Christian Johann Heinrich Heine,
one of the most significant German poets of the 19th century was born on December 13, 1797, He was also a renowned journalist, essayist, and literary
critic, but is best known for his wonderful lyric poetry, while his
radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German
authorities
Heine lived during the high watermark of German Romanticism,the idyllic, idealistic days of Schiller and Goethe,but Heine was only a half-hearted Romantic. Having suffered persecution first hand as a German Jew,
Heine was far too disillusioned by the injustices of the world to fully
take up the hopeful, sentimental spirit of Romanticism. Although he
dabbled in utopian philosophy for a brief time, Heine always kept his distance from the Romantic humanistic idealism of his age. He was one of the more cynical poets of the early
nineteenth century, and for this reason he is perhaps one of the wisest;
his poetry avoids the high flights of fancy that so marred later
Romanticism, and his opinions, though harsh and often pessimistic, come
as a breath of fresh air in the poetic universe of unrealistic Romantic
humanism.
Heine was Heinrich Heine was born in Düsseldorf, Rhineland, as the eldest of four
children into a Jewish family in a time when antisemitic sentiments were rife among the yet-to-be unified German kingdoms.. His father Samson Heine was a textile
merchant, his mother Peira van Geldern was the daughter of a physician.
He was called “Harry” as a child, but became “Heinrich” after his
conversion to Christianity in 1825.
Heine's parents were not particularly devout Jews. When he was a young
child they sent him to a Jewish school where he learned a smattering of
Hebrew. Thereafter he attended Catholic schools. Here he learned French,
which would be his second language, although he always spoke it with a
German accent. He also acquired a lifelong love for Rhineland folklore.
When his father's business failed,
Heine was sent to Hamburg, where his uncle Salomon encouraged him to
undertake a career in commerce. Salomon Heine was famous in his own
right as a multi-millionaire and one of the must successful businessmen
in German history to that point; Salomon encouraged his young nephew to
follow in his footsteps and take up a career in banking. Heine, however,
failed miserably as a businessman, and, with his uncle's financial
support, he turned to the study of law at the universities of Göttingen,
Bonn and Berlin.
Heine quickly discovered that he was more interested in literature than
in the law, nonetheless earning a law degree in 1825. During his time
at university he also decided to convert from Judaism to Protestantism.
Heine believed that this was necessary because of the severe
restrictions on Jews in almost all of Germany; in many cases, Jews were
forbidden to enter certain professions or live in certain regions, and
antisemitic persecution was experienced every day. Particularly
problematic for Heine, Jews were forbidden to lecture at universities,
so Heine, who dreamed of one day becoming a professor, saw no choice but
to abandon his religion. As Heine said in self-justification, his
conversion was "the ticket of admission into European culture." For much
of the rest of his life Heine wrestled over the incompatible elements
of his German and his Jewish identities.
In the late 18th century Heine’s birthplace, Dusseldorf in particular
and the Rhineland in general, was occupied by France. The Jews of the
Rhineland were emancipated, with Karl Marx’s father and Heine among
them, and were free to attend university and even to practice law or
medicine. When the area was annexed to Prussia in 1815, thus far
emancipated Jews were given the choice to convert to Christianity and
hold on to their profession, or to keep their faith and lose their
position. The backlash of this “choice” was that it radicalized the
intellectuals, sowing the seeds of future revolutionaries and
communists.
With
German nationalism, anti-Semitism grew in the early 19th century.
Mostly forgotten Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries even called
for legislation against Jews. Jews were so marginalized at the time, they
were basically invisible The sentiment of
physical exclusion of Jews had been present before the German
unification of 1870, although it was the most "Jewish-friendly" country
for a short while.
In 1817, two years after the German nationalists' victory over
Napoleonic France and on the 300th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses,
the student fraternities (Burschenschaften) organized a pilgrimage to
Wartburg, a center of German nationalism where Luther found sanctuary
after his excommunication. At the Wartburg Festival, students declared
their universities wouldn’t accept any foreign students - foreign
meaning French or Jewish. The only exception was the University of
Heidelberg, whose fraternity was labeled the “Juden” fraternity from
then on. Nationalistic, pro-unity speeches were given by students and
academics, and books whose authors antagonized German unification were
burned. The first book to be thrown onto the bonfire was written by a
Frenchman and carried the title “Civil.” Few believed it could happen in the twentieth century until May 6,
1933. That day, the German Student Association announced a nationwide
“Action against the Un-German Spirit.”
