Ludwig Börne: A Memorial 1571133429, 9781571133427, 9781571136800

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Ludwig Börne: A Memorial

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

HEINRICH HEINE

Ludwig Börne A MEMORIAL

Translated with commentary and an introduction by

Jeffrey L. Sammons

Camden House

Copyright © 2006 Jeffrey L. Sammons All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2006 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–57113–342–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heine, Heinrich, 1797–1856. [Ludwig Börne. English] Ludwig Börne: a memorial / Heinrich Heine; translated with commentary and an introduction by Jeffrey L. Sammons. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–342–9 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Börne, Ludwig, 1786–1837. I. Sammons, Jeffrey L. II. Title. III. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) PT2309.B6S3613 2006 838'.609—dc22 2006003309 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Introduction

I

n August 1840, the forty-two-year-old German poet and culturalpolitical writer of Jewish origin, Heinrich Heine, in de facto if not quite de jure exile in Paris, published a book about the German political writer of Jewish origin, Ludwig Börne, who had died, in de facto exile in Paris, three years before at the age of fifty. Regarded by Heine and by others since as his best written book, it was also his most disastrously conceived. It was intended to establish credentials of a revolutionary vision profounder than Börne’s politics of radical agitation and to recover the high ground of revolutionary principle and philosophy against the attacks upon him that Börne had mounted in his last years and that had remained influential with segments of the German public. The effect was quite the opposite. The book was met by a storm of outrage, dwarfing anything seen before in Heine’s contentious and polemical career. A compilation of critiques of Heine published from July 1840 until December 1841, most of them hostile responses to Börne, contains 416 items filling 470 pages.1 Hardly a voice could be found that would venture a word in the book’s defense; many of the German liberals and dissidents of the time were reinforced in their allegiance to Börne’s memory. For a time it looked as though Heine’s reputation would never recover from this debacle, and for decades it remained a segment, if a declining one, in the negative component of his reception history. The response was so ferocious that it blocked much understanding of the principles and assumptions motivating the strategy of the book or any critical consideration of its many peculiarities, and in the course of time those who did not abhor it tended to ignore it. Traditionally it did not draw much interested commentary. This may be the reason that it is Heine’s only major work that has never previously been fully translated into English.2 Today the evaluation has been reversed. Heine has been 1

Eberhard Galley and Alfred Estermann, eds., Heinrich Heines Werk im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen, vol. 6 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, Heinrich Heine Verlag, 1992).

2 A now wholly obscure abridged version appeared as Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne: Recollections of a Revolutionist, tr. Thomas Selby Egan (London: Newman, 1881); the cuts, some substantial, are not indicated. Translations have appeared in other languages, including Italian, Russian, Czech, Rumanian, Hebrew, and Japanese.

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations

viii

Introduction

ix

Book I

1

Book II

27

Book III

51

Book IV

75

Book V

105

Selected Bibliography

125

Index

131

Acknowledgments

F

or encouragement and advice I am grateful to Professor Mark M. Anderson, Department of German, Columbia University, and for ready assistance on particular questions to Professors Henry A. Turner and John M. Merriman, Department of History, Yale University; Professor Mark H. Gelber, Department of Foreign Literature, Ben Gurion University, Beer-Sheva; Professor Jonathan Hess, Department of German, University of North Carolina; and Ms. Marianne Tilch, Heinrich-HeineInstitut, Düsseldorf. I owe a particular debt to my son, Benjamin, for help with matters of classical antiquity and to my wife, Christa, for thoughtful and sensitive reading of the translation. My experience of translating has been the tritely familiar one of tacking between fidelity to the original and idiomatic re-creation in the target language. My instinct, I believe, tends toward fidelity, so that there are doubtless moments not fully naturalized in American English. My view of this is that Heine did not write in American English and we should not pretend that he did. I have done my best to reproduce his variety of tones: poker-faced sincerity, parodistic formality, measured crudeness, satirical obliquity, biblical prophecy, irony, hyperbole, and grandiosity. More often than I have liked I have despaired of capturing the full multivalence of his stylistic resources; once in a while the deficiency is repaired in the notes. With regard to one usage, I have had to invent a vocabulary item: “to yiddle” for mauscheln, “to mouth words with a Yiddish accent”; there did not seem to be any extant term in our language. Perhaps I shall be acknowledged as a beneficiary to English lexicography. The materials in the annotation have been drawn largely from the commentary in DHA and in HSA, and, to a lesser extent, from the garrulous but not always helpful commentary to Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb et al. (Munich: Hanser, 1968–76), as well as from the indispensable index volumes to LB: Inge Rippmann, BörneIndex. Historisch-biographische Materialien zu Ludwig Börnes Schriften und Briefen. Ein Beitrag zu Geschichte und Literatur des Vormärz (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1985). As I have supplemented these materials with my own researches, I naturally take full responsibility for accuracy and cogency.

Abbreviations The following abbreviations are employed throughout: D

The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version by Hal Draper. Boston: Suhrkamp / Insel, 1982.

DHA

Heinrich Heine. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr et al. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973–97.

HSA

Heinrich Heine. Säkularausgabe, ed. Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar (after 1992, Stiftung Weimarer Klassik) and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Berlin and Paris: Akademie Verlag and Editions du CNRS, 1970–.

LB

Ludwig Börne. Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Inge and Peter Rippmann. Düsseldorf: Melzer, 1964–68.

INTRODUCTION

taken at his word that he was, in fact, the true revolutionary spirit of his time in German letters, and for several decades he has been virtually immune from criticism. Börne then became the petty, narrow, simplistic agitator that Heine declared him to be; for those inclined to a Marxist vocabulary, he came to be dismissed as a “petty-bourgeois radical.” Although there still has been relatively little close analysis of the details of Heine’s book, its superiority is regularly asserted, sometimes with quite outlandish arguments. While in recent years there have been some efforts to recover Börne as a democratic activist in his own right, such revaluations often encounter a certain embarrassment because of the inhibitions against criticizing Heine. In this situation, a fresh approach would seem desirable. To begin to understand how the two most important GermanJewish public intellectuals of their time, often regarded by the larger public, for better or worse, as allies, came to be hostile to one another, biographical sketches of each up to the point of their intersection may be helpful. Heinrich Heine, known as “Harry” in his youth, was born (we think) December 13, 1797, in Düsseldorf into a world of uncommon mutability; in his autobiographical fiction, Ideas: The Book of Le Grand, he joked about a schoolboy’s difficulties in learning geography when the borders of countries and their colors on the map were changing practically every day (DHA, 6: 188–89). His birth city was the capital of the Duchy of JülichBerg but under the absentee rule of the Elector Palatine, and, more importantly, under French occupation, a reason that Heine’s school was a lycée on the French model administered and taught by liberal Catholic clergy. In 1799 the duchy passed to the Bavarian and Palatine elector, who in 1806 became the first king of Bavaria and shortly afterward ceded Jülich-Berg to Napoleon, who transformed the territory into the Grand Duchy of Berg, one of three French states he created on German territory. With the fall of Napoleon the duchy was incorporated into Prussia. Thus Heine, who had been Bergish, Palatine, Bavarian, and French without moving from the spot, became a Prussian at seventeen. If Heine’s youth was impressed and formed to a considerable extent by the French spirit, his late adolescence and young adulthood were to be oppressed and deranged by the post-Napoleonic regime imposed upon the German states by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. His mutable environment became apparently immutable; the era was widely felt by those who lived in it to be one of torpor and stasis. The number of German states was reduced to thirty-five principalities and four free cities balanced, for the time being, between the two most powerful monarchies, Prussia and Austria. A Federal Diet in Frankfurt was formed, whose function it was to ratify the policies of those two states, especially of Austria’s chancellor, Clemens Lothar Wenzel Prince Metternich, a Rhinelander like x

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Heine, who effectively governed Central Europe. Metternich’s principle was that nothing should ever happen. When revolution broke out in France in 1830, that was deplorable, and when it put the “citizen-king” Louis-Philippe on the throne, he was despised as illegitimate, but once he was established there, it was forbidden to criticize him, as it had been forbidden to criticize any foreign ruler, including the tsar of Russia and the emperor of China, in the German states. In order to maintain this discipline and to restore, as far as possible, the monarchical absolutism that had obtained before the French Revolution and Napoleon, the regime attempted to perfect the police state. Among the policies of restoration was the reenactment of the Jewish disabilities that had been somewhat relieved in Napoleonic times, a development that had a significant impact on the lives of Heine and Börne, as we shall see. The chief instrument of policy was to control the expression of opinion. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution had generated a wide variety of new ideas about liberty, authority, religion, and the motions of history. Feudal class relations were shifting as economic processes were creating a progressive, increasingly restless middle class. In Germany it was never more than a numerical minority, and it was bedeviled throughout the century with the problem of achieving liberties and civil rights for itself without admitting the dangerously needy and uneducated lower classes to a share in political power. But as the best educated and most literate class, the Bürgertum (not quite the same thing as the “bourgeoisie”) commanded the rhetoric of liberty and much of the media. Thus the regime was determined to stifle freedom of association and control all forms of print and publishing. As the pressure increased, so did the resistance. Censorship regulations were increasingly tightened; publishers and writers increasingly developed devices to evade and undermine them. Most of the embattled liberals, including a large proportion of the university students, came to believe that the creation of a unified nation would modernize Germany and make it more free. In the frustration of stasis, among many the nationalism came to absorb the ideas of liberty; Heine in particular rejected this development, indeed ominous for the future, as we know, and saw in it hostility to France and therefore to its ideals of liberty and equality. The French revolution of 1830 seemed for a moment to relieve the torpor, to put history in motion again. But the effect in Germany was muted; one or another of the worst tyrants was dethroned, here and there a constitution was written, but, on the whole, the well-carpentered Metternichian system weathered the disturbance. Spirits were dampened; what had been dissidence in many cases turned into a sullen acquiescence, and the regime would endure for another eighteen years until the revolutions of 1848 brought a new situation that is beyond the scope of our concerns here. The Metternichian restoration was the time when the epxi

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ochal German emigration to America began to gain momentum. For the most part it was economically motivated, but there were political refugees as well, and, as they enriched democracy in America, they drained Germany of their liberating potential. Many others found their way to France: thousands of artisans and workers, but also a considerable number of dissidents and radicals, the most prominent of them being Heine and Börne. In France they found an approximation of liberty and civil rights, especially freedom of the press within limits, not perfect, but significantly better than in the German Confederation. In these stressful historical circumstances Heine was born into a family of rising businessmen. His father, Samson, a soft and kind but not very competent man, rose less than the others, ultimately failing in business and falling into poor physical and mental health. The family came to be governed by Heine’s millionaire uncle Salomon, a Hamburg banker and possibly the richest commoner in Germany, whose vast and, in Heine’s view, unjust wealth, remaining just out of reach, vexed and frustrated the nephew for much of his life. Efforts to conduct him into the business life failed ignominiously. These were bad economic times; Hamburg in particular had suffered grievously from what may have been the most inhumane Napoleonic oppression in all the German lands, but Heine almost never mentions such things in order not to cast Napoleon, whom he regarded as a hero bringing equality and liberty to Europe, in a negative light. Uncle Salomon then sent his nephew to study law, first to the new University of Bonn, then, after a year, to Göttingen, a place Heine hated and from which he managed to get suspended for participation in a dueling affair. He went on to Berlin, at that time the outstanding university in Germany and perhaps in the world; there he made important connections, was introduced to the philosophy of Hegel, and joined a number of young Jewish intellectuals in a brief but intense initiative to modernize Jewish self-understanding called the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Association for the Culture and Science of the Jews). After four semesters he was obliged to return to Göttingen, known as a center of legal studies. Heine disliked the law as a system designed to reinforce privilege and oppression; as a student he was much more interested in literature and history, but took his law degree, by hook or crook, in 1825. Previous to that ceremony he had himself inconspicuously baptized into the Lutheran religion. His main motivation for taking this step, it would seem, was the recent restoration of Jewish disabilities in the civil service, the most plausible employer for a young man with a law degree. Heine’s unpublished aphorism that “the baptismal certificate is the ticket of admission to European culture” (DHA, 10: 13) is often quoted by those who like him primarily for his wit but is in no way adequate to the enduring unease that this step caused him, especially since he was never xii

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to hold a position in which it made any difference whether he was Jewish or Christian. By the time he completed his degree he had already begun to acquire a modest reputation as a poet, as even his law professor noted. He had begun writing poetry, as far as we can see, around the age of eighteen. As was always his practice throughout his career, he began with compact single poems that he then assembled into internally echoing clusters, into larger cycles, and eventually into books. Almost all the early poetry concerns unrequited love. To what extent it was fueled by his late adolescent infatuation with his cousin Amalie and later her sister Therese, both heiresses of Uncle Salomon’s millions, has been debated for decades and need not concern us here. More important is the new, reflective, ironic tone that he was able to evolve out of the conventions of Romanticism. Heine’s poetry emerged in a sea of verse; everyone wrote it, from schoolchildren to government ministers and, notoriously, the king of Bavaria. For those who had ears to hear, Heine’s poems distinguished themselves with a new tone, at once subversive and wistful, naming a tension between, on the one hand, a loss of faith in Romantic tropes and especially in love as a delusion or even a vice and, on the other, a persistent desire that the Romantic vision might, after all, be true, and that love might be what it felt like and deliver what it promised. Heine’s poems appeared in newspapers and periodicals, but, though he published a small volume called simply Gedichte (Poems) in 1822, he had not found a solid footing in the publishing industry. Then, in January 1826, he made the acquaintance of the energetic and fearless publisher Julius Campe (1792–1867), sole owner of the Hamburg firm of Hoffmann und Campe, who in the following year brought out Heine’s Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs). It was to become the most widely read volume of German poetry in the world, especially after it began to be propelled, in Heine’s phrase, “on wings of song” (DHA, 1/1: 141; D, 54) by the Lieder settings. However, neither Campe nor Heine could foresee this success in 1827; Campe paid him nothing for the book at the time and took it on as a favor because he was more interested in the prose writings. Heine had been publishing several apparently humorous, freeassociative essays about Berlin, about a journey to Prussian Poland, and particularly about a walking tour through the Harz Mountains. With Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey) he created a mixed genre of fiction and essay that became known as Reisebilder (Travel Pictures), modern in their formal flexibility, apparent (and only apparent) casual free association, wit, and wordplay. Running through them was a thread of dissidence, sometimes coded in subordinate clauses and throwaway remarks critical of oppression and despotism that began to draw the unfriendly attention of the authorities and promised conflicts with the censorship. Fortunately for xiii

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Heine, Campe was of all German publishers the most expert at defying the censorship, which he combated with increasing guile year after year. He brought out the first volume of the Travel Pictures, including The Harz Journey and poetry cycles, in 1826, and a second in the following year, including further poem cycles, the Briefe aus Berlin (Letters from Berlin), and the masterpiece of the whole four-volume series, Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand (Ideas: The Book of Le Grand). In April Heine left for a visit to England; Uncle Salomon had supplied him with a large draft, probably of £200, which he was not to cash but merely show to Nathan Rothschild to certify himself as a relative of the great man; Heine cashed it at once, leading to one of the many episodes of friction between uncle and nephew. In England he gathered materials for further Travel Pictures. However, neither travel pictures nor poetry promised a living; Heine needed a job. At this juncture he was helped by the diplomat and diarist Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785–1858), who was one of Heine’s most enduring and useful friends, and whose wife Rahel (1771–1833), the most famous of the Berlin Jewish salon hostesses, also encouraged the young man. Varnhagen mediated a potentially valuable connection with Baron Johann Friedrich von Cotta (1764–1832), the prestigious publisher of Goethe and Schiller and proprietor of various publishing enterprises. Cotta offered Heine the coeditorship of a periodical, the Neue allgemeine politische Annalen (New General Political Annals) in Munich. In the fall of 1827 Heine began a leisurely journey to Munich as a form of what today we might call networking, visiting in various places men of letters potentially useful for his editorial tasks. In mid-November he spent several days in Frankfurt with Ludwig Börne. Unlike Heine, Börne came out of a ghetto, the most important one in Germany. The Frankfurt ghetto was teeming, unhealthy, cramped almost beyond bearing, with gates locked on Sundays and holidays, but also vibrant and fertile; it was, after all, the home base of the international Rothschild dynasty. He was born Juda Löw Baruch on (we think) May 6, 1786 to a relatively prosperous banker who was a community leader and the representative of the ghetto to the emperor, the alleged protector of the Jews. Consequently Jakob Baruch was cautious, conservative, and submissive to authority, as well as religiously orthodox, qualities conspicuously absent in his son, who had generally poor relations with his father. Although the ghetto walls were destroyed by French bombardment in 1796 and Jews gradually began to move outside them, it continued to be a material site of Jewish subjugation. When Löw (or now, Louis) Baruch was fourteen, he was sent to Berlin with instructions to learn medicine from the physician Markus Herz (1747–1803), whose wife Henriette (1764–1847) was another of the prominent Jewish salon hostesses as well xiv

INTRODUCTION

that Heine really wanted nothing to do with him. Börne had become increasingly radical in Paris, abandoning his liberal monarchism for populist republicanism and associating himself with other German radicals and the crowds of German artisans and workers who had sought refuge in France, whose leader and spokesman he appeared to be. Unlike Heine, he had always regarded Napoleon as a tyrant, and he was much less tolerant than Heine of the July Monarchy of the “bourgeois” king, Louis-Philippe. In May 1832 he attended a gathering of some 30,000 German liberals at Hambach in the Palatinate, where he found himself something of a celebrity, although, to his amusement, his watch was stolen. Heine found all this busy activity tiresome and irrelevant mainly for two reasons. For one thing, he always suspected liberals and radicals of a susceptibility to nationalism, to which he was implacably opposed because he perceived it as a device in the interest of the ruling class directed against France and its revolutionary significance. He may have sensed as well a potential for anti-Semitism in nationalism, but this concern was usually subordinate to a demand for resistance to a conspiracy of state and church against human emancipation in general. Not that he did not regard himself as a patriotic German, but, as he put it in the preface to Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. A Winter’s Tale), laying claim to the national colors that he elsewhere scorned: “Plant the black, red, and gold flag upon the heights of German thought, make it into a banner of free humanity, and I will give my best heart’s blood for it” (DHA, 4: 300). Today Heine is much celebrated for this stand against national chauvinism, for it appears justified in the light of modern history and suits the current internationalist discourse about “Europe.” It may be doubted, however, whether it was a well-advised strategy in his own time. Self-celebratory gestures such as the one just cited (and which are rife in the book on Börne) rarely made a good impression on his readership. Friends repeatedly told him that he did not understand Germany any more. His insistence that nationalism was a war-mongering conspiracy in the interest of princes and political oppression must have seemed perverse in view of the fact that the ruling order was actively opposed to the movement toward national unity. Nationalism was still joined in the minds of many with the hopes for movement toward more democratic institutions. The public was only able to see that Heine was opposed to these yearnings, but could not see that he had a higher vision of freedom. That higher vision was the source of Heine’s other exasperation with the movement of which Börne had become a leader. Heine regarded his position as a philosophical one beyond the purview of the activists, but more relevant to the welfare of the people as a whole. Its operative terms were “sensualism” or “Hellenism” and their opposition to “spiritualism” or “Nazarenism.” In the modern age of Enlightenment and science, there xix

INTRODUCTION

as a great beauty. Louis fell violently in love with her, even though she was more than twenty years older, an early sign of the emotional insecurity and dependence characteristic of him. Henriette managed the situation with tact, and after Herz’s death the young man was shipped to Halle, where he boarded with a Christian family, attended the Gymnasium, and in 1804 began in a desultory way to study medicine at the university, as that was the only subject open to Jewish students at the time. After Napoleon closed the university in 1806, Louis drifted to Berlin, but when Jewish disabilities were relieved under Napoleonic auspices, he moved to Heidelberg in 1807 and switched to Kameralistik, which we might render as “administrative science.” In the following year he transferred to Giessen, where he was awarded a doctoral degree with slender qualifications, but wrote an essay, never published, on the legal and administrative condition of the Jews in Frankfurt. He also had begun to publish some literary and essayistic writings. In 1811 he obtained a position as a police actuary in Frankfurt, from which, however, he was dismissed in 1815 as a consequence of the post-Napoleonic reinstitution of Jewish disabilities; he managed to extract a modest pension. From then on he lived as a free-lance writer. Probably in the first instance to facilitate his writing career, he was baptized in 1818 into the Lutheran religion, taking the name Carl Ludwig Börne, which he was to bear from then on. The quality of Börne’s Christian faith has been a topic of much dispute. On the one hand, he was, like Heine, an Enlightenment thinker who was not likely to become dominated by religious belief. Consistently with his political convictions, he remained a steadfast supporter of Jewish emancipation, although privately, again like Heine, he could make dismissive remarks about Jews that might sound anti-Semitic in a different context. On the other hand, the appearance of things is that he adapted himself to a Christian identity more than Heine did and developed a friendlier relationship to ordinary religious discourse. At any rate, Heine thought so, and it was one of the characteristics that he most implacably held against Börne, eventually accusing him of tending toward Catholicism. In the previous year, 1817, Börne made the acquaintance of the intelligent and independent Jeanette Wohl (1783–1861), daughter of one of the richest men in the ghetto, who had taken the highly unusual step for a Jewish woman of her time of divorcing her unloved husband. From then on Börne and Jeanette Wohl were bonded in a friendship that endured to the end of Börne’s life and beyond. Many people expected them to marry, and some thought they had secretly done so. In phases of their relationship, Börne appeared to desire marriage, but she always put him off. It has been suggested that, in order to marry him, she would by law have had to convert to Christianity, which she was unwilling to do. But there is little xv

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or no indication that she had any desire at all to marry him. It is possible that she did not find him sexually attractive, but it is just as likely that she recognized that Börne wanted a mother more than a lover and that marriage would have obliged her to even more of a burden of mothering than she was already bearing. In any case, she maintained a role as muse, encouraging and prodding Börne, who, oddly in view of his fiery opinions, tended to a certain dilatoriness with regard to the work of writing. To push him to get forward with the most important of his journals, Die Wage (The Scale, 1818–21), she once wrote a letter consisting largely of the word “Wage” repeated over and over.3 She was to play a significant if largely passive role in the drama of Heine’s breach with Börne. The Scale was one of several periodicals Börne founded and largely wrote as they were one after the other hounded by the censorship, though he hounded the censorship back, so bedeviling one censor that he resigned in despair. In 1820 Börne was arrested for a time, but then released. The Metternichian regime even thought that his slashing pen might be turned to its service, but Börne, to his father’s disappointment, declined the opportunity. Since political opinion, at least in a liberal and democratic spirit, could not be permissibly expressed, much of his writing was in the form of theater criticism. He did not care much about the theater one way or another and liked little of what he saw, but he was able to employ his criticism for social and implicitly political commentary. As he developed this mode, he began to emerge as one of the wittiest and most roguishly ironic of writers in the German language, easily paired in this regard in the public eye with Heine. He also become notorious for an increasingly exasperated attitude toward Goethe, tending toward outright hostility; it may be what he is most remembered for in his larger reputation. It was grounded in an acknowledgment that Goethe was Germany’s greatest literary genius along with disappointment that he did not apply his poetic power in the interest of the people and the nation, but remained aristocratically aloof, occupying himself with trivia, corrupting the potentially more freedom-loving Friedrich Schiller, shrouding himself in a toga of complacent self-regard: Goethe could have been a Hercules, cleansing his fatherland of a great deal of rubbish, but he obtained the golden apples of the Hesperides, which he kept for himself, and then sat down at the feet of Omphale and remained sitting there. . . . You were given an elevated spirit, have you ever shamed baseness? Heaven gave you a tongue of 3

Jeanette Wohl to Börne, February 9, 1822, LB, 5: 822. The word is also the imperative of the verb meaning “to dare.” By this time the periodical had ceased to appear.

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fire, have you ever defended justice? You had a good sword, but you were always only your own guardian. (LB, 2: 819–20)

Just at the time Heine visited Börne, in November 1827, there had appeared a book by Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873), Die deutsche Literatur (German Literature), postdated 1828, a pugnaciously critical overview not just of literature in the strict sense but of virtually every kind of writing from religion, philosophy, and history to politics, art, and criticism. Prominent in the book is a violent attack on Goethe that in places seems to echo Börne: “that he was silent where his word would have been a sword and only began to speak when the swords had spoken long enough, understandably left hearts cold.”4 Börne may not have been as enthusiastic about Menzel as he appears to be in Heine’s account, since Menzel’s critique was moralistic at this time, not political like Börne’s, and he may not have expressed himself on Goethe in quite such crude terms, but he did share something of Menzel’s attitude. As Heine says Börne urged him to do, he did visit Menzel in Stuttgart and even stayed in his home. In the following June, Heine wrote a generally friendly review of German Literature for Cotta’s periodical, but demurred from the treatment of Goethe, whom he defended on the grounds of the monarchical immunity of poets that he always ascribed to himself also: In no way do we intend a defense of Goethe; we believe that Menzel’s doctrine, “Goethe is no genius, but a talent,” will appeal to few, and even these few will admit that Goethe now and then has the talent of being a genius. But even if Menzel were right, it would not have been proper to set out his hard judgment so harshly. It is still Goethe, the king; a reviewer who applies his knife to such a poetking should possess at least as much courtliness as that English executioner who beheaded Charles I, and before carrying out this critical office, knelt before the royal delinquent and begged his pardon. (DHA, 10: 246–47)

During their first meeting Heine and Börne were on good terms; in fact, Heine had already sent him an autographed copy of the first volume of the Travel Pictures the preceding year, and during the visit he presented Jeanette Wohl with a copy of the Book of Songs; after reaching Munich, he sent back to both of them a cordially dedicated copy of the 5 second volume of the Travel Pictures. Börne had been publishing reports from Paris and other items in Cotta’s periodicals, but he had become dis4

Wolfgang Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1828), reprint, ed. Eva Becker (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), 2: 229. 5 Heine to Börne, May, 1826; to Jeanette Wohl, November 15, 1827; to Börne and Jeanette Wohl, November 1827, HSA, 20: 247, 306, 308.

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satisfied with Cotta in a negotiation for a project of collected works; Heine recommended his publisher Campe, who within a year agreed to bring out Börne’s collected volumes. After that, the paths of Heine and Börne were not to cross for some time. For the next few years Börne continued to write and to travel, making numerous acquaintances among prestigious people in the cultural world. He was obliged also to care for his always fragile health. The French revolution of July 1830 found him taking the waters at Bad Soden, between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. Fired with enthusiasm, he left for France a few weeks later and by mid-September he was settled in Paris, where he was to live for the rest of his life. Heine, meanwhile, had remained in his coeditorship in Munich for only six months, after which he traveled around Italy, gathering experience for further installments of the Travel Pictures. In one of these, Die Bäder von Lucca (The Baths of Lucca), he generated the first of his national scandals when he responded to anti-Semitic jibes by the formalistic poet Count August Platen von Hallermünde (1796–1835) with a broad lampoon on Platen’s homosexuality. While in Italy Heine received worrisome reports about his father’s health and began to wend his way home, where he arrived in January 1829, a month after his father’s death. After this, he drifted about for a time, still something of a charitable ward of Uncle Salomon. The appearance of things is that he would have liked to find a paying position that would leave him time for his writing, but his efforts to achieve this were desultory and not very realistic. The revolution of 1830 caught him vacationing on the island of Helgoland. Unlike Börne, however, he made no plans to leave for Paris as soon as possible, but continued drifting and looking for a solution in Germany for another ten months. Not until May 1831 did he go to Paris, urged by Campe, who hoped for a renewed impetus to his writing. Heine does not seem at the time to have perceived this move as one into exile, and, although he soon came to love Paris, it is doubtful that he foresaw that he, too, would remain there for the rest of his life. Börne was delighted that Heine had come, or thought he was. As it turned out, Heine’s move to Paris was the critical moment in their relationship. Even before Heine had arrived, Börne imagined a project of publishing with Campe a periodical correspondence with Heine, to be printed in Switzerland and smuggled into Germany. He did not propose this idea directly to Heine, but to Campe, who apparently informed Heine, although we know no more about that (Heine and Campe were in direct personal contact at the time).6 Gradually, however, Börne had to realize 6

Börne described the project in a letter to Jeanette Wohl of February 3, 1831, LB, 4: 1299–1301.

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INTRODUCTION

is no need for scarcity, imposed by the privileged, nor any need for a radical egalitarian doctrine that would reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator; it was possible for all human beings to aspire to plenitude and gratification, including sexual emancipation, if they could throw off the external and internal fetters of a spiritualist, repressive order maintained anachronistically by aristocrats and priests. Required for this was an alliance of German philosophy, which, in Heine’s view, had systematically overthrown religion, with French revolutionary élan. German liberals were of no use for this purpose. Heine always suspected them of being infected not only with nationalism but also with puritanical repressiveness, remnants of Christianity. It is important to recognize that the dichotomy of Nazarenism and Hellenism is the core of Heine’s politics. It was for him the anthropological key to the whole of Western culture, and as such, certified the superiority of his vision to that of all others with their petty, local, immediate concerns. The pagan nature gods, emblems of a sensualist plenitude and exaltation of the body, had been demonized and driven underground by ascetic Catholicism, creating, we might say, a universal neurosis. But the German Reformation had overthrown Catholicism and freed men to judge for themselves, while German philosophy had overthrown theism altogether and prepared the way for a genuine emancipation. Yet the way was not yet open. It was blocked by the reactionary alliance of throne and altar that governed in the German states, employing spiritualist credulity for political and social repression. But the radicals had not got the message, either; Heine insisted they were leveling down, not up, with repressive, puritanical traditions. As he wrote in his book on religion and philosophy in Germany: In this, and in many other things, we differ from the men of the revolution. We do not want to be sans-culottes, frugal citizens, paltry presidents: we are founding a democracy of equally magnificent, equally holy, equally blissful gods. You demand simple clothing, abstemious habits, and unspiced pleasures; we, on the other hand, demand nectar and ambrosia, purple robes, sumptuous fragrances, pleasure and luxury, laughing nymph-dance, music and comedies. (DHA, 8/1: 61)

It is also important to recognize that the centrality of the dichotomy of Nazarenism and Hellenism is a matter of Heine’s reputation in our time when, especially in the student movement, gratification and plentitude came to be regarded as revolutionary issues. There is little evidence that it had any substantial effect or more than isolated echoes in his own time or in the following decades. Few seem to have acknowledged his claims of a higher principle; those who did are likely to have perceived it xx

INTRODUCTION

as an argument for lewdness, scorn of chastity and self-discipline, perhaps Jewish in its alleged amorality. Such a gospel was unlikely to have much fortune on the threshold of the Victorian age. It is true that Matthew Arnold borrowed the terms Nazarenism and Hellenism from Heine and gave them some currency in English, but he shifted their meaning and 7 deflected their radically revolutionary implications. Where Jewishness fit into all this was a little unclear. At first spiritualism or Nazarenism subsumed the Judeo-Christian tradition with its oppressive monotheism. This link continues to be intact in Börne, but not long afterwards he experimented with shifting Jewishness to the sensualist side of the ledger, part of the long process of a recovered allegiance to a version of Jewish identity. But we are not that far here. Thin, ailing, sexually repressed, Christianized Börne was the very image of the pseudorevolutionary cast of mind. The working class, Heine believed, no doubt wrongly, had, since the French Revolution, abandoned religious belief, but it was crude and ignorant, easily moved to useless uproar in the streets, unredeemed by modern philosophy. Heine professed amazement that a well-brought-up man like Börne could have anything to do with artisans and other scruffy commoners. Heine always expressed outrage about the oppression of the common people and the increasing misery of the working class, and sometimes formulated warnings of the potential in their sufferings for apocalyptic terror, but he never seems to have had any conception that the common people, at least as then constituted, might govern themselves. What was needed in their behalf, and what needed to be protected from unaesthetic people like Börne, who could not even appreciate Goethe, was the vision of a poet. Heine apparently made every effort to make this stance clear as soon as he had arrived in Paris. He seems to have flaunted a posture as dandy and aesthete, ragging and irritating Börne. In the account in his book, Heine tells Börne that his first errand in Paris was not to a shrine of the revolution but to see the late medieval Manesse Manuscript in the Bibliothèque Royale. Whether that is true we do not know, but it is true that his first reports from Paris were about the painting salon of 1831. Heine had reconnected himself with Cotta, at first with his Stuttgart Morgenblatt (Morning Paper), with which Menzel was prominently connected. Heine sought in the art works of the salon, the first since the revolution of 1830, symbolic signatures of a new revolutionary spirit. Börne doubtless thought that this was not the right place to look for it. To Jeanette Wohl he reported with some wonderment that “Heine also told me that 7

Matthew Arnold, “Heinrich Heine,” Cornhill Magazine 8 (1863): 233–49, often reprinted. See Ilse-Maria Tesdorpf, Did Auseinandersetzung Matthew Arnolds mit Heinrich Heine (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1971).

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INTRODUCTION

he wanted to occupy himself with art and he had written a large treatise on the last painting exhibition,” and when the first article appeared, 8 Börne complained that Heine’s perceptions were unphilosophical. Later Börne is likely to have noticed that, in an addendum to the book version of Französische Maler (French Painters, 1834), Heine declared: Yes, it is my sacred conviction that republicanism would be unsuitable, unfruitful, and disagreeable for the nations of Europe, and quite impossible for the Germans. When the German demagogues, in blind aping of the French, preached a German republic, and with insane rage tried to defame and disparage not only the kings, but even monarchy itself, the last guarantee of our society, then I thought it was my duty to speak out, as I did in the preceding pages in connection with January 21. Although monarchism has been somewhat spoiled for me since June 28 of last year, nevertheless I have not wanted to delete those statements in this republication. I am proud that I once had the courage not to be drawn into unreason and error either by caresses and intrigue, or by threats. (DHA, 9 12/1: 61–62)

Börne is likely to have thought this a further example of Heine’s ragging of him. Heine did send reports on public and political events from January to June of 1832, this time as a correspondent for Cotta’s Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (General Gazette), a paper that, because it tried to print all sides of an issue, became thereby the most important medium of liberal thought in Germany. After Prince Metternich’s office signaled Cotta that the articles had better stop, Heine published them in book form as Französische Zustände (Conditions in France, 1832). He reported on the sufferings of the working class and the subproletariat while keeping his distance from radicalism and Jacobinism, expressing more anxiety than hope about the prospect of a general revolution from below. He was curious about King Louis-Philippe, criticizing his policies and suspecting his motives while looking for signs that he might develop liberating Napoleonic authority. Börne, in a passage Heine quotes in Book V, saw this analysis as flip-flopping: “declaring the king of France, as though he had the ague, on one day good, on another bad, on the third day good again, on the fourth day bad again” (LB, 2: 809–10). Heine thought he was 8

Börne to Jeanette Wohl, September 28, November 9, 1831, LB, 5: 14, 77–78.

9

With January 21 Heine means the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI, which he had declared a “world misfortune” while deploring its exploitation by reactionaries (39–40). The reference to “June 28 of last year” (1832; the addendum is dated 1833) is an allusion to an action of the German Diet in the wake of the Hambach Festival reaffirming the monarchical principle and establishing a commission to force the German states to conform to it.

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INTRODUCTION

pursuing an accurate understanding of differing facets of a complicated situation. Hurt and bewildered by the studied avoidance of him, Börne began to criticize Heine’s political unreliability in print. Some of this critique appeared in French publications. Börne wrote French more easily than Heine, who always had to work with a translator but was very ambitious for a footing on the French literary market and for standing with the public, so that Börne’s critiques in French media were particularly painful. In one of them, of the French version of Heine’s essays on German culture, De l’Allemagne (On Germany, 1835), Börne wrote that you can never catch Heine because he is like a mouse with underground connections among varying opinions; if you chase him down one hole, he pops up out of another (LB, 2: 889–90). Despite such satirical conceits, Börne’s published comments remain within the bounds of reasonable disagreement, although Heine, who was extremely sensitive to and defensive about criticism of any kind, did not think so. With Börne’s private commentary it is otherwise. He gathered all the negative gossip about Heine that he could find: “I am collecting everything I hear from others about him and that I myself am able to observe”; “poor Heine is being chemically analyzed by me.”10 Heine was a star, and all kinds of reports circulated about him, some malevolent, some distorted, some imaginary, of a sort that today would be in a supermarket tabloid. Reading all this tattle together does not give one a very good feeling about Börne at this time; he seems himself to have been aware that he was in the grip of a not very creditable passion. All of this pettiness was deposited with Jeanette Wohl, to whom he admitted: “I presume that Heine is a scoundrel, but I cannot prove any bad action of his.”11 Börne had found that his most congenial mode of writing was in the form of correspondence with Jeanette Wohl; his major work, Briefe aus Paris (Letters from Paris), consisted of letters to her. While Börne kept the worst of his libels out of print, Heine was very likely aware that a depot of ammunition against him was being accumulated. In 1832 Jeanette married, to the surprise of the public, not Börne but a Frankfurt businessman, Salomon Strauss (1795–1866), who was twelve years her junior but a lively admirer of Börne, unquestionably a prerequisite to the marriage. After having managed his disappointment and with much pleading, Börne persuaded her in November of the following year to move with her husband to Paris, where he boarded with them. Börne was interested in all kinds of radicals and dissidents, among them the disavowed priest Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854). He had begun as an ultramontane conservative, defending the authority of the 10

Börne to Jeanette Wohl, October 14, November 2, 1831, LB, 5: 35, 68.

11

Börne to Jeanette Wohl, January 5, 1833, LB, 5: 438.

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INTRODUCTION

Church in all matters, but in the 1830s began to move toward a populist position, attacking the papacy as a reactionary power and forming a utopian vision of democratic sovereignty under Christian social principles. He argued for the separation of church and state and disengagement of the church from monarchs, for freedom of conscience, education, press, and association. Gregory XVI issued a whole encyclical against him and his associates in 1832; his book of 1834, Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer), was placed on the Index but in a short time went through more than a hundred printings. In the same year, Börne made a translation into German and published it simultaneously in Paris and Switzerland. In lieu of an honorarium he took five hundred copies, which he distributed free among German artisans in Paris, sensing, no doubt, that its exalted and evangelistic tone might be as likely to appeal to them as dryly rational political argument; however, it is plain that Börne himself was impressed by the vision of a religion militant in the interest of the common people. Heine, however, was horrified because he regarded anything with the taint of Catholicism as anathema. He preferred to regard Lamennais as a stealthily covert priest subverting the revolutionary movement from within, and in Book IV he insinuates that Börne himself was moving toward Catholicism. Börne did observe that the more sensual Catholicism was closer to the consciousness of the common people, while defending Christianity against Heine’s sensualist critique, adding that European revolutions did not occur in Protestant countries (LB, 2: 84–95),12 but there is no indication that he was moving toward Catholicism. He said rightly that Heine’s insistent view that Catholicism had been extinguished in France was mistaken, adding that the Church would revive as soon as it had “no pope, no budget-devouring bishops, no standing armies of monks, no black [that is, priestly] gendarmerie” and “the people itself elects its spiritual leaders” (LB, 2: 898), claims that clearly reflect the influence of Lamennais. During these years the situation of both Börne and Heine worsened in ways that might have made some solidarity between them advantageous; in 1833 Campe deplored their breach, saying that the cause of the fatherland needed a single focus.13 Both were beset by Austrian police spies, who reported on the hostility between them for several years from 14 the beginning of 1834. The pressures of the censorship increased. Börne’s Letters from Paris were banned, so that Campe brought out later 12

On the other hand, he remarked, in apparent contradiction, that the freest peoples are the most religious: “the Swiss, the English, the North Americans” (899). 13 Campe to Heine, March 16, 1833, HSA, 24: 157. 14

Michael Werner, ed., Begegnungen mit Heine. Berichte der Zeitgenossen (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973), 1: 284, 312–14, 317, 333–34.

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volumes with fictitious place of publication and publisher on the title pages. Campe wangled Heine’s works through the censorship while Heine squabbled with him about it, until a real crisis supervened in December 1835. A younger generation of oppositional writers, substantially influenced by Heine and Börne, had emerged, coming to be known as Young Germany; prominent among them were Ludolf Wienbarg (1802–72), Heinrich Laube (1806–84), Karl Gutzkow (1811–78), and Theodor Mundt (1808–61). They were not a conspiracy or even a coherent movement. Their allegiances differed, some, like Wienbarg and Laube, tending more to Heine, others, like Gutzkow and Mundt, to Börne. But the public and particularly the governments did not normally make such distinctions. The authorities sought a way to strike at them in terms that would not enhance their political credentials. The opportunity came in 1835 with Gutzkow’s Wally, die Zweiflerin (Wally, the Skeptic), a confrontational if ill-written novel of icy eroticism and liberal religious experiment. Gutzkow was indicted on what were essentially charges of pornography and blasphemy, and sentenced to a jail term. The German Confederation took the opportunity on December 10, 1835 of warning book dealers all over Germany against publishing the works of Wienbarg, Laube, Gutzkow, and Mundt; Heine’s name was added on Metternich’s insistence. Campe was particularly mentioned as a purveyor of “a literary school . . . whose efforts openly tend to attack the Christian 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.”15 Heine was particularly harmed by this ban, but he had a hard time grasping its importance because he kept insisting it was a misunder16 standing, that with his “loyal and royal conscience” he was concerned not with politics but with philosophy and religion, as though philosophy and religion were not crucial elements of the political system. Börne was not mentioned in the ban. There has been a good deal of speculation about the reason for this; the most likely explanation is that there was no plausible way he could be charged with immorality. Some have thought, less plausibly, that he might have been spared because he was still regarded as something of an ally of Wolfgang Menzel, who was attempting to draw Börne to his side against the Young Germans.

