The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine [Reprint 2013 ed.] 3484651016, 9783484651012

Table of contents :
Introduction
The Exhaustion of Current Heine Studies: Some Observations, Partly Speculative
Homeric Laughter by the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx
Under the Influence of Heinrich Heine: Aron Bernstein as a Writer and Literary Critic
The Impact of Heine on Nineteenth-Century German-Jewish Writers
Heine and the Yiddish Poets
Freud Reads Heine Reads Freud
Heine’s Body. Heine’s Corpus. Sexuality and Jewish Identity in Karl Kraus’s Literary Polemics Against Heinrich Heine
Bacherach and Barcelona: On Else Lasker-Schüler’s Relation to Heinrich Heine
The Heine Cult in Hebrew Literature of the 1890s and its Russian Context
Heine, Herzl, and Nordau: Aspects of the Early Zionist Reception
Heinrich Heine’s Jewish Reception in Croatia in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Lion Feuchtwanger’s Discovery of Himself in Heinrich Heine
Max Brod’s Presentation of Heinrich Heine
Fritz Heymann’s Approach to Heine
Jewish Reception as the Last Phase of the American Heine Reception
Appendix
Moi’se, Heine, Celan
(English Translation by Jay Shir)
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Conditio Judaica

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Studien und Quellen zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte Herausgegeben von Hans Otto Horch in Verbindung mit Itta Shedletzky

The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine Edited by Mark H. Gelber

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1992

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine/ed. by Mark H. Gelber. - Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992 (Conditio Judaica ; 1) NE: Gelber, Mark Η. [Hrsg.]; GT ISBN 3-484-65101-6

ISSN 0941-5866

© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Tübingen 1992 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Druck: Weihert-Druck GmbH, Darmstadt Einband: Hugo Nädele, Nehren

David S. Galton in memoriam for the encouragement and love he radiated to family and friends

Contents

Introduction

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Jeffrey L. Sammons: The Exhaustion of Current Heine Studies: Some Observations, Partly Speculative

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Renate Schlesier: Homeric Laughter by the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx

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Julius H. Schoeps: Under the Influence of Heinrich Heine: Aron Bernstein as a Writer and Literary Critic

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Lothar Kahn and Donald D. Hook: The Impact of Heine on Nineteenth-Century German-Jewish Writers

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Sol Liptzin: Heine and the Yiddish Poets

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Sander L. Gilman: Freud Reads Heine Reads Freud

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Leo A. Lensing: Heine's Body. Heine's Corpus. Sexuality and Jewish Identity in Karl Kraus's Literary Polemics Against Heinrich Heine

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Itta Shedletzky: Bacherach and Barcelona: On Else Lasker-Schüler's Relation to Heinrich Heine

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Hamutal Bar-Yosef: The Heine Cult in Hebrew Literature of the 1890s and its Russian Context

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Mark H. Gelber: Heine, Herzl, and Nordau: Aspects of the Early Zionist Reception

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Miijana Stancic: Heinrich Heine's Jewish Reception in Croatia in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

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VIII

Wulf Koepke: Lion Feuchtwanger's Discovery of Himself in Heinrich Heine

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Margarita Pazi: Max Brod's Presentation of Heinrich Heine

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Joseph A. Kruse: Fritz Heymann's Approach to Heine

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Jeffrey L. Sammons: Jewish Reception as the Last Phase of the American Heine Reception

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Appendix. Alain Suied: Moi'se, Heine, Celan

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(English Translation by Jay Shir)

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Contributors

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Index

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Introduction

In April, 1990, the Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University (Beersheva, Israel), together with the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, and the Goethe Institute, Tel Aviv, sponsored a three-day conference on the "Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine." This volume contains most of the lectures, many substantially revised, which were presented at the sessions, together with a few others, which could not be delivered at that time. The gathering in Beersheva provided an opportunity to utilize the methodological guidelines and insights of reception aesthetics within a very specific framework, that is, to investigate the particular Jewish reception of Heinrich Heine. By emphasizing the role of readers situated in history, the conditions of reading among a delimited readership, and reader-response in its various forms, the notion of Jewish reception itself becomes as much a topic of debate, as the complicated reception history of Heine. Thus, in addition to helping to fill a particular literary-historical gap, the very topic lends itself to a highly self-conscious critical discussion. The essays contained in this volume have different objectives, all falling within the purview of reception. Many focus on the reception of Heine by specific Jewish readers, who, more often than not, appear as major figures in their own right in Western literary or cultural history. The essays on Sigmund Freud (Gilman), Karl Kraus (Lensing), Else Lasker-Schüler (Shedletzky), Lion Feuchtwanger (Koepke), and Max Brod (Pazi) fall into this category, as does Karl Marx (Schlesier), despite his very problematical status as a "Jewish reader." However, since the reception history naturally touches upon marginal, often forgotten, figures, consideration of these cases very often provides striking insights into the widespread importance of Heine for the careers of numerous aspiring poets and writers. The essays on Aron Bernstein (Schoeps), on somewhat less well-known 19th century GermanJewish writers (Kahn, Hook), as well as the one on Fritz Heymann (Kruse) pertain here. Another object of concern is the Jewish participation or contribution to reception history in different national literatures, some more dominant, as the American example shows (Sammons), and others on the periphery of Western literary history, as the Croatian model indicates

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(StanSii). The relative international stature of these respective literatures is neutral as to the prominance of Heine as an abiding factor in its individual development. Related perhaps is the reception within particular Jewish ideological streams, as seen in the Zionist reception (Gelber). The specific receptions in Yiddish (Liptzin) and Hebrew literatures (Bar-Yosef) are of special interest within the overall Jewish reception; however, it is fair to say that the related essays in this volume serve to indicate that much more remains to be done in these areas. National literary traditions develop in conjunction with international cultural trends, and the interdependence of specific reception histories emerges as a clear concept, when the findings of different essays are considered carefully and measured against one another. Furthermore, the question concerning the extent to which Heine's implied reader would be a Jewish reader is addressed, albeit indirectly, in several of the contributions (Gilman, Shedletzky, Gelber). In a way, that question inevitably brings discussion back to the very works of Heine, a very desirable trend according to Jeffrey Sammons, if, as he puts it, the "current exhaustion" of Heine studies is to yield eventually to new, energetic interpretive approaches. In the appendix, an "Intervention" to the Beersheva Heine Conference, written by the French-Jewish poet Alain Suied, may be found. This poetical meditation is but one more reception of Heine; yet, as we have come to understand, all of the contributions in this collection must also be viewed in this light. What emerged in Beersheva, I believe, was the prospect of continuing, diverse Jewish receptions (of Heine and of other literary figures), many of which share more in common with contemporaneous non-Jewish readings than with other Jewish readings. To some extent, this may be the result of the existence of highly diverse Jewish readerships in different languages, often sharing many of the same social and cultural characteristics of non-Jewish readerships in whose midst Jews reside. Perhaps, though, this is also a result of the complex personality of Heine, and the broad range and numerous kinds of writings he authored. Heine's conversion, his Jewish interests and acculturation, his wavering political associations, his exile and problematical relationship with the state authorities, and his late return to Jewish themes are complicating factors in this discussion. To some degree, a consideration of the Jewish reception of Heine indicates that underlying all reception studies is a sense that readings of literary texts are transitory, if momentarily significant, experiences, among peoples, communities, and individuals. Also, the same readers respond differently over time to what thay have read, and the attempt to hint at a more or less uniform "national" reading of certain writers is bound to meet certain resistance. In a curious way, many of the reception studies found in this volume indicate that the reception of Heine in literary history is as much as, if not

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more of, an emotional response to the person of Heine than a reasoned appreciation of particular poems or literary works. Heine became a symbol of diverse cultural options for European Jewry, and he, together with his works, was often embraced or rejected on the basis of strong emotional responses among readers to aspects of his personality or controversial moments in his career.

