King of France, 168 Chateaubriand, Francois-Rene, Vicomte de, 146

Index Chevalier, Michel, 161 Chopin, Frederic, 169, 245, 325 Christiani, Charlotte (Heine's cousin), 96 Christiani, Rudolf, 96, 103, 106, 298 Clairmont, Mile, 132 Claudius, Matthias, 151 Clemens August, Elector-Bishop of Cologne, 55 Cobbett, William, 131, 149, 373 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 47, 57 Cornelius, Lambert, 41 Cornelius, Peter, 41 Cotta, Johann Friedrich von, 119, 121, 132-133, 135, 137-139, IJI, 172, 174175, 177, 181, 235, 242 Cotta, Johann Georg von, 215, 242, 244, 316 Crockford, John, 338 Cromwell, Oliver, 173, 245 Cui, Cesar, 70

Elchingen, Cecile d' (Heine's cousin by adoption twice removed), Princesse Murat, 26 Elchingen, Michel, Due d', 26 Eliot, George, 68, 348 Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, 23 Embden, Baron Ludwig von (Heine's nephew), 26, 298 Embden, Charlotte (Heine's sister), 13, 22-23, 26 96 97, 115, 204, 208, 266, 278, 284, 285, 298, 318, 339 Embden, Charlotte, see Moscheles, Charlotte Embden, Maria (Heine's niece), see Rocca, Maria, Principessa della Embden, Moritz (Heine's brother-inlaw), 22-23, 9^, 108, 115 Enfantin, Prosper, 160, 162, 164-165, 190, 213-214 Engel, Eduard, 335 Engels, Friedrich, 70, 134, 169, 194, 206, 211, 241, 255, 260, 261, 264, 265, 284, 322, 340, 375, 378 Ernst August, Elector of Hanover, 142 Escarpit, Robert, 347 Evans, Mary Ann, see Eliot, George Ewerbeck, Hermann, 264

Dante, 275, 328, 338 Darwin, Charles, 7 Daulnoy, J. B., 40 Decamps, Alexandre-Gabriel, 172, 173 Delacroix, Eugene, 172-173 Delaroche, Paul, 172-173 Delloye, Henri-Louis, 225 Dessauer, Joseph, 339, 344 Detmold, Johann Hermann, 134, 222, 223, 281, 284 Dickens, Charles, 340 Dickerscheit, Bernhard, 38, 39 Dingelstedt, Franz, 253-254, 257 Disraeli, Isaac, 70 Dollinger, Ignaz, 144, 372-373 Donizetti, Gaetano, 325 Dudevant, Aurore, see Sand, George Diimmler, Ferdinand, 105 Duff-Gordon, Lucie, 339 Dumas, Alexandre, 169, 220, 228, 245, 343, 344 Duveyrier, Charles, 161

Fane

. Ju l i a n , 347"348 Ferdinand, Due d'Orleans, 326 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 270 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 191, 306 Flaubert, Gustave, 7 Fouque, Friedrich de la Motte, 193 Fourier, Charles, 264 Franck, Hermann, 198 Frederick II, King of Prussia, 75, 285 Frederick William III, King of Prussia, I2 > 5 3°, 37, 48-50, 59, 139, 150, 186, 335 Heine, Samuel (Heine's uncle), 23 Heine, Therese (Heine's cousin), see Halle, Therese Herwegh, Georg, 256-259, 332 Hesse, Hartwig, 161 Hesse, Hermann, 351 Hiller, Ferdinand, 168 Hindermans, Frau, 37 Holderlin, Friedrich, 59, 100, 350 Hoffmann, Benjamin Gottlob, 119 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 113, 193, 194 Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich, 56, 174, 254-258, 273 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 350 Hohenhausen, Elise von, 47 Homer, 76, 143, 148, 314, 334-335 Horace, 265

Hüllmann, Karl Dietrich, 57 Hugo, Gustav, 110, 126 Hugo, Victor, 169, 228, 245, 325 Humboldt, Alexander von, 282 Hvass, Adolf, 218 Ibsen, Henrik, 7 Iggers, Georg (cited), 161 Immermann, Karl, 84-85, 129, 142-144, 146, 151 Irving, Washington, 105 James, Henry, 4 Janin, Jules, 269 Jaubert, Caroline, 251, 298, 399 Jaubert, Maxime, 251, 298 Jean Paul, 134, 193, 194 Johann, Archduke of Austria, 300, 332 Johnson, Samuel, 25, 226 Jost, Isaak Markus, 89 Julia, Henri, 298, 335 Justinus, 196 Kant, Immanuel, 35, 191 Karl, Duke of Braunschweig, 136-137 Karl August, Duke of Weimar, 100, 152 Kean, Edmund, 130 Klaproth, Heinrich Julius, 184 Kleist, Heinrich von, 59, 100, 142, 194 Klindworth, Georg, 86 Klingemann, Ernst August, 70 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 143 Kolb, Gustav, 175, 181, 242, 243, 260, 299, 301, 314, 315, 320, 322, 324, 327, 328, 329 Koopmann, Helmut, 384 Kotzebue, August von, 55 Kraus, Karl, 350-351 Krinitz, Elise, see Selden, Camille Kroeker, Kate Freiligrath, 256