15

H. H. Houben, Jungdeutscher Sturm und Drang (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1911), 63. 16

Heine to Campe, January 12,1836, HSA, 21: 132.

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I

t was in the year of our Lord 1815 that I first heard the name Börne. I 1 was with my late father at the Frankfurt fair, where he had taken me in order that I might look around the world some; he said it would be educational. A great spectacle presented itself to me there. In the so-called 2 sheds beyond the Zeil, I saw wax figures, wild animals, extraordinary works of art and nature. My father also showed me the big stores, both Christian and Jewish, where one buys goods ten percent below the manufacturing price and is still cheated. He also let me see the town hall, the Römer, where the German emperors were bought, ten percent below the 3 4 manufacturing price. We have finally run out of that product. Once my 5 father took me into the reading room of one of the ∆ or G lodges, where he often supped, drank coffee, played cards, and carried out other Masonic rituals. While I was engrossed in reading newspapers, a young man sitting next to me whispered softly into my ear: 6 “That is Doctor Börne, who writes against the actors!” When I looked up I saw a man who, looking for a journal, walked up and down in the room several times and soon went out the door again. Though he stayed only briefly, the whole essence of the man nevertheless remained in my memory and even today I could portray him with absolute accuracy. He wore a black dress coat, still newly lustrous, and blindingly white linen; but he was dressed less like a dandy than with an air of prosperous negligence, if not with an irritable indifference, sufficiently indicating that he had not spent much time before the mirror with the knot in his white cravat and that he put on the coat as soon as the tailor had delivered it to him, without long checking to see if it was too tight or too loose. He seemed neither tall nor short in stature, neither lean nor fat, his 1

Samson Heine (1764–1828).

2

A main boulevard in Frankfurt.

3

German emperors had been crowned in Frankfurt since 1562. Napoleon had put an end to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation nine years before, in 1806. 4

5

Symbols for Johannine and Scottish Rite Masonic lodges. Both Heine’s father and Börne were members of lodges in Frankfurt; Heine later joined one in Paris, but he never took Freemasonry seriously. 6

This cannot have happened in this way; see the introduction.

face was neither red nor pale, but of a reddened paleness or a paled red, and what it expressed was a certain disapproving elegance, a certain disdain, such as one finds among people who feel themselves better than their position but doubt that others acknowledge them. It was not that covert majesty that one can discover on the countenance of a king or a genius hiding incognito among the crowd; it was rather that revolutionary, more or less titanic sulkiness that one finds on the faces of every kind of pretender to the throne. His appearance, his movement, his gait had something assured, firm, full of character about them. Are extraordinary people secretly surrounded by the emanation of their spirit? Do we sense with the heart an aura such that we cannot see with our physical eyes? Perhaps the moral tempest in such an extraordinary person has an electrical effect on young, not yet deadened spirits who approach him, just as the physical tempest affects cats? A spark from the man’s eye touched me, I do not know how, but I did not forget this touch and never forgot Doctor Börne, who was writing against the actors. Yes, he was at that time a theater critic and practiced on the heroes of the boards. Like my university friend Dieffenbach,7 who, whenever he could catch a dog or a cat, cut off its tail out of the pure pleasure of cutting, which at that time we very much held against him when the poor beasts howled so horribly, but later forgave him, since the joy of cutting made him into Germany’s greatest surgeon, so Börne first experimented with the actors, and we must excuse many a youthful excess that he used to perpetrate on the Heigels, Weidners, Urspruchs, and suchlike innocent animals,8 who have since been running around without tails, for the sake of the better services that he was later able to render as a great political surgeon with his finely honed criticism. 9 It was Varnhagen von Ense who, about ten years after the abovementioned events, recalled the name of Börne to my memory and gave me his essays to read, especially those in The Scale and the Vibrations of 10 the Times. The tone in which he recommended this reading to me was 7

Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach (1794–1847), later a professor of surgery in Berlin, with whom Heine maintained a long acquaintance. 8

Karl Heigel and Julius Weidner were actors in Frankfurt; Urspruch was the name of a large family of performers. 9 Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785–1858), diplomat and memoirist of his times, one of Heine’s most enduring friends and wisest advisers. 10 Börne took over the Offenbach journal Zeitschwingen (Vibrations of the Times) in 1819, but it was driven out of business by the censorship in the same year. Meanwhile he began irregularly publishing and essentially writing himself Die Wage — Eine Zeitschrift für Bürgerleben, Wissenschaft und Kunst (The Scale: A Journal for Public Life, Learning and Art) in 1818, continuing it to 1821.

2

significantly urgent, and the smile that hovered on the lips of Rahel, who was present, that well-known, mysteriously melancholy, rationally mystical 11 smile, gave greater weight to the recommendation. Rahel seemed to be informed about Börne not only through literature, and, as I recall, she declared on that occasion that there existed letters Börne had once written to a beloved person, in which his passionate, high spirit expressed it12 self even more brilliantly than in his published essays. Rahel also commented on his style, with words, to be sure, that anyone unacquainted with her manner of speaking might misunderstand; she said: 13 “Börne can’t write, any more than I or Jean Paul can.” By writing she understood a calm arrangement, so to speak the editing of thoughts, the logical composition of rhetorical parts, in short, that art of forming periodic sentences that she so enthusiastically admired both in Goethe and in her husband, and concerning which at that time we carried on the most fruitful debates almost daily. The prose of today, as I should like to remark here in passing, was not created without much experimentation, consolation, contradiction, and effort. Rahel perhaps loved Börne all the more because she was also one of those authors who, if they are to write well, must find themselves in a passionate excitement, in a certain mental intoxication: bacchants of thought who stagger after the god with sacred inebriation. But with all her predilection for congenial natures, she nevertheless maintained the greatest admiration for those circumspect shapers of words who know how to manage and, so to speak, sculpt all their thinking, feeling, and observation like familiar material disjoined from the engendering soul. Unlike that great lady, Börne maintained the greatest antipathy toward that kind of style; in his subjective bias he did not comprehend objective freedom, the Goethean manner, and he regarded artistic form as callousness; he was like a child who, without sensing the

11

Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, née Levin (1771–1833), diarist and salon hostess. Heine was one of her many reverential admirers and during his beginnings as a writer depended on her for encouragement. She was a contributor to Die Wage. 12

The reference is presumably to Henriette Herz (1764–1847), wife of the physician Markus Herz, another Berlin Jewish salon hostess as well as a famous beauty, twenty years older than Börne. As a youth he had lived in the Herz home and developed a passion for her well known to the Varnhagens. 13 Jean Paul, pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), whose ingenious, digressive novels with their challenging style and wide-ranging vocabulary remained on the boundary of the Romantic movement. He was warmly regarded by the younger oppositional generation for his sympathy with the common people. Upon his death Börne delivered a eulogy that attracted a great deal of attention (LB, 1: 879–98).

3

incandescent meaning of a Greek statue, only touches the marble forms 14 and complains of coldness. By speaking here in advance of the antipathy that Goethe’s style aroused in Börne, I am suggesting at the same time that even then I did not unconditionally admire the latter’s stylistic manner. It is not my place to expose the faults of his way of writing; besides, any intimation of what I disliked about his style would be understood only by the very few. I will merely remark that to write a perfected prose requires, among other things, a great mastery of metrical forms. Without such mastery the prose writer lacks a certain tact; word combinations, expressions, breaks, and turns of phrase slip out of him that are only permissible in metrical discourse, and there arises a hidden dissonance that hurts only a few ears, but very fine ones. But however much I was inclined to find fault with the external shell, with Börne’s style and, especially where he does not describe but argues, to regard the short sentences of his prose as childish clumsiness, I nevertheless granted the greatest justice to the content, the kernel of his writing, I honored his originality, his love of truth, in general the noble character that was expressed throughout, and since then the author has never been lost to my memory. People told me that he was still living in Frankfurt, and when I had to pass through that city, several years later, in 1827 on my way to Munich, I had determined to pay a visit to Doctor Börne in his home. I succeeded in doing this, but not without a great deal of asking around and making wrong turns; everywhere I inquired after him, people looked at me strangely, and people in his place of residence appeared either to know him very little or to care even less about him. Strange! If we hear of a distant city in which one or another great man is living, we automatically imagine that he is the center of the city, that even its roofs must be radiant with his fame. We are then surprised when we arrive in the city itself, really wanting to seek out the great man, and have to inquire about him for a long time until we locate him in the great crowd! Thus the traveler sees the tall cathedral of a city from a distance, but once he gets into its urban area, the cathedral will disappear from his view, and only after wandering back and forth through many

14

Börne sometimes expressed himself in this fashion. But so did Heine when it suited him, for example, in Die romantische Schule (The Romantic School, 1835), where he says the statues of ancient gods in the Louvre “remind me of Goethe’s writings, which are just as perfected, just as magnificent, just as calm, and which seem to feel sadly that their rigidity and coldness excludes them from the animated, warm life of our time, that they cannot suffer and exult with us, that they are not human but unhappy mixtures of divinity and stone” (DHA, 8/1: 155).

4

crooked and narrow streets will the great tower structure appear again in the neighborhood of ordinary buildings and shops that all but hide it. When I asked a little eyeglass dealer about Börne, he answered with a roguish wag of the head that he didn’t know where Doctor Börne lived 15 but that Madame Wohl lived on the Wollgraben. An old, red-haired maidservant, whom I also asked, finally gave me the desired information, adding with a merry laugh: I serve the mother of Madame Wohl. I had difficulty recognizing again the man whose appearance still hovered vividly in my memory. No more trace of elegant dissatisfaction and proud gloominess. I now saw a satisfied little man, very thin but not ill, a little bit of a head with black, smooth hairlets, on his cheeks even a touch of red, the light brown eyes very alert, good humor in every glance, in every movement, also in his tone. He wore a little knitted waistcoat, which, tightly fitted like chain mail, gave him a drollishly fairy-tale appearance. He received me cordially and affectionately; not three minutes had gone by but we got into the most intimate conversation. What did we talk about first? When cooks come together, they talk about their employers, and when German writers come together, they talk about their publishers. Therefore our conversation began with Cotta and Campe,16 and when I admitted, after some customary complaints, the good qualities of the latter, Börne confided to me that he was pregnant with an edition of his complete works and wanted to keep Campe in mind for it. I could assure him concerning Campe that he was no ordinary book dealer who makes only a business of the noble, the beautiful, and the great and exploits an advantageous economic situation, but that he sometimes printed the great, beautiful, and noble in very disadvantageous economic situations and sometimes really made very bad business deals with it. 15 Börne’s friend Jeanette Wohl (1783–1861); see the introduction. The Wollgraben, originally the moat area on which the ghetto was imposed in the fifteenth century, was in Heine’s time the southern extension of the Judengasse, where, after the walls and gates of the ghetto had fallen, Jews were gradually able to reside. Jeanette Wohl does not actually seem to have lived on the Wollgraben, but Heine may be using the term as a general one for the Jewish quarter. 16 Johann Friedrich Cotta (1764–1832) was the publisher of Goethe and Schiller, probably the most prestigious in Germany. The previous sentence, comparing cooks and writers, appeared almost verbatim in Heine’s letter to Cotta of October 31, 1831 (HSA, 21: 26). Börne was a contributor to Cotta’s journals, but a negotiation for a collected edition failed, so Börne turned, on Heine’s advice, to the latter’s publisher, Julius Campe (1792–1867) in Hamburg, Germany’s leading publisher of oppositional and dissident writing, with whom Heine maintained a complex and often stormy relationship for thirty years. The praise following in this passage is addressed to his publisher and is probably ironically meant, for Heine usually preferred to claim that Campe exploited him heartlessly.

5

Börne listened with both ears to such words, and they later induced him to travel to Hamburg and make an agreement with the publisher of the 17 18 Travel Pictures for his complete works. As soon as the publishers are done with, the mutual compliments begin between two writers talking to one another for the first time. I will pass over what Börne said about my excellence and will mention only the gentle censure that he occasionally dripped into the frothing chalice of praise. For he had read the second part of the Travel Pictures shortly be19 fore, and thought that I had shown too little reverence to God, who had, after all, created heaven and earth and so wisely governed the world, while I had spoken with excessive veneration of Napoleon, who was, after all, only a mortal despot. Thus the deist and liberal was already visibly confronting me. He seemed to have little love for Napoleon, even though he unconsciously bore the greatest respect toward him in his soul. It galled him that the princes had so ungenerously torn down his statue from the Vendôme column.20 “Oh!” he cried, with a bitter sigh: “You could easily leave his statue there; you would need only to fasten on it a 21 plaque with the inscription ‘18th Brumaire,’ and the Vendôme column would have been his well-deserved pillory! How I loved this man until the 18th Brumaire; I supported him even up to the Peace of Campo For22 mio, but when he climbed up to the throne he declined in value ever 23 more; one could say of him: he fell up the red-carpeted steps!” 17

Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder, 4 vols. (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1826– 31). 18 Ludwig Börne, Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Works), vols. 1–10 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1829–32). Vols. 11–14 were published clandestinely. See n. 36. 19 The second volume of the Reisebilder, which had just appeared in 1827. Börne may not have actually read it at this time, as Heine later sent him a copy from Munich (HSA, 20: 308). 20 The Vendôme column, erected in 1810, was topped with a statue of Napoleon, cut off in the royalist restoration of 1814. In an essay of 1822 Börne appeared to deplore this iconoclasm, though the tone is by no means friendly to Napoleon (LB, 2: 100–102). Note the close attention Heine paid to the writings of his enemy, quite characteristic of him. 21

Date in the French Revolutionary calendar corresponding to November 9 (1799), when Napoleon overthrew the Directory. 22 The Treaty of Campo Formio of October 17, 1797, in which Austria ceded its Belgian provinces to France. 23

Heine had made a similar assertion on his own behalf in Die Reise von München nach Genua (The Journey from Munich to Genoa, 1828): “I love him unconditionally only until the 18th Brumaire — then he betrayed liberty. And he did it

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“Even this morning,” Börne added, “I admired him, when I read in this book that is lying on my table [he pointed to Thiers’s history of the 24 Revolution] the excellent anecdote about how Napoleon at Udine had 25 an interview with Cobentzl and in the excitement of the conversation smashed the porcelain that had been given to Cobentzl by Empress Catherine and to which he was certainly very attached. This smashed porcelain may have brought about the Peace of Campo Formio. Cobentzl surely thought: my emperor has so much porcelain and there will be a misfortune if the fellow were to come to Vienna and get too excited; the best thing would be to make peace with him. Probably, when, in that hour in Udine, Cobentzl’s porcelain service tumbled to the ground smashed to pieces, all the porcelain in Vienna shivered, and not just the coffee pots and cups, but also the Chinese pagodas; they may have nodded their heads more rapidly than ever, and the peace was ratified. In art shops one usually sees Napoleon climbing the Simplon on his rearing steed, storming the bridge at Lodi with high-flying banner, etc.26 But if I were a painter I would portray him smashing Cobentzl’s porcelain service. That was his most successful deed. Since then every king fears for his porcelain, and the Berliners felt particularly anxious about their great porcelain factory. You have no idea, my dear Heine, how one is curbed by the possession of beautiful porcelain. Look at me, for example, once so wild when I had little baggage and no porcelain at all. With possessions, and especially fragile possessions, come fear and servitude. Unfortunately I recently acquired a beautiful tea service — the pot was so enticingly and sumptuously gilded — the marital bliss of two lovers billing and cooing was painted on it — on the one cup the tower of St. Catherine’s, on the other the Guard Headquarters,27 nothing but homeland scenes on the rest of not out of necessity, but out of a secret predilection for the aristocratic” (DHA, 7/1: 68). 24 Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), Histoire de la Révolution française (History of the French Revolution), 10 vols. (1823–27). Börne had critically reviewed the first two volumes in 1824 (LB, 2: 569–75). 25 Count Ludwig Cobentzl (1753–1809), Austrian diplomat, who negotiated the Treaty of Campo Formio. 26

The familiar paintings of Napoleon’s crossing of the Saint Bernard Pass in May 1800 by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and of Napoleon at the Battle of Arcole in November 1796 by Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835), which Heine (as Börne) seems to have confused with the attack on the bridge at Lodi after the crossing of the Alps. 27

Konstablerwache, where weapons were stored. In April 1833 a group of radical teachers and students stormed it but were easily repelled. The allusion would have been easily recognized by Heine’s reader seven years later.

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the cups — now I am really worried about writing too freely in my stupidity so that I must suddenly flee — how could I pack up all these cups, not to speak of the big pot, in a hurry? In the rush they could all be broken, and under no circumstances would I like to leave them behind. Yes, we humans are odd birds! The same man who might risk the peace and joy of his life, even his life itself, to assert his freedom of expression, still does not want to lose a couple of cups, and becomes a silent slave in order to preserve his teapot. Truly, I feel how the damned porcelain hinders me in writing; I am getting so mild, so cautious, so anxious. In the end I am ready to believe that the porcelain dealer was an Austrian police agent and that Metternich28 saddled me with the porcelain to tame me. Yes, yes, that’s why it was so inexpensive and the man was so persuasive. Oh! the sugar bowl with the marital happiness was such a sweet lure! Yes, the more I examine my porcelain, the more probable it seems that it comes from Metternich. I don’t in the least hold it against him for trying to get the better of me in this way. When people apply clever means against me I 29 never get cross; only crudeness and stupidity are unbearable to me. Take our Frankfurt Senate —.” I have my reasons for not letting the man talk any more and will remark only that at the end of his speech he cried with a good-humored laugh: “But I am still strong enough to break my porcelain bonds, and, if they make it hot for me, truly, the beautiful gilded teapot will fly out the window together with the sugar bowl and the marital bliss and St. Catherine’s tower and the Guard Headquarters and the homeland scenes, and then I will be a free man once again!” Börne’s humor, of which I have just given a suggestive example, distinguished itself from Jean Paul’s in that the latter liked to scramble the most disparate things together, while the former, like a merry child, only grasped at what was nearby, and while the imagination of the confused polyhistorian of Bayreuth rummaged about in the lumber rooms of all ages and ranged around through all parts of the world with seven-league boots, Börne had his eye only on the present day, and the objects that occupied him all lay within his immediate horizon. He spoke about the book that he just read, the event that had just happened, Rothschild,

28

Prince Clemens Wenzel von Metternich (1773–1859), Austrian chancellor and soul of the restorationist oppression in the German states. 29

Heine originally wrote this passage ten years earlier for Die Bäder von Lucca (The Baths of Lucca, 1829), where the tea service was to have been his (DHA, 7/1: 418–19).

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whose house he passed every day, the Diet of the Confederation, which 31 resides on the Zeil and which he could similarly hate on the spot, and finally all his trains of thought led him to Metternich. His rancor toward Goethe may also have had local origins; I say origins, not causes; for even if the circumstance that Frankfurt was their common home town had directed Börne’s attention to Goethe, the hatred against this man that burned in him and ever more passionately blazed out was but the necessary consequence of a difference deeply grounded in the natures of both men. Here it was not an effect of petty envy but a selfless repugnance that belongs to congenital drives, a discord that is old as the world and appears in all the histories of the human race, most stridently in the duel that Jewish spiritualism fought against Hellene splendor of life, a duel that is still not decided and perhaps will never be fought to the end: the little Nazarene hated the great Greek, who was a Greek god to boot. Wolfgang Menzel’s work had just come out,32 and Börne was happy as a child that someone had appeared with the courage to come forward against Goethe so ruthlessly. “Respect,” he added naively, “had always kept me from saying such things in public. Menzel has courage, he is an honest man and a learned one; people will have to get to know him, he will give us much joy; he has a lot of audacity, he is a deeply honest man and a great scholar! There is nothing to Goethe, he is a coward, a servile flatterer, and a dilettante.” He often came back to this theme; I had to promise him to visit Menzel in Stuttgart and for this purpose he immediately wrote me a card of introduction. I still hear him adding zealously: “he has courage, an extraordinary amount of audacity, he is a good, deeply honest man and a great scholar!” As in his statements about Goethe, Börne also always betrayed his Nazarene narrowness in his judgment of other writers. I say Nazarene in order to employ neither the expression “Jewish” nor “Christian,” although both expressions are synonymous for me and I use them not to 30

Amschel Rothschild (1773–1855), then head of the Frankfurt branch of the firm. The original Rothschild home was located in the ghetto area where Börne grew up. 31

The German Confederation, eventually consisting of thirty-five principalities and four free cities, was formed under Prussian and Austrian auspices at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. One side of the Diet building faced on the Zeil. 32

Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873), Die deutsche Literatur (German Literature, 1828). The two-volume work was published late in 1827, postdated to the following year. After his arrival in Munich Heine was to write a review of it that was generally friendly but objected to the harsh treatment of Goethe (DHA, 10: 238–48).

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denote a belief but rather a temperament. “Jews” and “Christians” are for me quite homologous words, in contrast to “Hellene,” with which I also do not mean a particular people, but a mentality and viewpoint both congenital and cultivated. In this connection I would like to say: all men are either Jews or Hellenes, men with ascetic drives, hostile to images, and addicted to spiritualization, or men with a realistic nature, with a cheerful view of life, and proud of evolving. Thus there were Hellenes in German pastors’ families, and Jews who were born in Athens, possibly descended from Theseus.33 In this matter one can justly say that the beard does not make the Jew nor the pigtail the Christian. Börne was a complete Nazarene; his antipathy to Goethe derived directly from his Nazarene disposition; his later political excitation was grounded in that brusque asceticism, that thirst for martyrdom generally found among republicans that they call republican virtue and that is so little different from the lust for suffering of the earlier Christians. In later times Börne even turned to historical Christianity, he almost sank into Catholicism, he fraternized with the priest Lamennais34 and fell into the most repulsive Capuchin tone when he pronounced his opinion in public about a successor to Goethe, a pan35 theist of the cheerful observance. It is of psychological interest to investigate how the congenital Christianity gradually rose up in Börne’s soul after it had been long repressed by his sharp intellect and his gaiety. I say gaiety, gaieté, not joy, joie: the Nazarenes sometimes have a frisky good humor, a witty, squirrel-like sprightliness, quite charmingly capricious, quite sweet, also flashy, but followed by a rigid darkening of mood; they lack the majesty of pleasurable bliss that is only found among conscious gods. But if there is in our sense no great difference between Jews and Christians, such a thing nevertheless exists in the world view of Frankfurt philistines; during the three days I remained for Börne’s sake in the free Imperial and merchant city of Frankfurt on the Main, he talked very much and very often about the consequent abuses. Yes, with droll kindness he forced me to promise him three days of my life, he did not let me leave him, and I had to run around the city with him, visit all sorts of friends, lady friends also, e.g., Madame Wohl on the 33

As mythological king of Athens, Theseus was regarded as a model of justice and virtue, as well as of democratic government. 34

Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854), an early Christian socialist, whose zealously accusatory Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer) of 1834 Börne had translated into German in the same year. It is tendentious of Heine to call Lamennais a priest, because he had been disavowed by Rome and his book had been put on the Index. Heine comes back to him in Book IV. 35

Heine means himself.

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Wollgraben. This Madame Wohl on the Wollgraben is the well-known 36 goddess of freedom to whom later the letters from Paris were addressed. I saw a skinny person whose yellowish-white, pockmarked face resembled an old matzo. Despite her external appearance, and although her voice screeched like a door on rusty hinges, still, everything the person said pleased me, for she spoke with great enthusiasm of my works. I recall that she greatly embarrassed her friend when she wanted to tattle what he had whispered in her ear as we came in; Börne blushed like a girl when, despite his pleas, she revealed to me that he had declared my visit was a greater honor for him than if Goethe had visited him. When I now consider how poorly he already thought of Goethe at that time, I cannot account that remark as too great a compliment. Concerning Börne’s relationship to the above-mentioned lady I was able to learn at that time no more details than other people. It was also a matter of indifference to me whether the relationship was warm or cool, damp or dry. The ill-intentioned world claimed that Mr. Börne was sitting quite in clover with Madame Wohl on the Wollgraben;37 the completely ill-intentioned world whispered: there was only an abstract communion of souls between them; their love was platonic. As far as I am concerned, with outstanding people the object of their love feelings always interests me less than the feeling of love itself. This last — I know it — must have been very strong in Börne. From many a tossed-off remark in Frankfurt I noticed, just as I did later while reading his collected writings, that Börne must have been sorely plagued at various seasons by the malices of the little god. He has especially much to say about the torments of jealousy, as indeed jealousy lay in his character and made him, in life as in politics, regard all phenomena through the yellow lens of mistrust. I mentioned that Börne, at various times of his life, had been afflicted by love’s sufferings. — “Oh,” he sighed once as though from the depths of painful memories, “in later life this passion is much more dangerous than in youth.38 One can hardly believe it, since our reason has, after all, developed with age and should support us in the struggle with passion. Fine support! Remember this: reason only helps us to fight those little caprices that we could soon overcome without its intervention. But as soon as a great, true 36

Ludwig Börne, Briefe aus Paris, 1832–34. The first two parts were published as part of the Gesammelte Schriften by Hoffmann und Campe in Hamburg, parts three to six by “Brunet” in Paris or Offenbach, a fictitious firm now believed to be a front for Campe. 37 A pun in German: “in der Wolle sitzen.” 38

Heine made a similar comment on his own behalf in a note that appears to date from around 1838 (DHA, 11: 194).

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passion has taken over our heart and ought to be suppressed on account of the positive damage threatening us, then reason provides little help, yes, the villain, it soon becomes even an ally of the enemy, and instead of representing our material or moral interests, lends the enemy all its logic, all its syllogisms, all its sophistries, and delivers to mute madness the weapon of the word. Rational as it is, reason always goes over to the party of the stronger, to the party of passion, and abandons us again as soon as passion’s force is broken by the power of time or the law of reaction. How it then scorns the feelings that it recently had so jealously justified! Always mistrust in passion, dear friend, the voice of reason, and if passion has been extinguished, then mistrust reason’s voice as well, and don’t be unjust to your heart!” After Börne had shown me Madame Wohl on the Wollgraben, he wanted to let me see the remaining remarkable sights of Frankfurt, and cheerfully, in the most comfortable dogtrot, he ran along beside me as we wandered through the streets. He had a peculiar appearance from his short cape and his little white hat, which was half wrapped with a black band. It indicated the death of his father, who during his lifetime had kept his son on short rations but now had suddenly left him a great deal of money.39 At that time Börne seemed still to be carrying within himself the pleasant feelings of such changes in fortune and stood altogether at the zenith of well-being. He even complained about his health, that is, he complained that he was getting healthier day by day and that with increasing health his intellectual abilities were disappearing. “I am too healthy and can’t write any more,” he complained; he meant it as a joke, but perhaps seriously, because with such personalities talent is dependent on certain pathological conditions, on a certain sensitivity that enhances their manner of feeling and expression and disappears again with the return of health. “He cured me to stupidity,” said Börne of his physician, to whom he took me and in whose house we dined.40 39

Jakob Baruch had died in April. Börne had to contest the will with his relatives to obtain a middling inheritance, from which he derived a modest independent income. 40 Heine himself several times suggested that illness was necessary for a finer sensibility and for creativity, e.g.,: “only the sick human being is human, his limbs have a history of suffering, they are thoroughly spiritualized” (Reise von München nach Genua); “Is poesy itself an illness of man, as the pearl is only the morbid matter from which the oyster suffers?” (Die romantische Schule); ascribed to God: “A sickness is surely the basic ground / On which creative drive has depended; / Creating, I could be healed and mended, / Creating, I could be well and sound”; and in an undated note: “man comes to self-awareness of spirit through pain — illness spiritualizes, even animals” (DHA, 7/1: 65; 8/1: 193; 2: 63 [D, 356]; 10: 325).

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The objects with which Börne accidentally came into contact not only gave his mind immediate occupation but also had a direct effect on his mental mood, and his good or bad humor stood in direct connection to their alternation. Like the sea from passing clouds, Börne’s soul took on its respective coloration from the objects he encountered on his way. The sight of beautiful garden designs or a group of teasing maids who met us with laughter cast, as it were, rosy rays over Börne’s soul, and their reflection declared itself in sparkling quips. But as we walked through the Jewish quarter, the black houses seemed to pour their somber shadows into his spirit. “Look at this alley,” he said sighing, “and then praise me the Middle Ages! The people who lived and wept here are dead and cannot protest when our crazy poets and still crazier historians, when fools and knaves print their raptures about the old glory; but where the dead people are silent, the living stones speak all the more loudly.” Indeed, the houses of that street looked at me as though they wanted to tell me sorrowful stories, stories that one doubtless knows but does not want to know or would rather forget than have them called back into memory. Thus I still recall a gabled building whose coal-blackness stood out all the more because a row of chalk-white tallow candles hung from the windows; the entrance, half of which was gated with rusty iron bars, led into a dark cave where the dampness seemed to drip from the walls, and from within sounded a very strange, nasal singing. The broken voice seemed to be an old man’s and the melody rocked in the gentlest laments that gradually swelled to the most dreadful rage. “What sort of a song is that?” I asked my companion. “It is a good song,” he said with a morose laugh, “a lyrical masterpiece that will hardly find its equal in this year’s poetic almanac. You know it perhaps in translation: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, we hanged our harps upon the willows, etc.’41 A 42 splendid poem! and old Rabbi Chaim sings it very well with his tremulous, emaciated voice; la Sontag would perhaps sing it more melodi43 ously, but not with so much expression, so much feeling. For the old man still hates the Babylonians and weeps daily over the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. He cannot forget this misfortune, al41

Abridged from Psalm 137: 1–2. Notice how Heine suppresses his Jewish identity, leaving Börne to be the Jew. 42

Not identified. There was an old rumor, propagated particularly by anti-Semites, that Heine’s Jewish name was Chaim, but there is no evidence for it. 43 Henriette Sontag (1806–54). a celebrated singer. Börne had praised her Frankfurt performance with ironic enthusiasm earlier in the year in an article that became well known (LB, 1: 432–45). She was a prominent figure of the emerging star system that Börne relentlessly satirized in his theater criticism.

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though so many new things have occurred since then, and recently the Second Temple was destroyed by Titus, the villain. For I must tell you that old Rabbi Chaim by no means regards Titus as a delicium generis 45 humani, he regards him as a villain finally caught by God’s vengeance. For a little gnat flew up his nose and, gradually growing, rooted around in his brain with its claws, causing him such great pain that he could obtain some relief only when a hundred blacksmiths hammered on their an46 vils in his presence. It is very remarkable that all the enemies of the children of Israel come to such a bad end. You know what happened to 47 Nebuchadnezzar; he became an ox in his old age and had to eat grass. Look at the Persian minister of state Haman, was he not at last hanged at 48 Susa, in the capital? And Antiochus, king of Syria, did he not rot alive 49 plagued by lice? The more recent villains, the enemies of the Jews, should be careful. But what good does it do; they are not deterred by the terrible example, and some days ago I read another pamphlet against the 50 Jews, by a professor of philosophy who calls himself Magis amica. He will eat grass some day, he is already an ox by nature, perhaps he will be hanged one day if he insults the sultana, favorite of the king of Flachsen44

That is, in 70 C.E.

45

“An ornament of the human race,” from the beginning of the section on Titus in Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars. 46 A hyperbolized version of a Talmudic legend. 47

Daniel 4: 32.

48

Esther 9: 25.

49

2 Maccabees 9: 9: “the ungodly man’s body swarmed with worms.”

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Magis amica [veritas] ([truth] is a greater friend) was a pseudonym under which the rationalist theologian Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851) published a book in 1837 containing substantial excerpts from Heine’s Die romantische Schule. Paulus had attempted to be helpful to the Jews by demanding that they give up their religion, law, customs, and identity as a “nation” before being admitted to citizenship or emancipation. He had edited a volume against the emancipation of the Frankfurt Jews in 1817 but created the most controversy with a systematic argument, Die Jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen und Besserungsmitteln. Oder über Pflicht, Rechte und Veränderungen zur Verbesserung der jüdischen Schutzbürgerschaft in Teutschland (The Jewish National Separatism according to its Origin, Consequences, and Means of Improvement. Or on Duties, Rights, and Changes for the Improvement of the Jewish Protected Citzenry in Germany, 1831). There appears to be an anachronism here, for Börne cannot have known of this or the later pseudonym in 1827. It is possible that Heine does not mention Paulus’s name because he otherwise admired Paulus as a militant anti-Romantic and anti-Catholic, though he did own a copy of a refutation of Paulus’s book of 1831 by the champion of Jewish emancipation, Gabriel Riesser (1806–63).

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fingen, and he surely already has lice like Antiochus. I would like best that he were to go to sea and be shipwrecked on the North African coast. For I read recently that the Mohammedans who live there think themselves justified by their religion to treat all Christians who wreck there and fall into their hands as slaves. They divide these unfortunates among themselves and make use of each according to his abilities. Thus a young Englishman, traveling that coast, recently found there a German scholar who had been shipwrecked and enslaved, but could not be employed for anything but to brood on eggs for hatching, for he belonged to the theological faculty. I really wish that Doctor Magis amica would get into such a situation; if he were to brood on his eggs uninterruptedly for three weeks (if they are duck eggs, even four weeks), surely all kind of thoughts would come to his mind that had never occurred to him before and I’ll bet he would curse the religious fanaticism that demeans the Jews in Europe and the Christians in Africa, and even dehumanizes a doctor of theology into a brood hen. The chickens he hatches will have a very tolerant taste, especially if they are consumed with a sauce à la Marengo.”52 For reasons easily comprehended I shall pass over the remarks that my companion blurted out in bitterest profusion, when on our walk around the city of Frankfurt we passed the building where the Diet of the Confederation holds its meetings. The sentry was taking his noonday nap while standing upright and the swallows that had built their peaceful nests on the window tiles flew calmly up and down. Swallows mean good luck, said my grandmother, but she was very superstitious. We had to push our way from the corner of Schnur Alley to the Bourse; here runs the golden artery of the city, here the noble commercial class gathers and haggles and yiddles. For what we in North Germany call “yiddling” is nothing other than the actual Frankfurt local tongue, and it is spoken as splendidly by the uncircumcised population as by the circumcised.53 Börne spoke this jargon very poorly, although, just like Goethe, 51

Connecting the figure of Esther with a petty prince in Jean Paul’s novel Hesperus.

52

An allusion to Napoleon’s victory over the Austrians at Marengo on June 14, 1800. Because of a lack of provisions, Napoleon’s cook had to send out soldiers to forage for dinner supplies such as chickens. 53 The German word is mauscheln, a disparaging term for speaking Yiddish, for which there is no equivalent in English. West Yiddish (or Judeo-German) was largely of Middle Franconian origin and thus related to the Frankfurt dialect. However, according to expert opinion, Heine’s identification of mauscheln with the Frankfurt dialect is inexact. See Matthias Richter, Die Sprache jüdischer Figuren in der deutschen Literatur (1750–1933). Studien zu Form und Funktion (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1995), 18–35.

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he could never fully deny his native dialect. I have noticed that Frankfurters who distanced themselves from all commercial interests eventually completely unlearned that Frankfurt pronunciation we in North Germany, as I said, call yiddling. A ways further, at the end of Saal Alley, we enjoyed a much more pleasant encounter. For we saw a pack of boys coming out of school, pretty boys with rosy little faces, bundles of books under their arms. “I have much more respect,” — cried Börne — “much more respect for these boys than for their adult fathers. That boy with the high forehead is perhaps thinking now about the second Punic War and is enthusiastic about Hannibal, and when they told him today how the great Carthaginian even as a boy swore vengeance against the Romans, I’ll bet his little heart swore along with him hatred and downfall to evil Rome! Keep your oath, my little brother in arms. I would like to kiss him, the fine lad. The other little one, who looks so cleverly pretty, is perhaps thinking of Mithridates and would like to imitate him some day.55 That is also good, very good, and you are welcome to me. But, fellow, will you also be able to swallow poison like the old king of Pontus? Start practicing early. Whoever wants to make war against Rome must be able to stand all kinds of poisons, not just crude arsenic, but also soporific, fantastic 56 opium, and even the sneaking aqua tofana of slander! How do you like the boy with such long legs and such a dissatisfied pug nose? He is perhaps itching to become a Cataline, he also has long fingers and he will one day give the Ciceros of our republic an opportunity to make fools of 57 themselves with long, bad speeches. The one over there, the poor, sickly boy would certainly much prefer to play the role of Brutus. Poor boy, you will find no Caesar; you will have to make do with stabbing old wigs with words, and you will finally fall, not onto your sword but into Schelling’s 58 philosophy and go mad! I have respect for these little fellows, who concern themselves the whole day long with the most high-minded stories of 54

Jargon is another disparaging term for Yiddish, often used by Jews themselves; it became a vocabulary item in Yiddish itself, sometimes employed in a neutral sense. Goethe’s spoken German retained traces of the Frankfurt dialect. 55

Mithridates, king of Pontus, was an implacably persistent enemy of Rome. In defeat he attempted to poison himself but had to be dispatched by an underling. 56

A poison notorious in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy.

57

Cataline’s conspiracy against Rome was exposed and defeated by Cicero’s speeches, In Catalinam, possibly remembered without pleasure from schooldays. 58 Börne had been for a time a follower of the philosophy of nature of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), though he later lost interest in it. It was Heine who scorned Schelling as a reactionary, Romantic obscurantist, once calling him “Confusius” (DHA, 2: 123).

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mankind, while their fathers care only for the rise and fall of government bonds and think about coffee beans and cochineal and manufactured goods! I have a mind to buy that little Brutus over there a bag of sugar crisps. No, I had better give him brandy to drink so that he will remain small. Only as long as we are small are we completely unselfish, completely courageous, completely heroic. As the body grows the soul shrinks. I feel it in myself. Oh, I was a great man when I was still a small boy!” When we came over the Römer hill, Börne wanted to take me into the old Imperial citadel in order to see the Golden Bull there.59 “I have never seen it,” he sighed, “and since my childhood I have had a secret longing for this Golden Bull. As a boy I pictured it in the strangest way and thought it was a cow with golden horns; later I imagined that it was a calf, and only when I was a big boy I learned the truth, that it is only an old skin, a worthless piece of parchment on which is written how the emperor and the Empire sold themselves to one another. No, let’s not look at this miserable contract, which caused Germany to perish; I will die without having seen the Golden Bull.” Once again I will pass over his bitter comments. There was one theme that one only needed to touch upon to call forth the wildest and most painful thoughts lurking in Börne’s soul; this theme was Germany and the political condition of the German people. Börne was a patriot from head to toe and the fatherland was his whole love. When we walked through Jews’ Street on that same evening and renewed our conversation about the inhabitants, the fountain of Börne’s spirit bubbled all the more gaily, because that street, which had made such a gloomy appearance in the daytime, was now most cheerfully illuminated, and the children of Israel, as my cicerone explained to me, celebrated their merry Feast of the Lights. This was originally devoted to the eternal memory of the victory that the Maccabees had so heroically won over the king of Syria.60

59

Römer was the comprehensive name for the government complex in Frankfurt. The Golden Bull of 1356 established the system for electing the Holy Roman Emperor; the electors were originally the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the count Palatine, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg, and the king of Bohemia. With some adjustments the system remained in force until the end of the Empire in 1806. 60

This scene cannot have occurred as described. Heine’s visit to Frankfurt took place in the second week of November, 1827; Hanukkah began in that year on the evening of December 13. See the introduction.

17

61

“You see,” said Börne, “that is the 18th of October of the Jews, except that this Maccabean 18th of October is more than two thousand years old and is still celebrated, unlike the Leipzig 18th of October, which has not yet reached its fifteenth year and is already forgotten. The Germans should go to school to old Madame Rothschild to learn patriot62 ism. See, here in this little house lives the old lady, the Laetitia who had 63 given birth to so many finance Bonapartes, the great mother of all loans, who, despite the world rule of her royal sons still has not left her little family castle in Jews’ Street, and today, on account of the great festival of joy, has decorated her windows with white curtains. How contentedly the lamps sparkle that she lit with her own hands to celebrate that day of victory when Judas Maccabeus and his brothers so bravely and heroically liberated the fatherland, as Friedrich Wilhelm, Alexander, and Franz II did in our days.64 When the good lady contemplates these lights, tears come to her old eyes, and she remembers with mournful pleasure those younger days when the late Mayer Amschel Rothschild, her dear husband, celebrated the Feast of Lamps with her, and her sons were still little boys and put little lights on the floor, and jumped over them in childish joy, as is the tradition and custom in Israel!” “Old Rothschild,” Börne continued, “the founding father of the reigning dynasty, was a good man, piety and kindheartedness itself. He had a charitable face with a little pointed beard, on his head a tricorn hat, and his clothes more than modest, almost shabby. That’s how he walked around Frankfurt, and he was constantly surrounded, as though holding court, with a crowd of poor people to whom he distributed alms or encouraged with good advice; when you met on the street a line of beggars with comforted and cheerful expressions, you knew that old Rothschild had just passed through. When I was still a little boy and was going through Jews’ Street with my father one Friday evening, we met old Rothschild, who had just come out of the synagogue; I remember how, after he spoke with my father, he said a few affectionate words to me, and then finally put his hand on my head to bless me. I am thoroughly con-

61

The anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, when Prussian, Russian, and Austrian troops defeated Napoleon and began to drive him out of Germany. 62

Gutie Rothschild (1753–1849), wife of the family founder, Mayer Amschel (1744–1812). 63 An allusion to Maria Letizia Ramolino, the mother of Napoleon. 64

Friedrich Wilhelm III (1770–1840), king of Prussia; Alexander I (1777–1825), tsar; Franz I (1768–1835), emperor of Austria, styled Franz II when he was still Holy Roman Emperor until 1806. Calling him Franz II at this time is probably a joke at his expense.