One high point of the Heine conference in Beersheva was the awarding of the Ben-Gurion Medal by Professor Haim Elata, President of Ben-Gurion University, to Professor Sol Liptzin for his life-long contributions to Jewish scholarship. Sol Liptzin announced at the conference, that is, shortly before his 89th birthday, that his lecture on "Heine and the Yiddish Poets," which brought together two of his long-term scholarly interests in a provocative manner, would be the last public lecture of his career. As this volume goes to press, Sol Liptzin has just celebrated his 90th birthday. Also, I would like to add that Professor Lothar Kahn, who won an American Council of Learned Societies' grant to enable him to participate in the Heine conference in Israel, died unexpectedly in January, 1990, before the meeting. His colleague and close friend, Donald D. Hook, has reconstructed and revised Lothar Kahn's lecture for inclusion in this volume, for which I thank him sincerely. I would like to thank Shlomo Maier, director of the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, Jürgen Keil, director of the Goethe Institute, Tel Aviv, and Professor Ya'akov Blidstein, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ben-Gurion University, as well as the Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, BGU for their financial support of the Heine conference in Beersheva in 1990. I am also grateful to my colleagues, Gerda Elata, Michel Elial, Haim Finkelstein, Efraim Sicher, and Georges Slama, for their advice and participation. I am thankful to my assistant, Hana Chone, as well as to the students in my seminar on problems in reception aesthetics, who were helpful in diverse ways, in addition to contributing to the discussions. Very special thanks are due to Suzi Ganot, administrative assistant and secretary, Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, BGU, for her devoted assistance over an extended time, in terms of organizing the conference, assuring its success, and preparing the texts of the lectures for publication. Concerning the publication of this volume, I would like to thank Professor Hans Otto Horch and Birgitta Zeller of Niemeyer Verlag for their suggestions and aid. Doris Vogel has been indispensable in terms of her assistance in producing a readable manuscript. I am also grateful to her for completing the

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index. Ewald Bischoff has been extremely generous with his time and computer, and he has helped me solve numerous, technical problems. For other related help, I should like to thank Helmut Scholz, and, last, my wife, Jody.

Mark H. Gelber Beersheva/Omer

Jeffrey L. Sammons The Exhaustion of Current Heine Studies: Some Observations, Partly Speculative

The underlying premise of what follows here is that contemporary Heine studies have reached a relatively static state; that, despite the large amount of material that continues to appear without intermission, the view of him that has sustained the Heine industry has become exhausted in its possibilities, and that the topic will gradually become moribund unless there are initiatives from new perspectives, which, of course, are always possible. It might fairly be asked how one can know such a thing, and in fact I make the assertion with some diffidence. Not too many months ago, I was telling students that the Berlin Wall looked like a permanent installation for the foreseeable future and that no one could imagine a plausible scenario for the reunification of Germany. Like most others interested in these matters, I have since given up prophecy. The historical moment in which one is most directly engaged is often the one most difficult to perceive accurately. But, I think there are a number of signs that allow the reasonable conclusion that Heine studies are in fact becoming exhausted. One of these, which ought to strike any constant reader of the material, is its repetitiousness, the relatively frozen canonical view of Heine, the absence of any serious dissent to now conventional opinion. Another sign is the appearance of large, summarizing, conclusive overviews, traces, perhaps, of the flight of the owl of Minerva at dusk. We have at long last a usable modern biography in German, Wolfgang Hädecke's. 1 Another example is the 1987 Heine-Handbuch of Gerhard Höhn, in which the author himself argues that the time is appropriate for an overview.2 This is an immensely useful work, a first resource for anyone seriously concerned with Heine, though in its judgments it is a syncretic compendium of mainstream opinion and therefore further evidence that Heine has been stabilized into a classic. A third example, from the previous year, Stefan Bodo Würffel's Der produktive Widerspruch, makes a promising beginning by attempting to acknowledge all of Heine's conflicting voices but still appears as a continuation of current trends; its obedient discipleship to the Frankfurt School and especially to 1 2

Wolfgang Hädecke, Heinrich Heine: Eine Biographie (Munich: Hanser, 1985). Gerhard Höhn, Heine-Handbuch: Zeit, Person, Werk (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987).

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Adorno may also be a sign of its lurking obsolescence.3 There are symptoms as well in the central scholarly organ, the Heine-Jahrbuch. Of the eight major articles in the 1988 volume, only two are by German scholars. It is, of course, true that Heine has always been an international subject, but one of the characteristics of the modern phase of scholarship has been the recovery of initiative by the Germans; except for the still ceaseless flow of dissertations, there are some indications that he has become less interesting to German scholars other than those directly associated with the Düsseldorf institute and its publishing enterprises. In the 1989 Jahrbuch, studies of reception and peripheral associations greatly outweigh new perspectives on the author himself. I hope I may be forgiven for suggesting that an increased proportion of reception studies is a hint that scholars are running out of original ideas about the writer in his own right. More global signs of exhaustion are, on the one hand, phenomena of decadence in Heine studies, and, on the other, a certain amount of floundering in search of alternative perspectives that has so far remained ineffectual. As decadent, that is, as a kind of self-consuming final phase, I would categorize the application of a post-modern style of discourse to a conventional pattern of opinion. By post-modern I mean the privileging of the critic and the critic's discourse over the author and the author's discourse in a way that dispenses with any methodological discipline in the analysis or even apprehension of the text and its context. The most prominent exemplars of this development have been Dolf Oehler and Klaus Briegleb. Oehler has taken Heine's irony as a warrant to turn any utterance that does not fit his idea of what the author should have meant into its opposite, in order to maintain the construct of an unambiguously radical revolutionary totally committed to communism.4 Here is a characteristic example of his form of argument: When Heine in the French preface to Lutezia predicts that the communists would destroy art and poesy, he does not mean the communists; he means the bourgeoisie. That is the joke on the bourgeois reader. 5 Briegleb's, to me, increasingly unintelligible writing applies an exceptionally self-indulgent and fustian style, as though he were composing a modernistic literary work with Heine's texts as his resources, to the most conventional notions of a revolutionary vision superior to that of all his contemporaries except, of course, Marx, thus im3

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Stefan Bodo Würffei, Der produktive Widerspruch: Heinrich Heines negative Dialektik (Bern: Francke, 1986). Dolf Oehler, Pariser Bilder 1 (1830-1848): Antibourgeoise Ästhetik bei Baudelaire, Daumier und Heine (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); "Letzte Worte — Die Lektion aus der Matratzengruft," in Oehler, Ein Höllensturz der Alten Welt: Zur Selbsterforschung der Moderne nach dem Juni 1848 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 239-67, among other publications. Dolf Oehler, "Heines Genauigkeit. Und zwei komplementäre Stereotypen über das Wesen der proletarischen Massen," Diskussion Deutsch 8 (1977), 258.

The Exhaustion of Current Heine Studies

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plying that Heine is a topic that no longer requires any inquiry but merely the rhetorical embellishment of what has been established. In his last book, Heine appears as a Wandering (literally, in German, "Eternal") Jew, ultimately disinherited, who labored under a psyche distorted by his repressive mother and, as an "Eulenspiegel and fläneur," with sarcasm and irony acted out his disappointment at the failed revolution and his anarchistic, destructive rage toward the bourgeoisie and the liberal fools, ultimately sacrificing himself in martyrdom as a sign of his own and of Jewish obsolescence in the face of the true revolutionary utopia. Briegleb has become such an obscure writer that it is not easy to make out what he means by the image of the Wandering Jew, but one wonders whether it is an opportune allusion at this point in history. 6 On another periphery, possibly a symptom of an emerging vacuum at the center, has been a renewed interest in Heine by religious partisans, more commonly Christian than Jewish. There has been a surprising amount of this, ranging from the outright forgery by evangelicals of a poem in which Heine is alleged to have made an act of contrition 7 to serious, more or less well informed studies by religious liberals. 8 None of this has been very helpful or illuminating, as I do not believe that Heine can be credibly made into a paradigmatic figure for any form of Christian purpose, no matter how modern in spirit. More promising at first sight is the emergence of psychoanalytic inquiries. It is remarkable that there has not been more of this, although to engage in such a pursuit requires a recognition, not very prominent in contemporary Heine studies, that he was a complex personality with a 6

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Klaus Briegleb, Opfer Heine? Versuche über Schriftzüge der Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). Although it has been my practice for nearly thirty years to read everything of scholarly significance about Heine, no matter how trying, I must confess that I gave up my attempt to read this book all the way through. Briegleb develops the allusion to the Wandering Jew also in "Paris, den....' H. Heines Tagesberichte. Eine Skizze," Der Deutschunterricht 40 (1988), 39-50. Peter Walter, "Hat sich Heine am Ende seines Lebens bekehrt? Religionskritik und Altersreligiosität bei Heinrich Heine," Factum 9 (Sept., 1987), 35-46; 10 (Oct., 1987), 28-37. Although Walter's orthodoxy estranges him from Heine altogether, it at least enables him to see that the Christianizing claims are fraudulent. In recent years: Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Heinrich Heine als Theologe: Ein Textbuch (Munich: Kaiser, 1981); Leo F. J. Meulenberg, "Mein armer Vetter, der du die Welt erlösen gewollt': Die Gestalt Jesu im religiösen Werdegang von Heinrich Heine," Kerygma und Dogma 32 (1986), 71-98; Karl-Josef Kuschel, "Religion im Werk von Heinrich Heine," Poet und Prophet: Heinrich Heines Dichtung und Religionskritik (Stuttgart-Hohenheim: Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, 1987), 33-71; Johann M. Schmidt, "Streitaxt der Reformation' --'Hausapotheke der Menschheit,' Heinrich Heines Bibel," Evangelische Theologie 47 (1987), 369-86. For Judaizing examples see Heinz F. Tengler, "The Role of Judaism in Heine's Life and Work: Continuity in Change," Acta Germanica 17 (1984), 53-68, and Heinz R. Kuehn, "Rediscovering Heinrich Heine," Sewanee Review 97 (1989), 123-38.