During his college years Heine fell hopelessly in love with
two of his uncle's daughters, Amalie and Therese, both of whom rebuffed
his advances and ridiculed Heine over his financial failures. Heine was
heartbroken by these incidents, but he poured his emotions into his
poetry, creating what is perhaps the most memorable of his works, Die Buch der Lieder (The Book of Songs).
This early volume, consisting primarily of love poems dedicated to
Amalie and Therese, is most certainly written in the tormented mode of
German Romanticism, similar in style to the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Freidrich Schiller.
Heine, however, brings a unique element to his love poetry: his poems,
far from being sentimental, are bittersweet and self-doubting. The poet
frequently questions whether his feelings are, after all, as powerful as
he thinks they are, or worth the effort he has invested. In so doing
Heine proves himself to be a much more honest and human poet than any of
his contemporaries, as well as much easier for modern audiences to
digest. For these reasons Heine has often been labeled the first
"post-Romantic" poet, as he was one of the first poets of the nineteenth
century to openly cast doubt on the values of Romanticism. In
particular, Heine's poetry would constantly question the divide between
"poesy" and "reality"—that is, the divide between the flighty world of
the artistic imagination, and the material world.
In 1824, while still at Gottingen, Heine took a break from his
law studies to travel in the Harz Mountains. While on his travels Heine
wrote a short book about his experiences, freely mixing in imaginative
fancy and social commentary with his loving descriptions of nature and
the mountainsides; Der Harzreise (The Harz Journey) became
the first in a series of travel books that would earn Heine a modicum
of critical acclaim, the first stepping stones in the development of his
literary celebrity. In addition to the book on the Harz, Heine would
write additional travelogues for a trip to England, in 1827, and a
journey to Italy undertaken in 1828. The most popular of all Heine's Reisebucher, however, would be the last volume, entitled Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand (Ideas. The Book Le Grand),
in which Heine would take a whimsical "journey" into his own self. The
book, a curiously lyrical melange of memoir, meditation, and
journalistic commentary, would prove to be one of Heine's most popular.Following the July Revolution of 1830, Heine left Germany for Paris, France in 1831. Heine was particularly attracted to Paris because of the pseudo-religion of the socialist philosopher, Count .Saint-Simon.
Saint-Simon hoped to organize a utopian state, in which the State owned
all property, and everyone would be rewarded based on the quality and
amount of their work. Heine was attracted to this utopian vision,
believing that it might at last bring an end to the long history of
persecution and injustice which he saw as having tarnished all of human
history. In Paris, he began his second phase of life and work. The French capital
inspired Heine to a veritable flood of essays, political articles,
polemics, memoirs, poems and prose. Heine increasingly took on the role
of an intellectual mediator between Germany and France and for the first
time presented his position in a pan-European framework. He acquainted
the French public with German Romanticism and German philosophy
Later, as it began to dawn on Heine that he
would never return to Germany again, he began to write a series of works
of cultural criticism, this time in French, critiquing German culture
and particularly chastising what he viewed as the failed movement of Romanticism.
As the towering figure of the revolutionary literary movement Young Germany (Junges Deutschland),
he continued from Paris to disseminate French revolutionary ideas in
Germany.
Censorship of the time had a funny rule that books under 320 pages
were to be reviewed before publication. Anything larger was considered
to be uninteresting to the general public and not worth the censors’
time.
Heine’s publisher flouted this law by printing his clients’ work in
large font, increasing the page count and bypassing the censors, but
still spreading revolutionary texts. 1834 saw an end to this loophole,
and as Heine refused to be censored, his work went unpublished in
Germany. In 1835 the German Parliament banned the works of Young Germany
and thus, Heine’s book were also banned. Heine enjoyed life in the
French capital and made contact with the greats of European cultural
life living there, such as Hector Berlioz, Ludwig Börne, Frédéric
Chopin, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas and Alexander von Humboldt.
Gradually it became a matter of course that German authors of
distinction as visitors to Paris also visited Heine.
One event which really galvanised him was the 1840 Damascus Affair in
which Jews in Damascus had been subject to blood libel and accused of
murdering an old Catholic monk. This led to a wave of anti-Semitic
persecution. The French government, aiming at imperialism in the Middle
East and not wanting to offend the Catholic party, had failed to condemn
the outrage. On the other hand, the Austrian consul in Damascus had
assiduously exposed the blood libel as a fraud. For Heine, this was a
reversal of values: reactionary Austria standing up for the Jews while
revolutionary France temporised. Heine responded by dusting off and
publishing his unfinished novel about the persecution of Jews in the
Middle Ages, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (The Rabbi of Bacherach).
“Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.”