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vinced that I owe to this Rothschildian blessing that later, although I became a German writer, I never completely ran out of cash in my pocket.” I cannot help interjecting the remark here that Börne always lived in comfortable prosperity, and his later ultraliberalism was by no means to be ascribed, as with many patriots, to grim fury at his own poverty. Although he himself was rich, I say rich by the standard of his needs, he nevertheless maintained an unfathomable resentment against the rich. Although the blessing of the father rested on his head, he still hated the sons, Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s sons. How far the personal characteristics of these men justified such hatred I will not investigate here; it will be done extensively in another place. Here I only want to make room for the remark that our German apostles of freedom behave as unjustly as foolishly when they show hostility to the house of Rothschild with so much fury and bloodthirstiness on account of its effect on the interests of the revolution, in short, on account of its public character. There are no stronger promoters of the revolution than the Rothschilds, and what may sound stranger yet: these Rothschilds, these bankers of kings, these princely pursemasters, whose existence could be most seriously threatened by the overthrow of the system of European states, nevertheless carry in their hearts the consciousness of their revolutionary mission. This is especially the case with the man who is known by the unassuming name of Baron James65 and in whom now, since the death 66 of his illustrious brother of England, the whole political significance of the house of Rothschild resides. This Nero of finance, who has built his golden palace in the Rue Lafitte and from there rules the stock markets as the absolute imperator, he is, like his predecessor in his time, the Roman Nero, ultimately a violent destroyer of the privileged patriciate and founder of the new democracy. Once, several years ago, when he was in good spirits, and we strolled arm in arm, quite famillionairely, as Hirsch Hyazynth would say,67 around the streets of Paris, Baron James explained pretty clearly to me how he himself, through his system of government bonds, was fulfilling the first conditions for social progress everywhere in Europe, blazed the trail, so to speak. “To every foundation of a new order of things,” he said to me, “there belongs a confluence of outstanding men who have to concern themselves jointly with these matters. Such men previously lived from the income of their estates or offices and were therefore never completely free but always bound to a distant property or 65

Baron James de Rothschild (1792–1868), head of the Paris house. Heine had become well acquainted with him. 66 Nathan Rothschild (1777–1836), head of the London house. 67

An allusion to The Baths of Lucca, where this pun first appeared (DHA, 7:1: 123).

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to some kind of local administration; but now the system of government bonds gives these men the freedom to choose any place to live; everywhere they can live without employment from the interest of their government paper, their portable property, and they gather together and form the actual power of the capital cities. But it is well known what an effect such a capital, such a centralization of the intellects and social authorities, has on the most various forces. Without Paris, France would never have made its revolution; so many outstanding minds here had found ways and means to lead a more or less carefree existence, to socialize with one another, and so forth. It took centuries gradually to bring about such a favorable situation in Paris. With the system of interest income, Paris would have become Paris much faster, and the Germans, who would like a similar capital city, should not complain about the interest system: it centralizes, it makes it possible for many people to live in a place of their choosing, and from there to give mankind every useful impulse.” From this standpoint Rothschild regarded the results of his life and work. I am completely in agreement with this view, indeed, I will go further and see in Rothschild one of the greatest revolutionaries who have founded modern democracy. Richelieu, Robespierre, and Rothschild are for me three terrorist names,68 and they signify the gradual destruction of the old aristocracy. Richelieu, Robespierre, and Rothschild are the three most terrible levellers of Europe. Richelieu destroyed the sovereignty of the feudal nobility and bent it under that royal despotism that either demeaned it with courtly service or let it rot in rustic inactivity in the provinces. Robespierre finally cut the heads off this servile and lazy nobility. But the land remained, and its new lord, the new landowner, became quite the aristocrat again, like his predecessor, whose pretensions he continued under another name. Then came Rothschild and destroyed the supremacy of the land by raising the system of government bonds to the highest power, thereby mobilizing the great properties and revenues, and, so to speak, endowed money with the former privileges of land. In this way he created, to be sure, a new aristocracy, but, based as it is on the most unreliable element, money, it can never cause harm like the former aristocracy, which was rooted in land, in the earth itself. Money is more fluid than water, breezier than air, and we can forgive the impertinences of today’s finance nobility when we consider its transience. It melts away and evaporates before you know it.

68

Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu (1585–1642), cardinal and minister of Louis XIII, propagator of absolute monarchy; Maximilien de Robespierre (1758– 94), the most powerful figure at the time of the Terror.

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When juxtaposing the names Richelieu, Robespierre, and Rothschild, the observation forced itself upon me that these three greatest terrorists offer other similarities. They have in common, for example, a quite unnatural love of poesy: Richelieu wrote bad tragedies, Robespierre composed miserable madrigals, and James Rothschild, when he is happy, begins to make rhymes. But that is not relevant here; these pages have to do with a smaller revolutionary, with Ludwig Börne. He maintained, as we observe with regret, the strongest hatred toward the Rothschilds, and in his conversation, as we walked by their ancestral home in Frankfurt, it already expressed itself as stridently and poisonously as in his later letters from Paris.69 Nevertheless he granted some justice to the personal qualities of these people and he admitted to me quite naively that he could only hate them, but, despite all his efforts, not hold them in contempt or find them ridiculous. “For you see,” he said, “the Rothschilds have so much money, such a huge mass of money, that they fill us with an almost frightening respect; they are identified, so to speak, with the concept of money itself, and one cannot scorn money. Besides these people have applied the most certain remedy for avoiding that ridicule that has befallen so many other families of baronized millionaires of the Old Testament:70 they abstain from Christian holy water. Baptism is now an everyday affair among rich Jews, and the Gospel that was preached in vain to the poor of Judea is now flourishing among the rich. But, since the acceptance of it is only self-deception if not an outright falsehood, and the hypocritically assumed Christianity sometimes contrasts quite glaringly with the old Adam, these people expose themselves in the most alarming way to witticisms and mockery. Or do you believe that one’s inner nature is completely altered by baptism? Do you believe that one can change lice into fleas by pouring water on them?” “I don’t believe it.” “I don’t either, and for me it is a sight as melancholy as it is ridiculous when the old lice, who still hail from Egypt, from the time of the pharaonic plague, suddenly imagine that they are fleas and hop around as Christians. I have seen on the street in Berlin old daughters of Israel wearing long crosses at their throats, crosses that were longer than their noses and reached to their navels; in their hands they held a Protestant hymn book, and they spoke of the splendid sermon they had just heard in Trin69

See particularly letter no. 72, dated January 28, 1832 (LB, 3: 482–92), and a swipe at James de Rothschild’s wife Betty (1805–86) in letter no. 64 of December 27, 1831 (LB, 3: 427–28). Heine was particularly fond of her. 70 All five Rothschild brothers were awarded Austrian Imperial baronial titles in 1822 at Metternich’s suggestion.

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ity Church. The one asked the other with whom she had taken communion, and both smelled from the gullet. Even more repellent to me was the sight of dirty bearded Jews who came out of their Polish cloaca in order to be solicited for heaven by the Conversion Society in Berlin, and preached Christianity in their mumbling dialect and stank so horribly. It would in any case be desirable if one were to baptize that sort of Polish lice-folk not with ordinary water but with eau de Cologne.” “In the house of the hanged,” I interrupted him, “one does not talk about ropes, my dear doctor;71 tell me instead where the great oxen are that, as my father once told me, ran around the Jewish cemetery here in Frankfurt and bellowed so loudly at night that the neighbors were disturbed in their rest?” “Your honorable father,” cried Börne, laughing, “indeed told you no lie. It used to be the custom for the Jewish cattle dealers to consecrate the firstborn males of their cows to God according to biblical command, and for this purpose brought them here to Frankfurt from all parts of Germany; the oxen of God were assigned to graze on the Jewish cemetery, where they milled around until their blessed demise and truly often bellowed horribly. But the old oxen are now dead, and today’s cattle no longer have the true faith, and their first-born remain peaceably at home, if they haven’t gone over to Christianity. The old oxen are dead.” I cannot help remarking in this connection that Börne invited me during my stay in Frankfurt to dine at midday with a friend, because the latter, in persistent loyalty to Jewish customs, would set me before me the cholent stew;72 and indeed I enjoyed there the dish that is perhaps of Egyptian origin and as old as the Pyramids. I am surprised that Börne later, when, apparently in a humorous mood but in truth out of plebeian intention, agitated the mob not only against crowned monarchs but also 73 against a crowned poet —I am surprised that he has never told in his writings with what appetite, with what enthusiasm, with what devotion I once devoured the ancient Jewish cholent meal at the home of Doctor St.! This dish is indeed quite excellent, and it is most painfully to be regretted that the Christian church, which has borrowed so many good things from ancient Judaism, has not adopted cholent as well. Perhaps it is reserving it for the future, and when things are really going badly for it, when its most sacred symbols, even the Cross, will have lost their power, the Christian will grasp at the cholent meal, and the peoples who have 71

Referring, of course, to the fact that both Heine and Börne had had themselves baptized. 72

A stew made before the Sabbath and cooked overnight. Heine regularly called it Schalet. 73

Heine means himself.

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fled will crowd back into its womb with renewed appetite. At least the Jews will then join Christianity with conviction, for, as I can clearly see, it is only cholent that keeps them in their old covenant. Börne even assured me that the apostates who had gone over to the new covenant had only to smell cholent in order to feel a certain nostalgia for the synagogue, that 74 cholent was, so to speak, the cowherd’s melody of the Jews. We also went out together to Bornheim to drink coffee on the Sab75 bath and observe the daughters of Israel. They were beautiful girls and smelled of cholent, most charming. Börne winked with his eyes. In this secretive winking, in this uncertainly lustful winking, fearful of the inner voice, lay the whole difference in our modes of feeling. For Börne was, if not in his thoughts, then all the more in his feelings, a slave of Nazarene abstinence, and, as it is with all people of his kind, who regard sensual abstemiousness as the highest virtue but cannot fully practice it, he only dared taste of Eve’s forbidden apples in secret, trembling and blushing like a boy with a sweet tooth. I do not know whether these people have more intense feelings than we, who must do without the stimulus of secret cheating, of moral contraband; it is claimed, after all, that Mohammed forbade wine to his Turks so that it would taste all the sweeter to them. In large groups Börne was taciturn and monosyllabic, and he yielded to the fluency of speech only in face-to-face conversation when he believed himself to be with a like-minded person. That Börne regarded me as such was an error that was later to have many disagreeable consequences for me. Even in Frankfurt we harmonized only in the area of politics, not at all in the areas of philosophy, or of art, or of nature, all of which were closed to him. Perhaps I shall let slip a few characteristic traits in this connection. We were altogether of opposite sorts, and the difference may ultimately have been rooted not merely in our moral but even in our physical natures. There are basically only two kinds of people, the lean and the fat, or rather people who get ever thinner and those who from slight beginnings gradually go over to rounded corpulence. The first are the most danger74

This seems to be a reference to a folk song in which a Swiss mercenary faces execution for having deserted when he heard the alphorn of his homeland; Heine quotes it in The Romantic School (DHA, 8/1: 202); English in Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1985), 84. The praise of cholent may seem facetious, but he repeated it in several places, including a parody of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in “Princess Sabbath”: “Schalet, shining gleam from heaven / daughter of Elysium!” (DHA, 3/1: 128; D, 653). 75 Bornheim was a vacation place near Frankfurt. This is an imaginary scene, as Heine’s visit to Frankfurt did not extend to the Saturday Sabbath.

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ous kind that Caesar so feared — “Would he were fatter!” he says of Cas76 sius. Brutus was of a quite different sort and I am convinced that if he had not lost the battle of Philippi and stabbed himself on the occasion, he would have grown as fat as the writer of these pages — “And Brutus was 77 an honorable man.” Since I am reminded here of Shakespeare, I will take the opportunity 78 to speak for a reading that calls Hamlet “fat.” Pitiable prince of Denmark! Nature intended you to while away your days in the happiest portliness, and then the world goes out of joint and you are supposed to set it right! Poor, fat Danish prince! The three days I spent in Börne’s company in Frankfurt went by in almost idyllic peaceableness. He tried his very best to please me. He fired up the rockets of his wit as merrily as possible, and just as Chinese fireworks end with the pyrotechnician himself rising into the air with a crackling spray of flames, so the man’s humorous speeches always ended with a mad cascade of fire in which he abandoned himself in the most audacious way. He was harmless as a child. Until the last moment of my stay in Frankfurt he went genially beside me, watching for any indication that he might do me still another favor. He knew that I was traveling to Munich at the invitation of old Baron Cotta to take over the editorship of the Political Annals and also devote myself to some projected literary undertakings.79 At that time there was a need for the liberal press to create the organs that could later exert such a beneficial influence; there was a need to sow the seeds of the future, a seeding for which at the time only the enemies had eyes, so that the poor sower already harvested trouble and abuse. The poisonous torments that ultramontane aristocratic propaganda 80 in Munich inflicted on me and my friends are widely known.

76

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, I, 2.

77

Heine changes the tense of “And Brutus is an honorable man” (ibid., 3, 2), which Antony, of course, means ironically; Heine may have misremembered the passage, confusing it with Antony’s eulogy at the end of the play, now that Brutus was safely dead: “This was the noblest Roman of them all” (5, 5). 78

Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5, 2: “He’s fat and scant of breath.” Heine may be thinking of one of the discussions of Hamlet in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Book 5, Chapter 6, in which there is a dispute about Gertrude’s claim that her son is fat. 79 Heine coedited the Neue allgemeine politische Annalen for six months. He evaded the other plans Cotta had for him. 80

This is a tendentious and self-justifying characterization of Heine’s experiences in Munich. See Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 132–38.

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“Be careful about colliding in Munich with the priests,” were the last words that Börne whispered in my ear at my departure. When I was already sitting in the compartment of the mail coach, he looked after me for a long time, sadly, like an old seaman who has retired to the dry land and feels sympathy when he sees a young blade setting out to sea for the 81 first time. The old man believed then to have said farewell to the treacherous element forever and to be able to spend the remainder of his days in a safe haven. Poor man! The gods did not want to grant him this rest. He soon had to venture out again on the high seas and there our ships met while the storm raged in which he perished. How it howled! How it crashed! By the light of the yellow lightning bolts that shot down from the black clouds I could see exactly how courage and worry painfully alternated on his countenance! He stood at the helm of his ship and defied the tempestuousness of the waves that sometimes threatened to engulf him, sometimes only sprinkled him and wet him through in a petty way that made such a woebegone and at the same time comical picture that one could weep and laugh over it. Poor man! His ship was without anchor and his heart without hope. I saw how the mast broke, how the winds tore the rigging. I saw how he reached out his hand toward me. I could not grasp it; I could not abandon the precious cargo, the sacred treasures entrusted to me, to certain destruction. I carried on board my ship the gods of the future.

81

At that time Börne was only forty-one.

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Book II Helgoland, July 1, 1830 I myself am already tired of this guerilla warfare and long for quiet, at least for a condition in which I can give myself without restraint to my natural inclinations, my dreamy manner, my imaginings and broodings. What an irony of fate that I, who so gladly lie down on the cushions of a still, contemplative emotional life, that I of all people should have been destined to whip my poor fellow Germans out of their comfortable ease and hound them into movement! I, who like best to spend my time contemplating passing clouds, figuring out metrical word magic, listening for the secrets of the elemental spirits, and immersing myself in the wondrous world of old folk tales, I had to edit political annals, expound the interests of the times, arouse revolutionary desires, ignite passions, tweak the nose of the poor German Michel82 so that he might wake from his deep giant’s sleep. To be sure, I was only able to induce a gentle sneeze from this snoring giant, by no means an awakening. And even if I tugged vigorously at his pillow, he only put it back with his drowsy hand. Once out of desperation I wanted to set fire to his nightcap, but it was so damp from the sweat of thought that it only slightly smoldered, and Michel smiled in his slumber. I am tired and thirst for quiet. I, too, will get myself a German nightcap and pull it over my ears.83 If I only knew where I could lay my head down now. In Germany it is impossible. Every moment a policeman would come by and shake me in order to test whether I was really sleeping; the very idea ruins any ease. But indeed, where shall I go? Back to the

82

“Michel” is the sometimes mildly pejorative cartoon figure for the common German, like John Bull in England. He is often portrayed wearing a nightcap, indicating his absence from the wider world. 83

It is curious that, in his last book, Menzel der Franzosenfresser (Menzel the French-Eater, 1837), Börne expressed a similar feeling: “I am tired as a hunting dog and would like to write Florentine Nights” (LB, 3: 875). Florentinische Nächte was a novella cycle Heine published in 1836 in order to demonstrate to the authorities that he could write harmlessly.

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south? To the land where the lemons blossom and the oranges? Oh, dear! In front of every lemon tree there is an Austrian sentry thundering a 85 terrible “who goes there?” at you. Like the lemons, the oranges are now 86 very sour. Or shall I go to the north? Perhaps to the northeast? Oh dear! The polar bears are more dangerous than ever since they have civilized themselves and are wearing kid gloves. Or shall I go back to damned England, where I would not even like to be hanged in effigy, much less 87 live in person! They should pay you to live there; instead, staying in England costs twice as much as in other places. Never again to this vile land where machines behave like humans and humans like machines. They stop and start so alarmingly. When I was introduced to the governor here and this true Englishman stood for several minutes motionless in front of me, I could not help getting a notion to look at him from behind to see whether someone had forgotten to wind up the clockwork. That the island of Helgoland is under British control is exasperating enough for me.88 Sometimes I imagine that I smell the boredom that Albion’s sons exhale everywhere. Indeed, out of every Englishman there emanates a certain gas, the murderously stuffy air of boredom, and I have seen it with my own eyes, not in England, where the atmosphere is wholly impregnated with it, but in southern lands, where the traveling Briton wanders about in isolation and the gray aureole of boredom surrounding his head becomes quite sharply visible in the sunny, blue air. The English, to be sure, believe that their thick boredom is a local product, and in order to flee it they travel through all countries, bore themselves everywhere, and return home with a diary of an ennuyée.89 They are like the soldier whose comrades, when he was sleeping on his cot, rubbed garbage under his nose; when he awoke, he noticed that it smelled bad in the guardhouse and went outside, but came right back claiming that it smelled bad outside, too; the whole world stank.

84

An allusion to Mignon’s song of longing for Italy from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, beginning: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?” (Do you know the land where the lemons blossom?) 85 The occupation of northern Italy by the Austrians had drawn Heine’s critical commentary in his Italian Travel Pictures. 86

Heine probably means Russia. Heine had visited England in the spring and summer of 1827. He maintained a lifelong antipathy to England as a soulless merchant and industrial land and to the English as the persecutors of Napoleon. 88 The British had seized the island of Helgoland from Denmark in 1807 and retained control of it until ceding it to Germany in 1890. 87

89

In English (and French) in the original.

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One of my friends, recently returned from France, asserted that the English travel around the Continent out of despair at the crude cuisine of their homeland; at French tables d’hôte you see fat Englishmen who gob90 ble nothing but vols-au-vent, crème, suprêmes, ragoûts, gelées and suchlike airy fare, and with that colossal appetite practiced at home with masses of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and of which ultimately all French restaurateurs must perish. Is really the exploitation of the tables d’hôte the secret reason why the English travel around? While we smile at the perfunctory way they regard all the sights and art galleries, are they fooling us, and their scorned curiosity is nothing more than a cunning cover for their gastronomic intentions? But as excellent as French cuisine may be, otherwise things are said not to be looking good in France, and there is no end to the great movement backward. The Jesuits are flourishing there and singing triumphal songs. Those in power there are the same fools whose heads had already been chopped off fifty years ago. What good did it do? They have risen from the grave again and now their rule is more foolish than ever, for, when they were let out of the realm of the dead into the daylight, many of them in their haste put on any old head that was at hand, so that there were awful mistakes; the heads sometimes do not fit the bodies and the hearts that spook within them. There are some who speak reason itself on the tribune so that we admire their clever heads, but then they allow themselves to be led into the most stupid acts by their hopelessly insane hearts. It is a horrible contradiction between the thoughts and the feelings, the principles and the passions, the words and the deeds of these revenants! Or should I go to America, to that enormous freedom prison, where the invisible chains chafe even more painfully than the visible ones would at home, and where the most repugnant of all tyrants, the mob, exercises its crude sovereignty! You know what I think about this Godforsaken land, which I once loved before I knew it. Yet I must publicly praise and extol it out of professional duty. Dear German peasants! Go to America, where there are neither princes nor nobility, all men are equal, that is, equal boors, with the exception, of course, of a few million that have a black or brown skin and are treated like dogs! Actual slavery, which has been abolished in most of the North American provinces, does not outrage me as much as the brutality with which the free blacks and the mulattoes are treated there. Whoever is descended from a Negro in the most distant degree, and even if such a descent is revealed not by color, but only by facial formation, must suffer the greatest insults, insults that seem fantastic to us in Europe. At the same time these Americans make a great 90

Puff pastries, custard, poultry with sauce, stews, aspics.

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deal of their Christianity and are the most zealous churchgoers. They learned such hypocrisy from the English, who in general left them their worst characteristics. Worldly advantage is their actual religion and money their god, their only, all-powerful god. To be sure, many a noble heart there may lament in silence the general egotism and injustice. But if such a heart tries to fight against it, a martyrdom awaits it that exceeds all European concepts. I believe it was in New York where a Protestant preacher was so outraged by the treatment of the colored people that, defying the cruel prejudice, he married his own daughter to a Negro. As soon as this truly Christian deed became known, the people stormed the preacher’s house, the poor victim was seized by the mob and had to pay for its rage. She was lynched,91 that is, she was stripped stark naked, smeared with tar and rolled in slit-open feather beds, dragged through the whole city with this sticky feather covering, and mocked. 92 Oh Freedom! you are a bad dream! Helgoland, July 8. 93

Since yesterday was Sunday and a leaden tedium lay over the whole island and almost crushed my head, I reached out of desperation for the Bible, and I admit to you, that, despite being a secret Hellene, I was not only well entertained by the book, but thoroughly edified. What a book! Great and wide like the world, rooted in the gulfs of creation and reaching up to the blue secrets of the heavens. Sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfillment, birth and death, the whole drama of mankind, everything is in this book. It is the book of books, Biblia. The Jews should easily console themselves for having lost Jerusalem and the Temple and the Ark of the Covenant and Solomon’s implements and gems. Such a loss is small compared with the Bible, the indestructible treasure that they saved. If I am not mistaken, it was Mohammed who called the Jews “the people of the Book,” a name that has remained with them in the Orient until the pre-

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In English in the original, which has “flinshed,” believed to be an error or misprint. 92 Race riots motivated by mixed marriages in New York in 1834 were pictured in the novel of Tocqueville’s companion Gustave de Beaumont (1802–66), Marie, ou l’esclavage aux Etats-Unis (Marie, or Slavery in the United States, 1835). A report on the tar and feathering of clergymen because of their stand against racism appeared in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung in December 1839. 93 July 7, 1830, was a Wednesday. On the probable origin of Book II, see the introduction.

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sent day and that has a deep significance. A book is their fatherland, their possession, their ruler, their fortune, and their misfortune. They live in the enclosed borderlands of this book, here they exercise their inalienable citizenship, here they cannot be chased away or held in contempt, here they are strong and admirable. Absorbed in the reading of this book, they noticed few of the changes that took place in the real world around them; nations arose and disappeared, states blossomed and expired, revolutions stormed over the earth, but they, the Jews, lay bent over their book and noticed nothing of the wild hunt of time that passed over their heads! As the prophet of the Orient called them “the people of the Book,” so the prophet of the Occident in his philosophy of history called them “the people of the spirit.”95 Even in their earliest beginnings, as we can observe in the Pentateuch, the Jews manifest their predilection for the abstract, and their whole religion is nothing but an act of dialectic, whereby matter and spirit are separated, and the absolute is acknowledged only in the sole form of the spirit. What a frightfully isolated place they had to take among the peoples of antiquity, who were devoted to the most joyful worship of nature and conceived of the spirit in material phenomena, in image and symbol! What a terrible opposition they formed against brightcolored, hieroglyphic-swarming Egypt; against Phoenicia, the great temple of joy of Astarte, or especially against the beautiful sinner, lovely, sweetly fragrant Babylon, and finally even against Greece, the blooming homeland of art! It is a remarkable performance how the people of the spirit gradually freed themselves completely of matter, completely spiritualized themselves. Moses gave the spirit, as it were, material bulwarks against the real pressure from the neighboring peoples: round about the field where he had sowed spirit he planted the harsh ceremonial law and an egotistical nationhood as a protective hedge of thorns. But when the holy plant of the spirit had struck such deep roots and could no longer be rooted out, then came Jesus Christ and tore down the ceremonial law, which had no useful meaning any more, and even pronounced the death penalty on Jewish nationhood. He called all the peoples of the earth to partake of the kingdom of God that had previously belonged only to a single, chosen people of God, he gave all mankind Jewish citizenship. This was a great question of emancipation, which was far more magnanimously settled 94

The Koran several times refers to both the Jews and the Christians as “the People of the Scripture,” but Sûrah 4: 153 applies the term specifically to the Jews. 95

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). The Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History), published posthumously in 1837, does not contain the phrase. It may be a memory from Hegel’s lectures that Heine attended in Berlin.

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than today’s emancipation questions in Saxony and Hanover. To be sure, the Redeemer, who liberated his brothers from the ceremonial law and nationhood and founded cosmopolitanism, was a victim of his humaneness, and the city magistracy of Jerusalem had him crucified and the mob mocked him. But only the body was mocked and crucified, the spirit was glorified, and the martyrdom of the victor who secured the world rule of the spirit became the image of this victory, and all mankind has striven since, in imitationem Christi, for the mortification of the flesh and supersensory dissolution in the absolute spirit. When will harmony be achieved again, when will the world be healed from the one-sided striving for spiritualization, this mad error from which both the soul and the body sickened? A great cure lies in the political movement and in art. Napoleon and Goethe had a splendid effect. The former by forcing the nations to take on all kinds of healthy movement; the latter by making us receptive again to Greek art and creating solid works to which we can cling as though to marble images of the gods, in order not to perish in the absolute spirit’s sea of fog. Helgoland, July 18. In the Old Testament I read the Book of Genesis straight through. The holy prehistorical world roved like long caravans through my mind. The camels tower. The veiled roses of Canaan sit on their high backs. Pious cattle herders, driving oxen and cows before them. It all advances over bare mountains, hot stretches of sand, where only here and there a group of palms appears, fanning cool air. The bondsmen dig trenches. Sweet, peaceful, brightly sun-lit Orient! How pleasant to rest under your tents!97 Oh, Laban, if I could only pasture your herds! I would gladly serve you seven years for Rachel, and another seven for Leah, whom you include in the bargain! I hear them bleating, Jacob’s sheep, and I see how Jacob held the pilled rods before them when they came to drink in the 98 season of heat. The speckled ones now belong to us. Meanwhile Reuben comes home and brings his mother a bunch of dudaim that he has picked 96

In the 1830s there was much public discussion of the situation of the Jews in Saxony and especially in Hanover, one of the most despotically governed of the German states. Heine remained consistently aloof from the Jewish emancipation movement, which he regarded as merely an accommodation to bourgeois values and Christian spiritualism rather than a truly revolutionary force. 97 Possibly an echo of Numbers 24: 5: “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob,” recited upon entering the synagogue. 98

Genesis 30: 37–43.

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in the field. Rachel demands the dudaim and Leah gives them to her on 99 condition that Jacob will sleep with her that night. What are dudaim? The commentators have racked their brains about it in vain. Luther does 100 not know what else to do but to call these flowers dudaim also. Maybe 101 they are Swabian gillyflowers. I was very touched by the love story of 102 Dinah and young Schechem. However, her brothers Simeon and Levi did not regard the matter so sentimentally. It is atrocious that they slaughtered the unfortunate Schechem and all his relatives with a ferocious trick, even though the poor lover offered to marry their sister, give them lands and possessions, and join them to a single family, even though to this end he allowed himself and all his people to be circumcised. The two fellows should have been glad that their sister had made such a splendid match; the promised connection by marriage was highly advantageous, and along with it they would get, apart from the most valuable dowry, a good stretch of land that they very much needed. One cannot behave in a more decent way than this enamored Prince Schechem, who after all had only anticipated the rights of marriage out of love. But that is it, he had diminished their sister, and for this offence there was no other penalty for the prideful brothers than death, and when their father called them to account for their bloody deed and mentioned the advantages that

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Genesis 30: 14–15. The meaning of the word is not exactly known and has been much discussed. King James, the Revised Standard, and modern Jewish translations have “mandrakes,” assuming that some kind of aphrodisiac is meant. The modernized Luther Bible gives Liebesäpfel (love apples); Luther, himself, however, kept the Hebrew word, as Heine says, leaving it to the reader to figure out. Heine clearly had an annotated Luther Bible at hand, probably the edition from 1827 found in his preserved library. 101 An allusion to Heine’s polemic Der Schwabenspiegel (The Swabian Mirror) of 1838. The occasion was the withdrawal of the coeditor of a literary almanac, Gustav Schwab, from association with the publication in protest against the inclusion of Heine’s portrait. Heine struck back with a withering attack on what he called the Swabian School, in which he also included Wolfgang Menzel, whose enemy Heine had become (as had Börne). Heine several times employs the gillyflower (Gelbveiglein) as a synecdoche for the trivial local motifs of conventional nature poetry; e.g.: “The celebrities of the Swabian School have contempt for cosmopolitanism and remain at home nicely patriotic and comfortable with the gillyflowers and pudding broths of the dear Swabian land” (DHA, 10: 269). The allusion is another indication of the origin of Book II at the end of the 1830s. 102 Genesis 34. The passage is an example of Heine’s lifelong habit of alluding to the most disturbing and least edifying moments in the Bible. 100

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a marriage connection with Schechem would have furnished, they replied: 103 “Should we deal with our sister as with an harlot?” Obstinate, cruel hearts, these brothers. But under the hard stone there is the scent of a delicate sense of morality. It is strange that this sense of morality, which expresses itself on other occasions in the lives of the patriarchs, is not the result of a positive religion or a political legislation. No, at that time the Jews had neither a positive religion nor a political law; both came only at a later time. I therefore believe I am able to claim that morality is independent of dogma and legislation, it is a pure product of healthy human feeling, and true morality, the rationality of the heart, will live on forever, even when church and state have perished. I could wish that we had another word to denote what we now call morality. For otherwise we could be misled, like the Romance peoples, to derive morale from mores. But true morality is independent from the mores of a people as it is from dogma and legislation. The former are products of climate, of history, and such factors generate legislation and dogmatics. Thus there are Indian, Chinese, Christian mores, but there is only one, namely a human morality. It perhaps cannot be captured by a concept, and the law of morality that we call “moral” is only a dialectical game. Morality reveals itself in actions and moral significance lies only in their motives, not in their form and coloration. As a motto on the title page of Golovnin’s journey to Japan stand the beautiful words that the Russian traveler heard from a distinguished Japanese: “The mores of the peoples are different, but good actions are acknowledged as such everywhere.”104 For as long as I have been thinking I have thought about this matter, morality. The problem about the nature of good and evil, which has agitated all great minds for fifteen hundred years, has become concentrated for me in the question of morality. I sometimes jump from the Old Testament into the New, and here too I am thrilled by the omnipotence of the great book. What a holy ground your foot touches here! When reading it one should remove one’s shoes, as in the presence of sacred places.

103

Genesis 34: 31. Actually Jacob mentions not the advantages of the marriage, but the danger to their family and future from the hostility the sons will have generated: “Ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land.” 104

Vasili Mikhailovich Golovnin (1776–1831), Narrative of my Captivity in Japan, 1811–13. Heine had read the German translation of 1817 with enthusiasm (to Moses Moser, October 8, 1825, HSA, 20: 215).

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The most remarkable words of the New Testament for me are in the passage of the Gospel of John 16: 12–13. “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.” So the last word has not yet been said, and perhaps here is the ring to which the new revelation can be attached. It begins with deliverance from the Word, makes an end to martyrdom, and founds the kingdom of eternal joy: the millennium. All promises will at last find their richest fulfillment. A certain mystical ambiguity is predominant in the New Testament. The words: “Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”105 are a clever digression, not a 106 system. Thus when Christ is asked: “Art thou the King of the Jews?” the answer is evasive. To the question whether he is the son of God, Mohammed again showed himself to be much more open, precise. When he was approached with a similar question, namely, whether he was the son 107 of God, he answered: “God has no children.” What a great drama the Passion is! And how deeply it is motivated through the prophecies of the Old Testament! It could not be evaded; it was the red seal of authentication. Like the miracles, the Passion has served as an advertisement. If now a saviour arises, he will no longer have to have himself crucified in order to publish his doctrine effectively; he merely has it printed and advertises the pamphlet in the General Gazette for a fee of six kreuzers a line. What a sweet figure this God-man is! How narrow-minded the hero of the Old Testament appears in comparison to him! Moses loves his people with a touching tenderness, he cares like a mother for the future of this people. Christ loves mankind; that sun surrounds the whole earth with the warming flames of his love. What a soothing balm his words are for all the wounds of this world! What a healing spring was the blood that flowed on Golgotha for all who suffered! The white marble Greek gods were spattered with this blood, took ill from inner dread, and could never recover!108 Most of them, to be sure, had long carried the consuming 105

Matthew 22: 21.

106

Matthew 27: 11.

107

Koran, Sûrah 112: 3: “He begetteth not, nor was begotten.” However, the Koran in several places acknowledges the divine inspiration of Jesus and, in particular, retells the Annunciation and the Virgin Birth: Sûrah 3: 38–47. 108

Chapter 6 of Die Stadt Lucca (The City of Lucca, 1831) begins with lines from the Iliad describing a banquet of the gods, then continues: “Then came gasping up a pale, bleeding Jew with a crown of thorns on his head and a great wooden

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sickness within themselves and the shock only accelerated their death. 109 First Pan died. Do you know the legend as Plutarch tells it? At the time of Tiberius a ship passed one evening close to the Parae Islands, which lie near the coast of Aetolia. The people on board had not yet gone to sleep and many of them were sitting and drinking after dinner, when suddenly they heard a voice from the coast that cried out the name of Thamus (for so the helmsman was called) so loudly that all were highly amazed. At the first and the second call Thamus remained silent; he answered the third, whereupon the voice in amplified tones said these words to him: “When you come up as far as Palodes, announce that great Pan has died!” When he came that far, Thamus fulfilled the instruction and cried from aft in the ship to the land: “Great Pan is dead!” Upon this cry there followed the strangest laments, a mixture of sighing and shouting of amazement, and as though raised by many at once. The eyewitnesses told of this event in Rome, where the most peculiar opinions were expressed about it. Tiberius had the matter more closely investigated and did not doubt the truth of it. Helgoland, July 29. I have again read in the Old Testament. What a great book! More remarkable for me than the content is the depiction, where the word is, as it were, a product of nature, like a tree, like a flower, like the sea, like the stars, like man himself. It sprouts, it flows, it sparkles, it smiles, you know not how, you know not why, you find it all quite natural. That is truly the word of God, while other books only bespeak human wit. In Homer, the other great book, depiction is a product of art, and even if the matter, just as in the Bible, is drawn from reality, nevertheless it is shaped into a poetic form, as it were smelted in the crucible of the human mind; it is refined through a mental process that we call art. In the Bible no trace of art appears; it is the style of a notebook, where the absolute spirit, as it were, without any individual human assistance, enters the daily events with about the same factual accuracy with which we write our laundry lists. No judgment can be passed on this style, one can only register the effect on our disposition, and the Greek grammarians got into no little embarrassment when they were supposed to define a number of strikingly cross on his shoulder, and he flung the cross onto the high table of the gods so that the golden goblets trembled and the gods grew silent and pale, and ever more pale until they vanished into mist. Then came a sad time, and the world became gray and dark” (DHA, 7/1: 172–73). 109 Moralia: De defectu oraculorum, Chapter 17. Heine probably used a German translation.

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beautiful passages in the Bible according to traditional concepts of art. 110 Longinus speaks of sublimity. More modern aestheticians speak of naivety. Oh! as I said, here all standards of judgment are lacking; the Bible is the word of God. Only in a single author do I find something reminiscent of the direct style of the Bible. That is Shakespeare. With him, too, the word sometimes appears in that frightening nakedness that terrifies and jolts us; in Shakespeare’s works we sometimes see bodily truth without a drapery of art. But that happens only in singular moments; the guardian spirit of art, perhaps feeling its powerlessness, relinquished its office to nature for a few moments and afterward insists all the more zealously on its dominion in molded form and in the witty connections of the drama. Shakespeare is at once Jew and Greek, or perhaps both elements, spiritualism and art, have permeated each other in a conciliatory way and developed into a higher whole. Is perhaps such a harmonious mixture of the two elements the task of all European civilization? We are still very far from such a result. Goethe the Greek, and with him the whole poetic party, has recently expressed his antipathy to Jerusalem almost passionately.111 The opposing party, which has no great name at its head, but only some noisy brats such as, for example, the Jew Pustkuchen, the Jew Wolfgang Menzel, the Jew 112 Hengstenberg, these raise their pharisaical hue and cry all the more croakingly against Athens and the great pagans. My next-door neighbor, a judicial official from Königsberg who is 113 bathing here, thinks I am a Pietist because whenever he visits me he 110

On the Sublime, a Greek work traditionally ascribed to one Longinus but now regarded as of unknown authorship, cites in Chapter 9: 9 the first verses of Genesis as an instance of grandeur. 111

Heine is probably referring to an essay by Goethe’s house art expert, Heinrich Meyer (1788–1859), “Neu-deutsche religiöse patriotische Kunst” (Neo-German Religious and Patriotic Art), criticizing the Christianizing turn of the Romantics. It is regularly regarded as having expressed the views of Goethe himself, who published it in his journal Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity) in 1817. 112

Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Pustkuchen (1793–1834), a theologian who wrote parodistic continuations of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister; Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–69), a theologian at the University of Berlin influential at the Prussian court, whose newspaper published attacks on Goethe. Of course, neither Pustkuchen nor Hengstenberg was a Jew any more than Menzel was; Heine is attempting to insult them through his identification of spiritualist repression with Jewishness. 113

Karl Schnaase (1798–1875), who by 1829 had a position at the provincial court in Düsseldorf; that Heine still associates him with Königsberg may suggest a link of the East Prussian rationalist with Kant.

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finds a Bible in my hands. He would therefore like to provoke me a little bit and a caustic East Prussian smile flickers over his lean, bachelor face whenever he can speak about religion with me. We disputed yesterday about the Trinity. With the Father it was still all right; he is the creator of the world and everything must have a cause. It already got a little tricky with the belief in the Son, which the sensible man would gladly have refused to tolerate but which in the end he accepted with almost ironic good humor. However, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, encountered the most implacable opposition. He could not comprehend at all what the Holy Ghost is, and, bursting suddenly into laughter, he cried: “With the Holy Ghost it is probably in the end the same as with the third horse when you travel express; you must pay for it and yet never get to see it, this third horse.” My neighbor downstairs is neither a Pietist nor a rationalist but a Dutchman, indolent and curdled like the cheese he deals in. Nothing can move him; he is the picture of the most sober repose, and even when he converses with my landlady on his favorite subject, pickling fish, his voice never rises above the dullest monotone. Unfortunately, owing to the thin plank floor, I sometimes must listen to these conversations, and while I was speaking up here with the Prussian about the Trinity, the Dutchman down below was explaining how one tells cod, dried cod, and cured cod apart; they are basically one and the same. My landlord is a splendid seaman, famous on the whole island for his fearlessness in storm and danger, at the same time good-humored and gentle as a child. He has just returned from a long voyage and with jolly seriousness he told me about a phenomenon that he experienced yesterday, July 28, on the high seas.114 It sounds droll, for my landlord claims that the whole ocean smelled of freshly baked cake and, indeed, the warm, delicate aroma of cake rose so seductively into his nose that he had a proper heartache. You see, that is a counterpart to the teasing mirage that deludes the thirsting wanderer in the Arabian desert into believing that he sees a clear, refreshing pool of water. A baked Fata Morgana. Helgoland, August 1. You have no idea how much I like the dolce far niente here. I have brought with me not a single book that has to do with the concerns of the day. My whole library consists of Paul Warnefrid’s history of the

114

July 28, 1830, was the day the revolution broke out in Paris.

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115

Langobards, the Bible, Homer, and a few old tomes about witches. About them I should like to write an interesting little book. For this purpose I have recently occupied myself with researches into the last traces of paganism in the baptized modern world. It is highly remarkable how long and in what disguises the beautiful beings of the Greek legendary world maintained themselves in Europe. And basically they have maintained themselves to the present day, with us, the poets. The latter have, since the victory of the Christian church, always formed a silent community, where the joy of the ancient image worship, the jubilating belief in the gods, propagated itself from generation to generation through the tradition of the sacred songs. But alas! the Ecclesia pressa116 that honors Homeros as its prophet is daily ever more oppressed, the zealotry of the 117 black familiars ever more alarmingly inflamed. Are we threatened with a 118 new persecution of the gods? Fear and hope alternate in my mind and I am becoming very uncertain. I have reconciled again with the sea (you know that we were en delicatesse) and we are sitting together again in the evenings and have secret conversations. Yes, I will hang up politics and philosophy and give myself again to the contemplation of nature and to art. In the end, all this torment and effort is useless, and, although I martyr myself for the general welfare, it is not much changed. The world remains, not in rigid stasis, but in a fruitless cycle. At one time, when I was young and inexperienced, I believed that, even if the individual fighter perishes in mankind’s struggle for liberation, nevertheless the great cause would be victorious in the end. And I inspirited myself with those beautiful verses of Byron: “these are but the receding waves repulsed and broken for a moment on the shore, while the great tide is still rolling on and gaining ground with every breaker.”119 115

Paulus Diaconus (Warnefrid was his father’s name), Historia Langobardorum, from the eighth century. A German translation that Heine may have used appeared in 1838, another indication of the dating of Book II. 116 The persecuted church. 117

That is, the Christian clergy.