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number of peculiarities and several highly neurotic, if not to say, pathological characteristics. Unfortunately, the three major studies we now have tend to highly divergent if not contradictory results. Manfred Schneider's stimulating psychosocial inquiry into Heine's generation of dissidents found the problem in his relationship to his mother and the limits on her love in the interests of preparing the son for a capitalist society; 9 Franz Futterknecht finds the mother boundlessly loving and adoring and locates the problem in disillusion with the weak father, resulting in a narcissistic, emotionally arrested self in the son; 10 and Irene Guy, as far as I am able to follow her, applies a semiotic psychoanalysis derived from Julia Kristeva and sees the pathology emerging at the collapse of his health and the 1848 Revolution, causing him to regress into castration anxieties and fears of the "phallic" mother. 11 These results are useful for reminding us that psychoanalysis is not an Archimedean point outside of literary criticism from which firm scientific results can be obtained. But, while it is difficult to penetrate the psychological disposition of a person of the past, especially one so systematically veiled as Heine's, so that it would therefore seem appropriate to make minimal claims, these initiatives are promising. I believe that an unprejudiced inquiry, not bedevilled by semiotics or preoccupied with the bugaboo of "capitalism," could come to some conclusions about subliminal stresses in his relationship with his mother, their distortive effect upon his erotic constitution and on his relations to others generally, and their coding in the love poetry and elsewhere. But we are not at that point yet. In fairness, it should not be so surprising if Heine studies have reached a boundary. The current phase of scholarship has been going on for about a quarter of a century. It has been a period of great intensity; Heine has been, at least at intervals, the liveliest topic in German literary study. It is probable that during this time more has been learned about him that was not previously known or clearly understood than about any other German writer of the past. Apart from the large body of informational, interpretive, analytic, or ideological discourse about him that has accumulated in thousands of books and articles, enduring resources for the long-term future have been completed or are nearing completion. The Düsseldorf critical edition, which in its com9

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Manfred Schneider, "Die Angst des Revolutionärs vor der Revolution: Zur Genese und Struktur des politischen Diskurses bei Heine," Heine-Jahrbuch 19 (1980), 9-48; "'... Die Liebe für schöne Frauen und die Liebe für die Französische Revolution....' Anmerkungen zum romantischen Spracherwerb und zur Ikonographie des politischen Diskurses bei Heine," in Sebastian Goeppert (Ed.), Perspektiven psychoanalytischer Literaturkritik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1978), 158-93; Die kranke schöne Seele der Revolution: Heine, Börne, das "Junge Deutschland," Marx und Engels (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1980). Franz Futterknecht, Heinrich Heine: Ein Versuch (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1985). Irene Guy, Sexualität im Gedicht: Heinrich Heines Spätlyrik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984).

The Exhaustion of Current Heine Studies

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mentaries contains a vast proportion of the new knowledge about Heine, is progressing at such an encouraging pace that, contrary to earlier expectations, it may actually be completed in this century. 12 Heine's letters have been re-edited, and the letters to him edited for the first time, in the East German edition; when and if the remainder of that indifferently produced edition shall be completed is unimportant. 13 Heine's conversations and the recollections of others concerning him have been capably and usefully re-edited. 14 The task of maintaining comprehensive bibliography has been carried on in East Germany, latterly with assistance from the Soviet Union. 1 5 From East Germany has also come one of the most useful of tools for the Heine scholar, the day-to-day chronicle of his life. 1 6 It would seem to be in the nature of things that such an intensive enterprise would at some point run out of steam, that its premises would become exhausted, that scholars would begin to turn their attention elsewhere, that the changing times would suggest changing priorities. But, if this is the case, then the current phase of Heine studies is on the verge of becoming a chapter of reception — a particularly voluminous one, to be sure. Thus, like all aspects of reception history, it begins to invite retrospective investigation, and here it seems to me that there are some matters that ought to disturb us or at least induce some earnest reconsideration. Now it may be known to one or another of you that I have been saying something like this for a number of years and am now in serious danger of repeating myself; 17 indeed, some degree of repetition will be unavoidable. More seriously, the question is bound to arise: Who am I to pass such

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Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke (Manfred Windfuhr et al., Eds.), (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973-). Heinrich Heine Sakulärausgabe, Ed. Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris (Berlin and Paris: Akademie-Verlag and Editions du CNRS, 1970-). The correspondence is contained in volumes 20-27 with their corresponding commentary volumes and volumes 20-27 R, the index. Michael Werner (Ed.), Begegnungen mit Heine, in Fortführung von Η. Η. Houbens "Gespräche mit Heine" (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973). Gottfried Wilhelm with Eberhard Galley, Heine Bibliographie (Weimar: Arion Verlag, 1960); Siegfried Seifert, Heine-Bibliographie 1954-1964 (Berlin and Weimar: AufbauVerlag, 1968); Siegfried Seifert and Albina A. Volgina, Heine-Bibliographie 1965-1982 (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1986). Fritz Mende, Heinrich Heine: Chronik seines Lebens und Werkes, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1981; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981). Jeffrey L. Sammons, "Problems of Heine Reception: Some Considerations," Monatshefte 73 (1981), 383-91; Sammons, "Heinrich Heine: Reception in the World's Strangeness," in Joseph P. Strelka (Ed.), Literary Theory and Criticism: Festschrift Presented to Rene Wellek in Honor of his Eightieth Birthday, (Bern, Frankfurt a. Main, and New York: Peter Lang, 1984), 1245-64; both reprinted in Sammons, imagination and History: Selected Papers on Nineteenth-Century German Literature (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, and Paris: Peter Lang, 1988), 55-95.

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judgments, to distribute censure? I am a stranger to the culture, a native of a faraway land with a very different set of social and historical determinants of consciousness, with the consequence that my very relationship to the literary text is, as the Germans say, "von Haus aus" differently purposed and organized. I am aware that what I have to say may seem to imply that there is a right way to view Heine, a correct interpretation free of the distortions so easily detected in the views of others, and the doubt about this is not abolished by a claim that all commentators behave as if such a correct view were achievable, no matter how aware they may be of the local and relativizing determinants of consciousness. If one is a part of reception history, as I assume I am in some way, is it possible to find also a purchase outside it? In attempting to address this question, I find myself caught between two conflicting academic styles. One, more familiar to me from my origins, is a counsel of decorum, suggesting that one ought not to foreground one's empirical and personal self in one's academic discourse. The other is a demand that has been made insistently since the advent of the sociological and ideological-critical modes of literary study, that the scholar reflect upon the determinants of his own consciousness and understand himself as an exogenously formed rather than self-created self, his responses as conditioned rather than natural, his place in the communication system between self and text as circumscribed rather than sovereign. Even so, one might suppose that such acts of reflection are more properly carried out in private rather than in public. Be that as it may, my long-standing skeptical and distanced relationship to the contemporary epoch of Heine scholarship has necessarily been the cause of a great deal of reflection on the uncomfortable and rather peculiar role of the critic of a foreign literature. I was therefore much interested in Hiroshi Kiba's recent reflections on the function and status of Heine scholarship in Japan. 18 Among its features are the fact that the bulk of Japanese Heine scholarship is written in Japanese, sometimes though not always with German abstracts, and thus is not intended to be received in German or other Western-language scholarship; its audience, therefore, is projected as primarily indigenous. This limitation seems satisfactory, insofar as it is evidently possible to employ scholarly discourse to arouse an interest in Heine among Japanese readers. In the United States it is very difficult if not impossible to do this. There is no general public readiness for an interest in German literature of the past, and Heine is no exception to this absence. Even among many comparatists, except for some theory of the high Romanticism and pieces of Goethe, literary phenomena reinvented by the French, such as Hölderlin and Nietzsche, and scraps of the GerHiroshi Kiba, "Forschung als Rezeption. Grundzüge der japanischen Heine-Forschung seit 1945," Heine-Jahrbuch 28 (1989), 31-42.