— Heinrich Heine
In October 1843, Heine’s distant relative and German revolutionary, Karl Marx, and his wife Jenny von Westphalen
arrived in Paris after the Prussian government had suppressed Marx’s
radical newspaper. The Marx family settled in Rue Vaneau. Marx was an
admirer of Heine and his early writings show Heine’s influence. In
December Heine met the Marxes and got on well with them. He published
several poems, including Die schlesischen Weber (The Silesian Weavers), in Marx’s new journal Vorwärts (“Forwards“).
Ultimately Heine’s ideas of revolution through sensual emancipation and
Marx’s scientific socialism were incompatible, but both writers shared
the same negativity and lack of faith in the bourgeoisie.
Despite his isolation in France, Heine continued to comment on the
evolution of German culture. Plagued by criticism and censorship, Heine didn’t make life any
easier for himself. He regularly involved himself in liberal factions at
the universities he attended, held questionable and unrequited
romances, and challenged 10 different people to duels throughout the
years.
Though regarded as a literary celebrity, his exile in Paris was also
fraught with dissidence within the Young Germany group, exacerbated once
again by Heine’s tendency towards provocation, culminating in his last
duel in 1840, which he survived.
Following a visit to Germany in 1843, Heine
wrote a long satirical poem Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. A Winter's Tale),
an account of his visit and a harsh lampooning of the political culture
of the German people. Disillusioned with Saint-Simonism and utopanism
in general for some time, Heine also satirized utopian politics with
another long satirical poem entitled Atta Troll: Ein Sommernachtstraum ("Atta Troll: A Midsummer Night's Dream"), published in 1847.
In 1844, he published a second volume of poems, Neue Gedichte (New Poems)
that illustrated the poet's disillusionment with Romantic ideology. The
volume contains a sequence entitled "Verschiedene" that is a satirical,
grotesque version of his earlier love poetry; the "Verschiedene" poems
describe the poet's bitter feelings and resentment towards a litany of
fickle French girls of loose morals and little devotion. The
"Verschiedene" poems earned Heine a significant degree of scorn, though
they are now recognized as a comic masterpiece that signaled the end of Romanticism. Neue Gedichte
also contained a number of satirical poems written on political topics,
meant to illustrate the need for social reform.
Heine's early years in Paris had been happy ones. the French
proved to be a much more tolerant people than the Germans, and Heine
enjoyed a relatively high-class life as a literary celebrity. He was
married, happily, it seems, to a woman of low birth in 1841. Heine's
constant attacks on German culture and politics, however, had not come
without a price; by 1835 his works were banned by the German government;
and by 1840 Heine himself was barred from returning to the country.
Heine wrote movingly of the experience of exile in his poem In der Fremde ("Abroad"):
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(Translation by Hal Draper) |
In 1844, Heine's uncle Salomon died at last, leaving the poet destitute and at a loss for stability. His uncle, who had reluctantly supported his poet-nephew during his life, had completely disinherited him from his will; penniless, and having no other options, Heine entered into a lengthy legal battle with his uncle's estate, a fight which would drain much of the poet's energy as well as seriously tarnish his reputation among his peers. Moreover, around this time, Heine began to suffer from the symptoms of a nervous disease, possibly multiple sclerosis or syphilis. Confined to bed in 1848, Heine, blind, paralyzed, and in constant pain, returned to poetry, writing some of the bleakest and most heartbreaking verses ever rendered in the German language. These poems were collected in the volumes Romanzero in 1851, and Gedichte 1853 und 1854 (Poems: 1853 and 1854), and they are now considered by critics to be his greatest achievements. Here, for instance, is Heine's heartrending "The Mad Carnival of Loving," translated by Richard Garnett:
- This mad carnival of loving,
- This wild orgy of the flesh,
- Ends at last and we two, sobered,
- Look at one another, yawning.
- Emptied the inflaming cup
- That was filled with sensuous potions,
- Foaming, almost running over—
- Emptied is the flaming cup.
- All the violins are silent
- That impelled our feet to dancing,
- To the giddy dance of passion—
- Silent are the violins.
- All the lanterns now are darkened
- That once poured their streaming brilliance
- On the masquerades and murmurs—
- Darkened now are all the lanterns.
He would not leave what he called his “mattress-grave” (Matratzengruft) until his death on February 17, 1856 in Paris. Three days later he was buried in the Montmartre cemetery. Cimeterie. His wife Mathilde survived him, dying in 1883. The couple had no children. 85 years later in 1941 when France was under Nazi occupation, Hitler ordered the German army to obiterate Heine's grave. No trace of it remains
Heine is often labeled the first of the "post-Romantic" poets. His
criticisms of Romanticism, which became more and more scathing as the
poet matured, would help to precipitate the realist
phase of literary history. .
