Monatshefte

The fifteen papers in this volume, mostly by experienced Heine scholars, were first presented at a conference of the Universities of Düsseldorf and the Saarland in 2012, organized in connection with an edition of Heine’s Lebenszeugnisse completed by Sikander Singh. They reach out to the realities of Heine’s nineteenth-century environment.

Michael Werner places Heine’s anti-nationalism into the context of the macropolitics of the time. Heine regarded nationalism as a historical abnormality. Werner interestingly denominates the pre-nationalist past postulated by Heine as pre-modern, nationalism as the modern, and the prophesied cosmopolitan universalism as postmodern. Werner makes his case with his customary precision and learnedness, but two considerations might be added here: the post-modern post-nationalism seems to be still nowhere in sight, raising a question about Heine’s prophetic vision, and it might be asked whether Heine’s anti-nationalist fervor was wise in his time, insofar as it alienated him from his natural allies.

Bernd Kortländer treats Heine’s concept of time; in his early writing there is a certain nostalgia for the old times; the new times begin with the execution of Louis XVI; they are characterized by ineluctable, accelerating progress that was sometimes frightening, while Heine recognizes also a timeless time in which the poet dwells. For Paul Peters, Heine refutes the death of poesy; no one has previously noticed how he joins poesy to the prose of the world, resisting it and refusing reconciliation with it. Peters rather breathlessly declares Heine to have been the first to join poesy to dissonance and negativity, single-handedly achieving the transition to the modern, which apparently consists of Baudelaire.

Stefan Braese discusses the crises and uncertainties caused by the introduction of paper money, but does not stay with this topic, instead turning to a long discussion of Heine’s Jewish allusions, thoughts, and meditations, to which he ascribes Messianic [End Page 142] hopes. Rather than claiming business experience for Heine, a treatment of his helplessness in financial matters might have been more instructive; he never understood capitalist investment, as his mishaps in that area show, and apparently had no understanding of how his Uncle Salomon had become so wealthy. Money was for him a magic substance.

Volker Dürr finds, as others have, that Heine’s images of the Islamic Orient are metonymies for Jewish situations; he constructs a third, feminized space between Orient and Occident, emancipated through women. Heine was “Orientalist” in the now-familiar usage, but not in a negative sense. Markus Winkler examines the contrapuntal-polyphonic dichotomy of civilization and barbarism, in which the barbaric, as in the case of the Jews in Poland, is more authentic and closer to nature, though in Die Harzreise the narrator escapes from the barbaric students into nature. In “Vitzliputzli” the Aztecs are at first innocent and näıve in contrast to the greedy, violent Spaniards, but then the relationship reverses, as the Aztecs become cannibals and the narrator expresses sympathy for the ravaged Spaniards. This study, which can only be adumbrated here, is one of the most original and probing in the volume.

Gerhard Höhn directs his vast knowledge of Heine’s Paris to his portraits of rulers, descriptions of street scenes, and attention to signs of the times. Ralph Häfner provides an overview of Heine’s relations with the Cottas as a reporter from Paris, including projects that were not realized. Sikander Singh pursues Heine’s disappointments with museums. He highlighted the difference between art and life, deconstructed the Romantic transcendence of the aesthetic, and sometimes found his desire for meaning in art unfulfilled.

Since it is always worthwhile to hear from someone outside our guild, the commentary of the musicologist Volker Kalisch on Heine’s reports of Paganini is especially welcome. Kalisch reviews the intense critical response to Paganini at the time, notes in passing that Heine preferred to symphonic and chamber music the melodic, the instrumental, and the vocal, and, analyzing Heine’s synaesthetic fantasy of Paganini’s performance with a kind of spreadsheet, endeavors to determine the pieces Paganini played and thus fix the date of the concert Heine attended.

Sabine Brenner-Wilczek characterizes Die Romantische Schule, commenting on Heine’s flowery terms, uncritically accepting the notion of the Kunstperiode, and showing how polar concepts are bound together through subjectivity. Although Brenner-Wilczek is now the director of the Heinrich-Heine-Institut and thus publisher of the Heine-Jahrbuch, this is the most conventional of the contributions to the volume.

Olaf Briese, with numerous perceptive details, interprets Heine’s water images: the ocean, ecstatically admired; rivers, less liked because they are constrained and unidirectional—Heine was an underminer of the Rhine sentimentality—and streams, which he could personify. Briese points out that Heine was a city man without much sensitivity to nature; in Atta Troll nature is nasty compared with Paris.

In a study of the theme of the family, Karin Füllner treats three cases of only children: in Schnabelewopski, where the unconflicted family is a euphemistic representation of Heine’s own; in Der Rabbi von Bacherach, with Sara’s past memory of a happy family; and in Florentinische Nächte, where Max’s memory of family, like that of the others, is “vergoldet, idealisiert, ist in sehr weite Ferne gerückt und wirkt [End Page 143] irreal” (267–68). To these are contrasted the Rabbi’s family, which is childless and the other members of which are killed in the pogrom, van der Pissen’s grotesque family tableau in Schnabelewopski, and the horror story of Laurence’s family history in Florentinische Nächte.

Florian Trabert begins by deriving Heine’s dichotomy of spiritualism and sensualism from Edward Gibbon, but instead of pursuing this interesting suggestion in detail, he turns to parodistic treatments of religious legends. Having been convinced by Bodo Morawe of Heine’s unequivocal godlessness, Trabert examines particularly “Die Wahlfahrt nach Kevlaar” and “Tannhäuser” as satires on Christianity. Despite some careful insights, I am a little skeptical of the presuppositions.

Michael Perraudin concludes the volume with an essay on Heine’s uneasiness with the modern. The 1820s were not a quiet time, as often taken to be; there were the beginnings of steam engines, parliaments, railroads. Heine was disoriented by the cultural acceleration, found in the replacement of the familiar with the new a lack of authenticity, and was uncomfortable with the recently built city of Berlin. The son of a fabric importer, as Perraudin points out, he was particularly ironical about new trends in fashion: Perraudin supplies several contemporary fashion plates that correspond exactly to Heine’s descriptions. Perraudin’s contribution is a welcome corrective to the relentless insistence on Heine’s modernity.

Welcome also in this volume are indications that, as Briese explicitly points out, the centrality of Heine’s identity as a poet is being rediscovered: “Heine wird mit Recht poetisiert (ohne die Gesamtheit sozio-kultueller, politischer, philosophischer, religiöser und anderer Konstituenten zu übergehen)” (256–57). This shift in emphasis, tentative though it may be, has been evident for some time.