The Exhaustion of Current Heine Studies

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man and, more likely, "Austrian Moderne," the level of knowledge of German literature is deplorable. In the literary disciplines in the United States, there is outside the field of German, generally speaking, no interest in Heine, no apperception of his extremely lively and central role in the upheaval of German literary scholarship for the past quarter century, indeed little awareness of the upheaval itself apart from trace elements of Lukäcs and the Frankfurt School and of reception hermeneutics. What then is the audience for an American Heine specialist, especially at a time when German scholarship shows, for what may well be understandable reasons of current history, less and less interest in English-language contributions? Ideally, the scholar in that situation would like to be a mediator, with a positive relationship to the foreign culture, perhaps even one that grants perceptive and evaluative priority to the indigenous interpreters of that culture. Ironically, the American Germanists of the past who did develop such a relationship to the target culture are now much criticized for their submission to and transmission of the ideology of the Reich. 19 Whether those American Germanists of today who have absorbed and propagated the ideas and values of the German academic community will one day be criticized for their discipleship when the modern epoch of German intellectual life comes under critical scrutiny, no one can say. In any case this is not one of the risks I run, as, especially in regard to Heine, I have been in a relatively nonparticipatory posture for years. However, it has been an increasingly uncomfortable posture that has made me long to resign from the Heine topic altogether, although that no longer seems feasible. While neither an apologia nor a mea culpa would be of any use here, I might remark to what degree, as the current epoch of study shows signs of becoming reception-historical, it becomes easier to see how I came to be at odds with it. In the first instance, it may have been a category confusion to think of this epoch as having been primarily concerned with Heinrich Heine the person and the writer, and with his writings. Primarily it was, or in the course of the 1960s became, an elaborate effort of German scholars and intellectuals to create, an opposition to and repudiation of the German past, a fundamentally new cultural consciousness, relationship to tradition, and ideological orientation of intellectual work and responsibility, for which the decanonized, repudiated, exiled Heine was the vehicle. That it was an intensely German matter is shown by the fact that, although there has been a great deal of scholarship and commentary in all kinds of non-German-speaking countries, there has been virtually no participation in Austria or Switzerland. If my memory does not deceive me, among the thousands of items in the contemporary Heine bibliography, there has been only one major one from Austria, an illustrated, E.g., Richard Spuler, "Germanistik" in America: The Reception of German Classicism 1870-1905 (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1982).

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rather interestingly composed introductory book that went out of print almost instantaneously, 20 and only one major one from Switzerland, the comprehensive study by Würffei that I mentioned earlier. A possible topic for a reception study would be an effort to categorize foreign Heine commentary by the extent to which it either has remained bound to indigenous — and that means in many cases, traditional ~ generic and axiological premises or has associated itself with the German cultural revolution. In the United States, however, where we are not accustomed to fight our political and ideological battles on the ground of culture and literary scholarship, the nature of contemporary Heine study, despite an at least sporadic interest in German politics and current events, was simply not perceivable, as indeed the whole upheaval in cultural life and especially in the universities has been essentially unremarked, with the result that Americans occasionally find themselves startled or bewildered by some of its consequences, such as "anti-Americanism." That Heine scholarship has been a crucially German affair is indicated also by the fact that, like all significant German matters of the last forty years, it has a West German and an East German aspect. Recent events make one wonder whether the time has not become ripe for a critical retrospective on East German Heine discourse within the GDR itself. As I write this in the winter (1990) ~ I mention this temporal circumstance for the obvious reason that events have been following upon one another with breathless rapidity and one has no idea how they will look a few weeks or months hence — there has been no sign of such a retrospective, in fact none that I have seen of any participation of prominent humanistic academics in the spectacular public events. However, this may be owing to the slowness of scholarly publication. The first Heine commentaries in this new situation, should there be any, will be a significant sign. If they continue with the familiar themes - the propagation of Heine in the GDR as an ally in the struggle for peace and socialism, self-praise for the millions of copies of his works that have been distributed, accusations of distortion or evasion by bourgeois scholarship - it will bode ill for the role that scholars in the humanities intend to play in the new situation. A critical analysis of East German Heine reception from within, on the other hand, would be a timely and encouraging development. The most basic thing one ought to observe about it in retrospect is its totally opportunistic nature. From the beginning, the propagation of Heine in the GDR was a stick with which to beat the Federal Republic. Since the revival of interest in the Federal Republic was delayed — possibly a hangover from his silencing during the Nazi period, but just as likely, in my view, a reflex of the modernist devaluation of Heine that goes back to the time of 20

Herbert Schnierle and Christoph Wetzel et al., Heinrich Heine, Vol. 11 of "Die großen Klassiker; Literatur der Welt in Bildern, Texten, Daten," (Salzburg: Andreas & Andreas, 1980). The publisher failed and the entire twenty-volume series was remaindered.

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Karl Kraus ~ Heine became the vehicle for assertions of the ideological and, indeed, moral superiority of the GDR, of its true succession to the German humanistic tradition, and of the true succession of the capitalist-revanchist Federal Republic to the fascist Reich. The intellectual and critical level of much that was published in this phase was generally mediocre, but as a public relations device it was eminently successful, so that even the West became persuaded that Heine was nurtured in the East and suppressed in the West, and in fact this notion was one spur to the revival of Heine study in the West, at the same time as a projected collaborated critical edition fissioned into an Eastern and Western version. All of this is well known; what has been less noticed is that once the center of gravity of Heine study had, in the course of the 1970s, shifted to the West, notably to Düsseldorf and, in no small degree, Paris, the East German interest faded away. An original monograph on Heine has not been published there in more than twenty years. There is a single serious Heine scholar working there, Fritz Mende, whose thematic studies, published in a long series over the years, generally fall into three types: semiotic or wordfield studies that trace Heine's usage of terms or concepts; detailed, specifically focused reception studies; and examinations of Heine's relations with various contemporaries. These studies are learned and useful but, kept as they are within the cautious bounds of orthodox Marxism, not very adventurous. 21 The real touchstone of the situation is the once much-touted critical edition. Poorly bound and printed on paper that does not look promising for the future, with typographical errors that constantly generate errata lists, it offers a commentary reduced to the barest positivism and evading all difficulties. Since its main contribution, the correspondence volumes, have been completed, the pace has slowed noticeably, and in fact it is now clear that the rest of the edition will never hold its own next to its Düsseldorf competitor. The history of East German Heine reception is the history of a tacitly acknowledged failure of a cultural policy. It will be healthy if East German observers themselves publicly and explicitly confront this failure. 22 The West German discourse has been livelier, more differentiated, and, on the whole, more sophisticated. However, owing to the circumstance I mentioned earlier, that it has not actually been Heine and his works that have been at the center of the undertaking, but the restructuring of ideological consciousness, here, too, the results, or absence of them, have been shaped by 21

22

Characteristic examples of these essays are collected in Fritz Mende, Heinrich Heine: Studien zu seinem Leben und Werk (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1983). Walter Reese, Zur Geschichte der sozialistischen Heine-Rezeption in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, and Cirencester: Peter D. Lang, 1979) is a critique from the Left, from the perspective of Western Neo-Marxism. Something less sectarian is needed.

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anterior purpose. Since reception is our subject here, I might begin by addressing that aspect. Heine is an outstanding test case for reception studies because his reception has been exceptionally extensive, varied, and often disputatious. In the awareness of the world at large he consistently ranked second only to Goethe among German-language writers in the past, though I am by no means sure that this continues to be so in our time. This reception, to be sure, was to a very large extent one of the early poetry, often as carried by its musical settings, and some of the Reisebilder, along with a body of aphorisms and anecdotes, many of them spurious, that is, a reception of Heine as the poet of sentiment and wit, just those aspects of him that have been of least interest to modern German studies, so that we already witness an estrangement between those studies and the broader reception. This, in turn, shows that reception study, while perhaps an interesting and worthwhile endeavor in itself, does not inform current interpretation, no matter what the theorists may say. Nevertheless, there has been no shortage of reception studies; even to list them cursorily would lead too far afield. We have had accounts, in varying degrees of detail, of Heine among the French and the English, the Danes, the Swedes, and the Rumanians, the Cubans, the Peruvians, and the Mexicans, etc. etc. What we have not seen in this quarter century of intensive research is a systematic and thorough study of the German reception, and this absence is both symptomatic of and perfectly consistent with the superintending purpose — what I believe is now called the "Erkenntnisinteresse" - of the whole enterprise. For what we have had so far has not been so much concerned to recover the full history of German reception, but rather to arraign the German bourgeoisie of a repressive, reactionary, and anti-Semitic hostility to Heine as an illustrative segment of the prehistory of fascism, seen as the consequence of bourgeois ideology and capitalism23 and thus also tacitly to certify the modem phase of Heine as uniquely appreciative and adequate to its object as well as ideologically redemptive. In the compendia of anti-Heineana there has been what has seemed to me a perhaps understandable but nevertheless inordinate stress on anti-Semitic extremists like Adolf Bartels. Several years ago I asked publicly: "Can it really be true that no one in Bartels's time stated publicly that he was a hysterical and also boorish crank?" 24 Only just recently have I encountered an answer to this question: in 1906 Alfred Kenwrote that, in comparison to Bartels, Wolfgang Menzel was a "giant"; and he called Bartels a "sickly epigone" full of "feeble hysteria" and "flabby

23

24

See especially Karl Hotz (Ed.), Heinrich Heine: Wirkungsgeschichte als Wirkungskritik. Materialien zur Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte Heines (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975); and Karl Theodor Kleinknecht (Ed.), Heine in Deutschland (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976). Sammons, Imagination and History , 57-58.