Many composers have set Heine's works to music. They include Robert
Schumann (especially his Lieder cycle Dichterliebe), Friedrich Silcher
(who wrote a popular setting of "Die Lorelei", one of Heine's best known
poems), Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn, Johannes
Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Edward
MacDowell, and Richard Wagner; and in the 20th century Hans Werner
Henze, Carl Orff, Lord Berners, Paul Lincke, Yehezkel Braun, and
Friedrich Baumfelder (who wrote another setting of "Die Lorelei", as
well as "Die blauen Frühlingsaugen" and "Wir wuchsen in demselben Thal"
in his Zwei Lieder).
Heine's insight into
the human condition, and his constant search for real hope and change,
make him one of the most moving and influential poets in the European
tradition. His conversion to Christianity and attempted assimilation
into German Christian culture, only to be scorned and reviled by Nazi
hatred of Jews makes Heinrich a pure case and embodiment of one of the
enduring horrors and tragedies in European history, namely the Christian
abuse and inhuman oppression of its Jewry.
Banned by the German authorities during his own lifetime, Heine’s works
faced backlash again when they were posthumously banned by the Nazis in
the 1930s. Censorship went beyond bans and up in flames, when in 1933
Nazi students and youth began a nationwide book burning in Berlin as part of a nationwide action “against the un-German spirit”.
The librarian Wolfgang Hermann was instrumental in drawing up the
blacklist of books to be burnt, which was published in Börsenblatt, the
trade magazine for the German publishing industrywhich were then used to plunder private
bookshelves, public libraries and academic collections. . More than 2,500
authors were consigned to the flames.. Among the famous German-speaking
authors were Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Heinrich
Heine, Franz Kafka, Karl Marx and Stefan Zweig. The list included
authors such as the 1929 Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, targeted for
his support of the Weimar Republic, and international best-selling
author Erich Maria Remarque whose “All Quiet on the Western Front” was
vilified as a betrayal of the martyred soldiers of the First World War.
Before the books
were burnt, the organisers sent out what they called their “Twelve
Theses”, which were to be read at the book-burnings in every town. The first works attacked were those of Marx. His cousin’s would soon
follow suit. Never mind an author’s actual political leanings or
literay message, under the Nazi regime, Jewish authors were all
censored, “regardless of subject matter.”
It wasn’t only German-speaking authors whose books were burned, but also
American writers like Ernest Hemingway and Jack London, French writers
like Victor Hugo and André Gide, English writers like D.H. Lawrence and
H.G. Wells and Russian writers like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The Nazi student leader Herbert Gutjahr held a contemptuous speech.
"We have turned our actions against the un-German spirit. I turn
everything un-German over to the fire," he cried.The seething
bonfire below him was already swallowing up thousands of books as the
23-year-old threw another handful of volumes into the flames.
Scenes like this one played out all over Germany on May 10, 1933. In
the cities with major universities, students burned works by authors who
didn't uphold their racist ideology. Students had already spent weeks
lugging condemned manuscripts out of the libraries.
In
their eyes, the books contained "un-German" thoughts, or their authors
were considered enemies of National Socialism. Most of the authors were
socialists, pacifists or Jews.
The students didn't have to fear
resistance: Library employees and many professors went along with the
emptying of their collections, even if they didn't all agree with it.
After the Nazis took power in January 1933, Adolf Hitler received
dictatorial authority. That marked the beginning of his campaign to win
the minds of Germans. The German Student Union, an umbrella group for
all student organizations, announced in April 1933: "The state has been
conquered! But not yet the universities! The intellectual paramilitaries
are coming in. Raise your flags!"
With hardly any involvement
from the Nazi party, the Nazi student organization took the lead and
culminated their campaign with the book burnings on May 10.
The central book burning event took place at the Opernplatz in Berlin
and was broadcast live on the radio. Many students arrived dressed in
the SS or SA uniforms worn by the Nazis' paramilitary groups. A number
of professors turned out as well.
Selected students threw books
into the fire again and again as ideological proclamations were shouted
into the crowd. One of the statements was: "Against decadence and moral
decay! For breeding and convention in the family and state! I turn
writings by Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser and Erich Kästner over to the
fire!"
Erich
Kästner, the author of internationally renowned children's books
including "Emil and the Detectives" (1929), was present that night at
the Opernplatz and bore witness to the hideous spectacle Later he described this dark day with the word
“Begräbniswetter” (funeral weather)."I stood in front of the university, wedged between students in SA
uniforms, in the prime of their lives, and saw our books flying into the
quivering flames," Kästner wrote. He concluded: "It was
disgusting." It rained so hard that the flames
kept going out, and the fire brigade had to pour petrol on the fire to
get it burning properly.The majority of Germans, including many uncritical intellectuals and
professors, quietly stood by as their country's creative talent went up
in flames. Some even approved. Most troubling, however, is the key role
students played in ideologically shaping the country.