118

This passage might reflect an earlier layer of materials on which Book II was built. Heine’s book on folklore, Elementargeister (Elemental Spirits) was a product of the mid-thirties and first appeared in 1837. His view of the folkloric spirits as pagan deities demonized under Christianity was basic to his exploration of the topic. 119

George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Appendix to the Two Foscaris” from Sardanapalus. The Two Foscari. Cain (London, 1821), defending the need for revolution. It is unclear why Heine, who knew Byron well and had already referred to his de-

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Alas! when one observes the phenomenon of nature for a longer time, one notices that the sea, having progressed, after a while withdraws into its previous bed, later comes out of it again, tries to regain the lost territory with the same vehemence, finally dejectedly takes flight as before, and repeats this game constantly, nevertheless never getting any further. Mankind, too, moves according to the laws of ebb and flow, and perhaps the moon exerts its sidereal influence even on the spirit world. 120 Today is the new moon, and despite all the gloomy tendency to doubt with which my soul torments itself back and forth, strange premonitions are stealing upon me. Something extraordinary is happening in the world! The sea smells like cake and the cloud-monks looked so sad last night, so distressed. I walked up and down alone on the shore in the evening dusk. All around ceremonious quiet prevailed. The high-clouded sky resembled the dome of a Gothic church. The stars hung like countless lamps; but they burned dimly and tremulously. The ocean waves roared like a water organ: stormy chorales, painful, desperate, yet now and then triumphant. Up above an airy procession of white cloud formations that looked like monks, all moving along with bowed heads and woebegone look, a sad parade. It looked as though they were following a corpse. “Who is being buried? Who has died?” I said to myself. “Is great Pan dead?” Helgoland, August 6. While his army fought with the Langobards, the king of the Heruli sat calmly in his tent playing chess. He threatened with death anyone who would report a defeat to him. The watchman, who observed the battle sitting in a tree, kept calling: “we are winning! we are winning!” until he finally loudly sighed: “Unfortunate king! Unfortunate Heruli people!” Then the king realized that he had lost the battle, but too late! For at the same time the Langobards forced their way into his tent and stabbed him to death. I was just reading this story in Paul Warnefrid when the fat packet of newspapers with the warm, glowing hot news came from the mainland. They were sunbeams wrapped in newsprint, and they inflamed my soul to the wildest blaze. I felt as though I could light the whole ocean up to the North Pole with the fires of enthusiasm and the mad joy that flared up in me. Now I know why the whole ocean smelled like cake. The River Seine fense in the Briefe aus Berlin (Letters from Berlin, 1822; DHA, 6: 50), designates this prose passage as verse. The translation is quite free. 120 On August 1, 1830, the moon was nearly full; the new moon did not occur until August 18.

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had spread the good news directly into the sea and in their crystal palaces the beautiful nixies, who from time immemorial have been well disposed to all heroism, immediately put on a tea dance to celebrate the great events, and that is why the whole ocean smelled like cake. I ran like mad around the house and kissed the fat landlady and then her friendly sea wolf, I also embraced the Prussian judicial official, from whose lips, to be sure, the frosty smile of disbelief did not completely vanish. I even pressed the Dutchman to my bosom. But his indifferent fatty face remained cool and calm, and I believe if the sun of July in person had embraced him, mijnheer would have broken out only in a mild sweat, not in flames. This sobriety in the midst of general enthusiasm is outrageous. Just as the Spartans preserved their children from drunkenness by showing them an intoxicated Helot as a warning example, so we should feed a Dutchman in our educational institutions, whose unfeeling, languid, fishy nature might fill children with an abhorrence of sobriety. Verily this Dutch sobriety is a much worse vice than the drunkenness of a Helot. I would like to give mijnheer a whipping. But no, no excesses! The Parisians have given us such a brilliant example of forbearance. Verily, you deserve to be free, you French, for you carry freedom in your hearts. That is how you differ from your poor fathers who rose up out of millennia of servitude and, along with all their heroic deeds, also perpetrated those insane atrocities before which the spirit of mankind covers its face. This time the hands of the people only got bloody in the tumult of justified defense, not after the battle. The people themselves bound the wounds of their enemies, and when the deed had been done, returned to their daily occupations without even demanding a gratuity for their great work! The slave when he breaks his chain, The free man, fear him not! You see how intoxicated I am, beside myself, like everybody; I am quoting Schiller’s “Bell.”121 And the old boy, whose incorrigible foolishness cost so much citizens’ blood, has been treated by the Parisians with touching indul122 gence. He really was sitting at chess, like the king of the Heruli, when the victors burst into his tent. With a trembling hand he signed his abdication. He had not wanted to hear the truth. He kept an ear open only for the lies of the courtiers. They kept calling: “we are winning! we are 121

The quotation is garbled; it should read: “Before the slave [tremble], when he breaks his chain / Before the free man, tremble not.” The lines are not from Friedrich Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” but from “The Words of Faith.” In the French version Heine called them Schiller’s most banal lines (DHA, 11: 207). 122

Charles X (1757–1836), king of France 1824–30.

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winning!” This confidence of the royal fools was incomprehensible. He looked up in astonishment when the Journal des Débats, like the watchman during the Langobard battle, suddenly cried: “malheuereux roi! malheureux France!” With him, with Charles X, the realm of Charlemagne has come to an 123 end, as the realm of Romulus ended with Romulus Augustulus. As a new Rome began then, so a new France begins now. It is all still like a dream to me; especially the name Lafayette sounds 124 to me like a legend out of my earliest childhood. Is he really sitting on horseback again, commanding the National Guard? I almost fear it is not true, for it is printed. I will go to Paris myself in order to persuade myself 125 with the naked eye. He must look splendid when he rides there through the streets, the citizen of both worlds, the god-like old man, his silver locks flowing down over his sacred shoulder. He greets with his old, dear eyes the grandsons of those fathers who once fought with him for freedom and equality. It is now sixty years since he returned from America with the Declaration of Human Rights, the Ten Commandments of the new world faith that were revealed to him there amidst the thunder and lightning of cannon.126 At the same time the tricolored flag is waving again from the towers of Paris and the sound of the Marseillaise is heard! Lafayette, the tricolored flag, the Marseillaise! I am as though intoxicated. Daring hopes rise up passionately, like trees with golden fruit and wildly growing branches that stretch their foliage far up into the clouds. But the clouds flying by uproot these giant trees and race away with them. The sky is full of violins and now I smell it, the sea has the aroma of freshly baked cakes. Continuous violin music fills the sky-blue joyousness up there, and the sound of the emerald waves is like the cheery giggling of girls. But from under the earth there is a creaking and knocking, the ground opens, the old gods stick their heads out and with some amazement they ask: “what is the meaning of this jubilation that has penetrated to the marrow of the earth? What is new? May we come up again?” No, you will remain down there in Nebelheim, where soon a new companion

123

A boy put on the throne by his father, an ally of Attila the Hun, for about a year, 475–76 C.E., usually thought of as the last Roman emperor of the West, although the empire continued to exist under other rulers for a time. 124 Marie-Joseph du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), famous from his participation in the American and French Revolutions, played a decisive role in the revolution of 1830 as well, commanding the National Guard and assisting the compromise of the July Monarchy by proclaiming the Duc d’Orléans “the best Republic.” 125

It was actually to be ten months before Heine went to Paris.

126

Sixty years from Lafayette’s return to France in 1782 would give 1842.

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in death will descend to you. “What is his name?” You know him well, he who once flung you down into the realm of eternal night. 127 Pan is dead! Helgoland, August 10. Lafayette, the tricolored flag, the Marseillaise . . . Gone is my longing for quiet. I now know again what I want, what I should do, what I must do. I am the son of the revolution and reach again for the invulnerable weapons over which my mother pronounced her magic spells. Flowers! Flowers! I will wreathe my head for the fight to the death. And the lyre, too, hand me the lyre, that I may sing the battle song. Words like flaming stars that plunge from the heights and burn the palaces and illuminate the huts, words like shining javelins that whir up into the seventh heaven and there strike the pious hypocrites who have stolen into the Holy of Holies. I am all joy and song, all sword and flame! Maybe quite crazy, too. Of those wild sunbeams wrapped in newsprint one flew into my brain, and all my thoughts are ablaze. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No water extinguishes this Greek fire. But other people are not much better. The other bathing guests were also struck by the Parisian sunstroke, especially the Berliners, who are here this year in greater numbers than usual and cruise from one island to another, so that one could say the whole North Sea is flooded with Berliners. Even the poor Helgolanders jubilate with joy, although they grasp the events only by instinct. The fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little sand island where people swim laughed to me with the words: “The poor people have won!” Yes, the people, with their instinct, grasp the events perhaps better than we with all our supplementary knowledge. Thus Madame von Varnhagen told me: when they still did not know the outcome of the Battle of Leipzig, her maid suddenly burst into the room with the anxious cry: “the aristocracy won.”128 This time the poor people have won the victory. “But it won’t help them at all if they don’t overcome the inheritance law!” These words were spoken by the East Prussian judicial official in a tone that particularly caught my attention. I do not know why these words, which I do not un127

A Christian legend associated the death of Pan with the birth of Christ. Thus the new companion descending to the realm of the dead is now Christ. 128 The anecdote is adapted from Karl August Varnhagen’s diaries. But it is important to remember that for the majority of Heine’s potential readership the Battle of Leipzig was a major victory of the inchoate German nation. By associating the interests of the poor with the cause of Napoleon and expressing sympathy with both, he is aggressively confronting that readership.

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derstand, remain so anxiously in my memory. What does he mean by it, the dry coot? This morning another packet of newspapers arrived. I devour them like manna. Child that I am, I am more occupied with the touching details than with the meaningful whole. Oh, if I could only see the dog Medor! He interests me much more than the other ones who with fast 129 leaps fetched the crown for Philip of Orleans. The dog Medor fetched his master’s gun and cartridge pouch, and when his master fell and was buried in the courtyard of the Louvre together with his fellow heroes, the poor dog sat motionless on the grave like a statue of loyalty, remaining there day and night, eating only a little of the food offered to him, burying the greatest part of it in the ground, perhaps as nourishment for his 130 buried master. I cannot sleep any more, and the most bizarre night visions chase through my overstimulated mind. Waking dreams stumble over one another so that the figures get fantastically mixed up and, as in a Chinese shadow play, now shrinking to the size of dwarfs, now expanding gigantically; it is enough to drive one mad. In this condition I sometimes feel as though my own limbs were also colossally extending and that with enormously long legs I were running from Germany to France and back. Yes, I remember last night I ran this way through all the German states and statelets, and I knocked on the doors of my friends and roused them from their sleep. They gaped at me sometimes with amazed glassy eyes, so that I got scared myself and did not know right away what I actually wanted and why I was waking them! Many fat philistines who were snoring all too disgustingly I jabbed sharply in the ribs, and, yawning, they asked: “What time is it, anyway?” In Paris, dear friends, the cock has crowed; that’s all I know. Beyond Augsburg, on the way to Munich, I was met by a crowd of Gothic cathedrals that seemed to be in flight and were anxiously wobbling. I myself, tired of all the running around, finally took to flying, and so I flew from one star to another. But they are not populated worlds, as others imagine, but shining spheres of rock, desolate and sterile. They do not fall down because they do not know what they could fall on. They sway back and forth up there in the greatest embarrassment. Came also to heaven. The portals stood wide open. Long, high, echoing halls with old-fashioned gilding, quite empty, only that here and there, on 129

Heine presumably means the members of the Chamber of Deputies who on August 7 scurried to declare the Duc d’Orléans, Louis-Philippe (1773–1850), king of the French (1830–48). It is unlikely that Heine could have heard about this by August 10. 130 Börne reported on Medor in his letters from Paris of February 24 and March 8, 1831 (LB, 3: 200–203, 222).

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a velvet armchair, an old, powdered servant sat, in faded red livery, gently slumbering. In some rooms the door panels were off their hinges, in other places the doors were tightly locked and furthermore triply sealed with big, round official seals, as in houses where a bankruptcy or death has occurred. Finally I came to a room where an old, thin man was sitting at a writing desk and rummaging around in high piles of paper. He was dressed in black, had completely white hair, a wrinkled business face, and he asked me with a muffled voice what I wanted? In my naivety I thought he was the dear Lord God, and I said to him quite trustingly: “Oh, dear Lord God, I would like to learn to thunder, I already know how to make lightning. Oh, teach me to thunder, too!” “Don’t talk so loud,” replied the old, thin man vehemently, turning his back to me and rummaging further among his papers. “That is the registrar,” one of the red-clad servants whispered to me, who rose from his sleeping chair and rubbed his eyes with a yawn. Pan is dead! Cuxhafen, August 19. Unpleasant crossing, in an open boat, against wind and weather, so that I had to suffer from seasickness as I always do in such situations. Like other people, the sea also rewards my love with hardship and torments. At first it goes all right; I enjoy the teasing wallow well enough. But gradually my head grows dizzy and all kinds of fanciful visions buzz around me. The old demons rise from the dark ocean whirlpools in horrible nakedness down to their waist, and they howl bad, incomprehensible verses, and spray me in the face with the white foam of the waves. The clouds above form themselves into much more ghastly grimaces, hanging so low that they almost touch my head and whistling with their stupid, falsetto voices the weirdest follies into my ear. Such seasickness, without being dangerous, nevertheless causes the most dreadful discomfort, unbearable to madness. In the end, as with a feverish hangover, I imagine that I am a whale and I am carrying in my belly the prophet Jonah. But the prophet Jonah rumbled and raged in my belly and kept crying: “Oh, Nineveh! Oh, Nineveh! You shall be overthrown!131 In your palaces beggars will pick lice and in your temples the Babylonian cuirassiers 132 will feed their mares. But you, you priests of Baal, you will be taken by 131

Heine is expanding on Jonah 3: 4, recasting the prophecy as one against Christianity and the alliance of throne and altar. It is perhaps worth recalling that God did not permit Jonah’s prophecy to be fulfilled. 132 Heine means the French. Germans often contemptuously referred to Paris as “Babylon on the Seine.” In the first couple of years of the July Monarchy Heine

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the ears and your ears will be nailed fast on the portal of the temple! Yes, your ears will be nailed onto the doors of your shops, you bakers by appointment to God! For you have given false weight, you have sold the people light, deceptive breadstuffs! Oh, you tonsured rascals! when the people were hungry, you gave them a thin, homeopathic, fake food, and when they were thirsty, you drank instead of them; at most you handed the full chalice to the kings. But you, you Assyrian philistines and ruffians, you will get blows with canes and switches, and you will get kicks, too, and boxed ears, and I can predict it to you with certainty, for in the first place I will do everything in my power to see that you get them, and secondly, I am a prophet, the prophet Jonah, son of Amittai. Oh, Nineveh, oh, Nineveh, you will perish!” In my stomach my ventriloquist preached more or less thus, and seemed to gesticulate so violently and entangle himself in my entrails that everything in my body turned about until I finally could stand it no longer and vomited the prophet Jonah out. In this way I was relieved and finally completely recovered my health when I landed and got a good cup of tea at the inn. Here there are crowds of Hamburgers and their wives who frequent the seaside resort. Ship captains, too, from all countries, waiting for a favorable wind, walk up and down here on the high dikes or hang around in the taverns and drink very strong grog and jubilate over the sacred July days. In all languages they give three well-deserved cheers to the French, and the otherwise so taciturn Briton praises them as garrulously as the loquacious Portuguese, who regretted that he could not bring his cargo of oranges directly to Paris in order to refresh the people after the heat of their battle. Even in Hamburg, as I am told, in that Hamburg where the hatred of the French was most deeply rooted, there is nothing but enthusiasm for France. All is forgotten, Davout, the plundered bank, the executed citizens, the old-German coats, the bad liberation poems, Father Blücher, Hail to You in the Victory Wreath, all is forgotten.133 In Hamburg hoped that the French would lead a war of liberation into the rest of Europe, an improbable project in which Louis-Philippe wisely had not the least interest. 133 In 1814, after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, his marshal Nicholas Davout (1770–1823) reoccupied Hamburg and imposed an indemnity of forty-eight million marks; when the city could not pay, he seized all accounts and reserves of the bank. In February 1813, during the first occupation of the city, several resistance leaders were executed by firing squad. Gebhart Leberecht von Blücher (1742– 1819), who commanded the Prussian troops at Waterloo, became extremely popular; in his youth Heine had seen him as a guest in Uncle Salomon Heine’s house outside Hamburg. The Napoleonic aggression aroused German nationalism, which sometimes expressed itself in what was believed to be traditional

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the tricolor is waving, everywhere the Marseillaise can be heard, even the ladies appear in the theater with tricolored ribbons on their breasts, and they smile with their blue eyes, little red mouths, and little white noses. Even the rich bankers, who are losing a great deal of money in government bonds from the revolutionary movement, magnanimously share in the general joy, and whenever the broker informs them that the rate has fallen still further, they look all the more pleased and reply: “It’s all right, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter!” Yes, everywhere, in all countries, people are very easily able to grasp the meaning of these three July days and see in them a triumph of their own interests and celebrate it. The great deed of the French speaks so clearly to all peoples and all levels of intelligence, the highest and the lowest, and in the steppes of the Bashkirs the spirits will be as deeply shaken as on the heights of Andalusia. I already see how the Neapolitan will stop chewing his macaroni and the Irishman his potato when the news gets to them. Pulcinella is capable of reaching for the sword, and Paddy may make a bull that will get the Englishmen to stop laughing.134 And Germany? I do not know. Will we finally make the right use of our oak forests, namely to build barricades for the liberation of the world? Will we, to whom nature has meted out so much profundity, so much strength, so much courage, finally use our gifts of God and understand, 135 proclaim, and bring to fulfillment the word of the great Master, the doctrine of the rights of mankind? It was six years ago, while wandering on foot through the Fatherland, that I came to the Wartburg and visited the cell where Doctor Luther had 136 dwelt. A good man, of whom I will hear no criticism; he carried out a giant labor, and we want always gratefully to kiss his hands for what he did. We will not contend with him because he started in on our friends all too discourteously when they wanted to go a little further than he in the exegesis of the divine word, when they proposed the earthly equality of

Germanic dress and a vast amount of political verse. Heil Dir im Siegerkranz, a popular song, especially among students, set to the melody of God Save the King, was originally written in 1790 by Heinrich Harries (1762–1802) in honor of the Danish king, but had been reformulated by 1793 into a patriotic German song that eventually became the Prussian national anthem and was later addressed to the Kaiser. 134

Pulcinella (or Arlecchino) was a stock figure of a trickster servant in the commedia dell’ arte; an “Irish bull” was a British slang term for a foolish contradiction. 135

That is, Jesus.

136

During the Harz journey on October 3, 1824.

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137

men. To be sure, such a proposal was then still untimely, and Master Hemling, who cut off your head, poor Thomas Münzer, was in a certain sense well justified for such an action, for he had the sword in his hands, 138 and his arm was strong! On the Wartburg I also saw the armory where the old coats of mail hung, the spiked helmets, target shields, halberds, two-handed swords, the iron wardrobe of the Middle Ages. I walked pondering around the hall with a young university friend, a young man of the nobility, whose father was one of the powerful tetrarchs in our homeland and ruled his 139 whole trembling little country. His forebears, too, were mighty barons and the young man reveled in heraldic memories at the sight of the armor and the weapons, which, as an attached label indicated, had belonged to some knight or other of his family. When he took down the long sword of his ancestor from the hook and tried out of curiosity to see whether he could wield it, he admitted that it was too heavy for him and let fall his arm in discouragement. When I saw this, when I saw that the arm of the descendant was too weak for the sword of his forefathers, I thought secretly to myself: Germany could be free. (Nine years later.) Between my first and my second meeting with Ludwig Börne lies that July Revolution that, so to speak, split our times into two halves. The above letters may inform the reader of the mood in which the great event found me, and in the current memorial they are to serve as the connecting bridge between the first and the third book. The transition would otherwise be too abrupt. I hesitated to communicate a larger number of these letters, because in the following ones the temporary ecstasy of freedom lurched all too impetuously beyond all police regulations, while later all too sober observations emerge and the disappointed heart loses itself in discouraged, despondent, and despairing thoughts. Even during the first days of my arrival in the capital of the revolution, I saw that things had a much different coloration in reality than the lighting effects of my enthusiasm had lent to them from a distance. The silver hair that I had seen fluttering so majestically around the shoulder of Lafayette, the hero of both worlds, upon closer observation turned into a brown wig that piti137

Luther’s support of the suppression of the Peasants’ War, 1524–25.

138

The Anabaptist leader Thomas Münzer (ca. 1490–1525) was executed immediately upon his capture. Master Hemling, more commonly Hämmerling, was a popular term for executioner. 139

Heine’s companion may have been Alexander, Prince of Sayn-WittgensteinHohenstein (1801–74), whom he had known at the University of Bonn. Young Heine’s acquaintance among the nobility is a striking aspect of his biography.

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fully covered a narrow skull. And even the dog Medor, whom I visited in the courtyard of the Louvre, and who let himself be fed lying under the tricolored flags and trophies — it was not the right dog but a quite ordinary beast who had assumed the merit of another, as often occurs among the French, and just like so many others he exploited the fame of the July Revolution. He was pampered, promoted, perhaps raised to the highest positions of honor, while the true Medor, a few days after the victory, modestly stole away, like the true people who had made the revolution. Poor people! Poor dog! sic vos non vobis.140 It is already an old story. Since time immemorial the people have bled and suffered not for themselves but for others. In July 1830 they won the victory for that bourgeoisie that is worth no more than the noblesse it has replaced, with the same egotism. The people have won nothing by their 141 victory but regret and greater poverty. But be sure, when the tocsin is rung again and the people reach for their guns, this time they will fight for themselves and demand the well-earned reward. This time the true, genuine Medor will be honored and fed. God knows where he is running around now, despised, scorned, and starving. But be silent, my heart, you betray yourself too much.

140

“Thus do you, but not for yourselves”; that is, you labor but not for your own benefit and someone else takes the profit, a phrase of Virgil challenging another poet who took credit for a couplet Virgil had anonymously written. The quotation does not actually appear in Heine’s printed text but is found in the manuscript. 141

In the first of his political reports from Paris, dated December 28, 1831, Heine remarked that the people were being stamped back into the earth like the paving stones they had employed (DHA, 12/1: 82).

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Book III

I

t was in the fall of 1831 in Paris, a year after the July Revolution, when I saw Doctor Ludwig Börne again. I met him in the Hôtel de Castille, and I was not a little surprised at the change that expressed itself in his whole being. The little bit of flesh that I had previously observed on his body had now completely disappeared, perhaps melted in the rays of the July sun, which unfortunately had penetrated his brain as well. Alarming sparks glittered in his eyes. He sat, or rather, lived in a great, multicolored silk dressing gown like a turtle in its shell, and whenever he mistrustfully bent his thin little head out of it, I had an eerie feeling. But sympathy prevailed when he stretched out his emaciated hand from the wide sleeve for a greeting or a friendly handshake. His voice trembled with a certain debility and on his cheeks the red glint of consumption already grinned. The sharp-edged distrust that lurked in all his features and movements was perhaps a consequence of his hardness of hearing, from which he had already suffered earlier, but which grew ever worse and contributed not a little to spoiling conversation with him for me. “Welcome to Paris!” he cried to me. “That’s good that you have come; that’s fine. I am convinced that all the best-intentioned people will soon be here. Here is the assembly of the patriots of all Europe, and all peoples must reach their hands out to one other for the great work. All the princes must be kept busy in their own countries so that they will not make common cause to repress freedom in Germany. Oh, God! Oh, Germany! Things with us will soon look very distressful and very bloody. Revolutions are a terrible thing, but they are necessary, like amputations when one limb or another has begun to putrefy. Then one must cut quickly and without anxious hesitation. Every delay brings danger, and whoever out of pity or fright at the sight of blood stops the operation half way acts more cruelly than the worst fiend. The devil take all the softhearted surgeons and their half measures! Marat was quite right, il faut faire saigner le genre humain, and if he had been granted the 300,000 heads he demanded, millions of better people would not have perished and the world would have been cured of its ancient evil forever!”142 142

Jean-Paul Marat (1744–93), one of the most radical of the French revolutionaries. The quotation ascribed to him, “it is necessary to bleed the human race,” appears to be apocryphal; in his newspaper Marat did hold out the prospect of

“The republic” — I am letting the man talk himself out, while skipping many florid digressions — “the republic must be brought into being. Only the republic can save us. The devil take the so-called constitutional solutions from which our blathering members of the German chambers expect all salvation. Constitutions relate to freedom as positive religions to natural religion: they will cause as much mischief with their stable element as those positive religions, which, having been calculated for a certain spiritual condition of the people, are at first still superior to this spiritual condition, but later on become very burdensome when the spirit of the people has surpassed these rules. The constitutions correspond to a political situation in which the privileged yield some of their rights, and the poor people, who were previously quite disadvantaged, suddenly jubilate that they, too, have acquired rights. But this joy comes to an end as soon as the people, in their more liberated condition, become accessible to the idea of a complete, quite unlimited, quite equal freedom; what today looks like the most magnificent acquisition will seem to our grandchildren a paltry settlement, and the smallest privilege that the former aristocracy still might retain, perhaps the right of ornamenting their coats with parsley, will then arouse as much bitterness as the harshest serfdom did in the past, indeed, a still deeper bitterness, since the aristocracy will all the more arrogantly flaunt their final parsley privilege! Only natural religion, only the republic can save us. But the last remnants of the old regime must be destroyed before we can think about founding a new, better regimen. Then the idle weaklings and quietists come sniffling that we revolutionaries are tearing everything down without being capable of putting something in its place! And they praise the institutions of the Middle Ages in which mankind had reposed so securely and peacefully. And now, they say, everything is so barren and dull and desolate and life is full of doubt and indifference. “I used to be enraged by these extollers of the Middle Ages. But I have got used to their song and get annoyed only when the dear singers get into another key and continually bemoan that we tear things down. We are said to have nothing in mind other than tearing down everything. And how stupid this accusation is! You can’t build until the old building is demolished and the wrecker deserves as much praise as the builder, indeed even more, for his job is much more important. For example, in my home town there stood on Trinity Square an old church that was so rotted and dilapidated that people were afraid someone would suddenly be

500,000 heads by the end of 1791, but added that inundating France with blood would not make it more free.

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143

killed or maimed by its collapse. They tore it down and the wreckers prevented a great misfortune, while the former constructors of the church had promoted only good fortune. And one can more easily do without good fortune than suffer a great misfortune! It is true, much devout splendor used to flourish in the old walls, and later they were a pious relic of the Middle Ages, quite poetic to contemplate at night, in the moonlight. But anyone like my poor cousin, who, as he was passing by, was hit in the head by some stones from these surviving Middle Ages (he bled for a long time and is still suffering from the wound!) will curse the admirers of old buildings and bless the brave workmen who tear down such dangerous ruins. Yes, they tore it down, they razed it to the ground, and now green trees grow there and little children play there at noon in the sunlight.” In such speeches there was no trace of the former harmlessness, and the man’s humor, in which all good-natured cheerfulness had been extinguished, sometimes got bitter as gall, bloodthirsty, and very dry. His skipping from one topic to another no longer arose from a mad mood but from a moody madness, and was probably to be ascribed to the variety of newspapers with which Börne at that time occupied himself day and night. In the middle of one of his terroristic expectorations he suddenly reached for one of the daily papers that lay strewn in front of him in great heaps and cried, laughing: “Here you can read it, here it’s printed: ‘Germany is pregnant with great things!’ Yes, that’s true, Germany is pregnant with great things, but it will be a hard birth. And here there’s a need for a manly obstetrician, and he will need to operate with iron instruments. What do you think?” “I don’t think Germany is pregnant at all.” “No, no, you are mistaken. Maybe a freak will come into the world, but Germany will give birth. Only we must get rid of the gabby old women who push their way in and offer their services as midwives. There is, for example, this old hag von Rotteck.144 This old woman is not even an honorable man. A miserable writer who puts out a little liberal demagoguery and exploits the enthusiasm of the day to win over the multitude in order to find a market for his bad books and generally make himself important. He is half fox, half dog, and wraps himself in a wolf’s pelt in 143

There is no Trinity Square in Frankfurt. Heine (as Börne) may be thinking of a thirteenth-century Carmelite church that was torn down in 1786. In its place was eventually built St. Paul’s Church, where the revolutionary parliament met in 1848. 144

Karl von Rotteck (1775–1840), a prominent liberal politician in Baden. Börne had a friendlier attitude toward him than is suggested here, but did grow impatient with his moderation.

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order to howl with the wolves. I still prefer a thousand times more the stupid fellow von Raumer — I am just reading his Letters from Paris — he is all dog, and when he growls like a liberal he doesn’t fool anyone and 145 everyone knows he is a servile poodle who bites no one. He constantly runs around sniffing in all the kitchens and would like sometime to stick his snout in our soup but fears being kicked by his high patrons. And they 146 really do kick him and take the poor animal to be a revolutionary. Good heavens, he only demands a little tail-wagging freedom, and if they allow him this, he will gratefully lick the golden spurs of the Pomeranian knighthood. Nothing is more diverting than such tireless movement along with his tireless patience. This appears nicely in those letters in which the poor running dog himself tells on every page how he calmly stood in line in front of the Parisian theaters. I assure you, he stood calmly in line with the rank and file and is simple-minded enough to tell it on himself. But what even more strongly evinces his meanness of soul is the admission that, when he left the theater before the end of the performance, he always sold his readmission ticket. It is true that, as a foreigner, he was not expected to know that such a sale demeans a decent person; but he would merely have needed to look at the people to whom he peddled his leaving-ticket in order to figure out for himself that they are only the dregs of society, thieving rabble and pimps, in short, people with whom a decent man does not like to speak, much less do business. A man must be very dirty to take money from these dirty hands!” So that people will not suppose that I agree with Börne in his judgment on Herr Professor Friedrich von Raumer, I will remark to his advantage that, while I do think him dirty, I do not think he is stupid. The word dirty, as I also want expressly to remark, need not be taken here in the material sense. Madame Professor would otherwise scream bloody murder and have all her laundry lists printed recording how many clean undershirts and chemisettes her dear little husband had put on in the course of the year, and I am convinced that their number is large, as Herr Professor Raumer runs around so much in the course of the year and con145

Friedrich von Raumer (1781–1873), a historian and political scientist whose lectures Heine had heard in Berlin. A moderate liberal, he published Briefe aus Paris und Frankreich im Jahre 1830 (Letters from Paris and France in 1830, 1831). Börne became more critical of him than of Rotteck, not only for his moderation, but also for anti-Semitic remarks Raumer made about the allegedly Jewish opposition in Paris (LB, 3: 890). 146 Raumer had been obliged to resign from the Prussian censorship commission on account of a book he had written on Poland. Börne bitterly criticized him for having had anything to do with the censorship to begin with and claimed that he had resigned only out of injured vanity at the ban on advertising his book (LB, 3: 434–35, 519).

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sequently sweats and consequently needs much linen. For precooked fame does not come flying into his house; rather he must be continuously on his feet in order to find it, and when he writes a book, he must run constantly from pillar to post in order to get his thoughts together and finally to see to it that the laboriously patched-together opus is also supported by his literary claque. The nimble little candy-flavored man is quite unique in this busyness, and a clever woman once remarked not unjustly: “his writing is actually running.” Wherever there is something to be managed, there it is, the little Raumer thing from Anhalt-Dessau. Recently he ran to London; before that he was seen running back and forth everywhere for three months to get the necessary letters of recommendation, and after he had sniffed around in English society awhile and run a book together, he also ran down a publisher for the English translation, and Sara Austin, my amiable friend, is obliged to supply her pen to translate his sour, blotting-paper German into fine vellum English and to urge her friends to review the translated product in the various English journals.147 And then Brockhaus in Leipzig has these run-up English reviews trans148 lated back into German as English Opinions on Fr. v. Raumer! I repeat that I do not agree with Börne’s judgment on Mr. von Raumer; he is a dirty fellow but not a stupid one as Börne thought, who, perhaps because he had also published Letters from Paris, so sharply criticized his rival and at every opportunity poured the caustic of his most malicious scorn over him. Yes, don’t laugh; Mr. von Raumer was at that time a rival of Börne, whose Letters from Paris appeared almost simultaneously with the abovementioned letters in which it, the little Raumer thing, corresponded from Paris with Madame Crelinger and her husband.149 These letters are long since forgotten, and we recall only the amusing impression they made when they appeared on the literary market almost simultaneously with Börne’s Parisian letters. Concerning the latter, I confess that the first two volumes, which I got to see at that period, terrified me not a little. I was surprised by this ultraradical tone, which I had least 147 Sarah Austin (1793–1867), a prominent translator of German texts, including Heine’s, published her translation of Raumer’s book, England in 1835, in 1836. Austin and her daughter, Lucie Duff Gordon (1821–69), maintained a long and cordial friendship with Heine. 148 A volume of German translations, Kritiken des Werkes von Friedrich von Raumer: England im Jahre 1835 aus der Morning Chronicle, den Times, dem Dublin Review, Foreign quarterly Review und Edinburgh Review, was published in Leipzig in 1837. 149 Auguste Crelinger (1795–1865), for many years a star actress at the Berlin Court Theater, and her husband Otto.

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expected from Börne. The man who, in his decent, dapper manner of writing, always examined and controlled himself, and who weighed and measured every syllable before writing it down, the man who always retained in his style something of the philistine habits of his Imperial city, if indeed not the anxieties of his earlier office, the one-time police actuary of 150 Frankfurt on the Main now plunged himself into a sans-culottism of thought and expression such as had never before been experienced in Germany. Heavens! What shocking word formations! What hightreasonable verbs! What lese-majestic accusatives! What imperatives! What illegal question marks! What metaphors, the very shadow of which entitled one to twenty years of fortress imprisonment! But despite the fright these letters gave me, they aroused in me a memory of a very comical kind that amused me almost to laughter and that I cannot suppress here. I confess that the whole phenomenon of Börne as it appeared in those letters reminded me of the old constable who, when I was a little boy, ruled in my home town. I say ruled, because, when administering the peace with unlimited caning, he inspired in us little fellows a quite majestic respect and scattered us with a mere glance when we played our games too noisily in the street. This constable suddenly went mad and imagined that he was a little street urchin, and, to our weirdest amazement, we saw him, the all-powerful master of the streets, instead of establishing order, instigating us to the loudest misbehavior. “You are much too tame,” he cried, “but I’ll show you how to kick up a row!” And so he began to roar like a lion or meow like a cat, and he rang at the houses so that the door bells were torn off, and he threw stones, rattling the windowpanes, always shouting: “I’ll teach you boys how to kick up a row!” We little fellows were very amused by the old man and ran after him joyously until they took him to the madhouse. While reading Börne’s letters I really kept thinking of the old constable, and I often felt as though I was hearing his voice again: “I’ll teach you how to kick up a row!” In Börne’s conversations the escalation of his political madness was less noticeable because it remained in connection with the passions that raged in his immediate environment, constantly ready to strike a blow, as they not infrequently really did. When I visited Börne for the second time in the Rue de Provence, where he had definitively quartered himself, I found in his salon a menagerie of people such as one might hardly find in the Jardin des Plantes.151 Crouching in the background were some German polar bears smoking tobacco, who almost always remained silent and 150

Börne was employed as a police actuary in Frankfurt from 1811 until 1815, when the restoration of Jewish disabilities forced his dismissal. 151

The Paris zoological garden.

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only now and then cursed out a few thundering patriotic words in the deepest rumbling bass. Next to them squatted also a Polish wolf wearing a red cap, who now and again howled the most cloyingly insipid remarks with a hoarse throat. Then I found there a French monkey who belonged to the ugliest I have ever seen; he constantly made faces so that one might choose the handsomest of them. The most insignificant creature in that Börnean menagerie was a Mr. ,, the son of the old ,, a wine dealer in 152 Frankfurt am Main, who surely begat him in a dull moment: a tall, gaunt figure who looked like the shadow of an eau de Cologne bottle but smelled nothing like the contents of one. Despite his thin appearance, he wore, as Börne claimed, twelve woolen vests, for without them he would not exist at all. Börne constantly made fun of him: “I here present you a ,, it is, to be sure, no , of the first magnitude, but he is nevertheless related to the sun, he gets his light from it; he is a 153 submissive relative of Mr. von Rothschild. Imagine, Mr. ,, in a dream last night I saw the Frankfurt Rothschild hanging, and it was you who had put the noose around his neck.” Mr. , was frightened at these words and, as though in mortal fear, he cried: “Mr. Bayrnah, I beg you, don’t say that to anyone else. I have riz154 zons.” “I have rizzons,” the young man repeated several times, and, turning to me, he asked me in a low voice to follow him into a corner of the room in order to confide in me his delicate “positiaun.” “You see,” he whispered furtively, “I have a delicate positiaun. On the one hand, Madame Wohl on the Wollgraben is my aunt and, on the other hand, the 155 wife of Mr. von Rothschild is also, so to speak, my aunt. I beg you, don’t tell them in the house of Baron von Rothschild that you have seen me here at Bayrnah’s. I have rizzons.” Börne constantly made fun of this unfortunate man and ragged him particularly about the mumbling and gabbling way he pronounced French. “My dear countryman,” he said, “the French are wrong to laugh at you; they only expose their ignorance. If they knew German, they would see how correctly your expressions are constructed, namely, from the German point of view. And why should you deny your nationality? 152

The star, Stern in German, stands for Siegmund Jakob Stern (1809–72), a nephew of Jeanette Wohl and son of the wine dealer and banker Jakob Samuel Hayum Stern (1780–1833). 153 Stern was also a nephew of Salomon Mayer von Rothschild (1774–1855), head of the Vienna house. 154

The wordplay seems unrecoverable in English. With his Yiddish accent, Stern pronounces Gründe (reasons) as Grind, meaning scurf or ringworm, suggesting radical uncleanliness. 155

Caroline Stern (1782–1854) married Salomon Rothschild in 1800.

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I even admire the dexterity with which you translate your mother tongue, the yiddling of Frankfurt, into French. The French are an ignorant people and will never succeed in learning German properly. They have no patience. We Germans are the most patient and most teachable people. How much we must learn even as boys! How much Latin! How much Greek, how many Persian kings and their whole family up to the grandfather! I’ll bet such an ignorant Frenchman doesn’t know even in his old age that Cyrus’s mother was called Madame Mandane and was née Astyges.156 And we also have the best manuals for all branches of learning. Neander’s church history and Meyer Hirsch’s calculation book are clas157 sic. We are a thinking people and because we have so many thoughts that we can’t write them all down, we invented printing, and because sometimes doing nothing but thinking and writing books left us without a crust of bread, we invented the potato.” “The German people,” rumbled the German patriot from his corner, 158 “also invented gunpowder.” Börne turned quickly toward the patriot who had interrupted him with this remark and spoke, smiling sarcastically: “You are mistaken, my friend, one can’t really claim that the German people invented gunpowder. The Germans people numbers thirty million. Only one of them invented gunpowder; the remaining 29,999,999 Germans didn’t invent gunpowder. Incidentally, gunpowder is a good invention, just like printing, when the right use is made of it. We Germans, however, use the press to spread stupidity and gunpowder to spread slavery.” Conceding the point after he had been admonished for this mistaken claim, Börne continued: “All right, I will admit that the German press does very much that is good, but it is outweighed by the harmful printed stuff. In any case you must grant me this in regard to civil freedom. Oh! when I go through the whole of German history, I observe that the Ger156

Cyrus, king of Persia, was said to be the son of Mandane, daughter of Astyges, king of the Medes. 157 Johann August Wilhelm Neander (1789–1850), professor in Berlin, Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche (General History of the Christian Religion and Church, ten volumes, 1825–45); Meyer Hirsch (1765–1851), Sammlung von Beispielen, Formeln und Aufgaben aus der Buchstabenrechnung und Algebra (Collection of Examples, Formulas, and Problems from Alphabetical Calculation and Algebra, 1804). It is probably no accident that both men were of Jewish origin. Neander, born David Mendel, named himself in Greek a “new man” upon his baptism. 158 That the Germans invented gunpowder was one of Heine’s reiterated conceits. Among the many claimants to this invention is a fourteenth-century German monk, Berthold Schwarz. Heine paired his black (schwarz) art to the black art of printing as tokens of the Germans’ still unused revolutionary potential.