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paltriness. " 2 5 This quotation appeared in an essay on the history of the Hamburg Heine monument. Everyone who is even a little acquainted with the history of Heine's reputation knows something about the succession of disputes concerning the erection of a monument to him in Germany. The issue is constantly adduced as a particularly conspicuous example of the rejection of one of the most famous of German authors by his own nation. However, as I realized when I was trying to piece together the background of the Lorelei Fountain in New York City, there has never been a scholarly, historical study of the monument disputes. The item I cited is part of what seems to be, at long last, such a study, and it is perhaps significant that its author is not a literary scholar from the community of Heine experts but an art historian. Now it must be logically apparent to anyone that in order for the monument disputes to have occurred in the first place, there must have been substantial and articulate support for Heine. There can be no doubt that the discouraging resolution of these disputes and the primitive effects that accompanied them belong to the pre-history of fascism in Germany. But at the same time, the reception history becomes unintelligible if it is not recognized that from the appearance of Strodtmann's biography in 1867 until a period beginning sometime before World War I and continuing to the 1920s, when his standing was indeed diminishing ominously, Heine had many readers and admirers and was the object of a lively epoch of scholarly and philological study that, after all, laid the groundwork for everything we are able to do today. Of the history of this we have learned nothing in the modern phase. As far as Heine scholarship is concerned, names such as Adolf Strodtmann, Gustav Karpeles, Paul Holzhausen, Η. Η. Houben, Ernst Elster, Ewald Boucke, Jonas Fränkel, Helene Herrmann, Max Wolff, and even the otherwise unforgotten Oskar Walzel, along with many others, are just items in an antiquarian bibliography. For an examination of this broad fabric of Heine reception would lead to a much more complex picture than that of the modem resurrection of one who once was lost but now is found. Nor has there been a clear focus on the modern decline of Heine's reputation beginning in the first decade of this century. It is true that a good deal has been written about Karl Kraus's attack on Heine of 1910. 26 But much of it has been rather convoluted Dietrich Schubert,"'Jetzt wohin? Das 'deutsche Gedächtnismal' fur Heinrich Heine," Heine-Jahrbuch 28 (1989), 46. 26 See Mechthild Borries, Ein Angriff auf Heinrich Heine: Kritische Betrachtungen zu Karl Kraus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971); Bernd Kämmerling, "Die wahre Richtung des Angriffs. Uber Karl Kraus' Heine und die Folgen," Heine-Jahrbuch 11 (1972), 162-69; Hannelore Ederer, Die literarische Mimesis entfremdeter Sprache: Zur sprachkritischen Literatur von Heinrich Heine bis Karl Kraus (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1979), 12-115; Uta Schaub, "Liliencron und Heine im Urteil von Karl Kraus. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der literarischen Wertung," Heine-Jahrbuch 18 (1979), 191-201; Jay Bodine, "Heinrich

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in its apologetics, since in the contemporary epoch Kraus has been as much of a sacred cow in his own way as Heine has in his, so that painful problems are generated when they come into conflict with one another. It would be more fruitful to ask to what extent Kraus's pasquinade is only a special case of the modernist repudiation of Heine as a poet, a case of literary criticism having been overrun by popular reception, extending to Adomo's, in my view, ill-conceived Heine essay of 1956. 27 Of contemporary commentators, it seems to me that only Jürgen Habermas has begun to reflect on the reasons for Heine's failure to reach the public he sought to influence and to explain why, as an intellectual of more French than German type, he was resisted in all ideological camps, including the Left, though we are not yet at the point where Heine's own publicistic strategies are subject to critical analysis. 28 Instead of the analytic study of the reception history, what we are getting, as it were by ostensive definition, is the verbatim reproduction of all the reception materials. The last thing I would wish to do is show any disrespect toward the editors of this project, the venerable Eberhard Galley, to whom all modern Heine study owes a great debt, or Alfred Estermann, one of today's leading researchers of the "Vormärz." But, I confess I am bewildered by this undertaking. We now have four volumes, including one split volume, totalling 2,657 pages and 1,579 items, and we are only up to 1838. Where will this end? We have not even reached the Börne controversy, so productive of public dispute. The original plan was for volume two to include the aftermath of the Börne book and volume three to carry the reception materials to Heine's death; volumes four and five were to contain the foreign-language reception. 29 This was obviously impossible; the question is whether the project even now is sustainable. A more serious question is whether placing this mass of material before us aids or blockades reception study. The volumes do have comprehensive introductions and some commentary, but republishing the mass of material is not a substitute, nor, I should think, a necessary prerequisite, to reception history. Furthermore, these volumes are heavy and expensive, though no doubt subsidized all the same; they burden, both in bulk and in cost, our institutional and personal libraries. I sometimes wonder whether Heine scholarship might not benefit from a little less public funding. My own opinion is that it is not likely to get out of its present static

27

28

29

Heine, Karl Kraus and 'die Folgen.' A Test Case of Literary Texts, Historical Reception and Receptive Aesthetics," Colloquia Germanica 17 (1984 [i.e., 1985]), 14-59. Theodor W. Adomo, "Die Wunde Heine," in his Noten zur Literatur I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1956), 144-52. Jürgen Habermas, "Heinrich Heine und die Rolle der Intellektuellen in Deutschland," Merkur AO (m6), 453-68. Eberhard Galley and Alfred Estermann (Eds.), Heinrich Heines Werk im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, Heinrich Heine Verlag, 1981-), 1, 16.

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condition unless it is prepared to leave to one side some of the ideologically redemptive purpose that has motivated it for the last twenty-five years. I am intensely aware that my perspective in this matter is a particularly foreign one. I realize that, for historical reasons, German literary artists have been called upon to provide a redemptive vision for the nation in a way that has never been the case in my country, where we are inclined to obtain our political inspiration from figures in our political and constitutional history rather than our literary history. Even making allowances for this difference, however, one may ask whether the German tradition does not require more of poets and writers than they can effectively deliver. Do we now think that the Goethe and Raabe Societies of the past - and their aura, which was much vaster than their membership — were conducive to the redemption of the nation? Is it not the case, especially in regard to Raabe, that the work of interpretation and understanding has had to begin again virtually from scratch? Is it altogether welcome that the Heine Society of today, whose manifold, indeed, indispensable achievements I would in no way deprecate, often appears to seek the succession to those organizations of the past? From my foreign perspective I sometimes wonder whether the energetic public propagation of Heine — parading drummers through the streets in memory of Le Grand and the like — is actually advantageous to understanding. In principle it would be possible to create the illusion of a public consciousness imbued with the spirit of Heine, just as the notion that German public consciousness in the past was imbued with the spirit of Goethe or Schiller or Raabe was an illusion. In the long run, the employment of Heine as an icon for present purposes is bound to puppetize and ultimately impoverish him. One of the ways in which this can be done and has been done to a disturbing degree is to exempt him from criticism. An enduring characteristic of the reception history of the past has been the ambivalence with which he has been regarded, even by those positively disposed toward him. Sometimes this ambivalence, this weighing of positives and negatives, has been a symptom of recalcitrant or impatient apprehension. But, often it has been a genuine worry about Heine's lack of ethical discipline, his absence of empathy, his indifference to the sensibilities of his own potential public. This judicious aspect of reception has been explicitly abolished in the contemporary phase; it has been scorned as an evasive ambivalence within the liberal bourgeois consciousness itself. While irony and ambiguity are customarily thought of as characteristic of modernity, it is curious that much contemporary scholarship has attempted to deironize and deambiguate Heine, while claiming his relevance to modernity. From time to time the absurd claim has been made that bourgeois scholars and commentators are "afraid" of Heine, an exaggerated symptom of the overinflation of the ideological efficacy of a literary figure that marks this whole episode.