421

Lafayette, Marie-Joseph, Marquis de, 324 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 164, 299, 301 Lamennais, Felicite-Robert de, 164, 234, 235 Las Cases, Emmanuel-Augustin-Dieudonne, Comte de, 130 Lassal, Friederike, see Friedland, Friederike

Index Lassal, Heymann, 282, 286, 308 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 282-283, 285, 286, 300 Laube, Heinrich, 17, 88, 165, 167, 184, 202, 206-208, 210-211, 231, 232, 236237, 240, 252, 269, 273, 281, 284, 291, 296, 300, 306, 309, 339 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 191 Leo, August, 325 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 19, 90, 92n, 113, 123, 172, 191, 192, 208, 276, 288 Lewald, August, 244 Lewald, Fanny, 244, 337 Lincoln, Abraham, 7 Lind, Jenny, 291, 325 Lindner, Friedrich Ludwig, 133, 135, '3 J J 2

Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, 350 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 27-28, 135, 169, 222, H 9 ; 26o> 2 - 9> 2 8 i , 2 g 2 ,

' 89- 9'> 94. 97. ">3, 108, 9' 141, '4^, 17°, 305 Mozart < Wolfgang Amadeus, 145 Miiller, Adam, 195 Miiller, Wilhelm, 62 Miiller von Konigswinter, Wolfgang, 33^ Milliner, Adolf, 69, 98 Mundt, Theodor, 67, 206-208, 210-212 Murat, Joachim, Grand Duke of Berg, King of Naples, 31 Musset, Alfred de, 169, 228, 269, 325 Moser I0

422

'

Moses

Index Napoleon I, Emperor, 14, 31-34, 56, 71, 75, 80, 100, 108, 117-118, 128, 130, 133, 141, 149, 150, 163, 173, 180, 189, 192, 193, 321, 324 Napoleon III, Emperor, 14, 301, 321 Napoleon Louis, Grand Duke of Cleves and Berg, 31 Nerval, Gerard de, 169, 220 Netter, Lucienne, 343 Neunzig, Joseph, 56 Ney, Michel, Due d'Elchingen, 26 Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia, 22, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 306 Nolte, Vincent Otto, 184-185 Nostitz, Count, 341 Novalis, 59, 113, 194, 195, 203 Oehlenschlager, Adam Gottlob, 85 O'Meara, Barry Edward, 130 Oppenheim, Moritz, 5 Paganini, Niccolo, 216 Pereire, Emile, 337, 341 Peschel, Oskar, 314 Petofi, Sandor, 300 Petrarch, 46 Petronius, 233 Pfizer, Gustav, 229, 231 Platen von Hallermiinde, August, Count, 60, 142-147, 170, 253, 372-373 Poe, Edgar Allan, 179 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 264 Piickler-Muskau, Hermann, Prince von, 282, 322 Quinet, Edgar, 168 Raabski, Idzi Stefan, 88-89 Ramler, Karl Wilhelm, 146 Raumer, Friedrich von, 76 Reimarus, Samuel, 123, 208 Reinhardt, Richard, 264, 301, 307, 316, 340, 342-344, 399 Renduel, Eugene, 190 Richelieu, Armand, Due de, 26 Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich, see Jean Paul Riesser, Gabriel, 242, 279 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 3 50 Rintelsohn, 37 423

Robert, Friederike, 104, 127, 183 Robert, Louis-Leopold, 173 Robert, Ludwig, 94, 102, 104, 183 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 173, 235 Rocca, Maria, Principessa della (Heine's niece), 12, 27, 337 Rogue, Pauline, 219 Rose, William, 45-46 Rossini, Gioacchino, 169, 245, 325 Rostand, Edmond, 145 Rothschild, Anselm, 341 Rothschild, Baronesse Betty de, 248-250, 319 Rothschild, Baron James de, 169, 249250, 286, 325 Rothschild, Nathan, 129 Rousseau, Johann Baptist, 56, 67-69, 72, 97 Riickert, Friedrich, 142 Ruge, Arnold, 261, 307, 308, 378 Saint-Just, Louis de, 80 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvtoy, Comtede, 159 Sand, George, 169, 201-202, 204, 244, 269, 325, 339, 379 Sand, Karl, 55 Sandor, A. I. (cited), 5-6, 79 Sartorius, Georg, 73, 133 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 75 Savigny, Kunigunde, 75 Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, Prince Alexander Carl, 71 Schallmeyer, Agidius Jakob, 40 Scheffer, Ary, 172 Scheible, Johann, 289 Schelling, Friedrich, 77, 164, 191, 193, 230 Schenk, Eduard von, 137-139 Schiff, Hermann David (Heine's cousin), 340 Schiller, Friedrich, 35, 68, 100, 102, 113, 129, 133, 181, 193, 226, 229, 230, 257, 275, 276, 306 Schilling, August Wilhelm, Baron von, 86 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 47, 57-58, 62, 66, 193-195, 226, 318 Schlegel, Dorothea, 90 Schlegel, Friedrich, 57, 90, 193-195