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mans have little talent for civil freedom, but, on the contrary, always learned servitude easily, in theory as well as in practice, and successfully taught this discipline not merely at home but also abroad. The Germans 159 were always the ludi magistri of slavery, and wherever blind obedience was to be beaten into bodies or minds they took a German drillmaster. We have also spread slavery over all Europe, and as monuments of this deluge German princely families sit on all the European thrones, just as after the ancient floods the remains of fossilized sea monsters are found on the highest mountains. And now, hardly does a nation become free but a German whipping is laid on its back, and even in the sacred homeland of Harmodios and Aristogeiton,160 in liberated Greece, German servility is being introduced and on the Acropolis of Athens Bavarian beer is 161 flowing and the Bavarian rod is ruling. Yes, it is terrible that the king of 162 Bavaria, this little tyrant and bad poet, is allowed to set his son on the throne of the land where freedom and the art of poesy once flourished, where there is a plain called Marathon and a mountain called Parnassus! I can’t think about it without my brain shuddering. As I read in today’s paper, once again three students in Munich have had to kneel before King 163 Ludwig’s portrait and apologize. Kneeling before the portrait of a man who, on top of everything, is a bad poet! If I had him in my power, this bad poet should kneel before the portrait of the muses and apologize for his bad verses, for the offended majesty of poesy! Don’t tell me any more about the Roman emperors who executed so many thousands of Christians because they didn’t want to kneel before their portraits. Those tyrants were at least masters of the whole world, from sunrise to sunset, and, as we can see from their statues, if they were not gods, they were nevertheless handsome men. In the last analysis one bows easily before power and beauty. But to kneel before impotence and ugliness!” The sharp-witted reader will need no particular hint from me why I do not let the reprobate go on. I believe the quoted phrases are sufficient to indicate the man’s mood at that time; it was in agreement with the hot-headed activity of those German brawlers who came to Paris in wild swarms after the July Revolution and immediately gathered around 159

Masters of the game.

160

Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who attempted to assassinate the tyrants Hippius and Hipparchus, were long revered in Athens as champions of liberty. 161 After the disorders following upon Greek independence from Turkey, Otto (1815–67), son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786–1868), was made king of Greece by international treaty in 1832. His reign was to be fairly disastrous. 162 Ludwig I had artistic and literary ambitions; he published a good deal of verse, at which Heine scoffed. 163

A legal punishment in Bavaria for second-degree demagoguery.

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Börne. It is hardly to be believed how such a head, otherwise so wise, could be cajoled by the crudest frenzy and misled into the most violent hopes! At first he got into the circle of that madness when the center of it 164 was supposed to be the book dealer F. This F., it is hard to believe, was a man quite after Börne’s own heart. The red rage that boiled in the one’s breast, the three-day July fever that shook the one’s limbs, the Jacobin St. Vitus’s dance in which the one revolved, found a corresponding expression in the Parisian letters of the other. But with this remark I want to suggest only a mental error, not an error of the heart, with the one or with the other. For F., too, meant well by the German fatherland, he was upright, heroic, capable of any self-sacrifice, an honest man at any rate, and I believe myself obliged to such a testimonial because, since he has had to remain silent in close imprisonment, servile slander has been gnawing at his reputation.165 He can be reproached with many an unwise action, but with no ambiguous one, for he showed a great deal of character in misfortune, he was aglow with the purest civic virtue, and we must bind a wreath of oak leaves around the fool’s cap that jingles about his head. The noble fool, I preferred him a thousand times to that other book dealer who also came to Paris in order to arrange for a German translation of the French revolution, that subtle sneak who whines listlessly and philanthropically and looks like a hyena who has been seized for arrest.166 Incidentally, the latter was praised as an honorable man who would even pay his debts if he won the big prize in the lottery and because of such honorable merits he has been proposed as finance minister of the restored German Empire. Confidentially, he had to make do with the finance position because F. had already awarded the post of minister 167 of the interior to Garnier, as he had already granted the German impe168 rial crown to Captain S.

164

Friedrich Gottlieb Franckh (1807–45), who had been a book dealer in Stuttgart, came to Paris in the spring of 1831 to encourage revolutionary activity among the Germans there. Börne initially thought well of him but later found him too radical; Heine avoided him. 165

Franckh was arrested after the attack on the Frankfurt Guard Headquarters in 1833 (see above, n. 27) and was held in the notorious Württemberg fortress prison on the Hohenasperg until 1842. 166

Not certainly identified.

167

Joseph Heinrich Garnier (b. 1800), a republican activist among the Germans in Paris, who, upon returning to southwest Germany, was involved in underground publishing and oppositional conspiracies. In 1834 he fled to London, where he

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However, Garnier declared that the book dealer F. wanted to make Captain S. German emperor because this lout owed him money and he wouldn’t be able to get his money in any other way. But that is untrue and only shows Garnier’s maliciousness; perhaps F. appointed the worst person emperor out of republican guile in order to demean monarchy and make it ridiculous. Meanwhile F.’s influence had come to an end when he left Paris, I believe, in November, and in place of the great agitator a number of new chiefs rose up; among these the most important were the abovementioned Garnier and a certain Wolfrum.169 It is permissible for me to name them, as the one is dead and the reference to the previous importance of the other, who is safely in England, will be a great favor to him; both of them, however, Garnier partly and Wolfrum totally, drew their inspiration from the mouth of Börne, who from then on was to be regarded as the soul of the Parisian propaganda. The madness remained the same, 170 but, as Polonius said, there was method in it. I have just used the word “propaganda”; but I use it in another sense than certain informers who understand by that term a secret brotherhood, a conspiracy of revolutionaries in all Europe, a kind of bloodthirsty, atheistic, and regicide Freemasonry. No, that Parisian propaganda consisted of rough hands rather than fine heads; there were meetings of German-speaking artisans who gathered in a great hall in the Passage Saumon or in the faubourgs, probably primarily to converse with one another in the dear language of the homeland about patriotic matters. Here many minds were fanaticized by passionate speeches along the line of the Rhenish Bavarian Tribune,171 and since republicanism is such a straightfounded a German periodical, editing it for some years. It is not known what became of him after that. 168 Ludwig Friedrich Seybold (ca. 1783–1843), a former French and Württemberg army officer, sentenced to seven months of fortress imprisonment for his Erinnerungen aus Paris 1831 (Memoirs from Paris in 1831, 1832). 169

Hermann Wolfrum (1812–34), head of the Paris branch of the Press and Fatherland Society. He attempted to organize opposition in southwest Germany but was expelled to Paris, where he died of tuberculosis. Heine allowed himself to be elected to the board of the Society but had little to do with it, as in general he disliked such organized activity. 170

Hamlet 2: 2.

171

The Deutsche Tribüne (German Tribune), founded in Munich in 1831, moved in the following year to the Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate in an effort to escape the censorship, but it was banned anyway. It was edited by Johann Georg Wirth (1798–1848), the most persistent German fighter for freedom of the press. It was Wirth who had called for the founding of the Press and Fatherland Society.

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forward matter and easier to understand than, say, the constitutional form of government, which presumes various kinds of knowledge, so it was not long before thousands of German journeymen artisans became republicans and preached their new convictions. This propaganda was much more dangerous than the trumped-up bogies with which the abovementioned informers terrified our German governments, and perhaps much more powerful than Börne’s written speeches was Börne’s spoken word, which he directed to people who absorbed it with German faith and spread it around the homeland with apostolic zeal. The number of German artisans who at one time or another go journeying to France is enormously large.172 Therefore when I read that, to the amusement of North German papers, Börne had gone up to Montmartre with six hundred journeymen tailors in order to preach them a Sermon on the Mount, I had to shrug my shoulders out of pity, but least of all for Börne, who was sowing a seed that sooner or later must bring forth the most frightful fruits. He spoke very well, succinctly, persuasively, popularly; naked, artless speech, quite in the Sermon on the Mount tone. To be sure, I heard him speak only once, in the Passage Saumon, where Garnier presided over the “popular assembly.”173 Börne spoke about the Press Society needing to be careful about acquiring an aristocratic form; Garnier thundered 174 against Nicholas, the tsar of Russia; a deformed, bow-legged journeyman tailor took the floor and declared that all men are equal. I was not a little annoyed at this impertinence. It was the first and last time that I attended the popular assembly. But this one time was also sufficient. In this connection I will make a confession to you, dear reader, that you are not expecting. Perhaps you think that the greatest ambition of my life was to become a great poet, perhaps even to be made laureate on the Capitol like Messer Francesco Petrarcha in his time.175 No, it was rather the great popular speakers I always envied, and for my life I would have liked to raise in front of a motley crowd in the public marketplace the great word that stirs or calms the passions and always brings forth an immediate effect. Yes, just between ourselves, I willingly admit to you that in that time of inexperienced youth when one is beset by histrionic desires I often imagined myself in 172

The total number of Germans, mainly artisans and workers, in Paris during the July Monarchy is uncertain but has been estimated at around 60,000; it may have been larger. In 1835 the German Confederation forbade artisans to journey to France, but apparently without much effect. 173 Possibly on February 27, 1832. 174

Nikolai I (1796–1855), tsar from 1825.

175

Petrarch (1304–74) was crowned poet laureate on the Capitol in Rome in 1341.

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such a role. I absolutely wanted to become a great orator and, like Demosthenes, I sometimes declaimed on the lonely seashore when the wind and the waves roared and howled; this is the way one exercises one’s lungs and gets used to speaking in the noisiest popular assembly. I not seldom spoke in an open field before a large number of oxen and cows, and I succeeded in outbellowing the assembled crowd of cattle. It is still harder to give a speech to sheep. Whatever you say to these sheepheads, when you urge them to liberate themselves, not to walk patiently to the slaughtering block like their forebears, they answer you after every sentence with such an unshakably placid baa! baa! that one could lose one’s composure.176 In short, for the event that a revolution should be staged among us, I did everything to be able to appear as a German popular speaker. But alas! even at the first try I saw that I could never perform my favorite role in such a play. And if they were living today, neither 177 Demosthenes, nor Cicero, nor Mirabeau could appear as a speaker in a German revolution: for in a German revolution there is smoking. Imagine my shock: when I attended the above-mentioned popular assembly in Paris, I found all the saviors of the fatherland with tobacco pipes in their mouths, and the whole hall was so filled with the fumes of bad tobacco that they immediately got into my lungs and it was flatly impossible for me to speak a word. I cannot stand tobacco fumes and I realized that, in a German revolution, the role of a grand speaker in the manner of Börne and company did not suit me. In general, I realized that the career of a German tribune was not strewn with roses and least of all with spotless roses. Thus, for example, you have to shake hands quite firmly with all these listeners, “dear brothers and mates.” It was perhaps meant metaphorically when Börne declared that if a king were to shake his hand, he would purify it afterward in the fire;178 but I mean it not figuratively but quite literally that, were the people to shake my hand, I would wash it afterwards. In real revolutionary times it is necessary to have seen the people with your own eyes, smelled them with your own nose, to have heard with your own ears what this sovereign rats’ nest has to say, in order to grasp what Mirabeau implies with the words: you don’t make a revolution with

176 It is a little difficult to capture the wordplay in this passage. Rindvieh (cattle) is a word commonly used for a dimwitted fool, and Schafskopf (sheephead) for a numskull. 177 Honoré-Gabriel-Victor Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749–91), prominent orator during the French Revolution. 178

Letter from Paris, December 11, 1830 (LB, 3: 83).

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179

lavender oil. As long as we read about revolutions in books, everything looks very nice, and it is like those landscapes, ornately engraved on white vellum paper, that look so pure, so inviting, but when you observe them in natura, they may gain in grandiosity but make a very dirty and shabby impression in details; copper-engraved dunghills do not smell and it is easy to wade through a copper-engraved swamp with one’s eyes. Was it virtue or madness that induced Börne to breathe in the worst fetid aromas with pleasure and wallow happily in the plebeian muck? Who will solve for us the riddle of this man, who was raised in softest silk, later evinced his inner refinement in proud touches, yet toward the end of his days suddenly went off his head in vulgar tones and in the banal manners of a demagogue of the lowest rank? Was it that the plight of the fatherland goaded him into the most dreadful degree of rage or was he seized with the ghastly pain of a misspent life? Yes, maybe that was it; he saw that, through his whole life, with all his intelligence and all his moderation, he had achieved nothing, neither for himself nor for others, and he shrouded his head, or, to put it in a bourgeois way, he pulled his cap over his ears, no longer wanted to see or hear anything, and plunged into the howling abyss. That is always a solution that remains to us when we have arrived at those hopeless limits where all the flowers are wilted, where the body is tired and the soul morose. I will not promise that one day I shall not do the same thing under the same circumstances. Who knows, perhaps at the end of my days I shall overcome my aversion to tobacco fumes and learn to smoke and give the most unwashed speeches before the most unwashed public. Leafing through Börne’s Parisian letters, I recently ran across a passage that fits most remarkably with the expressions that I have just let slip. It reads as follows: “Perhaps you ask me with surprise how such a lout as I comes to set himself beside Byron. In that connection I must tell you something you do not know. When Byron’s genius in its journey through the firmament came to rest on earth one night, it visited me first. But it did not like the house at all, hurried away, and lodged in the Hotel Byron. That pained me for many years, it grieved me for a long time that I had amounted to 179 The familiar quotation is possibly apocryphal; a memoir of Jean-François Marmontel (1723–99) quotes Mirabeau to the effect that one does not make revolutions with rose-water. In Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany, a Winter’s Tale), Caput 26, Heine ascribed the thought to the radical Louis de Saint-Just (1767–94): “You can’t cure grave ills of society / With musk and attar of roses” (DHA, 4: 153; D, 532). In Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany), Heine remarked similarly of Luther’s crudeness that one does not make a religious revolution with orange blossoms (DHA, 8/1: 40HH).

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so little, achieved nothing at all. But now it has gone by, I have forgotten it, and live satisfied with my poverty. My misfortune is that I was born into the middle class, into which I do not fit at all. If my father had been the possessor of millions or a beggar, if I had been the son of a distinguished man or a vagabond, I would certainly have made something of myself. That others were half way ahead of me by birth discouraged me; if they had been ahead of me the whole way, I would never have seen them and would have caught them. But, as it is, I am the pendulum of a bourgeois parlor clock, swinging to the right, swinging to the left, and always returning to the middle.” Börne wrote this on March 20, 1831.180 He prophesied as poorly about himself as he did about others. The bourgeois parlor clock became an alarm bell whose ringing spread fear and terror. I have already shown what impetuous bell ringers were pulling at the ropes; I have indicated how Börne served as an organ for contemporary passions and that his writings must be regarded not as the products of an individual but as a document of our political storm-and-stress period. What particularly made themselves felt in that period and intensified the ferment to a steaming boil were the Polish and Rhenish Bavarian affairs,181 and these had the mightiest effect on Börne’s mind. His enthusiasm for the cause of Poland was as ardent as it was one-sided, and when this brave land was defeated despite the most wonderful courage of its heroes, all the dams of Börne’s patience and reason burst. The monstrous fate of so many noble martyrs of freedom who, after trudging through Germany in long mourning processions, gathered in Paris, was indeed suited to move a nobly feeling heart to its depths. But why need I remind you, dear reader, of these griefs; with your own weeping eyes you saw in Germany the passage of the Poles, and you know how the calm, quiet German people, who endure the miseries of their own country so patiently, were so powerfully shaken with pity and rage by the sight of the unhappy Sarmatians and got so far out of control that we were nearly about to do for those strangers what we would never, ever do for ourselves, namely set aside the most sacred duties of vassalage and make a revolution — for the sake of the Poles.

180

LB, 3: 248–49. Heine’s transcription is verbatim.

181

The Polish uprising of 1830–31, crushed by Russia with Prussian assistance, aroused a great deal of sympathy and support among German liberals and dissidents, not shared to any large extent by Heine. The “Rhenish Bavarian” affair concerned the struggle for freedom of the press in southwest Germany, culminating in a huge political rally at Hambach on May 27, 1832, attended by Börne; see below.

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Yes, more than all the impositions of the authorities and all the demagogic writings, the passage of the Poles revolutionized the German Michel, and it was a great error of the respective German governments to permit that passage in the way they did. The greater error, to be sure, lay in the failure to allow the Poles to remain longer in Germany, for these knights of freedom, had they stayed longer, would have themselves destroyed that alarming, highly dangerous sympathy that they had aroused in the Germans. But they passed rapidly through the land, had no time to discredit one another with poetry and truth, and left the most seditious excitement behind them. Yes, we Germans were nearly about to make a revolution, indeed not out of rage and misery, like other peoples, but out of pity, out of sentimentality, out of compassion for our poor guests, the Poles. Our hearts beat in lust for action when they told us by our firesides how much they had suffered from the Russians, how much misery, how many blows of the knout. We pricked up ears even more sympathetically when we heard of these blows, for a secret foreboding told us that the Russian blows those Poles were already enduring were the same ones we were yet to receive in the future. German mothers threw up their hands in terror when they heard that Emperor Nicholas, the cannibal, ate three little Polish children every morning, quite raw with oil and vinegar. But the most deeply affected were our maidens when they lay on the heroic breasts of the Polish martyrs in the moonlight and lamented and wept with them at the fall of Warsaw and the victory of the Russian barbarians. Those were no frivolous Frenchmen who on such occasions only teased and laughed, no, those lachrymose mustaches also cared something for the heart, they had feeling, and nothing equals the sweet zealousness with which German maidens and women beseeched their fiancés and husbands to make a revolution as quickly as possible — for the sake of the Poles. A revolution is a misfortune, but a still greater misfortune is a failed revolution, and we were threatened with one by the influx of our northern friends, who would have brought into our affairs all the confusion and unreliability that had destroyed them at home. Their intervention would have been all the more ruinous to us because German inexperience was easily led by the advice of that petty Polish shrewdness passing itself off as political insight, and indeed German modesty, suborned by the adroit chivalry characteristic of the Poles, would have entrusted them with the most important leadership positions. In this connection I was not a little worried by the popularity of the Poles. Much has changed since then, and really for the future, for the cause of German freedom at a later time, the popularity of the Poles need not be much feared. Oh no, when one day Germany rouses itself again, and this time will come nevertheless, the Poles will hardly exist by name, they will have been wholly merged with 66

the Russians, and as such we shall meet them again on thundering battlefields, and they will be less dangerous to us as enemies than as friends. The only advantage we owe them is the hatred of the Russians that they have planted in us and that, quietly proliferating in the German heart, will mightily unite us when the great hour strikes, when we shall have to defend ourselves against that terrible giant, still sleeping and growing in his sleep, stretching out his feet far into the aromatic flower gardens of the Orient, hitting his head on the North Pole, dreaming of a new world empire. Germany will one day have to win a struggle with this giant, and for that event it is good that we learned to hate the Russians early on, that this hatred was intensified in us, that all other peoples participate in it. That is a service that the Poles are doing us as they now wander the whole earth as propaganda for hatred of the Russians. Oh, these unfortunate Poles! They themselves will one day be the first victims of our blind rage, they will one day, when the struggle begins, form the Russian avantgarde, and they will then eat the bitter fruit of that hatred they themselves sowed. Is it the will of fate or is it their glorious obtuseness that always condemns the Poles to set themselves the worst traps and finally dig their own graves since the days of Sobieski, who defeated the Turks, Poland’s natural allies, and saved the Austrians — the chivalrous blockhead!182 I have just spoken of the “petty Polish shrewdness.” I believe this expression will not fall victim to misunderstanding; it comes, after all, from the mouth of a man whose heart beat for the Poles at the earliest date and who spoke and suffered for this heroic people long before the Polish 183 revolution. In any case I want to moderate the expression by remarking retrospectively that it here refers to the years 1831 and 1832, when the Poles did not possess even the first elementary knowledge of the great science of freedom and they thought of politics as nothing but a web of cunning and women’s tricks, in short, as a manifestation of that “petty Polish shrewdness” for which they ascribed themselves a quite special talent. These Poles had just emerged from their native Middle Ages and, carrying whole primeval forests of ignorance in their heads, they stormed to Paris, and here they threw themselves either into sections of the republicans or into the sacristies of the Catholic faction, for to be a republican one does not need to know much, and to be a Catholic one does not need to know anything, one needs only to believe. The brightest among 182

Jan Sobieski (1629–96) defeated the Turks in 1673 and in the following year was elected King Jan III; in 1683 he prevented the Turks from besieging Vienna, putting an end to the Turkish threat to Western Europe. 183 Doubtless a reference to Heine’s own early essay, Über Polen (On Poland, 1823).

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them understood revolution only in the form of insurrection, and they never divined that, especially in Germany, little is accomplished by tumult and running around in the streets. The maneuver with which one of their greatest statesmen proceeded against the German governments was as 184 disastrous as it was comical. For he had observed while passing through Germany how a single Pole was sufficient to set a quiet German town in motion, and since he was the most learned Lithuanian and from geography knew exactly that Germany consisted of some thirty states, from time to time he sent a Pole to the capital of one of these states. He, so to speak, placed a Pole on each of those thirty German states as though on a roulette number, probably without much hope of success, but calmly calculating that one Pole is a small loss, but if he really causes an insurrection, my number will win, so maybe a whole revolution will come out of it! I am speaking of 1831 and ‘32. Since then eight years have gone by, and the Poles, just like the heroes of the German tongue, also have had many a bitter but useful experience and some of them have been able to use the terrible leisure of exile for the study of civilization. Misfortune has schooled them earnestly and they have been able to learn something solid. When one day they return to their homelands, they will strew the most beneficial seeds, and, if not their homelands, then surely the world will harvest the fruits of their sowing. The light that they will one day bring home will perhaps spread widely to the farthest Northeast and set the dark pine forests ablaze, so that in the flaming brightness our enemies will look upon and horrify one another. They will then throttle one another in mad, mutual terror and relieve us of the danger of their visit. Providence sometimes trusts the light to the clumsiest hands so that a beneficial fire breaks out in the world. No, Poland is not yet lost.185 Its real life is not concluded with its political existence. Like Israel after the fall of Jerusalem, perhaps after the fall of Warsaw Poland will rise to the highest calling. Deeds may be reserved to this people that the spirit of mankind will rank higher than the victorious battles and the chivalrous rattle of swords along with the hoofbeats of their national past! And even without such late blossoming significance Poland will never be completely lost. It will live forever on the most glorious pages of history!!! After the passage of the Poles I have called the events in Rhenish Bavaria the next lever of ferment in Germany since the July Revolution, 184

Joachim Lelevel (1786–1861), a geographer by profession, who founded the Polish National Committee in Paris; it later became the Polish Democratic Society. 185

The first line of the Polish national anthem.

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causing excitement in Germany and exerting the greatest influence on our countrymen in Paris. The popular assembly here was in the beginning nothing other than a branch office of the Press Association of Zwei186 brücken. One of the most powerful speakers of the Bipontines came 187 here; I never heard him speak in the popular assembly but saw him once by chance in a coffee house where in a high dudgeon he announced the new empire and threatened the moderate traitors, particularly the contributors to the Augsburg General Gazette, with the rope. (I am amazed that I then still had the courage to be active as a contributor to the General Gazette. Now the times are less dangerous. Eight years have gone by since, and the bogyman of those days, the tribune from Zweibrücken, is at this moment one of the most verbose contributors to the General Gazette.)188 The German revolution was supposed to proceed from Rhenish Bavaria. Zweibrücken was the Bethlehem where the young freedom, the saviour, lay in its cradle crying world-redeeming tears. Beside the cradle there roared many a little ox who later, when people were depending on their horns, turned out to be very easy-going cattle. It was believed quite certainly that the German revolution would begin in Zweibrücken and everything there was ready to erupt. But, as I said, the easy-going character of some persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. There was, for example, among the conspiratorial Bipontines a mighty blowhard189 who always raged the loudest, who frothed the most furiously in hatred of tyranny and was supposed to lead with the first deed and cut down a sentry guarding a main post. “What!” cried the man when they gave him this order, “what! You could ask of me such a horrible, such an abominable, such a bloodthirsty act! I, I should kill an innocent sentry? I, a father of a family! And this sentry is perhaps also a father of a family. One father of a family is to murder another father of a family! yes, kill! destroy!”

186

The announced intention to found the Press Association in January 1832 in Zweibrücken in the Bavarian Palatinate led to a ban and the arrest of Johann Wirth, but he was acquitted and the association went public in April. “Zweibrücken” means “two bridges”; thus Heine’s use of the term “Bipontines” in what follows. 187

Henry-Charles-Joseph Savoye (1802–69), a lawyer in Zweibrücken. Both Heine and Börne were acquainted with him. 188 The Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung attempted to cover the whole spectrum of contemporary opinion and therefore was the most important medium of liberal opinion possible under the conditions of censorship. Heine contributed political and cultural articles in 1831–32 and again in 1840–44. 189

Not certainly identified.

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Since Dr. Pistor, one of the Zweibrücken heroes, who told this story, has now departed from the realm of all responsibility, I am probably per190 mitted to name him as my source. He assured me that, on account of the sentimentality of the father of a family, the German revolution was adjourned for the time being. And yet the moment was rather favorable. Only then and during the days of the Hambach festival could a general 191 upheaval have been attempted in Germany with some hope of success. Those Hambach days were the last deadline the goddess of freedom set for us; the stars were favorable; since then every possibility of success has expired. Gathered there were many men of action who burned with earnest purpose and could count on the most certain support. Each one saw that it was the right moment for the great venture and most of them gladly risked happiness and life. Truly, it was not fear that unshackled the word only and restrained the deed. But what was it that stopped the men of Hambach from beginning the revolution? I hardly dare say it, for it sounds unbelievable, but I have the story from an authentic source, namely from a man who is known as a truthloving republican and in Hambach was himself a member of the committee debating the revolution that was to begin.192 He confessed to me in confidence: when the question of competence arose, when they argued whether the patriots present in Hambach were really competent to begin a revolution in the name of all Germany, those who advised quick action were outvoted by the majority, and the decision was: “they were not competent.” 193 Oh Gotham, my fatherland! May Venedey forgive me if I divulge this secret competence story and name him as my informant, but it is the best story I have ever heard on 190

Daniel Ludwig Pistor (1806–86), a Zweibrücken lawyer, fled into exile in Paris. Heine, who disliked him intensely, is apparently referring to the fact that Pistor, after his appeal for amnesty to the king of Bavaria in 1838 had been refused, withdrew from political activity. 191 The meeting of some 25,000 to 30,000 liberals at Hambach in May 1832, initially to agitate for freedom of the press but eventually making republican demands, was the high point of resistance in Germany during the Metternichian era. It became an emblem of revolutionary hopes and their futility. 192

Jakob Venedey (1802–71), on the radical wing at Hambach, where he was arrested: after living in exile in Paris, Le Havre, and London, he became a member of the Frankfurt parliament during the revolution of 1848. Heine’s relations with him, originally good, eventually deteriorated. The report Heine ascribes to him here is roughly correct. 193

In German, Schilda, name of the fictional town of fools found in many cultures. The English village of Gotham, around which tales of foolishness and stupidity began to accumulate in the thirteenth century, is our nearest equivalent.

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this earth. When I think of it I forget all the worries of this earthly vale of tears and perhaps one day, after my death, in the hazy tedium of the realm of the shades, it will serve to cheer me up. Yes, I am convinced that when I tell it there to Proserpina, the peevish spouse of the god of Hell, she will smile, perhaps laugh out loud. Oh Gotham, my fatherland! Is the story not worth being stitched on velvet with golden letters like 194 the poems of the Mu’allaqāt that can be seen in the mosque of Mecca? At any rate I would like to put it into verse and have it set to music so that it can be sung to the big royal babies as a lullaby. You can sleep peacefully, and as a reward for singing you the song calming your fears, you big royal babies, I ask you to open the prison doors of the incarcerated patriots. You have nothing to lose, the German revolution is still far away from you, good things take time, and the question of competence has not yet been decided. Oh Gotham, my fatherland! However that may be, the Hambach festival belongs to the most remarkable events of German history, and if I am to believe Börne, who attended the festival, it was a good omen for the cause of freedom. I had lost sight of Börne for a long time, and I saw him again upon his return from Hambach for the last time in this life.195 We went for a walk together in the Tuileries; he told me much about Hambach, and was still enthusiastic about the exultation of the great popular ceremony. He could not praise enough the unity and decency that prevailed there. It is true, I have heard from other sources that there were no extreme excesses at Hambach at all, neither drunken frenzy nor vulgar crudeness, and the orgy, the carnival delirium, was more in ideas than in action. Many a mad word was spoken aloud in those speeches, some of which later were printed. But the real insanity was only whispered. Börne told me that, while he was talking with Siebenpfeiffer,196 a old farmer came up to him and whispered a few words into his ear, at which he shook his head. “Out of curiosity,” added Börne, “I asked Siebenpfeiffer what the farmer wanted, and he confessed to me that the old farmer had said to him with explicit words: ‘Mr. Siebenpfeiffer, if you want to be king, we will make you one!’” “I was having a good time,” Börne continued; “we were all like blood brothers, shook hands with one another, drank pledges of eternal 194 A pre-Islamic collection of poems. In 1820 Heine had consulted a German translation of 1802 in connection with his Orientalizing drama Almansor. 195

Not strictly true; Heine continued to see him until January 1833, when the breach between them became irreparable. 196 Philipp Jakob Siebenpfeiffer (1789–1845), one of the organizers of the Hambach festival.

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friendship, and I particularly remember an old man with whom I wept for a whole hour, I no longer know why. We Germans are a quite splendid people and not at all as impractical as we used to be. In Hambach we had the loveliest May weather, like milk and roses, and a pretty girl was there who wanted to kiss my hand as though I were an old Capuchin; I did not permit it, and her father and mother ordered her to kiss me on the mouth and assured me that they had read my complete works with pleasure. I was having a good time. My watch was stolen, too. But that pleases me also, that’s good, that gives me hope. We, too, have rogues among us, and that’s good, and we shall therefore succeed all the more easily. There is that cursed fellow Montesquieu who persuaded us that virtue is the principle of republicans,197 and I was already afraid that our party would consist of nothing but honest people and therefore would achieve nothing. It is absolutely necessary that we should have rogues among us just like our enemies. I should have liked to discover the patriot who lifted my watch; when we get to rule I should like to assign him the police and diplomacy. But I’ll get him, the thief. For I will advertise in the Hamburg Correspondent that I will pay the honest finder of my watch the sum of one hundred louis d’or. The watch is worth it, just as a curiosity; for it is the first watch stolen by German freedom. Yes, we too, Germania’s sons, we are awaking from our sleepy honesty — tyrants, tremble, we’re stealing too!”198 Poor Börne could not stop talking about Hambach and the pleasure he had had there. It was as though he sensed that it was the last time he would be in Germany, the last time breathing German air, imbibing German stupidities with thirsty ears. “Oh!” he sighed, “as the wanderer in summer thirsts for a refreshing drink, so I sometimes thirst for those fresh, bracing stupidities such as thrive only on the ground of our fatherland. They are so deep, so sadly funny, that your heart rejoices at them. With the French here stupidities are so dry, so superficial, so rational, that they are altogether intolerable for someone used to something better. I am therefore becoming more peevish and bitter in France by the day and I will die in the end. Exile is a terrible thing. If I should get to heaven some day, I shall certainly feel unhappy there among the angels singing so beautifully and smelling so good, for they don’t speak German and don’t smoke bad tobacco. I only feel good in the fatherland! Love of the fatherland! I laugh at this word in the mouth of people who have never lived in 197

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689– 1755), who stressed republican virtue in numerous places in De l’Esprit des lois (On the Spirit of the Laws, 1748). 198 Börne had told of his stolen watch at the end of Menzel der Franzosenfresser: LB, 3: 983–84.

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exile. They could speak as well of love of oatmeal. Love of oatmeal! In an African desert it has a meaning. If I am ever so fortunate as to return to dear Germany, call me a rascal if I ever write against an author who has lived in exile. If it had not been for the fear of the disgraceful things they make you say in prison, I would never have gone away, would have cheerfully let myself be arrested, like good Wirth and the others, whose fate I predicted, indeed, predicted everything, as I saw it in a dream.” “Yes, that was a crazy dream,” Börne cried suddenly with a loud laugh, and jumping from a morose mood into a gay one, as was his habit, “that was a crazy dream! The tales of the apprentice who had been in America prepared me for it. For he told me that in North American cities you see very large turtles creeping around on whose backs is written in chalk in what restaurant and on what day they are to be consumed as tortoise soup. I don’t know why this story struck me so much, why I thought all day about the poor animals that creep so calmly around the streets of Boston and don’t know that on their backs is written precisely the day and place of their demise. And in the night, imagine, in a dream I see my friends, the German patriots, transformed into nothing but such turtles, calmly creeping around, and on the back of each stands in big letters the place and date when it will be stuck into the damned soup pot. The next day I warned people, though I couldn’t say what I had dreamed, for they would have taken it ill of me that they, the men of the movement, had appeared to me as slow-moving turtles. But exile, exile, that is a terrible thing. Oh, how I envy the French republicans! They suffer, but in their fatherland. Until the moment of death their feet stand on the beloved ground of the fatherland. And especially those French who fight here in Paris and have before their eyes the dear monuments that tell of the great deeds of their fathers and console them and encourage them! Here the stones speak and the trees sing, and such a stone has more sense of honor and preaches God’s word, namely the martyrology of mankind, far more forcefully than all the professors of the historical school in Berlin and Göttingen.199 And these chestnut trees, here in the Tuileries, isn’t it as though they were secretly singing the Marseillaise with their thousand green tongues? Here is sacred ground; here you should remove your

199 The historical school was the name for a legal theory that combated revolutionary and progressive ideas by ascribing greater value to traditions and institutions that had evolved over time. Its advocates were particularly based at the University of Göttingen, where Heine took his law degree; he came to regard them with pronounced hostility.

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200

shoes when walking. Here on the left is the terrace of the Feuillants; there on the right, where the Rue Rivoli goes, the Club of the Jacobins 201 held its meetings. Here before us, in the Tuileries Palace, thundered the Convent, the assembly of Titans, compared with which Bonaparte with 202 his lightning bird appears only as a little Jupiter. Over there we are 203 greeted by the Place Louis XVI, where the great example was made. And between both of them, between the palace and the place of execution, between the Feuillants Club and the Jacobin Club, in the middle, the holy wood, where every tree is a blooming liberty tree. . . .” However, sometimes there are very rotten limbs on these old chestnut trees in the Tuileries gardens, and just at that moment, when Börne was about to complete the above phrase, a limb broke from one of them with a loud crack and, plunging with full force from a considerable height, had nearly crushed us both if we had not quickly jumped aside. Börne, who did not save himself as quickly as I, was struck with a branch of the falling limb, injuring his hand, and he growled in annoyance: “A bad omen!”

200

The factions of the French Revolution were named after their meeting places. The less radical Feuillants were so called because they met in the cloister of Notre Dame des Feuillants, a Bernardine order. 201

The Jacobins, named for the Dominican convent of St. James, constituted the most radical faction; “Jacobin” became a general term for a radical revolutionary, also in Germany. 202

As emperor Napoleon included among his heraldic ornaments an eagle clutching lightning bolts. 203 The square where Louis XVI was executed was so called only for a time during the restoration; in Heine’s time it was called Place de la Concorde, as it is today.

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Book IV

A

nd nevertheless the festival of Hambach registered a great step forward, especially if it is compared with that other festival that took place earlier for the glorification of the common interests of the people, 204 on the Wartburg. Only in externals, in coincidences, are the two mountain celebrations very much alike, by no means in their deeper essence. The spirit articulated in Hambach is fundamentally different from the specter that spooked around on the Wartburg. In the former place, in Hambach, the modern age jubilated in songs of sunrise and drank the pledge of eternal friendship with all mankind, but in the latter place, on the Wartburg, the past croaked its obscure raven song, and in the torchlight stupidities worthy of the most idiotic Middle Ages were said and done! In Hambach French liberalism delivered its most intoxicated Sermons on the Mount, and even if many irrational things were said, still reason itself was recognized as the highest authority that binds and looses and prescribes its laws to the laws; on the Wartburg, by contrast, that narrow Teutomania prevailed, whining a lot about love and faith, but whose love was nothing but hatred of the foreign and whose faith consisted only in unreason and in its ignorance could think of nothing to do but burn books!205 I say ignorance, for in this respect the earlier opposition we know under the name of “the Old Germans” was even more splendid than the more recent opposition, although the latter does not exactly sparkle with learnedness. Particularly the one who suggested the book 204

On October 18, 1817, the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, several hundred German fraternity students gathered on the Wartburg in Thuringia, where Luther had translated the New Testament. Patriotic, in some cases chauvinistic speeches were made demanding German unification. Although Duke Carl August of Weimar had given his permission for the event, he was afterwards obliged by other German rulers to institute a criminal investigation of the professors who had supported it. On the same date two years later, Heine, having just arrived as a student at Bonn, attended a similar event, since banned by the Carlsbad Decrees, with the result that he was interrogated by the university court. The Wartburg festival marked the beginning of spontaneous resistance to the Metternichian system, as the Hambach festival marked an end point. 205

After the main ceremony some students, in memory of Luther’s burning of the papal bull, burned books by authors thought to be unpatriotic, along with conservative symbols such as military insignia, a pigtail, and a corporal’s cane.

burning on the Wartburg was at the same time the most ignorant creature on earth who ever performed gymnastics and edited Old German 206 glosses; truly, this fellow should have thrown Bröder’s Latin grammar 207 into the fire as well. Strange! Despite their ignorance, the so-called Old Germans had borrowed from German “larnedness” a certain pedantry that was as repulsive as it was ridiculous. With what petty finickiness and pickiness they discussed the distinguishing marks of German nationality! Where does the Teuton begin? Where does he end? May a German smoke tobacco? No, claimed the majority. May a German wear gloves? Yes, but only of buffalo hide. (The dirty Massmann wanted to be on the safe side and did not wear any.) But drinking beer is permitted to a German, and he should do it as a genuine son of Germania, for Tacitus speaks quite precisely of German cerevisia.208 In the beer cellar at Göttingen I used to have to admire the thoroughness with which my Old German friends created their proscription lists for the day when they would come to power. Whoever descended in the seventh generation from a Frenchman, Jew, or Slav was to be condemned to exile. Whoever had written the least thing against, 209 say, Jahn or any Old German absurdities could prepare himself for death, specifically death by the ax, not the guillotine, even though this was originally a German invention and already known in the Middle Ages 210 under the name of the “Italian drop.” I remember in this connection that they quite seriously debated whether a certain Berlin writer, who in the first volume of his work had spoken out against the art of gymnastics, should already be put on the above-mentioned proscription list, for the last volume of his book had not yet appeared, and in this last volume the 206

Hans Ferdinand Massmann (1797–1874), who was active among the Turner, the gymnastic movement founded in support of nationalist aspirations, and, as a philologist, annotated medieval German texts. Heine pursued Massmann mercilessly from the time he obtained a Munich professorship for which Heine (quite quixotically) had applied, sending up Massmann’s nationalist enthusiasms by making fun of his Old German garb and insisting that he knew no Latin, naturally a canard. 207 Christian Gottlob Bröder, Practische Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache (Practical Grammar of the Latin Language), first published in 1793 and repeatedly revised since; Heine had used it in school. 208

The Latin word for beer. Tacitus does not use it but clearly refers to beer in De Germania, 23, when he reports that a “liquor for drinking is made out of barley or other grain, and fermented into a certain resemblance to wine.”

209

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), the founder of the Turner movement.

210

Welsche Falle, German term for the Italian mannaia, a forerunner of the guillotine. It was employed in 1268 to execute the teen-aged Konradin, last of the Hohenstaufens, an event long retained in German nationalistic memory.

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author might perhaps say things that would give a quite different signifi211 cance to the incriminated utterances of the first volume. Have these murky fools, the so-called Germanomaniacs, completely disappeared from the scene? No. They have just taken off their black coats, the livery of their madness. Most of them even got rid of their weepy brutal jargon and, disguised in the colors and phrases of liberalism, they were all the more dangerous to the new opposition during the political storm and stress period after the July days. Yes, in the army of the German men of the revolution erstwhile Germanomaniacs were swarming, who babblingly imitated the modern watchword and even sang the Marseillaise while making the most dreadful faces. However, it was a matter of a common fight for a common interest, for the unity of Germany, the only idea of progress that that earlier opposition brought to market. Our defeat is perhaps fortunate. We would have fought loyally beside one another as comrades in arms, we would have been very unified during the battle, even still in the hour of victory, but the next morning a difference would have emerged that would have been irreconcilable and could have been settled only by the ultima ratio populorum,212 namely the Italian drop. To be sure, the short-sighted among the German revolutionaries judged everything by French standards, and they divided themselves into 213 constitutionals and republicans, and Girondists and Montagnards, and according to such divisions they outdid one another in mutual hatred and slander, but the informed knew very well that in the army of German revolutionaries there were only two fundamentally different parties that were not capable of any compromise and were raging secretly toward the bloodiest strife. Which of the two seemed to preponderate? The informed among the liberals did not conceal to one another that their party, which professed the principles of the French doctrine of freedom, was, to be sure, the strongest in numbers, but weaker in zeal and resources. Indeed, those regenerate Germanomaniacs formed the minority, but their fanaticism, which was more of a religious kind, easily surpasses a fanaticism hatched only by rationality; furthermore, they have available those powerful formulas for bewitching the mob, the words “fatherland, Germany, 211

The reference is to Hegel, who in the preface to his Philosophy of Right in 1820 had attacked the then suspended Jena philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773– 1843), a supporter of the student fraternities (and anti-Semitic propagandist). 212

“The final argument of the people,” a play on ultima ratio regum, “the final argument of kings,” namely cannons. 213 The Girondists, whose leaders were deputies from the Department of Gironde, were the moderate republicans during the French Revolution; the Montagnards, so called because they occupied the highest seats in the auditorium, were among the most radical.