The main speaker arrived at midnight. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi
propaganda minister with a PhD in Germanic studies, spoke to the Berlin
crowd and the short-wave listeners at home. "German men and women! The
age of excessive Jewish intellectualism has come to an end, and the
breakthrough of the German revolution has cleared the path for the
German way."
Goebbels belied how much he mistrusted the
students' self-organized campaign; at that point, he and Hitler were
afraid of losing their grip on the Nazi movement.
Ominously, a character in Heine’s play Almansor (1821) a tragic love story between an
Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from
Islam to Christianity. Taking place in Granada in 1492, the tragedy
depicts the burning of the Qua’ran, the act that prompts the sentence “That
was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn
people as well.”these chilling prophetic words are now engraved in the ground of Berlin's Opernplatz commemorating the
horrifying book burning of 1933. Heine's words were tragically fulfilled: Mass murder of Europe's Jews began just several years later.
Why Heine depicted Muslims as the
victims of book burning and not the Jews is still an open question. But one can’t help but wonder whether or not the Nazi censors were aware
of the terribly ironic scene they enacted in Opernplatz that repressive
evening, or if anyone could have guessed at the tragedy to come. The mobs also burned the books of Helen Keller, an American author who
was a socialist, a pacifist, and the first deaf-blind person to graduate
from college. Keller responded: “History has taught you nothing if you
think you can kill ideas. . . . You can burn my books and the books of
the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a
million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.” The US magazine Newsweek called the burnings a "holocaust of books."
The Opernplatz memorial shows what is missing. Underground, almost out of sight,
no books, empty white shelves, directly under the Bebelplatz. What was
lost and burnt were the books by those who the Nazis ostracised and
persecuted, who had to leave the country and whose stories were no
longer allowed to be told. Symbolically, the underground bookshelves
have space for around 20,000 books, as a reminder of the 20,000 books
that went up in flames here on 10 May 1933 at the behest of the Nazis.
The Israeli artist Micha Ullman designed the library memorial, which was unveiled on 20 March 1995.
1933 marked the beginning of a mass exodus among Germany's intellectuals
and artists. Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht fled to America, Sigmund Freud fled to
England and Lion Feuchtwanger fled to France, where he was arrested and
sent to a prison camp, but escaped and fled to the United States. Those
writers who didn’t emigrate, like Erich Kästner, were banned from
publishing their works in Germany until after the war. The nation that had often been admired abroad as the land
of poets and thinkers had made it clear to its most talented minds that
they were no longer welcome.
Today the city of Dusseldorf honours Heinrich Heineits poet with a boulevard (Heinrich-Heine-Allee)
and a modern monument. In Israel, the attitude to Heine has long been the subject of debate
between secularists, who number him among the most prominent figures of
Jewish history, and the religious who consider his conversion to
Christianity to be an unforgivable act of betrayal. Due to such debates,
the city of Tel-Aviv delayed naming a street for Heine, and the street
finally chosen to bear his name is located in a rather desolate
industrial zone rather than in the vicinity of Tel-Aviv University,
suggested by some public figures as the appropriate location.
Ha'ir (a left-leaning Tel-Aviv magazine) sarcastically suggested that "The Exiling of Heine Street" symbolically re-enacted the course of Heine's own life. Since then, a street in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem and a community center in Haifa have been named after Heine. A Heine Appreciation Society is active in Israel, led by prominent political figures from both the left and right camps. His quote about burning books is prominently displayed in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. (It is also displayed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Always more precise about what he loathed than about what he loved, incapable of leading or of following party; exile, poet, jew.,Heinrich Heine was the ultimate outsider, le the last words be in his own verse,
Ha'ir (a left-leaning Tel-Aviv magazine) sarcastically suggested that "The Exiling of Heine Street" symbolically re-enacted the course of Heine's own life. Since then, a street in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem and a community center in Haifa have been named after Heine. A Heine Appreciation Society is active in Israel, led by prominent political figures from both the left and right camps. His quote about burning books is prominently displayed in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. (It is also displayed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Always more precise about what he loathed than about what he loved, incapable of leading or of following party; exile, poet, jew.,Heinrich Heine was the ultimate outsider, le the last words be in his own verse,
I am a German Poet,
In German lands I sine;
And where great names are mentioned
They're bound to mention mine.
Nazi book burning 1933