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Traces of a countermovement to this monolithic heroization have sometimes come from observers able to empathize with Heine's victims. Quite gingerly, Hans Mayer sought a more balanced, less apologetic interpretation of the attack on Platen, 30 but it was to be a militantly gay writer, Hubert Fichte, who in one of the last works of his life defended Platen not only against Heine's assault but also against the complacent collaboration of his apologists. 31 As Ludwig Börne is at long last coming into a better informed and more respectful perspective, soft-voiced suggestions from the Heine community are being ventured that something might be said in Börne's favor after all. 3 2 Much has been asserted and repeated about Heine's "cosmopolitanism," but members of nations toward which this cosmopolitanism quite failed, such as the Belgians, may be inclined to look upon it in a more skeptical light. 33 When the feminists finally get hold of Heine, the skepticism is likely to become considerably more intense. 34 Eventually, scholarship may get around to some other issues that up to now have been virtually blacked out because of their embarrassing potential: e. g., Heine's journalistic relationship to Giacomo Meyerbeer and other figures of musical life, or the real reasons for his secret French government pension and its consequences. However, more important than these perhaps rather peripheral issues would be the restoration of an understanding that was long axiomatic in the reception history: the centrality of Heine's identity as a poet. The hyperbolization of his bad conscience about poetry into a repudiation of poetry and even a premonition of the "end of literature" is one of the most striking and, in my view, crippling features of the contemporary phase. This campaign looks quite peculiar from almost any foreign point of view; that it is part of the internal German problematic, the resolution of which Heine has been obliged to serve, is illustrated by the fact that even in the Soviet Union his identity as a poet and his descent from Romanticism have seemed

30

31

32

33

34

Hans Mayer, "Die Platen-Heine-Konfrontation," Akzente 20 (1973), 273-86; reprinted in Mayer, Aussenseiter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 207-23. Hubert Fichte, "Deiner Umarmungen süße Sehnsucht": Die Geschichte der Empfindungen am Beispiel der französischen Schriften des Grafen August von Platen-Hallermände (Tübingen: Konkursverlag, 1985). Joseph A. Kruse, "Der große Judenschmerz: Zu einigen Parallelen wie Differenzen bei Börne und Heine," in Alfred Estermann (Ed.), Ludwig Börne 1786-1837 (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1986), 189-98; Kruse, "Die Kunst-eine Tochter der Zeit" in Inge Rippmann and Wolfgang Labuhn (Eds.), Neue Studien zu Ludwig Börne (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1988), 32-50. Georg Pauls, "'Das de Pottersche Viehstück.' Heine, Börne und die belgische Revolution von 1830," Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire 65 (1987), 785-811. Though not itself to be taken seriously, a harbinger of what may yet be to come is Ingrid Straube, Heinrich Heines Frauen: Ein Gespräch (Aachen: Rimbaud-Presse, 1986).

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axiomatic. 35 My own conviction that he is most important as a poet and imaginative writer is an evaluative judgment that need not be binding on anyone else. But to deny his identity as a poet is to disrespect his own selfunderstanding and the source of the strength that sustained his fragile selfregard. Traditionally, poetry has striven for universality of vision; it was just his belief in his superiority as a poet that certified for him the universality of his historical and social vision superior to that of all his contemporaries. We are not obliged to accept his claims in this regard — and should not, in my view — but we are obliged to apprehend his cast of mind and his strategies of expression in a way congruent with their character — and this, I would claim, much contemporary discourse on him has declined to do. His poetic imagination in its universal aspirations drew into itself all the ambiguous antinomies of the social and historical world of his time and left them struggling with one another, unresolved, in his consciousness. It is in his elaborate, ironic, contradictory, in the last analysis, conscientious expression of these stresses that the interest of a Heine seen whole would be located, not in some intact message he is alleged to provide for our time. I said at the outset that I have given up prophecy, but I will venture a couple of cautious predictions. In the first place, I think the magnitude of the discourse about Heine will soon shrink. I believe this will be all to the good; we are reaching the point where too much has been written about him, and some of it is mere clutter. But there will always be those who are inspired to enthusiasm and curiosity by reading him, as opposed to reading about him. From them I expect we can hope for new beginnings and new perspectives. When they begin to emerge, they may, as is customarily the case with such shifts, come to regard the epoch that is now coming to an end with critical severity. Such severity may at times even be unfair, as some of the foregoing may have been unfair. But whether acknowledged or not, new initiatives will owe a great debt to the past quarter century of scholarship, to the unparalleled philological achievements, to the great learning, to the deepened sensitivity to texts and subtexts, to the methodological refinement of critical apprehension, and, in summary of all this, to its achievement in keeping Heine - or parts of him - alive.

Alexander Sergejewitsch Dmitrejew, "Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Schaffen des jungen Heine und dem ästhetischen Programm der Jenaer Romantik"; Sergej Pawlowitsch Gischdeu, "Das Private, Empirische und Zufällige in der Lyrik von Heinrich Heine," in Karl Wolfgang Becker et al. (Eds.), Heinrich Heine: Streitbarer Humanist und volksverbundener Dichter (Weimar: Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar, [1973]), 172-89, 322-34.

Renate Schlesier

Homeric Laughter by the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx

Which contemporary left the clearest and most powerful traces in the work of Karl Marx? None other than Heinrich Heine. From the first lyrical attempts of the 18 year-old to the unfinished studies on capital that the 64 year-old communist scholar left behind at his death, Heine is omnipresent in the writings of Marx. His manuscripts, publications, and letters abound with Heine quotations, direct and hidden, with Heine allusions, Heine reformulations, echos of Heine in all respects. Wherever Marx refers to Heine, whether by name or indirectly, he does so with manifest agreement and sympathy. Only Heine enjoys such a privilege with Marx, while every other contemporary poet or writer with whom Marx became acquainted in the course of his life received his approval for a limited period of time. Marx's sympathetic reception of Heine is by no means restricted to literal borrowings. Until the end of his life Marx's work manifests a stylistic dependence on Heine, in the form of favorite syntactic constructions, preferred rhetorical devices, and deliberate ruptures of style. Like Heine, Marx reached back to famous poets of the European tradition and well known figures from Greek mythology, in the service of parody and polemic, satire and pathos. Here the same figures dominate as in Heine: Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, Prometheus, Shylock, Don Quixote, and Faust. Marx's use of the tradition was influenced by ancient models, such as Lucian and by modem models, such as Lawrence Sterne (both favorites of Heine), and it was most intimately shaped by the "alienation-effect" inaugurated by Heine. One particular book served both authors as an arsenal of material, figures, and expressions: the Book of Books, the Bible, that is, the Old Testament and the New Testament, of course in Luther's translation. Here it is apparent what it is that feeds the striking affinity between Marx and Heine: namely, the brokenness that derives from the discontinuity between German Judaism and German Protestantism, in which mediation by Jews of German mother tongue, whether baptized or not, was at best risky, if not impossible. Both men were defined by this native no man's land, and both attempted to destroy its borders. That Marx's work constantly attests to a goal of which he never lost sight ~ that is, to free Judaism from the blemish imputed by the Christians - is

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usually overlooked. That he chose Heine as his ally in this cause cannot come as a surprise. It has, nonetheless, so far remained almost unnoticed.

The paths of the two men crossed for the first time at the end of 1843 in Paris. The 25 year-old Marx had been in exile there for two months, the 46 year-old Heine had already been living there for 12 years and had just returned from the journey during which he conceived Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. Marx was newly married, the first child was on its way, and he only participated to a limited extent in the action of the capital city "of the entire civilized world," as Heine had called Paris in 1832.1 Heine, too, was less active than before, married now for two years and already plagued by his worsening eye condition — the first indication of the illness of his last years. Like Heine, Marx now belonged to the large German emigrant colony in the French capital, which had grown between 1830 and 1844 from 6,000 to about 40,000 - others estimate 80,000. The Germans banished before the March revolution of 1848, all ardent patriots, followers of the French Revolution and of its democratic ideals, formed numerous clubs and circles of like-minded friends, that cooperated or more often rivalled each other. Most of them were permeated with the radical ideas of French Utopians and communists like Saint-Simon, Fourier, Babeuf, Blanqui, and Proudhon, or of German socialists and anarchists like Max Stirner and the apprentice tailor Wilhelm Weitling. The purveyors of catchwords and intellectual models to the German exiles, whether intellectuals or artisans, were above all two engaged liberal democratic German writers with razor-sharp styles, both baptized Jews, who had come to Paris after the June revolution of 1830. The influence of these champions of the German radicals was soon to split their circles into two divergent directions. They were Ludwig Börne, whose militant Briefe aus Paris addressed to Jeanette Wohl-Strauss in Frankfurt had appeared in 1833, and Heinrich Heine, who in 1840, three years after Börne's death, mocked him in his polemic Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift as doctrinaire and philistine, and mocked his pen-friend as the caricature of a "Goddess of Freedom." 2 This won Heine new enemies, and, in 1841, even a duel with Salomon Strauss, the husband of Börne's friend. In this dispute Marx was firmly on the side of Heine. Even in 1846, in his last extant letter to Heine from his London exile, Marx still took sides with Heine in his attack on Börne, using an animal metaphor that Heine had often 1

2

Heine, Französische Zustände, III, 134. The Heine quotations (here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated) are from the edition of Klaus Briegleb: Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, Vol. I-VI (München: Hanser, 1968-1976). The translations are my own. Heine, IV, 19.