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faith of our fathers, etc.” still electrify the muddled masses of the people much more reliably than the words “humanity, cosmopolitanism, rationality of the sons, truth!” I want to suggest with this that those representatives of nationhood were much more deeply rooted in the German ground than the representatives of cosmopolitanism, and that the latter will probably get the short end of the fight with the former if they do not forestall them as swiftly as possible — with the Italian drop. In times of revolution we are left only with the choice of killing or dying. People have no concept of such times if they have not tasted of the fever that agitates them and infuses them with a completely new manner of thinking and feeling. It is impossible to pass judgment on the words and deeds of such times during the dead calm of a period of peace like the present. I do not know to what extent these suggestions will meet with a silent acquiescence. Our successors will perhaps inherit our secret ills and it is our duty to indicate what cure we thought effective. At the same time I have insinuated here to what extent a certain alliance had to obtain between me and those revolutionaries who transferred French Jacobinism onto German conditions. Despite the fact that my political opinions separated me from them in the realm of thought, I would at any time have sided with them on the battlefield of the deed. We had, after all, common enemies and common dangers! To be sure, in their turbid partiality those revolutionaries never understood the positive obligations of this natural alliance. In addition, I had advanced so far beyond them that they no longer saw me and in their shortsightedness thought that I had remained behind. This is neither the place nor the time to go into more detail about the differences that soon had to emerge between me and the German revolutionaries in Paris. Our Ludwig Börne must be regarded as the most important representative of the latter, especially in the last years of his life when, as a consequence of the republican defeats, the two most active agitators, Garnier and Wolfrum, left the scene. The first of these has already been mentioned. He was one of the most vigorous subversives and one must grant him that he possessed all demagogic talents to the highest degree. A person of much intelligence, much knowledge, and great rhetorical skill. But an intriguer. In the storms of a German revolution Garnier would certainly have played a role, but since the play was not performed, things went badly with him. People say he had to flee Paris because his landlord put his life in danger, not by threatening to poison his food, but by refusing to serve him any without cash payment. The other of the two agitators, Wolfrum, was a young man from Bavaria proper, from Hof, if I am not mistaken, who was training 78

here as a clerk in a commercial house, but gave up his job in order to devote all his activity to those emerging ideas of freedom that gripped him, too. He was a good, unselfish person driven by pure enthusiasm, and I consider myself all the more obliged to state this because his memory is still not yet cleansed of a horrible libel. Namely, when he had been expelled from Paris and General Lafayette demanded an explanation in the Chamber from Count d’Argout, then minister of the interior, for this arbitrariness, Count d’Argout blew his long nose and claimed that the expelled man had been an agent of Bavarian Jesuits and the proofs had been found among his papers.214 When Wolfrum, who was staying in Belgium, learned of this vile accusation from the newspapers, he wanted to hurry back here immediately, but because of lack of funds could travel only on foot, and having fallen ill from exhaustion and inner excitement, 215 upon arriving in Paris he had to go to the Hôtel-Dieu; there he died under an alias. Wolfrum and Garnier were always Börne’s loyal followers, but they maintained a certain independence from him and not infrequently drew their inspiration from quite other sources. But after these two disappeared, Börne stepped forward among the revolutionaries directly in person; he no longer dominated through agents of his will but in his own name, and he was not lacking a retinue of limited and overheated heads who did homage to him with blind admiration. Among these faithful supporters he sat in all the majesty of his many-colored silk dressing gown and held court over the great of this earth, and, alongside the tsar of all the Russias it was probably the writer of these pages who was hit the hardest by his Rhadamanthine rage.216 What was only halfway intimated in his writings was most stridently supplemented in his conversation, and the mistrustful pettiness that took hold of him and a certain disgraceful virtue that does not stop even at telling lies for the sacred cause, in short, obtuseness and self-deception, drove the man into the swamps of slander. The reproach in the words “mistrustful pettiness” is meant here to capture less the individual than the whole type, of which Maximilien Robespierre of glorious memory found its most perfect representative. In the end Börne had the greatest similarity with him: in his face, wary mistrust, in his heart, a bloodthirsty sentimentality, in his head dry concepts. Only he had no guillotine available, and he had to resort to words, to mere slandering. This reproach, too, captures more the type; for it is 214

Baron (not Count) Antoine d’Argout (1782–1858) made this accusation in the Chamber of Deputies on January 25, 1834. 215 The oldest hospital in Paris, which had come to serve the poor. 216

Rhadamanthys, son of Zeus and Europa, was made one of the judges of the underworld.

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remarkable: just like the Jesuits, the Jacobins have adopted lying as a permissible weapon of war, perhaps because both were conscious of the highest purposes: the former strove for the cause of God, the latter for the cause of humanity. Therefore we are willing to forgive them their slanders! Might there not have been in the case of Ludwig Börne sometimes a secret envy? He was, after all, human, and while he believed that he was ruining the good name of an adversary only in the interest of the republic, perhaps giving himself at the same time some credit for bringing this sacrifice, he was unconsciously satisfying the secret desires of his own evil side, like Maximilien Robespierre of glorious memory! And it was particularly in connection with me that the dearly departed yielded to such private feelings, and all his assaults were in the end nothing other than the petty envy that the little drum master feels toward the big drum major: he envied me the great feather plume that rejoices so jauntily in the air, my richly embroidered uniform on which there is more silver than he, the little drum master, could pay for with his whole fortune, the dexterity with which I balance the big baton, the glances of love that the young wenches throw me and that I perhaps return with some coquetry!217 Börne’s entourage may also bear much of the blame for the indicated lapses; he was incited by his loyal followers to many a deplorable statement, and what was said orally was still more malevolently pruned and processed for strange private purposes. Despite all his mistrust he was easy to deceive; he never suspected that he was serving quite alien passions and not infrequently even obeying the insinuations of his opponents. People assured me that some of the spies who sniffed around on the account of certain governments knew how to behave so patriotically that Börne fully trusted them, huddling and conspiring with them day and night. And yet he knew that he was surrounded by spies, and he once said to me, “there’s a fellow walking constantly behind me, following me through all the streets, standing in front of all the buildings I go into, and certainly is well paid by some government for it. If I only knew which government, I would write to it to say that I should like to earn the money myself, that I myself would submit a reliable daily report about how I had spent the whole day, with whom I had spoken, where I had gone; yes, I am ready to deliver this report at a much cheaper price, even 217 Börne did admit, in the midst of a catalogue of disparagement, that he envied Heine his youth, “that he has remained young so much longer than I”: to Jeanette Wohl, November 2, 1831, LB, 5: 68. Heine, with his good memory, may have recalled that Börne had called him “the drum major of liberalism” (“le tambour-major du libéralisme,” LB, 2: 896).

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for half the money that this fellow constantly walking behind me gets paid, for after all, I have to run all these errands myself anyway. Perhaps I 218 could make a living from being my own spy.” At that time a great, perhaps the greatest influence was exerted on Börne by the so-called Madame Wohl, an ambiguous lady already mentioned in these pages, of whom one did not certainly know to what designation she was entitled by her relationship with Börne, whether as his lover or merely his wife. Their closest friends long stubbornly insisted that Madame Wohl was secretly married to him and some fine morning would appear in society as Frau Dr. Börne. Others claimed that there was only Platonic love between them such as between Messer Francesko and Madonna Laura,219 and they certainly found a great similarity between Petrarch’s sonnets and Börne’s Parisian letters. For these were addressed, not to an imaginary wraith, but to Madame Wohl, which certainly contributed to their value by bestowing upon them the specific physiognomy and individual character that no art can imitate. If the character not only of the writer but also of the receiver is mirrored in letters, then Madame Wohl is a highly respectable person ardent for freedom and human rights, a creature full of sensibility, full of enthusiasm. And indeed, we must credit this view when we hear with what devotion the lady held to Börne in bitter times, how she dedicated her whole life to him, and how now, after his death, she remains inconsolable, still occupying herself in her loneliness with the deceased. Unquestionably the most intimate affection obtained between the two of them, but while the public was uncertain what sensuous facts might have arisen from it, we were surprised by the sudden news that she had married not Börne but a young businessman from Frankfurt.220 The amazement at this was increased by the fact that the new bride together with her husband came here, took one and the same lodging with Börne, and all three formed a single household. Yes, people said the young husband had only married the lady in order to get closer to Börne, that he had made it a condition that the previous rela218

Heine probably has this jest from one of the most famous of Börne’s satirical essays, Monographie der deutschen Postschnecke (Monograph of the German Mail Snail, 1821), in which he included imaginary spy reports on himself (LB, 1: 639– 67). However, he had already published an offer, in his periodical Zeitschwingen (Vibrations of the Times) of October 2, 1819, to submit reports on himself if he could do so in print (not in LB; cited from Wolfgang Labuhn, Literatur und Öffentlichkeit im Vormärz. Das Beispiel Ludwig Börne [Meisenheim: Hain, 1980], 158). A police spy reported that this suggestion led to the banning of the journal. 219 An allusion to the poems addressed by Petrarch to his unreachable beloved. Börne himself drew this parallel in letters to Jeanette Wohl. 220

Salomon Strauss (1795–1866). See the introduction.

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tionship between the two of them should continue unchanged. As people tell me, he only played the servant in the house, performed only the ruder tasks and became a very useful errand boy for Börne, whose fame he peddled and against whose enemies he railed with spite and venom. Indeed, that husband of Madame Wohl does not belong to the good sort who combine a certain harmlessness with tolerance in marriage and thereby disarm all ridicule. No, he reminds one rather of that bad type 221 mentioned in the Indian stories of Ctesias. For this author reports that in India there are horned asses, and while all other asses have no gall at all, the horned asses have such a superfluity of gall that their flesh tastes quite bitter. I hope no one will misunderstand why I emphasize the above details from Börne’s private life. They are meant only to show that there were quite particular entanglements that obliged me to keep my distance from him. My whole sense of purity of soul rebelled in me at the thought of getting into the least contact with his intimate environment. If I should confess the truth, I saw in Börne’s household an immorality that disgusted me. This confession may sound strange in the mouth of a man who has never joined in the zealot’s clamor of so-called preachers of morals and has been himself sufficiently anathematized by them. Did I really deserve these anathemas? Upon profoundest self-examination I can attest of myself that my thoughts and actions have never been inconsistent with morality, with the morality that is native to my soul, that is perhaps my soul itself, the animating soul of my life. I obey almost passively moral necessity, and therefore make no claim to laurel wreaths and other prizes for virtue. I recently read a book in which it is claimed I had boasted that no Phryne walks the Parisian boulevards whose charms have remained unknown to me.222 God knows from what esteemed scribbler such pretty anecdotes have been repeated, but I can give my assurances to the author of that book that, even in my wildest youth, I have never known a woman if I was not enraptured by her beauty, the carnal revelation of God, or by great passion, that great passion that is equally of a divine kind because it liberates us from all egotistically petty feelings and the vain possessions of 221

Ctesias of Cnidos, a Greek writer of the fourth century B.C.E., De rebus indicis (On India), chapter 26. This must be a memory from Heine’s student days when he was exposed to the Romantic interest in India. The point of the allusion is that a cuckold is said to wear horns.

222 Phryne was a famous Greek courtesan of the fourth century B.C.E. The book was by the liberal writer Hermann Marggraff (1809–64), Deutschlands jüngste Literatur- und Culturepoche. Charakteristiken (Germany’s Most Recent Epoch of Literature and Culture. Characterizations, 1839). Marggraff was one of the early propagators of the invidious comparison of Heine with Börne.

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life, indeed, makes us sacrifice life itself! But in regard to our Ludwig Börne, we may forthrightly declare that it was by no means enthusiasm for beauty that drew him to his Madame Wohl. No more did the relationship of these two persons find its moral justification in a great passion. Had they been governed by a great passion, neither would have hesitated to live together even without the blessing of church and city hall; slight qualms about the world’s head shaking would not have prevented them. And in the end the world is just and forgives the flame, if only the fire is strong and genuine and blazes beautifully and long. Toward a mere flickering flash in the pan the world is hard and derides any half-hearted ardor. The world respects and honors every passion as long as it proves to be a true one and in such a case time generates a certain legitimacy. But Madame Wohl joined herself to Börne under the cloak of marriage with a ridiculous third party, whose bitter flesh she may have occasionally savored while her spirit feasted on the sweet spirit of Börne. Even in this most decent case, even in the case that only her pure, beautiful mind was devoted to her idealistic friend and her not very beautiful and not very cleanly hide to the crude husband, the whole household was based on the dirtiest mendacity, on profaned marriage and hypocrisy, on immorality. The disgust that menaced me from his surroundings when meeting Börne was joined by the distress with which his continuous politicking filled me. Again and again political argument and more argument, even at meals, when he knew how to find me out. At table, where I am so glad to forget the wretchedness of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me with the patriotic gall he gushed over them like a bitter sauce. Calf’s foot à la maître d’hôtel, at that time my harmless favorite food, he ruined for me with bad news from the homeland that he had forked together out of the most unreliable newspapers. And then his cursed remarks that spoiled one’s appetite. Thus, for example, he once crept after me into the restaurant on the Rue Lepelletier, where at that time only political refugees from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Poland dined at midday. Börne, who knew them all, remarked while happily rubbing his hands together that we two were the only ones of the whole company who had not been condemned to death by their respective governments. “But,” he added, “I haven’t given up all hope of getting that far. We shall all be hanged in the end, you just as well as I.” I observed on this occasion that it would indeed be very advantageous for the cause of the German revolution if our governments would proceed somewhat more rapidly and really hang some revolutionaries, so that the others would see that the matter was no joke and everything had to be risked for everything. “You surely want,” Börne interrupted me, “that we will be hanged alphabetically, and then I would be one of the first, already coming in letter B, whether I am to be

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hanged as Börne or Baruch; and it would be a good while before they came to you, deep into H.” That was the table talk that I did not find very refreshing, and I revenged myself by affecting an exaggerated, almost passionate indifference to the objects of Börne’s enthusiasm. For example, Börne was annoyed that, right after my arrival in Paris, I found nothing better to do than to 223 write a long report for German papers on the painting exhibition. I will leave aside whether the interest in art that motivated me to such a task was so incompatible with the revolutionary interests of the day; but Börne saw in it a proof of my indifference to the sacred cause of humanity, and I could for my part spoil his pleasure in his political sauerkraut when at table I talked of nothing but Robert’s Reapers, Horace Vernet’s Judith, 224 Scheffer’s Faust. “What did you do,” he once asked me, “on the first day of your arrival in Paris? What was your first errand?” He surely expected that I would name the Place Louis XV or the Pantheon, the tombs 225 of Rousseau and Voltaire, as my first outing, and he made an odd face when I honestly confessed the truth that immediately upon my arrival I went to the Bibliothèque Royale and had the attendant get out the manu226 script of the Manesse Codex of the minnesingers. And that is true; for years I longed to see with my own eyes the dear pages that have preserved, among others, the poems of Walther von der Vogelweide, the 227 greatest German lyric poet. For Börne this was a further proof of my indifference and he accused me of a contradiction with my political principles. That I never considered it worth the trouble to discuss them with him goes without saying; and when he once thought he had discovered a 223

Heine’s reports on the art salon of 1831 appeared in the Stuttgart Morgenblatt für die gebildeten Stände (Morning Paper for the Educated Classes) in October and November, 1831, and in book form as Französische Maler (French Painters, 1833, dated 1834). 224 Léopold Robert (1794–1835), L’Arrivée des moissonneurs dans les marais Pontins; Horace Vernet (1789–1863), Judith et Holopherne; Ary Scheffer (1795– 1858), Faust dans son cabinet, all works mentioned in Französische Maler. 225

The previously mentioned Place Louis XVI was at first called Place Louis XV during the restoration. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet, 1694–1778) were reburied in the national monument of the Panthéon during the Revolution. 226 The Manesse Manuscript, a fourteenth-century Swiss compilation of poems by 140 German medieval poets, obtained from the Fugger family by the elector Palatine, was sold to Louis XIV of France; it was returned to Heidelberg in 1888, where it remains in the university library. Its stylized illustrations have become familiar in reproductions and on calendars. 227 Walther von der Vogelweide (ca. 1170–ca. 1230), possibly of Austrian origin. The Manesse Manuscript is a main source for his poems.

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contradiction in my writings, I contented myself with the ironic answer: “You are mistaken, my dear; such a thing is never found in my books, for every time before I write it is my habit to read over my political principles in my earlier writings so that I will not contradict myself and one cannot reproach me with falling away from my liberal principles.” But not only at meals, even during my night’s rest Börne inconvenienced me with his political extremism. He once came climbing up to my flat at midnight, wakened me from sweetest sleep, sat down by my bed, and for a whole hour lamented the sufferings of the German people and the infamies of the German governments and how dangerous the Russians were for Germany and how he had determined to save Germany by writing against Tsar Nicholas and against the rulers who so mistreated the people, and against the Federal Diet. And I think he would have gone on this way until morning if I had not suddenly, after a long silence, burst out in the words: “Are you the synagogue caretaker?” I only spoke to him twice after that. Once was at the marriage of a common friend who had chosen us both as witnesses,228 the other time during the walk in the Tuileries that I already mentioned. Soon afterward 229 the third and fourth parts of his Parisian letters appeared, and I not only avoided the merest opportunity for meeting him, I also made him aware that I was deliberately going out of his way, and since that time I encountered him two or three times but never spoke a single word with him. Given his sanguine temperament, this exasperated him to desperation, and he set everything in motion he could think of to approach me in a friendly way or least to get into conversation with me. So I never in my life had an oral dispute with Börne, we never seriously insulted one another; only in his printed discourse did I notice his lurking malice, and it was not injured self-esteem but higher concerns and the loyalty I owe to my thinking and purposes that motivated me to break with a man who wanted to compromise my thoughts and efforts. But such stubborn rejection is not quite my way, and I might have been indulgent enough to speak to Börne again and associate with him, especially as several people dear to me beset me with many pleas and our common friends often got into embarrassing situations with invitations, as I did not accept any unless I was given previous assurances that Mr. Börne was not invited, and, furthermore, my private interests suggested that I not provoke the wrathful man too much with such strict rejections, but with one look at 228

The ophthalmologist Julius Sichel (1802–68), Heine’s and Börne’s personal physician. 229

In January 1833, immediately after the appearance of Heine’s Französische Zustände (Conditions in France) in December 1832, dated 1833. Here Börne began to express his doubts about Heine’s political reliability.

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his entourage, at his faithful followers, at the many-headed, tangle-tailed rats’ nest whose soul he was, disgust kept me from any further contact with Börne. Thus several years went by, three, four years; I lost track of the man in my mind, too; I even took little notice of the articles he wrote against me in French journals and that were so slanderously exploited in honest 230 Germany, until one late fall evening I heard the news that Börne had 231 died. As I am told, he is supposed to have brought his death upon himself by obstinacy, by refusing for a long time to call his physician, the excellent Dr. Sichel. This not merely renowned but also very conscientious physician, who would probably have saved him, came too late when the patient had already applied a terroristic cure to himself and ruined his whole 232 body. Börne had previously studied some medicine and knew just enough of this science as one needs in order to kill. In politics, which he took up later, his knowledge was not much more significant. I did not attend his funeral, which our local correspondents did not neglect to report to Germany and which gave an opportunity for mali233 cious interpretations. But nothing is more foolish than to see in such a circumstance, which could be purely accidental, a harsh hostility. The fools, they do not know that nothing can be more pleasant than to follow the funeral procession of an enemy! I was never Börne’s friend, and I was also never his enemy. The annoyance he could sometimes arouse in me was never significant, and I made him pay for it sufficiently with the cold silence with which I returned all his anathemas and crankiness. During his lifetime I wrote not one line against him, I made no reference to him, I ignored him completely, and that enraged him beyond all measure. 230 Börne wrote a severely critical review of Heine’s De l’Allemagne (On Germany) of 1834 in Le Réformateur in the following spring (LB, 2: 885–903). A lively discussion of the breach between Börne and Heine followed in German periodicals. 231 This slip is inexplicable. Heine will certainly have heard immediately of Börne’s death on February 12, 1837. A week later an acquaintance pointed out to Heine that his absence from Börne’s funeral would not easily be forgiven (HSA, 25: 26). 232 This is quite inaccurate. Börne, who had long suffered from tuberculosis, died in an influenza epidemic. While it is true that he attempted a then fashionable cold water cure, he was continuously under the care of Dr. Sichel during the last three weeks of his life. 233

Börne’s funeral on February 14 was attended by an estimated one thousand mourners and was widely reported in the German press. To be sure, Heine was also suffering from influenza at the time.

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If I speak about him now, I do so truly out of neither enthusiasm nor ill humor; I am conscious, at least, of the coolest impartiality. I am writing here neither an apologia nor a critique, and by describing the man from my own point of view, the monument with which I am providing him might perhaps be regarded as iconic. And he deserves such a monument, the great wrestler who grappled so courageously in the arena of our political games and where he won, if not the laurel, then certainly the oak wreath. We provide his monument with its true features, without idealizing; the greater the resemblance, the more it honors his memory. He was, after all, neither a genius nor a hero; he was no god of Olympus. He was a human being, a citizen of the earth; he was a good writer and a great patriot. By calling Ludwig Börne a good writer and awarding him the plain adjective “good,” I do not wish to magnify or minimize his aesthetic value. In general, as I have already said, I am giving here no more a critique than an apologia of his writings; only my humble opinion may find a place in these pages. I shall try to frame this private judgment as briefly as possible; therefore only a few words on Börne in a purely literary connection. If I were to seek a similar character in literature, there might first come to mind Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, with whom Börne has been very often compared. But this similarity rests only on the inner soundness, the noble purpose, the patriotic passion, and the enthusiasm for humanity. Also the rational cast of mind was the same in both. But here the comparison ends. Lessing was great by reason of that open mind for art and philosophical speculation that Börne completely lacked. There are two men in foreign literature with whom he has a much closer similarity; these men are William Hazlitt and Paul Courier.234 Both are perhaps Börne’s closest literary relations, only that Hazlitt is superior to him in artistic sensibility and Courier can hardly rise to Börne’s humor. A certain esprit is common to all three, although it has a different coloration with each: it is melancholy with Hazlitt, the Briton, where it flashes like sunbeams from thick, English fog banks; it is almost playfully cheerful with the Frenchman Courier, where it fizzes and sizzles like the young wine of the Touraine in the wine press and sometimes boisterously bubbles up; with Börne, the German, it is both, melancholy and cheerful, like the 234 The liberal essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830) substantially influenced Heine’s view of Shakespeare, especially his unorthodox evaluation of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The French classicist Paul-Louis Courier (1772–1825), an opponent of the restoration in France, had been compared with Börne by Jeanette Wohl and others.

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acidic, serious Rhine wine and the mad moonlight of the German homeland. His esprit sometimes becomes humor. This is less the case in Börne’s earlier writings than in his Parisian letters. Here, time, place, and content not merely fostered humor, but actually brought it forth. I mean to say that we owe the humor in his Parisian letters far more to the circumstances of the times than to the talent of the author. The July Revolution, this political earthquake, had exploded relationships in all spheres of life to such an extent, and thrown together the most dissimilar phenomena so variously, that the Parisian correspondent of the revolution needed only to report faithfully what he saw and heard to achieve the highest humor automatically. Just as passion sometimes substitutes for poesy and, for example, love or the fear of death breaks out in inspired words that the true poet cannot invent any better or more beautifully, so the circumstances of the times can sometimes substitute for native humor, and a quite prosaically talented, clever writer provides truly humoristic works by letting his mind faithfully reflect the comical and sorrowful, profane and sacred, grandiose and tiny combinations of a topsyturvy world order. If the mind of such an author is, moreover, itself in an agitated condition, if this mirror is displaced or discolored by his own passion, then wild images will appear that outdo all the products of humoristic genius. Here is the barred grate that separates humor from the madhouse. In Börne’s letters traces of true madness not infrequently appear, and feelings and thoughts grimace at us that would have to be put into the straitjacket or under the shower. In regard to style the Parisian letters are much more estimable than Börne’s earlier writings, where the short sentences, the little dog trot steps, generate an unbearable monotony and betray an almost childish helplessness. These short sentences disappear more and more in the Parisian letters, where the unbridled passion necessarily overflows in broader, fuller rhythms, and colossal, storm-threatening periods roll on, whose construction is beautiful and perfected as though by the highest art. Nevertheless, the Parisian letters can be seen as only a transition stage in regard to style if compared with his last publication, Menzel the FrenchEater. Here his style reaches its highest formation, and here a harmony in both words and thoughts predominates, proclaiming painful but sublime serenity. This publication is a clear lake in which the heavens with all their stars are reflected, and Börne’s mind dives up and down like a beautiful swan, calmly washing away the calumnies with which the mob had befouled his feathers. Indeed, people have rightly called this publication Börne’s swan song. It has become little known in Germany235 and obser235

The book was published in Paris and was immediately banned and confiscated in Germany.

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vations on its contents would certainly be appropriate here. But, since it is written directly against Wolfgang Menzel and I would again have to 236 discuss him thoroughly on this occasion, I would rather say nothing. There is only one comment that I cannot repress here, and it is fortunately of a kind that leads away from personal bitterness and ascribes a general significance, where the worth or worthlessness of individuals no longer comes up, to the strife with Menzel into which Börne as well as the so-called members of the so-called Young Germany got. Perhaps I will even supply a justification of Menzel’s conduct and his apparent apostasy. Yes, he was only apparently apostate, only apparently, for he had never belonged to the party of revolution with his heart and mind. Wolfgang Menzel was one of those Teutomaniacs, those Germanomaniacs, who, after the hot sun of the July Revolution, were forced to take off their Old German coats and turns of phrase, and dress themselves mentally and bodily in modern clothing cut according to the French measure. As I already have shown at the beginning of this book, many of these Teutomaniacs, in order to take part in the general movement and the triumphs of the spirit of the times, forced themselves into our ranks, the ranks of the fighters for the principles of the revolution, and I do not doubt that they would have fought bravely beside us in the common danger. I feared no disloyalty from them during the battle, but after the victory; their old nature, their repressed Teutomania, would have burst out again; they would soon have aroused the crude masses against us with the obscurantist conjuring songs of the Middle Ages, and these conjuring songs, a mixture of age-old superstition and demonic earth spirits, would have been stronger than all arguments of reason. Menzel was the first, who, after the air grew cooler, took his Old German coat off the peg and joyfully vaulted back into the old circle of ideas.237 Truly, with this turn of his a stone fell from my heart, for in his true shape Wolfgang Menzel was much less dangerous than in his liberal disguise; I could have embraced him and kissed him when he again fulminated against the French and berated the Jews and again entered the lists for God and country, for Christianity and German oaks, and was blustering horribly! I confess, as little fear as he aroused in me in this form, the more he had frightened me a few years earlier when he suddenly got into raving enthusiasm for the July Revolution and the French, when he gave 236

In July 1837 Heine had published Ueber den Denunzianten (On the Denouncer), in which he attempted unsuccessfully to be so insulting as to draw Menzel into a duel. See the introduction. 237 The verb is zurückturnte, an allusion to the nationalists’ enthusiasm for gymnastics.

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emotional, generous-spirited, Lafayettish emancipation speeches for the rights of the Jews, when he let loose with views about the fate of the world and mankind, views in which a godlessness was grimacing such as is hardly found among the most determined materialists, views hardly worthy of those animals that nourish themselves with the acorns of the German oak. Then he was dangerous, then, I confess, I trembled before Wolfgang Menzel! Börne in his short-sightedness had never recognized Menzel’s true nature, and since one is much more indignant toward renegades, toward lapsed allies, than against old enemies, his anger blazed most fiercely against Menzel. I published an attack on Menzel at almost the same time, but, as far as I was concerned, quite different motives were involved. The man had never offended me, even his crudest calumnies had not touched any tender spot in my spirit. Anyone who has read my piece will, moreover, see from it that the words were intended less to wound than to provoke, and everything had the purpose of challenging the knight of Germandom onto a field of battle other than the literary one. Menzel in no way satisfied my honest purpose. It is not my fault if the public drew from this all sorts of unpleasant inferences. I had most generously offered him the opportunity to rehabilitate himself in public opinion with a single act of manliness. I risked blood and life. He did not want to. Poor Menzel! I really have no grudge against you! You were not the worst. The others are much more perfidious; they persist longer in their liberal disguise or do not altogether drop their masks. I mean here first of all some Swabian chamber singers of freedom whose liberal trills grow ever fainter and who will soon tune up the old songs of 1813 and 1814 with their old beery bass voices.238 God preserve you for the fatherland! When you sacrificed Menzel, your most intimate ally, just to rescue a shred of your popularity, that was a very contemptible deed. And then credit must be given to Menzel for acknowledging his invectives with a direct, manly signature; he was not an anonymous scribbler and always stood up for himself. After every insult he sprayed on us he kept almost benignly still as though to receive the punishment he deserved. Indeed, he had no lack of printed blows, and his literary back is as full of black stripes as a zebra’s. Poor Menzel! He paid for many another who could not be caught, for the anonymous and pseudonymous brigands who shot their cowardly arrows out of the darkest hiding places of the daily press. How will you punish them? They have no names that you could stigmatize, and even if you could extort from a trembling newspaper editor a couple of empty letters that serve them for names, you 238

On Heine’s quarrel with the Swabian poets, see above, n. 101.

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would not get much further. You will then find that the author of the insolent defamation was none other than that miserable threatening beggar who with all his servile importunity was unable to extort a single sou from you. Or, what is still more bitter, you discover, that on the contrary, a lout who did you out of two hundred francs, to whom you gave a coat to cover his nakedness, but to whom you did not want to give a single written line with which he could parade himself in Germany as your friend and great fellow writer, that it was such a lout who yapped at your good name in the homeland.240 Oh, this riffraff is capable of opposing you with their full names, and then you are really in a pickle! For, if you reply, you lend them a lifelong importance that they know how to exploit, and they find it an honor that you have beaten them with the same stick with which the most famous men have been beaten. To be sure, the best thing would be that they would get their whipping quite unmetaphorically, not with an intangible stick but with a real, material one, as was done to their ancestor Thersites.241 Yes, it was an instructive example you gave us, noble son of Laertes, royal sufferer Odysseus! You, the master of the word, who excelled all mortals in the art of speaking, you knew how to account for yourself to anyone and spoke willingly and victoriously: only on the sticky Thersites you did not want to waste a word, you thought such a gnome not worthy 242 of a reply, and when he abused you, you beat him in silence. 243 When my cousin in Lüneburg reads this, he will perhaps remember the walks we took there, where I gave a groschen to every beggar boy who spoke to us, with the serious advice: “dear fellow, if you should turn to literature later on and write critiques for the Brockhaus Literary

239

One consequence of the press censorship was that articles were often identified, even within the editorial offices, by coded initials or symbols. This was the case, for example, with Heine’s own contributions to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung. 240

Ludwig Wihl (1807–82), who in 1838 tried to involve Heine in a plan for a newspaper in Paris, but then became an ally of Karl Gutzkow in his breach with Heine and published against him, arousing his angry contempt. They exchanged polemics with one another; in 1839 Heine published a parody of one of Wihl’s attacks in the name of Julius Campe’s dog (DHA, 10: 280–81). 241 Ugliest of the Greeks, who, after jealously abusing the leaders, was given a thrashing by Odysseus (Iliad, Book 2). 242

Not exactly. Odysseus first made a speech.

243

Rudolf Christiani (1797 or 1798–1858), lawyer and politician, married Heine’s cousin Charlotte, daughter of his uncle Isaak. Christiani was put in charge of Heine’s collected edition in his last will but died before it could be undertaken.

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244

News, please don’t tear me down!” My cousin laughed then and I myself did not yet know that “the groschen my mother denied to a beggar 245 woman” could also have such fatal effects in literature. I have just mentioned the Brockhaus Literary News. Here are the caves where the most unfortunate of all German scribblers languish and sigh; those who descend here lose their names and get a number like the condemned Poles in the Russian mines, in the lead mines of Novgorod; here, like them, they must perform the most horrible labors, for example, 246 praise Mr. von Raumer as a great historian or acclaim Ludwig Tieck as a 247 scholar and as a man of character, etc. Most of them die of it and are namelessly buried as dead numbers. Many of these unfortunates, perhaps most of them, are former Teutomaniacs, and even if they are not wearing Old German coats any more, they are still wearing Old German underpants; they are distinguished from their Swabian fellow partisans by a certain Berlin accent and a far windier manner. From time immemorial, populism in North Germany was more of an affectation, if, indeed, not a practiced lie, especially in Prussia, where even the champions of nationalism try in vain to deny their Slavic origin. All praise, therefore, to my Swabians, who at least mean what they say more honestly and have a greater right to claim Germanic racial purity. Their main organ at present, Cotta’s trimestral review,248 is animated by this pride, and the editor, the diplomat Kölle (a clever man but the greatest blabbermouth of this earth, who certainly has never concealed a state secret!), the editor of that review, is the most inveterate race monger, and his every third word is al249 ways Germanic, Romanic, and Semitic race. His greatest torment is that 244

In the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung (News for Literary Entertainment), published by Brockhaus in Leipzig, Heine was regularly attacked, especially on moral grounds. 245

A quotation from the popular fate tragedy Die Schuld (Guilt, 1816) by Adolf Müllner (1774–1829). 246 See above, n. 145. 247

Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), playwright, novelist, and scholar, especially of English Elizabethan literature. He and the younger generation of writers had come into a hostile relationship with each another, largely owing to mutual misunderstandings. 248 The Deutsche Viertel-Jahrsschrift (German Quarterly) was published by the younger Cotta, Johann Georg (1796–1863) in Stuttgart and Tübingen. Founded in 1838, it lasted until 1870 and became a prestigious literary periodical. 249 Ferdinand Kölle (1781–1848), Württemberg diplomat. Heine had been acquainted with him in Paris. Heine always sensed in German nationalism an antiSemitic potential, accounting for much of his skepticism toward the liberal movement of his time.

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the champion of Germanophilia, his darling Wolfgang Menzel, bears all 250 the signs of Mongolian descent in his face. I find it necessary to remark here that I do not by any means attribute the tediously prolix defamation that the above-mentioned trimestral journal recently rummaged up against me to mere Teutomania, nor even to 251 personal resentment. I was long of the opinion that the author, a certain G. Pf., wanted to avenge his friend Menzel with this article. But, for the sake of truth, I must admit my mistake. I have recently been put straight. “The friendship between Menzel and the said G. Pf.,” an honest Swabian told me not long ago, “consists only in the fact that the latter helps Menzel, who knows no French, with his knowledge of that lan252 guage. And so far as the attack on you is concerned, it was not meant so badly; G. Pf. used to be the greatest enthusiast for your writing, and if he now inveighs so fervently against its immorality, it is to give himself the appearance of strict virtue and to obscure somewhat the suspicion of Socratic love that weighs upon him.” I would gladly have paraphrased the term “Socratic love,” but these 253 are the actual words of Dr. D.....r, who told me this harmless bit of gossip. Dr. D.....r, who certainly would have nothing against it if I were to give his full name, is a man of outstanding intellect and of a love of truth that expresses itself in his whole being. Since he is in London at the moment, I could not write out his full name without asking him first; but it is available, as is the whole name of one of the most respectable Parisian 254 scholars, Prof. D......g, in whose presence the same thing was said to me. But for the public it is useful to learn what motives are sometimes

250

Heine, in his attack on Menzel, lampooned his German nationalism by claiming that he had racially Mongoloid features. 251

Gustav Pfizer (1807–90), “Heines Schriften und Tendenz” (Heine’s Writings and Leanings), in the first issue of the Deutsche Viertel-Jahrsschrift in 1838. With its eighty-one pages, it is the longest and most detailed attack on Heine during his career. It was one of the main impulses to his counterattack on the Swabian poets. 252

An intentional canard; Menzel was no more ignorant of French than Heine’s enemy Massmann was of Latin. 253 Franz Demmler, a Stuttgart publisher, who, when in Paris, brought Heine news of Swabia. 254

Probably, as indicated by the number of dots in the ellipsis, which Heine usually entered exactly, Joseph Duesberg (or Duisberg), a professor of history in Paris.

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concealed under the well-known “moral-religious-patriotic beggar’s 255 cloak.” I have only apparently digressed from my topic. Many attacks on the late Börne find a partial explanation in the above hints. The same is the case in connection with the book, Menzel the French-Eater. This work is a defense of cosmopolitanism against nationalism, but it can be seen in this defense how Börne’s cosmopolitanism dwelt only in his head, but that patriotism was deeply rooted in his heart; while his opponent’s patriotism only flit about in his head and the coolest indifference yawned in his heart. The crafty words with which Menzel puffs his Germandom like a Jewish peddler his junk, his old tirades about Hermann the Cheruscan,256 257 258 the Corsican, the healthy vegetative slumber, Martin Luther, Blücher, the Battle of Leipzig, with which he means to titillate the pride of the German people, all these antiquated phrases Börne knows how to illuminate in a manner that their ridiculous nullity is displayed most delightfully; and at the same time the most touching natural sounds of his love of the fatherland break out of his own heart like bashful confessions that cannot any longer be held back in the last hour of life, that we sob out rather than articulate. Death stands by and nods as an inexorable witness of truth! Yes, he was not merely a good writer but also a great patriot. In connection with Börne’s value as a writer I must mention as well his translation of the Paroles d’un croyant,259 which was also completed in the last years of his life and should be regarded as a masterpiece of style. However, that he translated just this book, that he allowed himself to be lured at all into Lamennais’s circle of ideas, I cannot commend. The influence this priest exercised on him appeared not only in the just mentioned translation of the Paroles d’un croyant but also in various French 255

A remark of Goethe in a letter to Karl Friedrich Zelter of October 4, 1831, characterizing Pfizer’s poems. To be able to call upon Goethe in this connection was a strategic resource of great utility. 256

Arminius, the Cheruscan chief who defeated the legions of Quintilius Varus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 C.E. The event acquired iconic significance for German nationalism. That his Germanic name was “Hermann” is suppositious but not implausible. 257

A usually pejorative term for Napoleon.

258

In German, gesunder Pflanzenschlaf, a phrase in the second edition of Menzel’s Die deutsche Literatur (German Literature, 1836), where he countered Börne’s complaint that the Germans were asleep with a claim that sleep was healthier for Germany’s quiet evolution than revolution. The perhaps unfortunately chosen image was regularly exploited by Menzel’s enemies. 259

See above, n. 34.

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essays that Börne wrote at that time for the Réformateur and the Bal260 ance, in those curious documents of his mind, where a hesitation about, a despairing of the Protestant authority of reason reveals itself quite worrisomely and his diseased spirit languishes toward Catholic attitudes. It was perhaps good luck for Börne that he died. If death had not saved him, perhaps we would see him today disgraced as a Roman Catholic. How is that possible? Börne might have become Catholic in the end? He could have fled into the womb of the Roman Church and tried to stupefy his head with the tones of organs and the sounds of bells? Well, yes; he was on his way to doing the same thing that many honest people have already done when vexation rose into their brains and forced reason to flee, and poor reason, when parting, gave the advice: if you have to be crazy, turn Catholic and they at least will not lock you up like other monomaniacs. “To turn Catholic out of vexation” — so goes a German saying, whose damned deep meaning is only now becoming clear to me. Catholicism is, after all, the ghastly charming blossom of that doctrine of despair whose swift spread over the earth no longer appears as a great miracle when one considers in what a dreadfully painful condition the whole Roman world languished. Just as the individual hopelessly opened his veins and sought in death asylum from the tyranny of the Caesars, so the great crowd plunged into asceticism, into the doctrine of mortification, into the obsession with martyrdom, into the whole suicide of Nazarene religion, so as to throw off the sufferings of life at that time once and for all and to defy the torturers of the ruling materialism. For people to whom life offers nothing more, heaven was invented. Hail to this invention! Hail to a religion that poured sweet, soporific drops into suffering mankind’s bitter cup, spiritual opium, a few drops of love, hope, and faith!261 Ludwig Börne, as I have already mentioned in the first section, was by nature a born Christian, and this spiritualist inclination had to go round the bend into Catholicism when the despairing republicans, after 260

The Réformateur, edited by the revolutionary François-Vincent Raspail (1794– 1878), who became one of Börne’s most intimate friends, contained the critical review of Heine’s De l’Allemagne. After the periodical failed, La Balance. Revue allemande et française, was founded by Börne himself in 1836. He did not criticize Heine in it, but published his first attack on Menzel’s “Gallophobie.” 261 This passage is thought to be the source of Marx’s famous definition of religion in the Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as “the sigh of the oppressed creature . . . the opium of the people”: Karl Marx, Early Writings, tr. Rodney Livingstone and Greger Benton, ed. Lucio Colletti (New York: Vintage, 1975), 244.

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the most painful defeats, joined themselves to the Catholic party. How serious is this alliance? I cannot say. Many a republican may really have turned Catholic out of vexation. Most of them, however, loathe their new allies in their hearts and both sides playact with one another. It is only a matter of fighting the common enemy, and indeed, the alliance of the two fanaticisms, the religious and the political, is threatening in the highest degree. But sometimes it happens that people lose themselves in their roles and a clever game turns into crude seriousness; and so many a republican may well have flirted so long with the Catholic symbols until he at last really believed in them; and many a sly priest may have sung the Marseillaise so long until it became his favorite song, and he could no longer say mass without falling into the melody of the battle song. We poor Germans, who unfortunately can never take a joke, we took the fraternization of the republicans with Catholicism at face value, and this error can one day become very costly for us. Poor German republicans, you who wanted to drive out Satan with Beelzebub, you will, if you succeed in such an exorcism, fall out of the frying pan into the fire! How so many German patriots, in order to feud with Protestant governments, could make common cause with the Catholic party, I cannot comprehend. One will hardly ascribe to me, on whom the Prussians have inflicted so much heartache, a blind sympathy with Borussia;262 I may therefore frankly confess that in the struggle of Prussia with the Catholic party I 263 wish victory only to the former. For a defeat here would necessarily have the consequence that some German provinces, those of the Rhineland, would be lost to Germany. What do the pious people in Munich care whether German or French is spoken along the Rhine; for them it is sufficient that the mass is sung in Latin. Priests have no fatherland, they have only one father, a papa, in Rome. But that the defection of the Rhineland, its reversion to Romanic France is a settled matter between the heroes of the Catholic party and their French allies, is doubtless widely known. To these allies has belonged for sometime a certain former Jacobin who now wears a crown

262

The Latin name for Prussia.

