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Heinrich
Heine |
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Heinrich
Heine (1797-1856) was born in Düsseldorf, the son of
a Jewish tradesman. When business failed, Heinrich was sent
to Hamburg, where his rich banker uncle Salomon prepared
him for a career in commerce. Heine studied law at the universities
of Bonn, Berlin and Göttingen, gaining his degree in 1825,
but was always more interested in literature.
To avoid the restrictions placed upon Jews, Heinrich converted
to Protestantism and changed his first name to Heinrich,
but didn't in fact enter government service. He had made
his poetic debut by 1821, brought out a collection of verse
(inspired by unreturned love for cousins Amalie and Therese)
by 1827, and thereafter supported
himself by poetry, journalism, travel books, and works on
philosophy and German literature. In 1834 he fell in love
with Crecence Eugénie Mirat, an illiterate sales girl, marrying
her seven years later. As a journalist in Paris,
Heine gradually aligned himself with French progressive
thought, becoming unpopular with conservative opinion in
German, even having his books banned in 1835. He admired
Napoleon, supported strikes by Silesian weavers, and corresponded
with Karl Marx. In 1844 his uncle left him a small pension,
and another was provided by the French Government —
both much needed when Heine's health deteriorated, leaving
him paralyzed and partly blind. Nonetheless, Heine still
managed to produce one of his finest collections (Romazero)
and to fall in love with Camilla
Selden, an Austrian woman, for whom he wrote particularly
fine poetry. He died in Paris in February 1856, a controversial
figure, continuing so even under the Nazis where his songs
were printed unattributed.
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Heine's
poetry |
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Heine
is best known for his bittersweet
lyrics,
but wrote in many forms, including sonnets, odes, ballads
and biting satire. Heine worked very hard on the 1827 Buch
der Lieder (he was not "a singer born"), but
the later poetry is the better. His revolutionary politics,
and opposition to the lusher vein of Romanticism have made
much less
popular in Germany than outside, though Rilke
was influenced by him, as indeed were many non-German
poets: Becquer, etc. Heine combined
a lyricism
of great simplicity
and purity with an ardent and melancholy disposition. His
language was not new, but he added levels of speech through
the parodistic mingling of conventionally poetic, conversational
and commercial terms, and strengthened its rhythmic vitality.
Heine used traditional, folk-like imagery to extend the
remit of Romanticism, and his stay in Paris deepened a preoccupation
with social issues. Heine never lost his love or hope for
Germany, but felt compelled to satirize her failings in
ways that his contemporaries could not understand or forgive.
Heine was a perplexing man, and the poetry combines surface
lightness with probing thought, faith with cynicism, hope
for a better world with doubts
that the arts would achieve very much. It can have many
failings — sentimental, self-centred, ambivalent and
shallow — but Heine is also the creator of mysterious
pieces like Still ist die Nacht, Das ist eine weiáe Möwe,
Begegnung, Lebensfahrt, Schelm von Bergen, Gedächtnisfeier,
Jehuda ben Halevi and Mir lodert und wogt im Hirn eine Flut,
and of satires like Atta
Troll whose grace and accuracy have never been surpassed.
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German Romanticism |
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The German
Romantics
had to cope with the staggering achievements of Goethe,
Schiller,
and Herder,
and did so by moving into the darker sides of human nature,
and into areas
where language fails. Its great founders were Schiller
and Schlegel,
but many writers following them lacked the resources to
distinguish between dream and reality, taking easy
routes into the Middle
Ages, religion or dissipation. Imagination
seemed hostile to ordinary life, and the cost was often
high: the talent dried up or had to be paid with drink or
suicide. Heine was not immune to these influences, and was
slow to find his true voice. Though addressed to many pretty
girls, his lyrics are not expressions of love so much
as a self-created
atmosphere necessary for literary creation. Heine himself
saw through the humbug, and a mordant sarcasm and then clear-sighted
opposition to convention increasingly broke through. He
produced much more journalism than poetry in the intervening
years. But wrangling over uncle Salomon's will, and the
conditions attached, left Heine feeling betrayed. He lost
his social ideals, and, as his health declined, Heine turned
inwards to paint man's nature in the most somber colours.
Much is wrong with the 1851 Romanzero — weak
poems, lack of organisation and finish — but it is
still one of the world's great books, an astonishing record
of self-analysis in the most difficult of circumstances.
In October 1854 Heine published his last collection, containing
odd poems as good as the previous, and even more a cry from
the grave. He had lived through to the far side of Romanticism,
and recorded with stark clarity what he saw.
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Reading the German |
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Translations can be found at poetry-archive,
tony
kline, poem
hunter, Schiller
institute, kirjasto,
w.
mann, abelard2
and j.
massaad, and a good site for German poetry generally
is german
corner. Heine texts set to music (by Schumann, Schubert,
Mendelssohn, Liszt, and many others) are listed on get
author texts. Many readers will have learned German
at school, and these sites offer excellent resources: learngerman,
germanware,
german
language web exercises, and Colonel
Craig's links. The international Goethe
Institutes teach German, and German learning courses
can also be obtained on CD,
cassette,
online
and elsewhere.
German speakers will find these sites useful: Projekt
Gutenberg, heinrich-heine,
Freien
University, German
Links, FU
Berlin, Sammlung,
hexnet,
world
poetry yahoo
and google.
For books on German Romanticism see B. Peuker's Lyric
Descent in German Romantic Tradition (1987), and H.
Bloom's German Poetry through 1915 (1987). On Heine
himself are S. Prawer's Heine the Tragic Satirist
(1961), Laura Hofrichter's Heinrich Heine (1963).
As ever, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics (1993) provides useful summaries and references.
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