Index Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 76 Schloss, Michael, 316-317 Schmalz, Theodor, 75 Schubert, Franz, 65 Schücking, Levin, 336 Schütz, Friedrich, 195 Schumann, Robert, 249 Schwab, Gustav, 229-230 Scott, Sir Walter, 47, 95-96, 149 Selden, Camille, 341-344, 398-399 Sethe, Christian, 48-49, 56,59 Shakespeare, William, 68, 69, 130, 145, 166, 218, 225-228, 268, 314 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 176-177, 351 Sichelf Julius,' 284 Sieveking, Karl, 123 Silcher, Friedrich, 65 Simrock, Karl, 56, 273 Sissman, L. E„ 3 3 4 n Smets, Wilhelm, 66, 69 Smith, John Stores, 347 Sophocles, 84 apiller von HauenschUd, Richard Georg 314

Tieck, Ludwig, 85, 113, 193-195, 226, 340 Titian, 109 Tonelli, Giorgio (cited), 34 Toynbee, Arnold, 194 Trittau, Alphons, 317 Uhland, Ludwig, 60-61, 63, 193, 194, 230

,T , _ T, . . Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 82l0z > "4- " 9 . ^ US, '54, 166, 170, 177, 221, 260, 271, 281-283 Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel, 82-83, 93, i f ' 1 [ 0 4 - • . i 6 7 , 183, 227 eit X ' . ^ P P F " ( c l t e d ) > 37. 9 3 Verdl ' Giuseppe, 325 Fernet, Horace, 172-73,250 VeS( ue v o n l Putthngen, J o h a n n - 398399 ,T. ^. .t, . ;!C0' Ulovannl ,'93 Victoria, Queen of England, 291 ^ T 7 ' A l f r e d d6' l69' " 8 Voltaire, 19, 39, 79, 163-164 Voss ' J o h a n n Heinrich, 15,, .92

Spinoza, Benedict, 39, 82, 101, 161, I9I

305

Spontini, Gasparo, 87, 325 Stael, Germaine de, 114, 165, 188-189, 192, 193, 195, 287, 318 Stahr, Adolf, 337 Steen, Jan, 186 Steffens, Heinrich, 206 Steinmann, Friedrich, 56-57, 64, 69, 72, 237 Sterne, Laurence, 105 Stolberg, Friedrich, 192-193 Straube, Heinrich, 56, 99 Strauss, David Friedrich, 230 Strauss, Salomon, 239-242 Strauss-Wohl, Jeanette, 134, 235, 238241 Strodtmann, Adolf, 56, 80, 221, 249, 320,331,349 Sue, Eugene, 220, 283

Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 59 Wagner, Richard, 169, 186, 217, 242, 249, 325, 332 Walpole, Horace, 79 Walzel, Oskar, 62-63, 2 9 ! , 348 Washington, George, 33, 180 Watt, James, 324 Weber, Carl Maria von, 87 Wedekind, Eduard, 288 Weerth, Georg, 264, 275, 303, 313, 340, 387 Weik, John, 320 Weill, Alexandre, 251, 281, 284, 326, 344 Weitling, Wilhelm, 263 Welcker, Karl Theodor, 57 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 130, 150, 324 Werner, Zacharias, 193, 195 Wertheim, Leopold, 295 Werther, Wilhelm, Baron von, 184-185

Taillandier, Saint-Rene, 12, 14 Taine, Hippolyte, 342-343 Thierry, Augustin, 224 Thiers, Adolphe, 175, 224-225, 243, 326 424

Index Wesselhoft, Robert, 152 Wiebel, Wilhelm, 73-74 Wienbarg, Ludolf, 4, 17, 206-207, 210" 211,215 Wihl, Ludwig, 231, 232, 305 Windischgratz, Alfred, Prince, 300 Wirth, Johann Georg, 234-235 W i t von Dorring, Johannes, 136-137

425

Wohl, Jeanette, see Strauss-Wohl, Jeanette Wohlwill, Immanuel, 89-91, 335 Wolf, Friedrich August, 76 Wiinneberg, Ferdinand Ignaz, 59 Zelter, Karl Friedrich, 230 Zunz, Leopold, 89, 91-94

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sammons, Jeffrey L. Heinrich Heine. Bibliography: p. Includes index, i. Heine, Heinrich, 1797-1856—Biography. 2. Authors, German—19th century—Biography. PT2328.S2 831'-7 [B] 79-84015 ISBN 0-69I-0632I-4 ISBN 0-691-10081-0 pbk.