263

These tensions had been rising since the Catholic Rhineland had fallen to Protestant Prussia in 1815. They came to a head in 1836, when the archbishop of Cologne demanded that children of mixed marriages be raised as Catholics. The arrest of the archbishop in 1837 set off the Kölner Wirren (Cologne confusions) that began to define the tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Germany, as well as the relationship of both to liberalism and democracy. Heine, for reasons of his own, explicitly supported Prussia in this conflict.

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and is negotiating with certain crowned Jesuits in Germany. Pious jobbery! Hypocritical betrayal of the fatherland! It is obvious that our poor Börne, who allowed himself to be lured not only by Lamennais’s writings, but also by his personality, and unconsciously took part in the machinations of the vicarious Roman proxies, it is obvious that our poor Börne never sensed the dangers that threaten our Germany through the alliance of the Catholic and the republican parties. He did not have the least suspicion of it, he whose heart was in the integrity of Germany as much as that of the writer of these pages. In this connection I must grant him the most splendid character. “I would not cede to France so much as a German chamber pot,” he once cried in the excitement of a conversation, when someone remarked that France, the natural representative of the revolution, would have to be strengthened by reacquiring the Rhineland in order to be able to resist aristocratic, absolutist Europe more securely. “Not one chamber pot will I cede,” cried Börne, stamping up and down in the room quite angrily. “Of course,” remarked a third person, “we will not cede to France a foot of German land; but we should cede to them a few of our German countrymen whom we can do without. What would you think if we were to cede, for example, Raumer and Rotteck to the French?” “No, no,” cried Börne, turning from towering rage to laughter; “not even Raumer or Rotteck will I cede, the collection would no longer be complete, I want to keep Germany entirely as it is, with its flowers and its thistles, with its giants and its dwarfs. No, not even those two chamber pots will I cede!” Yes, this Börne was a great patriot, perhaps the greatest who sucked from Germania’s stepmotherly breasts the warmest life and the bitterest death! Rejoicing and bleeding in the soul of this man was a touching love of the fatherland that, bashful by nature like any love, liked to hide under growling invective and carping surliness, but in an unguarded moment burst out all the more violently. When Germany committed all kinds of follies that could have bad consequences, when it did not have the courage to take a healthy medicine, to have a cataract removed or bear with a minor operation, then Börne raged and scolded, and stamped and stormed; but when the foreseen misfortune actually occurred, when Germany was trampled on or whipped until the blood flowed, then Börne pouted no longer, and he began to blubber, poor fool that he was, and he 264

Louis-Philippe. Among the “crowned Jesuits” Heine probably means King Ludwig I of Bavaria and possibly the mentally defective Austrian emperor, Ferdinand I. Around this time Louis-Philippe tried to marry a daughter to a son of the former and a son to a daughter of the latter, but without success.

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would then declare in sobs that Germany was the best land in the world, and the most beautiful land, and the Germans were the most beautiful and most noble people, a true pearl of a people, and nowhere were people cleverer than in Germany, and even the fools were wise there, and churlishness was actually high spirits, and he longed for the homeland’s beloved jabs in the ribs, and sometimes he lusted for a really juicy German stupidity like a pregnant woman for a pear. It is also true that his separation from the fatherland was a genuine martyrdom, and thus suffering wrung out many an angry word in his writing. Whoever does not know exile does not comprehend how garishly it colors our agonies and how it pours night and poison into our thoughts. Dante wrote his Hell in exile. Only those who have lived in exile know what love of the fatherland is, love of the fatherland with all its sweet terrors and yearning sorrows! It is fortunate for our patriots that they have to live in France, as this land exhibits so much similarity with Germany; almost the same climate, the same vegetation, the same way of life. “How terrible exile must be where this similarity is lacking,” Börne once remarked to me as we walked in the Jardin des Plantes, “how awful if you were to see only palms and tropical plants around you and completely strange kinds of animals like kangaroos or zebras. Fortunately the flowers in France are just like those at home, the violets and roses look just like the German ones, as do the oxen and cows, and the asses are patient and not striped, just as with us, and the birds are feathered and sing in France just as in Germany, and even when I see dogs running around here in Paris, I can think myself back over the Rhine, and my heart calls out to me: those are our German dogs!” A certain dullness of apprehension has long misperceived the love of the fatherland in Börne’s writings. He was able merely to shrug his shoulders in pity at this dullness and, of the wheezing old women who dragged up wood to burn him at the stake, he could in peace of mind cry out sancta simplicitas! But when Jesuit ill-will tried to cast suspicion on his patriotism, he got into an annihilating fury. His outrage then knew no limits, and like a offended Titan he flung the most lethal blocks of stone on the serpents creeping around his feet with their flickering tongues. Here he is fully in the right, here his manly rage flares most nobly. How remarkable is the following passage in the Parisian letters directed against Jarcke,265 who among Börne’s opponents is to some extent distinguished by two characteristics, namely intelligence and decency:

265

Karl Ernst Jarcke (1801–52), an extremely conservative political theorist. He had been Heine’s fellow student at Bonn. The passage is from the Briefe aus Paris, November 26, 1832 (LB, 3: 618–21). As is customary with Heine, it is cited essentially verbatim.

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“This Jarcke is a remarkable man. He was called from Berlin to 266 Vienna, where he gets half the salary of Gentz. But whether he earned not a hundredth of it, or a hundred times more, what matters only is what they wanted to pay Gentz for, the good or the bad in him. I have an unusual liking for this Jarcke, who has gone Catholic and mad, because he provides me, and certainly many others, with useful sport and with pleas267 268 ant pastimes. For a year he has been editing a political weekly. That is an entertaining camera obscura; in it all the inclinations and disinclinations, desires and imprecations, hopes and fears, joys and sufferings, fears and foolhardiness, and all the purposes and devices of the monarchists and aristocrats along with their shades pass by one after the other. The accommodating Jarcke! He discloses everything, he warns everyone. He writes the most hidden secrets of the great world on the wall of my little room. I learn from him, and now I tell you what they intend for us. They want not only to destroy the fruits and blossoms and leaves and branches and trunks of the revolution, but also its roots, its deepest, most widespread, firmest roots, though half the world should cling to them. The court gardener Jarcke goes around with pruning knife and shovel and hatchet from one field, from one country into another, from one people to another. After he has uprooted and burned all the roots of the revolution, after he has destroyed the present, he goes back to the past. After he has cut off the head of the revolution and the unhappy malefactor has ceased to suffer, he forbids her long since deceased, long since decayed grandmother to marry; he makes the past the daughter of the present. Isn’t that wild? This summer he inveighed against the Hambach festival. The innocent festival! The good sheep! The wolf of a Federal Diet, which was guzzling from the river upstream, reproached the sheep, the German people, who were drinking farther downstream, with muddying his waters, and he would have to eat them up.269 Mr. Jarcke is the tongue of the wolf. Then he uproots the revolution in Baden, the Bavarian Rhineland,

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After the death of Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832), Metternich’s journalistic and public-relations factotum, Jarcke was called from his position in the Prussian ministry of justice to one of councilor in the Vienna chancellery. 267 Jarcke had converted to Catholicism in 1824. With his Catholic conservatism he was to be more comfortable after the “Cologne confusions” in Austrian rather than Prussian service. 268 The Berliner politisches Wochenblatt (Berlin Political Weekly), a governmentinfluenced, counterrevolutionary, and monarchist publication. 269

An allusion to one of the animal fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95).

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270

Hesse, Saxony; then the English Reform Bill; then the Polish, the Belgian, the French July Revolution. Then he defends the divine rights of 271 Dom Miguel. Thus he is constantly going backwards. Four weeks ago he destroyed Lafayette, not the Lafayette of the July Revolution, but the Lafayette of fifty years ago who fought for the American and French Revolutions. Jarcke creeping around Lafayette’s boots! It was as though I were watching a dog scratch at the foot of the Great Pyramid with the intention of overthrowing it! Always rearward! A fortnight ago he put his shovel to the hundred-fifty-year-old English revolution, the one of 1688. Soon it will be the turn of the elder Brutus, who drove the Tarquins off,272 and so Mr. Jarcke will finally get to the Lord God, who committed the imprudence of creating Adam and Eve before he had provided for a king, setting into the heads of mankind that it could survive without princes. But Mr. Jarcke should not forget that, as soon as he is through with God, they will not need him any more in Vienna. And then adieu, court councilor, adieu, salary. He will probably have the good sense to leave this one root of the Hambach festival alone. “This is the same Jarcke of whom I had promised in an earlier letter to communicate to you something he had said about me.273 Not only about me; it probably concerned others, but he certainly was thinking mainly of me. Last summer he wrote in the Political Weekly an essay: ‘Germany and the Revolution.’ In it the following passage appears. Whether the cute malice or the grand stupidity is more to be admired is difficult to decide. 274 “The passage from Jarcke’s article reads as follows: “‘Besides it is entirely correct that those principles we have described above can never enter creatively into real life, that Germany will never be changed into a republic after the measure of today’s seducers of the peo270

The Reform Bill, which modernized and to some extent extended the franchise, had been finally passed on June 4, 1832. Jarcke had consistently supported the resistance to it in the House of Lords. 271

Dom Miguel (1802–66), third son of the Portuguese king João VI, persistently led the struggle to restore absolutism. In 1828 he had himself proclaimed king, in violation of the constitution, in an attempt to displace his niece, Queen Maria II; after a civil war, he was deposed in 1834. Metternich was largely behind Dom Miguel’s intrigues. 272 Lucius Junius Brutus who, according to tradition, led a rising against his uncle Tarquinius Superbus, king of Rome, in 510 B.C.E. and became one of the two first consuls. 273 Letter of November 12, 1832 (LB, 3: 595). 274

Jarcke, “Deutschland und die Revolution,” Berliner politisches Wochenblatt, No. 29 (July 21, 1832), 187.

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ple, that their freedom and equality cannot be achieved even by the force of terror; yes, it is doubtful whether the most impudent leaders of the bad cause are not themselves merely playing a gruesome game with Germany’s highest values, whether they do not themselves know best that this path leads without salvation to destruction and merely for that reason carry on the work of seduction with clever calculation in order, in a great world-historical act, to take revenge for the oppression and the humiliation that the people to whom they belong by origin have suffered for centuries from ours.’ “Oh, Mr. Jarcke, that goes too far! And when you wrote this, you were not yet an Austrian councilor, but nothing more than the Prussian equivalent — how will you not rage when you are sitting in the Vienna state chancellery? That you reproach us with the wickedness of wanting to make the German people unhappy because it has made us unhappy ourselves, for that we forgive the criminologist and his lovely theory of imputation. That you credit us with the cleverness of destroying our enemies under the appearance of love, for that we must thank the Jesuit who supposed he was praising us that way. But that you take us for so stupid that we would give up a bird in the hand for one in the bush, for that you must answer to us, Mr. Jarcke. What? If we hated the German people, would we strive with all our might to help free it from the most ignominious degradation into which it is sunk, from the leaden tyranny that weighs upon it, from the haughtiness of its aristocrats, the arrogance of its rulers, from the mockery of all court fools, the libels of all corrupted writers, in order to abandon it to the small, soon passing, and so honorable dangers of freedom? If we hated the Germans, we would write like you, Mr. Jarcke. But we would never allow ourselves to be paid for it; for even sinful revenge has something about it that can be defiled.” Suspicion cast on his patriotism aroused in Börne, in the quoted passage, an irritation that the mere reproach of Jewish descent would never have been able to provoke in him. It even amused him when his enemies, given the spotlessness of his conduct, could not think of anything to hold against him other than that he was the offspring of a tribe that had once filled the world with its fame and despite all denigration still has not completely lost the ancient sacred holiness. He often even boasted of this origin, in his humorous way, to be sure, and, parodying Mirabeau, once said to a Frenchman: “Jésus Christ — qui entre parenthèses était mon cousin — a preché l’égalité etc.”275 Indeed, the Jews are made of that dough from which gods are kneaded; if people kick them today, they fall on their knees before them tomorrow; while some of them grub around in the 275

“Jesus Christ — who, incidentally was my cousin — preached equality,” an allusion to a remark Mirabeau is said to have made about Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, assassinated in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572.

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shabbiest filth of haggling, others climb the highest peaks of mankind, and Golgotha is not the only mountain where a Jewish god has bled for the salvation of the world. The Jews are the people of the spirit, and whenever they return to their principle, they are great and magnificent, and they shame and overcome their crude oppressors. The profound Rosenkranz compares them with the giant Antaeus, except that he grew stronger every time he touched the earth, whereas they acquire new 276 strengths as soon as they come into contact with heaven. Remarkable phenomenon of the most glaring extremes! While among these people all possible grotesques of baseness are found, one finds among them also the ideals of the purest humanity, and as they have guided the world in the past into new paths of progress, so the world may perhaps expect new initiatives from them. Nature, Hegel once said to me, is quite amazing; the same tools it uses for the most sublime purposes it employs also for the meanest tasks, for example, the organ to which it has entrusted the highest mission, the propagation of mankind, serves also for. . . .277 Those who complain about Hegel’s obscurity will understand him here, and even if he did not quite speak these words in connection with Israel, nevertheless they can be applied to it. However that may be, it is easily possible that the mission of this tribe is still not yet fulfilled, and this may be especially the case in connection with Germany. It, too, awaits its liberator, a secular Messiah — the Jews have already blessed us with a divine one — a king of the earth, a savior with scepter and sword, and this German liberator is perhaps the same one Israel expects. Oh, dearest, longingly awaited Messiah! Where is he now, where does he dwell? Is he still unborn or has he been lying hidden somewhere for a millennium, awaiting the great, right hour of salvation? Is it old Barbarossa, who sits slumbering in the Kyffhäuser on his stone throne and has been sleeping so long that his white beard has grown through the stone table, and only once in a while shakes

276

Karl Rosenkranz (1805–79), Hegelian philosopher, in his Studien. Erster Teil (Studies. Part 1, 1839), 132; the book is in Heine’s preserved library. 277 As a student in Berlin, Heine had some personal connection with Hegel. Heine’s knowledge of and debt to Hegel are among the most controversial topics in Heine scholarship. In this case it is possible that he heard Hegel say something like this, as it corresponds to a passage in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Spirit).

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his head drowsily and blinks with half-closed eyes, perhaps dreamily 278 reaches for the sword, and nods again into his deep millennial sleep? No, it is not Emperor Redbeard who will liberate Germany, as the people believe, the German people, the narcoleptic, dreaming people, who can only imagine their Messiah in the form of a sleeping old man! There the Jews really have a much better idea of their Messiah, and many years ago, when I was in Poland and associated with the great Rabbi 279 Menasse ben Naphtali in Cracow, I listened with a joyfully open heart when he spoke of this Messiah. I no longer know in what book of the Talmud the details are found of which the rabbi gave a quite true ac280 count, and only the outlines of his description of the Messiah still hover in my memory. “The Messiah,” he told me, “was born on the day when 281 Jerusalem was destroyed by the villain Titus Vespasian, and since then he dwells in the most beautiful palace of heaven, surrounded by radiance and joy, also wearing a crown on his head, just like a king, but his hands are bound with golden chains!” “What,” I asked in surprise, “what do these golden chains mean?” “They are necessary,” replied the great rabbi, with a sly glance and a deep sigh; “without these fetters the Messiah, when he sometimes loses patience, would otherwise suddenly hurry down and undertake the work of salvation too soon, in the wrong hour. He is, after all, no calm sleepyhead. He is a handsome, very lean but immensely strong man; flourishing like youth. The life he leads, moreover, is very monotonous. The greatest part of the morning he passes with the customary prayers or laughs and jokes with his servants, who are disguised angels, prettily singing and playing the flute. Then he has his long locks combed and he is rubbed with ointments and dressed in his regal purple robe. The whole afternoon he studies the Kabbalah. Towards evening he summons his old chancellor, 278

According to legend, the medieval emperor Friedrich Barbarossa (ca. 1123–90) remained sleeping with his men and horses in the Kyffhäuser Mountain in Thuringia, awaiting the day when the glory of the German Empire would be restored and he would come forth to lead it. The legend became, in innumerable variations, an image of the hopes of German nationalism, but for others an allegory of German inertness and procrastination. In that spirit Heine constructed a brilliant parody of the legend in his mock-epic political poem, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. A Winter’s Tale, 1844). 279

No such rabbi has been identified, nor does Heine seem to have gone to Cracow during his visit to Poland. The scene is probably fictional. 280 A passage warning against expecting the Messiah too soon is found in the tractate Baba Metzia. Needless to say, Heine had no knowledge of the Talmud other than what he picked up from secondary sources. He may have invented this legend. 281

In 70 C.E., an event memorialized by the Jews in the fast of the Ninth of Av.

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who is a disguised angel, just as the four strong state councilors who accompany him are disguised angels. The chancellor must then read to his master out of a great book what has happened every day. All kinds of events occur about which the Messiah smiles with pleasure or shakes his head in annoyance. But when he hears how his people are treated down below, then he gets into the most terrible rage and howls so that the heavens tremble. The four strong state councilors must then hold the furious man back so that he will not hurry down to the earth, and they would surely not overcome him if his hands were not bound with the golden chains. They mollify him by saying gently that the time has not yet come, the right hour of salvation, and in the end he sinks onto his couch and covers his face and weeps.” Thus approximately Menasse ben Naphtali reported to me in Cracow, certifying his reliability by reference to the Talmud. I have often had to think of his stories, especially in recent times, after the July Revolution. Indeed, in bad days I thought I heard with my own ears a rattling, as though of golden chains, and then despairing sobs. Oh, despair not, handsome Messiah, who wants not only to save Israel, as the superstitious Jews think, but all of suffering mankind! Oh, do not break your golden chains! Oh, keep him bound for a time so that he does not come too soon, the saving king of the world!

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Book V

T

he political conditions of that time (1799) have a quite troubling similarity with the most recent conditions in Germany; only that then the sense of freedom flourished more among scholars, writers, and other such littérateurs, but today expresses itself much less among these, but much more in the great active mass, among artisans and tradespeople. While at the time of the first Revolution the leaden German sleeping sickness weighed on the people, and a brutal calm, so to speak, prevailed in all Germania, the wildest ferment and ebullience manifested itself in our world of letters. The loneliest author living in the most remote corner of Germany took part in this movement; almost by a natural sympathy, without being exactly informed of the political events, he felt their social significance and expressed it in his writings. This phenomenon reminds me of the big seashells that we sometimes put on our mantelpieces for decoration and, though they be ever so distant from the sea, nevertheless suddenly begin to resound as soon as it is flood tide and the waves break against the coast. When the Revolution flooded forth here in Paris, the great human ocean, when here it surged and stormed, there, on the other side of the Rhine, German hearts resounded and roared. But they were so isolated, they stood among nothing but insensate porcelain, teacups and coffee pots and Chinese pagodas that mechanically nodded their heads as though they knew what it was all about. Oh! our poor predecessors in Germany had to pay very dearly for their sympathy with the Revolution. Junkers and priests worked their crudest and meanest malice on them. Some of them fled to Paris and withered and vanished here in poverty and misery. I recently saw a blind countryman who is still in Paris since that time; I saw him in the Palais Royal, where he had warmed himself a little in the sun. It was painful to see how pale and thin he was and how he felt his way along the buildings. I was told that it was the old Danish poet Heiberg.282 Also I recently saw the attic room in which Citizen Georg

“

282

Peter Andreas Heiberg (1758–1841) was expelled from Denmark in 1799 for his political opinions and became an official in the French foreign ministry, from which he was pensioned in 1817.

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Forster died. But it would have been much worse for the friends of freedom who remained in Germany if Napoleon and his Frenchmen had not defeated us. Napoleon certainly never imagined that he himself was the rescuer of ideology. Without him our philosophers together with their ideas would have been wiped out with the gallows and the wheel. However, the German friends of freedom, too republican to do homage to Napoleon and too high-minded to join the foreign power, wrapped themselves thenceforth in deep silence. They went about sadly with broken hearts, with closed lips. When Napoleon fell, they smiled, but wistfully, and remained silent; they took almost no part in the patriotic enthusiasm that then welled up in Germany with permission from on high. They knew what they knew and remained silent. Since these republicans have a very chaste, simple way of life, they regularly become very old, and when the July Revolution broke out, many of them were still alive, and we were no little amazed when the old geezers, whom we were always used to see walking around so bent over and almost moronically silent, suddenly raised their heads and laughed toward us young fellows in a friendly way, and shook our hands, and told merry stories. One I actually heard singing; for in the coffee house he sang the Marseillaise to us, and we learned the melody and the beautiful words, and it was not long until we were singing it better than the old man himself, for he sometimes laughed like a fool in the best stanza, or wept like a child. It is always good when such old people remain alive in order to teach their songs to the young. We young ones will not forget them, and some of us will instill them in grandchildren who are not yet born. But many of us will meanwhile have rotted away, in prison at home or in an attic in a foreign land.”284 The above passage, from my book De l’Allemagne (it is missing in the German edition) I wrote about six years ago, and, in rereading it, all those desolate griefs of which I felt only the breath of the first forebodings at that time lay themselves upon my soul like damp shadows. They trickle like ice water through my most fervent feelings and my life is only a painful paralysis. Oh, cold winter hell in which we live with teeth chattering! Oh death, white snowman in endless fog, why are you nodding so scornfully!

283

The translator and world traveler Georg Forster (1754–94), who had thrown his lot in with the French Revolutionary party in Mainz, died of natural causes in Paris, thus quite likely avoiding being guillotined. 284

The passage was censored out of Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland; Heine restored it in French translation in De l’Allemagne (On Germany), also of 1835. There are numerous variants.

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Happy are those who are quietly decaying in the prisons of the homeland, for these prisons are a homeland with iron bars, and German air wafts through them, and the turnkey, if he is not completely mute, speaks the German language! It is now more than six months since any German 285 sound rang in my ear, and everything that I create and propose clothes itself laboriously in foreign phrases. You possibly have a concept of physical exile, but of spiritual exile an idea can be formed only by a German poet who finds himself forced to speak and write French all day long and even at night, sighing in French on the bosom of his beloved! My thoughts, too, are exiled, exiled into a foreign language. Happy are those who, in a foreign country, have only to struggle with poverty, with hunger and cold, purely natural evils. Through the skylights of their attic rooms the heavens and all their stars cheer them. Oh, golden misery with white kid gloves, how much more infinitely tormenting you are! The despairing head must be barbered, if indeed not perfumed, and the angry lips that would like to curse heaven and earth must smile, always smile. Happy are those whose suffering has at last cost them their last bit of reason and who have found a refuge in Charenton or Bicêtre,286 like poor F., like poor B., like poor L., and so many others with whom I was less 287 acquainted. The cell of their madness seems to them a beloved homeland, and in their straitjackets they imagine themselves victors over all despotism, imagine themselves proud citizens of a free country. But they could have had all that just as easily at home! Only the transition from reason to madness is a vexatious moment and horrible. I shiver when I think how F. came to me for the last time in order to consult with me about admitting the men in the moon and the most distant star dwellers to the great league of nations. But how are we to inform them of our proposals? That was the great question. Another patriot with a similar intention had thought up a colossal mirror with which one could reflect proclamations in giant letters into the air so that they could be read by all mankind at once without interference from the censor and the police. What a subversive project! And yet there is no mention of it in the Federal Diet’s reports on revolutionary propaganda! The most fortunate are probably the dead who are lying in the grave, in Père Lachaise, like you, poor Börne! 285

This is a little exaggerated for effect. Heine had had numerous visitors during that time, including Giacomo Meyerbeer, Clara Schumann, and several writers visiting from Germany. 286

Mental institutions around Paris.

287

It is not known who are meant here.

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Yes, those are fortunate, those in the prisons of the homeland, fortunate are those in the attics of bodily misery, fortunate the madmen in the lunatic asylum, most fortunate the dead! As far as I am concerned as the writer of these pages, I do not think I may complain quite so much, for I share the good fortune of all these people to an extent through that wondrous sensibility, that involuntary sympathy, that mental illness that we find among poets and to which we do not know how to give the right name. Though I may stoutly and laughingly wander through the sparkling streets of Babylon during the day, believe me, as soon as evening falls, the melancholy harps sound in my heart, not to speak of the night, when all the drums and cymbals of pain, the whole Janissary music of world torment, crashes in that heart, and the horribly screeching mummery show rises up. Oh, what dreams! Dreams of prison, of misery, of madness, of death! A shrilling mixture of nonsense and wisdom, a poisoned mixed soup that tastes of sauerkraut and smells of orange blossoms! What a grisly feeling when dreams of the night mock activities of the day and ironic ghouls peep out of flaming poppies and taunt you, and proud laurels turn into gray thistles, and nightingales break out in derisive laughter. Usually in my dreams I am sitting on a cornerstone of the Rue Lafitte on a damp fall evening when the moon shines down onto the dirty boulevard pavement with long, glancing beams, so that the filth looks gilded if not studded with gleaming diamonds. The passers-by are also nothing but shining filth: stock jobbers, gamblers, cheap scribblers, counterfeiters of ideas, still cheaper trollops, who, to be sure, have only to prevaricate with their bodies, sated fatbellies who have been fed in the Café de Paris and now stumble toward the Académie de Musique,288 the cathedral of vice 289 where Fanny Elssler dances and laughs. Among them the carriages rattle and the lackeys jump, colorful as tulips and nasty as their gracious masters. And if I am not mistaken, sitting in one of those impudent gold car290 riages is the quondam cigar dealer Aguado, and his stamping horses spatter my rose-red tights. Yes, to my own amazement I am completely dressed in rose-red tights, in a so-called flesh-colored costume, since the advanced season as well as the climate do not permit complete nakedness as in Greece among the Thermopyleans, when King Leonidas with his three hundred Spartans quite nakedly danced on the eve of the battle, quite nakedly, his head wreathed in flowers. I am costumed just like 288

Properly, L’Académie nationale de musique, the Paris Opera.

289

An Austrian dancer (1810–84), famous in Europe and America.

290

Alexandre Aguado, Marques de las Marismas del Guadalquivir (1784–1842), an extremely rich and influential Parisian banker and art collector of Spanish origin.

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291

Leonidas in David’s painting when I sit on the cornerstone by the Rue Lafitte where Aguado’s damned driver spatters my tights. The lout, he even spatters my flower wreath, the beautiful flower wreath I wear on my head, which is, however, just among ourselves, already rather dry and without fragrance. Oh! they were fresh, happy flowers when I adorned myself with them, believing that the next morning it would be time to go into battle, to the sacred death in victory for the fatherland. That was a long time ago; I am sitting glumly and idly by the Rue Lafitte, awaiting the battle, and meanwhile the flowers are fading on my head, and my hair, too, is turning white, and my heart grows ill in my breast. Holy God! how slowly time passes in such inert waiting, and in the end my courage will fail. I see how the people pass by, look at me in pity, and whisper to one another: the poor fool! Just as my nighttime dreams mock my daydreams, so it happens sometimes that my daytime thoughts make fun of my nonsensical nighttime dreams, and rightly so, for I often act in my dreams like a real dolt. Recently I dreamed that I was taking a great journey through all Europe, only I was not employing a carriage with horses but a quite magnificent ship. This went well when there was a river or a lake in my way. But that was for the most part not the case, and usually I had to go over dry land, which was very inconvenient for me, for then I had to drag my ship over broad plains, forest paths, marshlands, and even over very high mountains until I again came to a river or lake where I could sail comfortably. Usually, however, as I say, I had to drag my vessel along by myself, which cost a great loss of time and no small effort, so that in the end I awoke from tedium and weariness. But now, at my calm morning coffee, I made the correct observation that I would have traveled much more rapidly and easily if I had not had a ship at all and had always gone on foot like an ordinary poor devil. In the end it is all the same how we make the great journey, whether on foot, or on horseback, or by ship. We all end in the same lodging, in the same bad tavern where they open the door with a shovel, where the room is so narrow, so cold, so dark, but where one sleeps very well, almost too well.

291

Leonidas lost his life while leading the heroic but futile defense of the pass of Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 B.C.E. Since no source from antiquity reports that the Spartans were dancing before the battle, Heine probably has his image from Jacques-Louis David’s (1748–1825) Léonidas aux Thermopyles, exhibited in the Louvre. In the painting Leonidas is naked except for a tall hat and a band over his shoulder. He is not dancing but members of his entourage appear to be or, as Herodotus reports in his History, 7: 208, exercising.

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Shall we be raised some day? Strange! My daytime thoughts deny this question, and so out of pure contrariness it is affirmed by my nighttime dreams. Thus, for example, I dreamed not long ago that I had gone to the churchyard in the first hour of morning and there to my extreme surprise I saw how a pair of highly polished boots stood by each grave, just as by travelers’ doors in inns. That was a strange sight; a gentle silence prevailed over the whole churchyard, the weary pilgrims of the earth slept, grave by grave, and the highly polished boots standing there in long rows gleamed in the fresh morning light, so hopefully, so full of promise, like a proof of the resurrection as clear as day. I cannot give the exact place where Börne’s grave is located in Père Lachaise.292 I am saying this explicitly. For, when he was alive, I was not seldom visited by Germans who asked me where Börne lived, and now I am very often bothered by the question of where Börne lies buried. As far as I am told, he lies down to the right in the cemetery, among nothing but generals from the Imperial period and actresses of the Théâtre français — among dead eagles and dead parrots. I recently read in the Gazette for the Elegant World that the cross on Börne’s grave had been broken off by a storm.293 A younger poet sang 294 of this circumstance in a fine poem, as, in general, Börne, who during his lifetime was so often pelted with the most rotten apples in prose, now, after his death, is venerated with the most fragrant verses. The people like to stone their prophets in order to revere their relics all the more fervently; the dogs that bark at us today will devoutly kiss our bones tomorrow! As I have already said, I am providing here neither an apologia nor a critique of the man with whom these pages are concerned. I am only sketching his portrait with exact indications of the time and place when he sat for me. Nor do I conceal what favorable or unfavorable mood influenced me during the session. I thereby provide the best standard for the credit that my account deserves. But if, on the one hand, the continuous display of my personality is the most suitable means for fostering the reader’s own judgment, so, on the other hand, I believe myself especially obliged to an exposition of my 292

Börne’s grave is northeast of the main entrance on the Chemin du Dragon near the Grand-Rond. Heine appears never to have visited it, but it is correct, as he will say shortly, that it is to the right in the cemetery. 293 Zeitung für die elegante Welt, October 12, 1839. 294

Theodor Creizenach (1818–77), “Das Kreuz auf dem Père Lachaise” (The Cross on Père Lachaise), published together with the report in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt. It is to be doubted that Heine actually thought this doggerel a “fine poem.”

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own person in this book, since, owing to a confluence of the most various circumstances, both Börne’s enemies as well as his friends never ceased, in every commentary on him, to prattle about my own mind and motives in more or less well or ill-intentioned fashion. The aristocratic party in Germany, well aware that the moderation of my words is much more dangerous to them than Börne’s berserk rage, liked to try to decry me as his like-minded crony in order to load upon me a certain solidarity with his political follies. The radical party, far from exposing this stratagem, instead supported it in order to make me appear in the eyes of the crowd as their comrade and thereby exploit the authority of my name. It was impossible to oppose such machinations in public; I would only have drawn the suspicion that I was disavowing Börne in order to win the favor of his enemies. Under these circumstances Börne really did me a service when he attacked me publicly not just in brief, casual remarks but in extended confrontations and informed the public himself about the difference of opinion obtaining between us. He did this, namely, in the sixth volume of his Parisian letters and in two articles that he had printed in the French journal Le Réformateur.295 These articles, to which, as I have already mentioned, I never replied, again provided every commentary on Börne with an opportunity to speak of me as well, now, to be sure, in a quite different tone than before. The aristocrats heaped the most perfidious encomia on me, almost praising me down to the ground; suddenly I was once again a great poet, after having seen that I could no longer play my political role, the ridiculous radicalism. The radicals, on the other hand, now began to take out after me in public (privately they had done so all the time); they found not a good word to say of me, they denied me any character, and granted me only the standing of a poet. Yes, I was given, so to speak, my political dismissal and was sent into retirement, as it were, next to Parnassus. Whoever knows these two parties will easily evaluate the generosity with which they allowed me the title of poet. The former see in a poet nothing other than a dreamy courtier of vain ideals. The latter see in the poet nothing; poesy does not find the paltriest echo in their dull hollowness. What a poet really is we will leave aside. But we cannot avoid expressing our humble opinion about the concepts that people connect with the word “character.” What is understood by the word “character”?

295

Briefe aus Paris, February 25, 1833; Le Réformateur, May 30, 31, 1835 (LB, 3: 809–15; 2: 885–903). Note again the intensity and precision with which Heine studied Börne’s writings and his good memory for them; these texts had appeared respectively more than six and four years earlier.

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He has character who lives and breathes in the defined circles of a defined view of life, as it were, identifies himself with it, and never gets into contradiction with his thought and feeling. With quite outstanding spirits towering above their age the crowd can therefore never know whether they have character or not, for the great crowd does not have vision enough to comprehend the circles in which such elevated spirits move. Yes, because the crowd does not know the boundaries of the intentions and claims of such elevated spirits, it can easily happen that they see neither authority nor necessity in their actions, and the spiritually dull-witted and myopic then complain of arbitrariness, inconsistency, lack of character. Less gifted people, whose more superficial and narrow view of life is more easily fathomed and summed up, and who, so to speak, proclaim their life program in the marketplace once and for all in popular language, such people can always be grasped coherently by the honorable public; it possesses a standard for every one of their actions; it is then delighted by its own intelligence as though having solved a charade, and rejoices: behold, there is a person of character! It is always a sign of narrow-mindedness when one is easily comprehended by the narrow-minded crowd and explicitly celebrated for having character.296 Among writers this is even more dubious, as their deeds actually consist in words, and what the public honors as character in their writings is, in the end, nothing other than slavish submission to the moment, a lack of creative serenity, of art. The principle that one can recognize the character of a writer from his style is not necessarily correct; it is merely applicable with that mass of authors whose pen is guided only by momentary inspiration and who obey words more than commanding them. With artists that principle is inadmissible, for they are masters of the word, wield it to any purpose they like, stamp it at will, write objectively, and their character does not betray itself in their style. Whether Börne has character while others are merely poets, this unfruitful question we can answer with the most forbearing shrug. “Merely poets” — we will never censure our enemies so bitterly that we put them in one and the same category as Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Camoëns, Philip Sidney, Friedrich Schiller, Wolfgang Goethe, who were merely poets. Just among ourselves, these poets, even the last one, sometimes exhibited character! “They have eyes and see not, they have ears and hear not, they even have noses and smell nothing”: these words can be applied very well to 296

The German words here given as “narrow-mindedness” and “narrow-minded” are in Heine’s original “Bornirtheit” and “bornirten,” suggesting an aural link with “Börne.”

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the crude crowd, which will never understand that no spiritual greatness is possible without inner unity and that what actually should be called character belongs to the most essential attributes of the poet. The distinction between character and poet, moreover, initially pro297 ceeded from Börne himself, and he himself had prepared the way for all those shabby inferences that his followers later reeled off against the writer of these pages. In the Parisian letters and in the aforementioned articles of the Réformateur there were already sufficient flickerings with forked tongue about my characterless poethood and my poetic characterlessness, and the most poisonous insinuations twist and writhe there. Not with explicit words, but with all kinds of hints the most ambiguous convictions, if not, indeed, complete lack of conviction, are imputed to me! I am accused not only of indifferentism but also of contradicting myself. Here one can even hear some hissing sounds that . . . (can the dead blush in the grave?) . . . yes, I cannot spare the departed this shame: he even hinted at bribery.298 Beautiful, sweet calm that I feel at this moment in my deepest soul! You reward me sufficiently for everything I have done and for everything I have declined to do. I shall not defend myself against the reproach of indifferentism nor against the suspicion of venality. Years ago, during the lifetime of the insinuators, I thought it beneath my dignity; now even decency requires silence. That would be a horrible display — polemic between death and exile! You stretch out your hand to me in appeal from the grave? Without resentment I will stretch out mine to you. See how beautiful it is and pure! It was never soiled by the handshake of the mob, just as little as by the dirty gold of the enemies of the people. Basically you never insulted me. In all your insinuations there is not a louis d’or’s worth of truth! 297

Börne had written in an essay of 1826, “Remarks on Language and Style”: “Perhaps the style of a writer depends more upon his character than his mind, more upon the moral than the philosophical or artistic view of life” (LB, 1: 591). However, the contrast of character and talent became a critical commonplace going back at least to the time of Goethe, often applied to Heine’s disadvantage. 298 In the French text of De l’Allemagne Heine had written: “Providence, which has imposed this task on me, will also give me the necessary enlightenment” (DHA, 8/1: 263). Börne commented near the beginning of his review in the Reformateur: “above all, since M. Heine’s Providence has been placed under the protection of an influential ministry” and towards the end hinted at a commoner demanding “his part of the secret funds of Providence” (LB, 2: 885, 902). If that was an insinuation aimed at Heine, there were no grounds for it at the time, but it became a tender point in 1840, when he began to receive a secret pension from the French government, the exposure of which in 1848 was seriously embarrassing to him.

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The passage in Börne’s Parisian letters where he most unhesitatingly attacked me is at the same time so characteristic for the assessment of the man himself, his style, his passion, and his blindness, that I cannot refrain from communicating it here. Despite his bitterest purpose he was never able to wound me, and everything he brought forward to my disadvantage here, as well as in the above-mentioned articles of the Réformateur, I could read with a serenity as though it had been directed not against me, but, say, against Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, or against the caliph Harun al-Rashid, or against Frederick the Great, who ordered that the lampoons against his person that were hanging somewhat too high on the Berlin street corners be tacked lower so that the public might more easily read them.299 The passage in question is dated from Paris on February 25, 300 1833, and reads as follows: “Shall I speak a reasonable word about Heine’s Conditions in France? I dare not. The insect-like discomfort that buzzed around my head while reading the book and alighted now on this, now on that feeling, put me into too irritable a mood, so that I cannot guarantee — I do not say, the correctness of my judgment, for I would never assert such an arrogant claim — even the honesty of my judgment. But I have remained sensible enough to presume that this ill humor is my fault, not Heine’s. Whoever possesses such great secrets as he does, such as finding in the threehundred-year inhumanity of Austrian politics a lofty continuity and in the king of Bavaria one of the noblest and most brilliant princes who have ever ornamented a throne; declaring the king of France, as though he had the ague, on one day good, on another bad, on the third day good again, on the fourth day bad again; finding that Messrs. von Rothschild remained calmly in Paris during the cholera while the unpaid efforts of German patriots were ridiculous; and who with all this tenderheartedness still considers himself a resolute man — whoever has such great secrets may have still greater ones that might explain the puzzling quality of his book, but I do not know them. I can imagine myself not only into the thinking and feeling of any other person, but into his blood and nerves, put myself at the wellsprings of all his attitudes and feelings, and follow their course with tireless patience. But as I do this I do not have to sacrifice my own being, just set it aside for a while. I can make allowances for childish games, for the passions of a youth. But when, on the day of the bloodiest 299

One of the public-relations stunts with which Frederick the Great bolstered his popularity, when in 1781 he ordered a caricature of him to “hang somewhat lower.” 300

Briefe aus Paris, the first of three parts of letter no. 109 (LB, 3: 809–15), essentially verbatim as usual. Börne’s citations from Heine’s Französische Zustände, in turn, are also generally verbatim or nearly so.

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battle, a boy chasing butterflies on the battlefield gets tangled with my feet, when, on a day of the greatest urgency, when we fervently pray to God, a young fop comes by seeing nothing in the church but the pretty girls and flirts and whispers with them — that can, notwithstanding our philosophy and humaneness, well make us angry. “Heine is an artist, a poet, and the only thing lacking in the most general acknowledgment of this is his own. Because he often wants to be something other than a poet, he often loses himself. For one for whom form is the highest thing, it must also remain the only thing; for as soon as he steps over the edge he overflows into boundlessness and the sand swallows him up. He who honors art as his divinity and, according to whim, also directs many a prayer to nature, transgresses against both art and nature. Heine begs nectar and pollen from nature, and builds cells for them with the formative wax of art. But he does not build the cell to keep honey in it, but gathers the honey to fill up the cell. Therefore he does not touch us when he weeps; for we know that his tears water only his carnation beds. Therefore he does not convince us even when he speaks the truth, for we know that in the truth he loves only what is beautiful. But truth is not always beautiful, it does not always remain so. It takes a long time before it begins to flower, and it must fade before it bears fruit. Heine would worship German freedom if it were in full flower, but because it is covered with manure on account of the raw winter, he does not recognize it and holds it in contempt. With what handsome enthusiasm did he not speak of the battle of the republicans in the St. Méry Church and of their heroism!301 It was a fortunate battle; they had the privilege of exhibiting beautiful defiance to tyranny and of dying their beautiful death for freedom. If the battle had not been so beautiful —and all that would have needed would have been another location, where the republicans could have been dispersed and captured — Heine would have made fun of it. What Brutus did, Heine would glorify as beautifully as he could; but if a tailor were to draw the bloody dagger from the heart of a violated young seamstress, whose name might be Babs, and thus spur the stolid burghers to their own liberation, he would laugh about it.302 Put Heine 301

In a series of daily reports appended to Französische Zustände Heine described in detail the republican uprising of June 5–6, 1832 (DHA, 12/1: 193–202), during which the insurgents were trapped and slaughtered by troops of the National Guard in the cloister of St.-Méry. In the subsequent Article IX (184–87) Heine celebrated the courage and heroism of the nameless victims from all classes of society. The event was widely mourned in French art and literature. 302 The spottily educated Börne seems to have confused the story of Lucretia, who stabbed herself after having been violated by a son of Tarquinius Superbus, giving an impetus to Lucius Junius Brutus to drive the Tarquins out, with Livy’s tale of Virginia (the model for Lessing’s Emilia Galotti), whose father stabbed her to

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into the Salle des menus plaisirs at that memorable moment when France awoke from its thousand-year sleep and swore it no longer wanted to 303 dream — he would have been the most madly ardent Jacobin, the most enraged enemy of the aristocrats and would blissfully have had all the noblemen and princes butchered in one day. But if he were to see a tobacco pipe with a black-red-gold tassel in the German student manner sticking 304 out of the coat-pocket of the fire-breathing Mirabeau — then pooh on freedom! And he would go and make beautiful verses on Marie Antoinette’s beautiful eyes. When he praises in his book the sacred dignity of absolutism, he did so, apart from the fact that it was a rhetorical exercise experimenting with the craziest things, not because he is of a politically pure heart, as he says; but because he wants to keep the breath pure in his mouth, and probably, on the day he wrote that, he had seen a German liberal eating sauerkraut with bratwurst.305 “How can you ever believe anyone who does not believe anything himself? Heine is so very ashamed to believe anything that he has the “Lord” God printed with all capital letters, in order to show that it is a 306 technical term for which he is not responsible. The pampered Heine with his Sybaritic nature can be disturbed in his sleep by the falling of a rose petal; how should he rest comfortably on freedom, which is so knobby? Let him stay far away from it. He who is wearied by every rough surface, he who gets bewildered at every contradiction, let him not go about, not think, let him lie down in his bed and close his eyes. For where is there a truth in which there is not some untruth? Where a beauty that would have no blemish? Where something sublime that would not be death to prevent her enslavement by the decemvir Appius Claudius, leading to a successful popular uprising against the decemvirs. Heine, better grounded in such matters, is likely to have noticed the minor gaffe. 303 On June 20, 1789, when the members of the National Assembly, having been shut out of the entertainment hall at Versailles, moved to the neighboring Tennis Court, where they took an oath to remain until they had given France a constitution. Börne calls the Salle des menus plaisirs the Ballhaus. 304 Black, red, and gold were the colors symbolic of national unity and were therefore forbidden to display. But dissidents, especially students, often made them into bits of clothing or accouterments such as watch fobs and pipe tassels. 305 Heine ascribes the “politically pure heart” by implication to himself in Article VII (DHA, 12/1: 155). The other phrase (Athemreines Mundes) does not occur in Heine’s text. 306 That is, HERR, in the inserted note to Article IX (DHA, 12/1: 191), dated October 1, 1832. In older German biblical and religious texts, Herr, Gott, and Jesus were often printed in capitals or, more commonly, with the first two letters capitalized. The latter is the case in Heine’s Bible of 1827.

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flanked by an absurdity? Nature seldom makes poetry and never rhymes; 307 let him who does not like its prose and its inconsistencies turn to poesy. Nature’s governance is republican; it lets everything have its way until it grows into misdeeds and only then does it punish. He who has weak nerves and avoids danger, let him serve art, absolute art, which deletes every rough thought before it becomes a deed and polishes every deed until it becomes too puny for misdeeds. “Heine has such great value in my eyes that he will not always succeed in overestimating himself. But it is not this self-overestimation with which I reproach him, but that in general he overestimates the efficacy of individuals, even though he has so clearly and beautifully shown in his own book that today the individuals no longer count for anything, that even Voltaire and Rousseau would be of no importance because now the choruses act while the characters talk. What are we then when we are many? Nothing but the heralds of the people. When we announce, and with a loud, audible voice, what has been assigned to each of us by his party, we are praised and rewarded; when we speak inaudibly, or even treacherously bring a false message, we are blamed and chastised. This is just what Heine forgets, and because he believes that he, like many another, could destroy a party or help it thrive, he regards himself as important; looks around to see whom he is pleasing, whom not; dreams of friends and enemies, and because he does not know where he is going and what he wants, he does not know where either his friends or his enemies stand, looks for them now here, now there, and cannot find them either here or there. Nature has fortunately given to us other miserable people only one back, so that we fear the blows of fate only from one side, but poor Heine has two backs; he fears the blows of the aristocrats and the blows of the democrats, and to evade both he must go forward and back at the same time. “In order to please the democrats, Heine says that the Jesuiticalaristocratic party in Germany slanders and persecutes him because he boldly defies absolutism.308 Then to please the aristocrats he says that he has boldly defied Jacobinism; he is a good royalist and will always remain 309 of a monarchist mind. In a Parisian millinery where he was known last summer, he was the only royalist among the eight milliners with their 307

The wordplay here (reimet . . . Ungereimtheiten) is difficult to capture in English. The German idiom es reimt sich nicht means that “it does not rhyme” but also that “it does not fit” or “make sense.” 308

A paraphrase of a passage in the inserted note to Article IX (DHA, 12/1: 191).

309

In Article II (DHA, 12/1: 88). Heine several times declared himself a monarchist, but he could find no monarchs to admire except Louis-Philippe at rare intervals.

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eight admirers — all sixteen of highly dangerous republican persuasion — 310 and therefore the democrats were threatening his life. He says quite literally: ‘I am, by heaven! no republican, I know that if the republicans are 311 victorious, they will cut my throat.’ Further: ‘If the insurrection of June 5 had not failed, it would have been easy for them to prepare the death sentence that they had always intended for me. I am happy to forgive them this 312 foolishness.’ I am not. Republicans who were such fools as to think they had to get Heine out of the way in order to reach their goal would belong in the madhouse. “In this way Heine thinks he is boldly defying now absolutism, now Jacobinism. How one can defy an enemy by turning away from him I do not understand. Now, in revenge, Jacobinism will also boldly defy Heine by the same move. Then they will be even, and no matter how hard they may bump into one another, they cannot hurt one another very much. This gentle way of waging war is very praiseworthy and in this case neither of the defiant ones can lack for a trumpeting herald to announce his heroic deeds. “If there was ever a person whom nature had determined to be an honest man, it is Heine, and in this way he can make his fortune. He cannot lie for five minutes, for twenty lines, for half a sheet. If it were for the sake of a crown he could not suppress any smile, any mockery, any joke, and if, misapprehending himself, he nevertheless lies, nevertheless dissembles, appears serious where he should laugh, humble where he would like to mock, everyone sees it right away, and from such pretense he has the reproach but not the advantage. He is pleased to play the Jesuit of liberalism. I have already said that this game can be of use to the good cause, but since it is a lucrative role, a honest man cannot take it upon himself but must leave it to others. So, in denial of his own better nature, Heine finds his pleasure in managing the role diplomatically and making his teeth the prison bars of his thoughts, behind which everyone sees quite clearly and laughs. For to hide that he has something to hide, that far he will never get with dissimulation. When Count Moltke tries to involve him in a polemic about the nobility, Heine asks him to desist, ‘for it then 310

At the end of Article IX (DHA, 12/1: 187), Heine reports that he had accompanied one of the milliners home from the morgue, where she had found the corpse of her beloved. He says nothing about being threatened by the republicans in the shop. 311 Verbatim from the daily report of June 7 (DHA, 12/1: 197). 312

Verbatim from the inserted note to Article IX (DHA, 12/1: 187). Börne, perhaps willfully, suppresses Heine’s, to be sure, tacit motivation here: the lurking fear, going back to experiences of his youth, that popular insurrection would turn against the Jews.

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seemed to me dubious to discuss publicly in my customary manner a 313 question that would have to address the passions of the day so fiercely.” Neither Mr. von Moltke nor Heine can make this passion of the day against the nobility, which has already lasted fifty times three hundred sixty-five days, any more fierce than it already is. In order to speak warmly about something, should one then wait until the passion that can give it sustenance is subdued in order then to ignite it anew? That, to be sure, is the wisdom of diplomats. Heine believes he knows something that can defend Lafayette against the accusation of having taken part in the June insurrection, but ‘an easily understandable discretion’ keeps him from telling it clearly.314 If Heine gets to be minister in this way, then I expect to be condemned to become his private secretary and watch him from morning to night without laughing.” I would sincerely like to include here as well the above-mentioned two articles from the Réformateur, but three difficulties prevent me: first, these articles would take too much space; second, since they are written in French, I would have to translate them myself; and third, although I inquired in ten cabinets de lecture, I could nowhere turn up a copy of the already failed Réformateur. But the content of these articles is sufficiently familiar to me; they contained the most malicious insinuations of apostasy 313 Inserted note to Article IX (DHA, 12/1: 190). In 1830 Count Magnus von Moltke (1783–1864) published a pamphlet, Ueber den Adel und dessen Verhältnis zum Bürgerstand (On the Nobility and its Relationship to the Middle Class). Among the polemic rejoinders was another pamphlet, Kahldorf über den Adel in Briefen an den Grafen M. von Moltke (Kahldorf on the Nobility in Letters to Count M. von Moltke, 1831), to which Heine, apparently on commission from his publisher Campe, wrote an introduction, one of the most fiery of his political texts, still filled with enthusiasm for the Revolution of 1830 (DHA, 11: 134–45). Heine did not know “Kahldorf,” pseudonym for Robert Wesselhöft (1796– 1852), who had been in prison since 1824 for student fraternity leadership; later he emigrated to the United States, where he became personal physician to Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, and ex-President Van Buren, and a figure in literary life. When Heine made Moltke’s acquaintance in Paris he found him more liberal than he supposed, and when Moltke asked him to recant his criticism, he wrote the passage in Französische Zustände where he acknowledged Moltke’s personal integrity and a certain liberality of opinion despite his convictions about the rightful privileges of the nobility, thus avoiding a possibly dangerous polemic (Federkrieg). 314 In the introductory remark to the daily reports (DHA, 12/1: 193), where Heine adds that the circumstances “would fill the most inveterate Jacobin with compassion and awe for Lafayette.” This may refer to an anecdote that the rebels, seeing that Lafayette wanted nothing to do with their cause, considered, while pulling his carriage, throwing him into the Seine and blaming the government, a plan that he is said to have found not bad.

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and inconsistency, all kinds of charges of sensuality, also Catholicism is defended against me in them, etc. There can be no question here of a defense against them; this document, which is meant to be neither an apologia nor a critique of the departed, also intends no justification of the survivor. In short, I am conscious of the integrity of my purpose and my intentions, and if I cast a glance at my past, an almost joyful pride arises in me about the good stretch of the way that I have already traversed. Will my future give evidence of similar steps forward? To be frank, I doubt it. I feel a strange weariness of my spirit; even if it has not accomplished much in recent times, it was still always on its feet. Whether anything I accomplished in this life was good or bad, we will not contend about it. It is enough that it was great; I was aware it was from the painful expansion of my soul, out of which these accomplishments came forth, and I am aware of it also from the pettiness of the dwarfs that stand before them and get dizzy blinking up at them. Their gaze does not reach to the top, and they only bump their noses on the pedestal of those monuments that I have planted in the literature of Europe to the eternal fame of the German spirit. Are these monuments completely flawless, are they completely without fault and sin? Truly, I will not make any specific claims about that. But what the little people have to object testifies only to their own droll obtuseness. They remind me of the little Parisian badauds315 who during the erection of the obelisk on the Place Louis XVI exchanged their respective views on the value or 316 usefulness of this great gnomon. On this occasion the most delightfully philistine opinions emerged. There was a consumptive, thin tailor who claimed that the red stone was not hard enough to withstand the northern climate very long, and the snow melt would soon crumble it and the wind blow it over. The fellow was called Petit Jean and made very bad coats of which not a scrap will come down to posterity, and he himself already lies buried in Père Lachaise. But the red stone is still standing firm on the Place Louis XVI and will stand there for centuries despite all melted snow, wind, and tailor’s chatter! The most entertaining thing that happened during the erection of the obelisk was the following event: In the place where the great stone had lain before being set up they found some little scorpions that probably came from some scorpion eggs that had been brought from Egypt in the packing of the obelisk and were hatched here in Paris by the heat of the sun. At the sight of these scorpions the badauds cried genuine bloody murder, and they cursed the great 315

Idlers.

316

The Obelisk of Luxor, a gift of the viceroy of Egypt to Louis-Philippe, was erected in 1836.

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stone to which France now owed the poisonous scorpions, a new plague on the land from which children and children’s children would suffer. And they put the little monsters into a box and brought them to the 317 commissaire de police of the Madeleine quarter, where a procès-verbal was taken immediately, and time was of the essence, for the poor creatures died a few hours later. During the erection of great spiritual obelisks, too, all kinds of scorpions can appear, petty little poisonous beasts that perhaps also originate in Egypt and soon will die and be forgotten, while the great monument stands sublimely and indestructibly, admired by our latest descendants. It is actually a strange thing about the Obelisk of Luxor, which the French brought over from old Mizraim318 and set up as an ornament in the middle of that grisly square where they celebrated that dreadful 319 breach with the past, on January 21, 1793! Frivolous as they are, the French, perhaps they have planted a memorial here that will lay a curse on anyone who touches the sacred head of Pharaoh! Who will decipher this voice of prehistory, these ancient hiero320 glyphs? Perhaps they do not contain a curse but a prescription for the wounds of our time! Oh, if one could read them! If one could pronounce them, the healing words graven here. Perhaps is written here where the hidden spring trickles from which mankind must drink in order to be healed, where the secret water of life is, of which our nurse told us so much in the old children’s tale, and for which we now pant as sick old 321 men. Where does the water of life flow? We search and search. Oh, it will be a good while before we locate the great remedy; until then we must waste away through a long painful time, and all kinds of quacks will appear with nostrums that will only make the condition worse. First will come the radicals prescribing their radical cure that, in the end, only works externally, at most removes the social scabs but not the inner decay. Even if they were to succeed in freeing suffering mankind for a short time from its wildest torments, it would happen at the cost of the 317

Police report.

318

The Hebrew name for Egypt.

319

The day of the execution of Louis XVI.

320

Several passing references indicate that Heine was aware of the studies deciphering hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) published in the 1820s; here he prefers to hold to the Romantic view of hieroglyphics as a hermetic script containing secret wisdom. 321 Heine is evidently thinking of one of the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Das Wasser des Lebens (The Water of Life), in which the third son of the king is tricked by his jealous brothers out of bringing his ill father the water of life, but eventually is vindicated and wins the beautiful princess.

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last traces of beauty that have remained to the patient up to now; he will arise ugly from his sickbed as a cured philistine and in the ugly hospital gown, in the ash-gray costume of equality, he will have to drag himself about all the days of his life. All the inherited gaiety, all the sweetness, all the floral fragrance, all poesy will have been pumped out of life, and noth322 ing will remain but the Rumford soup of utility. For beauty and genius no place will be found in the commune of our new puritans, and both will be flayed and oppressed, still far 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 where everyone in the ill-feeling of his own mediocrity seeks to demean all higher endowment down to the banal level. The kings are departing, and with them go the last poets. “The poet should go with the king”;323 these words now may well fall victim to a quite different interpretation. Without a belief in authority no great poet can rise up. As soon as his private life is illuminated by the merciless light of the press and daily criticism invades and gnaws at his words, even the song of the poet can no longer find the necessary respect. When Dante went through the streets of Verona, the people pointed their fingers at him and whispered “he was in Hell!” Could he have otherwise described it with all its torments so exactly? How much more deeply are we affected, with such a reverent belief, by the story of Francesca da Rimini, of Ugolino,324 all those figures of torment emanating from the mind of the great poet. . . . No, they did not merely emanate from his mind, he did not make them up, he lived them, he felt them, he saw them, touched them, he was really in Hell, he was in the city of the damned — he was in exile! The bleak workaday attitude of the modern puritans is already spreading all over Europe, like a gray gloaming that precedes a frozen wintertime. What do the poor nightingales mean who suddenly raise more painfully but also more sweetly than ever their melodious sobbing in the 322

Sir Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814), an American-born British scientist, came to serve the elector of Bavaria, under whom he was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire, choosing the name Rumford from his wife’s home town in Maine. As a reforming minister of war he developed an inexpensive but nourishing soup for the troops. 323

Slightly misquoted from Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans), I: 2: “Drum soll der Sänger mit dem König gehen, / Sie beide wohnen auf der Menschheit Höhen!” (Therefore the singer should walk with the king, / They both dwell on the heights of mankind.). Often misapplied, the line is dubiously meant, for it is spoken by the effete King Charles VII, who would rather play at poetry with René of Anjou than confront the crisis besetting his kingdom. 324

Figures in Dante’s Inferno, cantos 5 and 33.

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German poets’ forest? They are singing their sorrowful adieu! The last nymphs spared by Christianity flee into the wildest thicket. In what sad condition I saw them there, last night! As though the bitternesses of reality were not sufficiently grievous, the bad nighttime visions torment me further. In garish picture-writing my dream shows me the great suffering that I would gladly conceal from myself and that I hardly dare to utter in the sober conceptual sounds of the bright day. Last night I dreamed of a great, desolate forest and a disagreeable autumn night. In the great, desolate forest, between the trees reaching to the sky, clearings sometimes came into view, though they were filled with a ghostly white fog. Here and there, out of the thick fog, a quiet campfire greeted me. Walking up to one of them, I observed all kinds of dark shadows moving around the flames; but only immediately up close could I exactly recognize the slender forms and their lovely melancholy faces. They were beautiful, naked female figures, like the nymphs that we see on the lascivious paintings of Giulio Romano325 and who lie about gracefully in the voluptuous bloom of youth under the summer-green bower and enjoy themselves. Alas! no such cheerful show presented itself here to my gaze! The women of my dream, although still adorned with the loveliness of eternal youth, nevertheless bore a secret destruction in body and being; their limbs were still charming with sweet proportions, but grown somewhat thin and as though frosted over with cold misery, and, especially in their faces, despite the smiling frivolity, the traces of an abysmal grief twitched. Also, instead of lying on the luxuriant grassy banks like Giulio’s nymphs, they crouched on the hard ground, under half leafless trees, where, instead of the amorous rays of the sun, the swirling mists of the damp autumn night dripped down on them. One of these beauties sometimes arose, grasped from the brushwood a blazing brand, swung it over her head like a thyrsus and tried to take one of those impossible dance postures that we have seen on Etruscan vases,326 but, sadly smiling, as though compelled by weariness and the night chill, she sank back beside the crackling fire. One among these women especially moved my whole heart with an almost lustful pity. She was a tall figure, but with much more emaciated arms, legs, breast, and cheeks than the others, the effect of which, however, was enchantingly attractive rather than repellent. I do not know how it happened, but, before I realized it, I was sitting next to her at the fire, occupied with warming her trembling, frosty hands and 325

(1499–1546), Italian Renaissance painter.

326

The thyrsus was the staff of Dionysus. Heine several times calls up the image of the abandoned Dionysian dance to symbolize the sensualism he associated with pre-Christian antiquity.

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feet with my burning lips; I also played with the black, damp locks hanging over her face with its straight Greek nose and over her touchingly cold, meager Greek breast. Yes, her hair was of an almost gleaming blackness, as were her eyebrows, which flowed together, richly dark, giving her gaze a strange expression of languishing wildness. “How old are you, unfortunate child?” I said to her. “Don’t ask my age,” she answered with a half melancholy, half wanton smile, “if I were to make myself a millennium younger, I would still be well advanced in years! But it is growing ever colder and I am sleepy, and if you will lend me your knee as a pillow, you will very much oblige your obedient servant.” While she lay on my knees, slumbered, and sometimes rattled in her sleep like one dying, her companions whispered all kinds of conversations of which I understood very little, since they pronounced Greek quite differently than I had learned it in school and later with old Wolf.327 I only got so much, that they were complaining about the bad times and expecting them to get worse, and resolved to flee still deeper into the forest. Then suddenly, in the distance, a yelling of rough mob voices arose. They cried, I no longer know what. In the midst of it a Catholic mass bell giggled. And my beautiful forest women grew visibly paler and thinner, until they completely dissolved in the fog and I awoke with a yawn.

327

Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), philologist, member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences with the right to lecture at the university, which he had helped found; in his prime the most famous Homer scholar in the world. Heine encountered him when his career was in decline, but attended his course on Aristophanes and developed a personal relationship with him. Heine, however, did not know Greek; even his Latin was barely serviceable.

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Selected Bibliography* Amerongen, Martin van. “Heinrich Heine und Ludwig Börne.” In Rose und Kartoffel. Ein Heinrich Heine-Symposium, ed. A. A. van den Braembussche and Ph. van Engeldorp Gastelaars, 143–55. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. Anderson, Mark M. “Ludwig Börne Begins his Professional Career as a Freelance German Journalist and Editor of Die Wage.” In Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes, 129–35. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997. Bock, Helmut. Ludwig Börne. Vom Gettojuden zum Nationalschriftsteller. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1962. Booss, Rutger. Ansichten der Revolution. Paris-Berichte deutscher Schriftsteller nach der Juli-Revolution 1830: Heine, Börne u.a. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1977. Burschell, Friedrich. “Boerne and Heine in Exile.” In In Tyrannos. Four Centuries of Struggle against Tyranny in Germany, ed. Hans J. Rehfisch, 162–80. London: Drummond, 1944. Chase, Jefferson S. Inciting Laughter: The Development of “Jewish Humor” in 19th Century German Culture. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2000. Chiarini, Paolo. “Heine contra Börne ovvero ‘Critica dell’impazienza rivoluzionaria.’” Studi germanici N.S. 10 (1972): 355–92. Dietze, Walter. “Ludwig Börne, der ‘Zeitschriftsteller.’” In Dietze, Reden, Vorträge, Essays, 64–112. Leipzig: Reclam, 1972. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, ed. Ludwig Börne und Heinrich Heine, Ein deutsches Zerwürfnis. Nördlingen: Greno, 1986. Estermann, Alfred, ed. Ludwig Börne 1786–1837. Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1986. Füllner, Karin. “‘Tagesgedanken’ und ‘Nachtträume.’ Der Traum einer großen Schiffsreise in Heines ‘Börne’-Buch.” In “. . . und die Welt ist so lieblich verworren.” Heinrich Heines dialektisches Denken. Festschrift für Joseph A. Kruse, 359–65. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2004.

*

The bibliography is restricted to selected titles relevant to the study of the relationship of Heine and Börne from a variety of perspectives. The sources listed in the acknowledgments at the beginning of the book are not repeated here.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Galley, Eberhard, and Alfred Estermann, eds. Heinrich Heines Werk im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen. Vol. 6: Juli 1840 bis Dezember 1841. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, Heinrich Heine Verlag, 1992. Geissler, Michael. “Flaneure und Chiffoniers: Ludwig Börne und Heinrich Heine.” In Geisler, Die literarische Reportage in Deutschland. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines operativen Genres, 177–206. Königstein/Ts.: Scriptor, 1982. Gilman, Sander L. “The Rhetoric of Self-Hatred: Börne.” In Gilman. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, 148–67. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. Gutzkow, Karl. Börne’s Leben. Ludwig Börne’s Gesammelte Schriften, Supplementband. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1840. Hardin, James. “Ludwig Börne (1786–1837).” In German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789–1832, ed. James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweitzer, 34–40. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 90. Detroit, New York, Fort Lauderdale, and London: Gale Research, 1989. Hess, Jonathan M. “Ludwig Börne’s Visit to the Anatomical Cabinet: The Writing of Jewish Emancipation.” New German Critique 55 (1992): 105–25. Hinderer, Walter. “Die Frankfurter Judengasse und das Ghetto Europas. Der praktische Hintergrund von Ludwig Börnes emanzipativem Patriotismus.” Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift, N.S. 24 (1974): 421–29. ———. “Ludwig Börne, der Apostel der Freiheit”; “Nazarener oder Hellene: Die politisch-ästhetische Fehde zwischen Börne und Heine.” In Hinderer. Über deutsche Literatur und Rede: Historische Interpretationen, 126–53, 154–67. Munich: Fink, 1981. Hirth, Friedrich. “Heine und Börne.” In Hirth. Heinrich Heine: Bausteine zu einer Biographie, 25–43. Mainz: Kupferberg, 1950. Höhn, Gerhard. “Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift.” In Höhn, HeineHandbuch. Zeit, Person, Werk, 415–36. 3rd rev. edn. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2004. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. “Talent oder Charakter: die Börne-Heine-Fehde und ihre Nachgeschichte.” Modern Language Notes 95 (1980): 609–26. Jasper, Willi. Keinem Vaterland geboren. Ludwig Börne. Eine Biographie. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1989. Kahn, Lothar, with the assistance of Donald D. Hook. “Ludwig Börne.” In Kahn and Hook. Between Two Worlds: A Cultural History of German-Jewish Writers, 30–34. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1993.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Index Aguado, Alexandre, 108–9 Alexander, prince of SaynWittgenstein-Hohenstein, 48 n. 139 Alexander I, tsar, 18 Allgemeine Zeitung (General Gazette), Augsburg, xxii, 30 n. 92, 35, 69 Antiochus, king of Syria, 14–15 Appius Claudius, decemvir, 115– 16 n. 302 Argout, Antoine d’, 79 Aristogeiton, Athenian patriot, 59 Aristophanes, 124 n. 327 Arminius, chief of the Cherusci, 94 Arnold, Matthew, xxi Association for the Culture and Science of the Jews, xii Astyges, king of the Medes, 58 n. 156 Austin, Sarah, 55 Balance, La, 95 Baruch, Jakob (Börne’s father), xiv, 12 Beaumont, Gustave de, works by: Marie, ou l’esclavage aux EtatsUnis (Marie, or Slavery in the United States), 30 n. 92 Berlin, University of, xii, xv, 73 Berliner politisches Wochenblatt (Berlin Political Weekly), 100 Blücher, Gebhart Leberecht von, 46, 94 Börne, Ludwig, works by: “Bemerkungen über Sprache und Stil” (“Remarks on Language and Style”), 113 n. 297

Briefe aus Paris (Letters from Paris), xxiii, xxiv–xxv, xxxiv, xxxviii, 11, 54, 55, 64–65, 98–101, 111, 114–19 Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Works), 11 n. 36 Menzel der Franzosenfresser (Menzel the French-Eater), xxvi, xxxiv, 27 n. 83, 72 n. 198, 88–89, 94 Monographie der deutschen Postschnecke (Monograph of the German Mail Snail), 81 n. 218 Die Wage (The Scale), xvi, 2 Bonaparte, Maria Letizia Ramolino, 18 Bonn, University of, xii, 75 n. 204 Bröder, Christian Gottlob, 76 Brutus, Lucius Junius, Roman consul, 100, 115–16 n. 302 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 16–17 Byron, George Gordon Noel Byron, Baron, 64 Byron, George Gordon Noel Byron, Baron, works by: “Appendix to the Two Foscaris,” 39 Camoëns, Luis de, 112 Campe, Julius, xiii–xiv, xviii, xxiv– xxv, xxvi, xxvii–xxx, xxxv–xxxvi, xxxviii n. 49, 5–6 Carl August, duke of Weimar, 75 n. 204 Cataline, 16 Catherine, empress of Russia, 7 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 112

INDEX

Champollion, Jean-François, 121 n. 320 Charles I, king of England, xvii Charles X, king of France, 41–42 Christiani, Charlotte. See Heine, Charlotte Christiani, Rudolph, 91–92 Cicero, 16. 63 Cobentzl, Johann Ludwig Joseph von, 7 Coligny, Gaspard de, 101 n. 275 Cotta, Johann Friedrich von, xiv, xvii–xviii, xxi, xxii, 5, 24 Cotta, Johann Georg von, 92 Courier, Paul-Louis, 87 Creizenach, Theodor, 110 Crelinger, Auguste, 55 Crelinger, Otto, 55 Ctesias of Cnidos, 82 Cyrus, king of Persia, 58

Friedländer, Amalie. See Heine, Amalie Friedrich II, king of Prussia, 114 Friedrich II (Barbarossa), emperor, 102–3 Friedrich IV, elector Palatine, 84 n. 226 Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of Prussia, 18 Fugger family, 84 n. 226 Garnier, Joseph Heinrich, 60–61, 62, 78, 79 Gentz, Friedrich von, 99 Giessen, University of, xv Girondists, 77 Giulio Romano, 123 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xiv, xvi–xvii, xxi, 3–4, 5 n. 16, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15–16, 24 n. 78, 28 n. 84, 32, 37, 94, 112, 113 n. 297 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works by: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), 24 n. 78, 28 n. 84, 37 n. 112 Göttingen, University of, xii, 73, 76 Golovnin, Vasili Mikhailovich, 34 Gregory XVI, pope, xxiv Grimm, Jakob, 121 n. 320 Grimm, Wilhelm, 121 n. 320 Gros, Antoine-Jean, 7 n. 26 Guard Headquarters (Frankfurt). See Konstablerwache Gutzkow, Karl, xxv, xxvi, xxviii– xxix Gutzkow, Karl, works by: Börne’s Leben (Börne’s Life), xxviii Wally, die Zweiflerin (Wally, the Skeptic), xxv

Dana, Richard Henry, 119 n. 313 Dante, 98, 112, 122 David, Jacques-Louis, 7 n. 26, 109 Davout, Nicholas, 46 Demmler, Franz, 93 Demosthenes, 63 Deutsche Tribüne (German Tribune), 61 Dieffenbach, Johann Friedrich, 2 Droste-Vischering, Clemens August von, archbishop of Cologne, 96 n. 263 Duesberg (Duisberg), Joseph, 93 Duff Gordon, Lucie, 55 n. 147 Elssler, Fanny, 108 Engels, Friedrich, xxix, xl Ferdinand I, emperor, 97 n. 265 Feuillants, 74 Forster, Georg, 105–6 Franckh, Friedrich Gottlieb, 60 Franz I (II), emperor, 18

132

INDEX

Halle, Therese. See Heine, Therese Halle, University of, xv Hambach festival, xix, xxii n. 8, xxxiv, 65, 69–72, 75, 99, 100 Hannibal, 16 Harmodious, Athenian patriot, 59 Harries, Heinrich, 47–47 n. 133 Harun al-Raschid, caliph of Baghdad, 114 Hazlitt, William, 87 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xii, 76–77, 102 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, works by: Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Spirit), 102 n. 277 Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History), 31 Philosophie des Rechts (Philosophy of Right), 77

“Einleitung zu ‘Kahldorf über den Adel’” (“Introduction to Kahldorf on the Nobility”), 119 n. 313 Elementargeister (Elemental Spirits), 39 n. 118 Florentinische Nächte (Florentine Nights), xxvi, 27 n. 83 Französische Maler (French Painters), xxi–xxii, 84 Französische Zustände (Conditions in France), xxii– xxiii, 85 n. 229, 114–19 Gedichte (Poems), xiii Die Göttin Diana (The Goddess Diana), xxxi Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey), xiii, xiv Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand (Ideas. The Book of Le Grand), x, xiv Neue Gedichte (New Poems), xxvi “Prinzessin Sabbath” (“Princess Sabbath”), 23 n. 74 Reise von München nach Genua (Journey from Munich to Genoa), xxxiii, 6–7 n. 23, 12 n. 40 Reisebilder (Travel Pictures), xiii, xiv, xvii, xviii, xxxvii, xxxix, 6 Die romantische Schule (The Romantic School), 4 n. 14, 12 n. 40, 14 n. 50, 23 n. 74 Der Schwabenspiegel (The Swabian Mirror), 33 n. 101 Die Stadt Lucca (The City of Lucca), 35–36 n. 108 “Über den Denunzianten” (“On the Informer”), xxvi, 89 Über Polen (On Poland), xxxvii

Heiberg, Peter Andreas, 105 Heidelberg, University of, xv Heigel, Karl, 2 Heine, Amalie (Heine’s cousin), xiii Heine, Betty (Heine’s mother), xxvii Heine, Charlotte (Heine’s cousin), 91 n. 243 Heine, Heinrich, works by: Die Bäder von Lucca (The Baths of Lucca), xviii, xxxiv Briefe aus Berlin(Letters from Berlin), xiv, 39–40 n. 119 Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), xiii, xvii, xxxix De l’Allemagne (On Germany), xxiii, xxxv, 86 n. 230, 95 n. 260, 105–6, 113 n. 298 Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter’s Tale), xix, 179 n. 64

133

INDEX

“Verschiedene” (“Various Women”), xxvi “Vorläufige Erklärung” (Preliminary Declaration), xxxviii, 67 n. 183 Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany), 64 n. 179, 106 n. 284 Heine, Isaak (Heine’s uncle), 91 n. 243 Heine, Mathilde (Heine’s wife), xxx Heine, Salomon (Heine’s uncle), xii, xiii, xiv, xviii, xxv, xxxvii, 46 n. 133 Heine, Samson (Heine’s father), xii, xviii, xxi, 1, 22 Heine, Therese (Heine’s cousin), xiii Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 37 Hermann. See Arminius Herodotus, 109 n. 291 Herz, Henriette, xiv–xv, 3 n. 13 Herz, Markus, xiv, 3 n. 13 Hipparchus, tyrant of Athens, 59 n. 160 Hippius, tyrant of Athens, 59 n. 160 Hirsch, Meyer, 58 Hirth, Friedrich, xxvii n. 19 Homer, 36, 39, 91, 124 n. 327

Kahldorf. See Wesselhöft, Robert Kant, Immanuel, 37 n. 112 Karl Theodor, elector Palatine, x Kölle, Ferdinand, 92–93 Konradin, Imperial pretender, 76 n. 210 Konstablerwache (Frankfurt), 7–8 La Fontaine, Jean de, 99 Lafayette, Marie-Joseph du Motier de, 42, 43, 48–49, 79, 90, 100, 119 Lamennais, Félicité de, xxiii–xxiv, 10, 94–95, 97 Lamennais, Félicité de, works by: Paroles d’un croyant (Letters of a Believer), xxiv, 10 n. 34, 94–95 Laube, Heinrich, xxv, xxvii, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxvii, xxxix n. 50 Lelevel, Joachim, 68 Leonidas, king of Sparta, 108–9 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 87 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, works by: Emilia Galotti, 115–16 n. 302 Livy, 115–16 n. 302 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 119 n. 313 Louis XIII, king of France, 20 n. 68 Louis XIV, king of France, 84 n. 226 Louis XVI, king of France, xxii n. 8, 74 n. 203, 121 n. 319 Louis-Philippe, king of the French, xi, xix, xxii, 42 n. 124, 44, 45–46 n. 132, 97 n. 265, 114, 117 n. 309, 120 n. 316 Lucretia, 115–16 n. 302 Ludwig I, king of Bavaria, xiii, xxxv, 59, 70 n. 190, 97 n. 265, 114 Luther, Martin, 33, 47–48, 64 n. 179, 75 n. 205, 94

Ibsen, Henrik, xxxix Jacobins, 74, 78, 80 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 76 Jan III, king of Poland, 67 Jarcke, Karl Ernst, 98–101 Jean Paul, xxxvii, 3, 8, 14–15 João VI, king of Portugal, 100 n. 271 Julius Caesar, 16

134

INDEX

Mandane, princess of the Medes, 58 Manesse Manuscript, 84 Mann, Thomas, works by: “Notiz über Heine” (“Note on Heine”), xxxix Marat, Jean-Paul, 51 Marggraff, Hermann, 82 Maria II, queen of Portugal, 100 n. 271 Marie Antoinette, queen of France, 116 Marmontel, Jean-François, 64 n. 179 Marx, Karl, xxix n. 29, xl, 95 n. 261 Massmann, Hans Ferdinand, 76 Maximilian Joseph, elector Palatine and of Bavaria; king of Bavaria, x Mehemet Ali, viceroy of Egypt, 120 n. 316 Menzel, Wolfgang, xvii, xxi, xxv– xxvi, xxxvii, 9, 33 n. 101, 37, 89–90, 93, 94 Menzel, Wolfgang, works by: Die deutsche Literatur (German Literature), xvii, 9, 94 n. 258 Metternich, Clemens Lothar Wenzel, Prince, x–xi, xvi, xxii, xxv, xxxii, 8, 9, 21 n. 70, 99 n. 266, 100 n. 271 Meyer, Heinrich, 37 n. 111 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 107 n. 285 Miguel, Dom, Portuguese pretender, 100 Milton, John, 112 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel-Victor Riqueti de, 63–64, 101, 116 Mirat, Augustine Crescence. See Heine, Mathilde Mithridates, king of Pontus, 16 Mohammed, 23, 30, 31, 35 Moltke, Magnus von, 118–19 Montagnards, 77

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de, 72 Morgenblatt für die gebildeten Stände (Morning Paper for the Educated Classes), Stuttgart, xxi, 84 n. 223 Mu’allaqāt, 71 Müllner, Adolf, 92 Mundt, Theodor, xxv Münzer, Thomas, 48 Napoleon I, x, xii, xv, xix, xxii, xxxiii, 1 n. 4, 6–7, 15, 28 n. 87, 32, 74, 94, 106 Neander, Johann August Wilhelm, 58 Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, 13–14, 114 Nero, Roman emperor, 19 Neue allgemeine politische Annalen (New General Political Annals), xiv, 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxxix–xl Nikolai I, tsar, 62, 66, 79, 85 Orléans, Duc de. See LouisPhilippe Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, 14–15 Paulus Diaconus, 38–39, 40 Petrarch, 62, 81 Pfizer, Gustav, xxxviii n. 45, 93 Pistor, Daniel Ludwig, 70 Platen von Hallermünde, August von, xviii, xxxviii n. 45 Plutarch, 36 Pustkuchen, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm, 37 Raspail, François-Vincent, 95 n. 260 Raumer, Friedrich von, 54–55, 92, 97 Réformateur, Le, 95, 111, 112, 113, 119

135

INDEX

Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis de, 20–21 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich. See Jean Paul Riesser, Gabriel, xxx, 14 n. 50 Robert, Léopold, 84 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 20– 21, 79, 80 Romulus Augustulus, Roman emperor, 42 Rosenkranz, Karl, 102 Rothschild, Amschel, 8–9, 57 Rothschild, Betty de, 21 Rothschild, Caroline von, 57 Rothschild, Gutie, 18 Rothschild, James de, 19–21 Rothschild, Mayer Amschel, 18– 19 Rothschild, Nathan, xiv, 19 Rothschild, Salomon Mayer von, 57 Rothschild family, xiv, 18, 19, 21, 114 Rotteck, Karl von, 53, 97 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 84, 117 Rumford, Sir Benjamin Thompson, 122

Schwarz, Berthold, 58 n. 158 Seybold, Ludwig Friedrich, 60–61 Shakespeare, William, 37 Shakespeare, William, works by: Hamlet, 24, 61 Julius Caesar, 24 Merchant of Venice, The, 87 n. 234 Sichel, Julius, 85, 86 Sidney, Philip, 112 Siebenpfeiffer, Philipp Jakob, 71 Sobieski, Jan. See Jan III Sontag, Henriette, 13 Steinmann, Friedrich, xxxiii n. 38 Stern, Siegmund Jakob, 57 Strauss, Salomon, xxiii, xxix–xxx, xxxviii, 81–83 Strauss-Wohl, Jeanette. See Wohl, Jeanette Strodtmann, Adolf, xxxviii n. 49 Tacitus, 208 Tarquinius Superbus, king of Rome, 100, 115–16 n. 302 Thiers, Adolphe, works by: Histoire de la Révolution française (History of the French Revolution), 7 Thompson, Sir Benjamin. See Rumford, Sir Benjamin Thompson Tiberius, Roman emperor, 36 Tieck, Ludwig, 92 Titus, Roman emperor, 14, 103 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 30 n. 92

Saint-Just, Louis de, 64 n. 179 Savoye, Henry-Charles-Joseph, 69 Scheffer, Ary, 84 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 16 Schiller, Friedrich, xiv, xvi, 5 n. 16, 112, 116, 122 Schiller, Friedrich, works by: Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans), 122 “Das Lied von der Glocke” (“The Song of the Bell”), 41 “Die Worte des Glaubens (“The Words of Faith”), 41 Schnaase, Karl, 37–38 Schumann, Clara, 107 n. 285 Schwab, Gustav, 33 n. 101

Urspruch family, 2 Van Buren, Martin, 119 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, xiv, 2–3, 43 n. 128 Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel, xiv, 3, 43 Varus, Publius Quintilius, 94 n. 256

136

INDEX

Venedey, Jakob, xxx n. 34, 70 Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. See Association for the Culture and Science of the Jews Vernet, Horace, 84 Virgil, 49 n. 140 Voltaire, 84, 117 Wagner, Richard, xxx Walther von der Vogelweide, 84 Warnefrid, Paul. See Paulus Diaconus Wartburg festival, 75–76 Weidner, Julius, 2 Wesselhöft, Robert, 119 n. 313 Wienbarg, Ludolf, xxv Wihl, Ludwig, 91 Wirth, Johann, 69 n. 186, 73 Wohl, Jeanette, xv–xvi, xvii, xxi– xxi, xxix, xxx n. 33, xxxvii, xxxviii, 5, 10–11, 57, 80 n. 217, 81–83 Wohl, Jeanette, works by: Ludwig Börne’s Urtheil über Heinrich Heine (Ludwig Börne’s Judgment on Heinrich Heine), xxix Wolf, Friedrich August, 124 Wolfrum, Hermann, 61, 78–79 Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Gazette for the Elegant World), 110 Zelter, Karl Friedrich, 94 n. 255

137