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applied to the "Teutons": "A more oafish treatment than this book received from the Christian-Germanic asses can scarcely be demonstrated in any period of literature, although no German period is lacking in oafishness." 3 In August, 1844, only a few months after he came to know Heine personally, Marx first met Friedrich Engels, two years his junior. Engels had, since his very first publications of the early 1840s, reckoned himself to the oppositional camp. He considered Heine's Börne book a "perfect scandal" and a "sordid infamy," as he put it in a pompous literary critical treatise of 1842, in which the condemnation of Heine culminated in the sentence: "Heine's book on Börne is the most worthless book ever written in the German language." 4 Engels, who in his later works and letters also often took up formulations and impulses from Heine, quite in the spirit of Marx's own evocations of Heine, nonetheless never came to share his comrade's predilection for Heine. In 1883, a few weeks after Marx's death, he wrote a celebration of the Heine epigone Georg Weerth as the "first and most important poet of the German proletariat" in the periodical Der Sozialdemokrat. He still felt driven to use this occasion to take a swipe at Heine: "[...] Weerth is a master in the expression of natural, robust sensuality and pleasures of the flesh. [In this] he surpasses Heine (because he was healthier and purer); he is only surpassed in the German language in this regard by Goethe." 5 Marx remained free his whole life from the tendency to glorify nature and from petit-bourgeois double standards ä la Engels and would never have dreamed of considering Heine's literary treatment of the erotic to be "adulterated" or "unhealthy." Out of the meeting at the end of 1843 with the poet he had unconditionally admired since his schooldays and faithfully emulated, there arose at once a close and even intimate companionship, which lasted until Marx's expulsion from Paris at the beginning of 1845. During this time Marx, together with other philosophical minds from the Berlin school, enriched the German emigrant milieu in Paris with Left Hegelianism. In February, 1844, he published with Arnold Ruge the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, of which only one issue appeared, and in which at his request three poems of Heine were included. Marx himself contributed to the Jahrbücher some texts he had written before he left Germany or during his first weeks in Paris: three programmatic letters to Ruge; two extensive social-philosophical critiques of Hegel and Hegel's follower Bruno Bauer: Kritik des Hegeischen Staatsrechts and Zur i

4 5

MEW 27, 441. Here and elsewhere, the translations are my own; unless otherwise indicated, the quotations of Marx (and of Engels) are from the edition of the "Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED," Marx-Engels-Werke (Berlin: 1957). Engels, MEW 1, 441; 440. Engels, MEW 21, 8.

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Judenfrage\ as well as his first masterpiece of agitation theory, the Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie, which he wrote in January 1844, at the time of his first personal contact with Heine. In this work the voice of his "friend" can be heard from start to finish. It is well known that the critique of religion determined the tenor of this text of Marx, at the start of which stands the famous definition of religion: "It is the opium of the people." 6 The image of opium can already be found one year earlier in Marx's Berlin teacher, Bruno Bauer, as well as in the writings of the socialist Moses Hess, Marx's and Engel's comrade-in-arms until 1848, who later became a forerunner of Zionism. Hegel used the same image in 1822 in his Berlin lectures on the philosophy of history (which Heine attended), where he was however referring specifically to Indian religion. Marx, on the other hand, generalizes the opium analogy, elevating it to a concept of social criticism, and this he derived from Heine's Börne book, where Heine writes: "Heaven was invented for people for whom the earth has nothing more to offer ... Hail this invention: Hail a religion that poured some sweet lulling drops into suffering humanity's bitter chalice, some drops of love, hope, and faith!" 7 Heine is, clearly enough, alluding here to Paul, the apostle who left Judaism to embrace Christianity ~ whereas Marx is talking without further differentiation of religion as such. Some pages later he focuses on Protestantism and, explicitly, on Luther, whom he both praises and blames. The final sentence recoins the Christian message as the prophecy of an atheist revolution in Germany on the French model: "When all internal conditions are fulfilled, the German Day of Resurrection will be heralded by the resounding of the Gallic cock."s Heine's earliest sketch of a revolutionary program, the "Einleitung" to Kahldorf über den Adel of 1831 starts with precisely this emblematic animal, soaring however not on the wings of Christian but of Enlightenment pathos. The first sentence reads: "The Gallic cock has now crowed for the second time, and day is breaking in Germany too." 9 Heine's Einleitung already contains in a nutshell his work De l'Allemagne, which after its pre-printing in 1833/34 in the Revue des deux mondes was published in book form in 1835 and appeared in German in Heine's Salon Π under the title Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. In Marx's Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie one can find again all the central theses of Heine's introduction to Kahldorf as well as of his book on Germany, above all the characterization of German 6 7 8 9

Marx, MEW 1, 378. Heine, IV, 111. Marx, MEW 1, 391. Heine, II, 655.

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philosophy as the "dream of the French Revolution"10 and of the Germans in general as philosophizing dreamers. They performed in thought what the French enacted in reality, and, even more pointedly, they did not kill a king but a god: "The supreme lord of the world has been swimming unproven in his own blood," 11 namely, since Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft. What arose out of the history of German philosophy after Kant was, according to Heine, the program of a "democracy of equally magnificent, equally holy, equally blessed gods." 12 Marx sums it up in lapidary fashion, with, in turn, rhetorical recourse to the gospel language of Luther, containing a reference to Kant's ethics: The critique of religion ends with the lesson that man is the highest being for man, and, with the categorical imperative, that he should therefore overthrow all conditions in which man is an abased, an enslaved, an abandoned, a despicable being. 13 Marx remained loyal throughout his life to the view inspired by Heine that a special - and by the way a particularly violent ~ role is reserved for Germany in the revolutions of the future; and that revolutionary theory has the task of providing midwifely services, in critically reworking the tradition of German idealist philosophy; and, finally, that metaphysics thereby has to be "sublated" (aufgehoben), in the threefold Hegelian sense of preserved, destroyed, and elevated, in a terrestrial eschatology. Heine, himself, bade a vehement farewell to this conception after the revolution of 1848, in alliance with the Bible and in express opposition to Marx. In 1852, in the preface to the second edition of Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (and in the same words two years later in the Geständnisse), Heine distanced himself from the demand for a "restoration of man to his divine rights"14 that he had himself proclaimed in his book, and held up to the representatives of Left Hegelianism of the Vormärz — among whom Marx is especially singled out - the story of Nebuchadnezzar, this Babylonian king, who held himself to be god almighty, but fell terribly from the height of his presumption [...]. In the splendidly grandiose book of Daniel one will find this legend, which I recommend for edifying consideration not only to the goodly Ruge, but also to my much more stubborn friend Marx, and also to the Messrs. Feuerbach, Daumer, Bruno Bauer,

10 11 12 13 14

Heine, ibid. Heine, III, 604. Heine, III, 570. Marx, MEW 1, 385. Heine, III, 633.

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Hengstenberg, and what ever else their names may be, these godless self-gods. 15 The formulation "godless self-gods," by the way, replaced (in accordance with Heine's wish expressed in a letter to his publisher Campe while the book was being typeset) the original wording "gods without God," perhaps because the latter seemed to Heine not to fit so well the story of Nebuchadnezzar. With the ironically pointed reference to the holy book of the Jews, Heine reveals the hidden central focus of Marx's contributions to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Beside the variations on themes of Heine mentioned above (and many more) that resound in Marx's Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie, a motif can be discerned there that, although easy to overhear, in fact determines the general tone of Marx's anthropology, which strives to be both anti-theological and theological at the same time. Before Marx came to dictate a virtually messianic power needed to realize the "German emancipation," even the "emancipation of the Germans as humans," of the proletariat and its emergence as a class, 16 the scenery of contemporary society had appeared to him by no means as an already established class society. Rather, he perceived the "drama" of a division of society, proceeding indefinitely, into the most diverse races that oppose each other with petty antipathies, bad consciences and brutal mediocrity, that are all treated by their masters without difference, albeit with different formalities, as licensed existences, precisely in the interest of their reciprocal, ambiguous, and jealous position. And even this, the fact that they are dominated, ruled, possessed, they have to acknowledge and testify to as a concession of heaven! 1 ' Marx names only one of the servants that he distributes across so many diverse "races." He does not name an historical personality but a literary figure, none other than Shakespeare's Shylock. The historical school of law has Shylock, but Shylock the servant, swear, for ever, pound of flesh that is cut out of the heart of the people, upon its appearance/ credit (Schein), its historical "Schein," its ChristianGermanic "Schein." 18 Shylock stands here, as the tri-colon climax underlines, for all the exploiters among the baptized German Jews, whose subservience to authority and 15 16 17 18

Heine, III, 510. Marx, MEW 1, 390f. Ibid., 381. Ibid., 380.

Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx

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sanctimoniousness Heine had been satirizing since the 1826 poem "Frieden" in the first part of the Reisebilder, and in the figure of Gumpelino from the second part of the Reisebilder of 1827, as well as in the Berlin Jews sneered at in the Börne book. But, behind Shylock, the cover name Marx gave to the figure of the "Christian-Germanic" Jew, there hides an existential aporia that tormented Marx and that he had addressed, while stressing the objectivity of his argument in the treatise Zur Judenfrage, written just before his introduction to the critique of Hegel. It is the same aporia that Heine had repeatedly reflected upon in pain and for which he later coined the formula in his Geständnisse: "So they, the Jews, were condemned by law to be rich, hated, and murdered." 19 In Marx's Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie nothing like this appears. There is, of course, no talk of murder or bloodshed; the refashioning of Shylock appears, in this context, strangely abrupt, and, indeed, throughout the text the term "Jew" is most carefully avoided. One might almost think that Marx had already realized that vision of the future that he had developed at the end of Zur Judenfrage. For there he asserted in conclusion: As soon as society manages to overcome (aufheben) the empirical essence of Judaism, chaffering and its preconditions, the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object; because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, is humanized; because the conflict between individual-sensuous existence and the species-being of man is overcome (aufgehoben). The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism. 20 Marx's treatise nevertheless emphasizes ceaselessly what stands in the way of both emancipations, namely the increasingly successful social universalization of Judaism, or, as Marx sums it up, the prevailing "Jewish limitedness of society." 21 Marx pillories above all, and with consciously blasphemous, even pro-heathen (and, as we now know, anticipatory) diction, the economic universalization of Judaism: Money is the zealous God of Israel, before whom no other god can exist. Money abases all gods of man - and transforms them into a commodity. Money is the general value of all things, constituted for itself. It has therefore robbed the whole world, the

19 20 21

Heine, VI/1, 484. Marx, MEW 1, 377. Ibid.

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human world as well as nature, of its peculiar value. Money is the essence of his labor and his existence alienated from man, and this alien being dominates him, and he worships it. The God of the Jews has made itself worldly, it has become the world God. The bill of exchange is the real God of the Jew. His God is only the illusory bill of exchange. 22 Marx does not neglect to mention at the end a kind of religious universalization: "Christianity originated in Judaism. It has dissolved itself into Judaism again." 23 The combination of Jewish Christianity and the "Jewish" bill of exchange that Marx develops here derives from an early sneering comment by Heine, in which however there is no trace of such ontologically elevated self-hatred. In the Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand of 1827 Heine had, alluding to the antiSemitism "of many Berlin scholars" who had expressed themselves so "humanely" about the food of the Jews, sarcastically pointed out what "inventions" one has to thank them [the Jews] for, e.g., the bill of exchange, Christianity ~ but wait! We do not want to give them too much credit for the latter, since we have not yet actually made much use of it ~ I think Jews themselves have made less of a profit there than on the invention of the bill of exchange. " 2 4 In contrast to Heine, Marx does not even hint at the bloody history of Christian hatred of the Jews in his treatise Zur Judenfrage, nor does he do so later, as far as I know. Here, and even in the political-economic manuscripts of the last decades of his life, the abolition of capital and capitalism proves to be the cover name for the abolition of the "objective" reasons for the hatred of the Jews. In the text Zur Judenfrage this cover name is not yet available to Marx. He operates there, as he still does in Das Kommunistische Manifest of 1848 and even occasionally in Das Kapital, with the popular category of economically motivated anti-Semitism: What is the wordly ritual of the Jew? Chaffering. What is his wordly God? Money. Well! The emancipation from chaffering and from money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. And further, demonstrated ad hominem:

22 23 24

Ibid., 375. Ibid., 376. Heine, II, 285.

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An organization of society that did away with the preconditions of chaffering, that means the possibility of chaffering, would have made the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would dissolve like stale smoke in the real life-air of society. On the other hand: [and now comes the opportunity, if not the special calling, that Marx does after all discern in Jewish existence] if the Jew recognizes this practical being of his as null and void and if he works on its abolition (Aufhebung), he works, out of his own development so far, on human emancipation as such and tums against the highest practical expression of human selfalienation.25 One must not be misled by the crudeness of the word "chaffering" or by the roughly hewn hardness of the argumentation. Apodicticity and terminological brutality point (in scholarship and in the rest of ordinary life), as is well known, either to sheer thoughtlessness or to deep hurt. The last thing one may impute to Marx is that he abstains from reflection. He rather conceals here an undiagnosed painful wound, which he attempts to heal by removing the conditions of its emergence - a procedure from which at best future generations could profit, but not the already wounded individual. Consequently, for Marx it is a phenomenon of eschatological anthropology: The emancipation of the Jews in its ulimate significance is the emancipation of man from Judaism.26 But, is not the scandal of Judaism here attacked with rabid Christian means? The Sermon on the Mount of Beatitudes had preached: "And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. " 2 7 The aim that Marx first envisioned in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and later expounded in a more objectivist manner, namely, the prospect of the resolution of the emancipation of the Jews into the emancipation of mankind, of a historically justifiable transformation of the opposition between the Jews as the prototypical rich man and the poor people into the opposition between capitalist and proletarians — this aim had already been sketched out years earlier by Heine, not, like Marx, in the context of a philosophical text, but in that of a literary one. The trail leads back, not surprisingly, to Shylock. In his 1838 study of Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen Heine interprets, in a chapter on Jessica, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in the most topical political terms as a drama that shows "us actually neither Jews nor Christians, but rather oppressors and oppressed" and "the madly painful yell of the latter when they can repay with interest their insolent tormentors for the injuries they 25 26 27

Marx, MEW 1, 372. Ibid., 373. Matt. 5, 29.

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caused." 28 Heine uses the figure of Shylock as an occasion to observe that "the common people always only hated in the Jews people who had money." 29 Does this mean that nothing new has been added in the present? Not at all. We no longer live in the Middle Ages, even the common people are becoming more enlightened, no longer kill the Jews with one blow, and no longer embellish its hatred with religion; our age is no longer so naively hot with faith, traditional resentment dresses itself up in modern phraseology, and the rabble in the beer halls, as in the Chambers of Deputies, declaims against the Jews with mercantilist, industrial, scientific, or even philosophical arguments. 30 But, in the end the modern hatred of the Jews is and remains medievally motivated, as Heine recognized with his unerring insight: But is it the fault of the Jews that this spirit of business has developed so threateningly among them? The blame lies uniquely with that madness, which in the Middle Ages failed to recognize the significance of industry, considered trade to be something ignoble and monetary transactions even to be ignominious, and which therefore gave into the hands of the Jews the most profitable part of such branches of industry, namely monetary transactions; so that they, excluded from all other occupations, had by necessity to become the most refined merchants and bankers. One forced them to become rich and then hated them for their wealth; and, even though Christendom has now given up its prejudices against industry, and Christians have become just as great rogues in trade and industry and just as rich as the Jews: the traditional popular hatred has remained attached to the latter, the people still see in them the representatives of money and hate them. 31 The Jessica chapter ends with this clear-sighted and gloomy diagnosis, a chapter that a few pages earlier had still struck a bright tone, talking of "the intense elective affinity between the two peoples of morality, the Jews and the Teutons." 32 Heine had held there a rousing speech, grounded in a faith in progress, on behalf of the pioneering role of the Jews, a speech that still finds its echo in Marx: And not only Germany bears the physiognomy of Palestine, but also the rest of Europe raises itself toward the Jews. I say raises itself, because the Jews already bore within themselves at the 28 29 30 31 32

Heine, IV, 251. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 260f. Ibid., 257.

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beginning the modern principle, which only today is unfolding among the European peoples." Judaism's faithfulness to the law and, finally, even the founder of Christianity are offered in justification of the exemplary quality of Judaism and of how it points to the future: So, cosmopolitanism has quite literally sprouted from the ground of Judaea, and Christ, who, despite the displeasure of the spice and dye merchant from Hamburg mentioned earlier, was a real Jew, has quite literally founded a publicity campaign for cosmopolitanism. 34 Two years later Heine began to doubt the timely progressiveness not of Judaism but of modern anti-Semitism, when in 1840 the bloody persecution of the Jews of Damascus became known through the report of the Austrian consul there. Heine felt himself "reminded of the darkest times of the Middle Ages by their martyrdom." 35 So it was the French consul in Damascus, Count Ratti-Menton, wrote Heine in the correspondence reports published between 1840 and 1843 in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung,36 who inoculated the Orient with occidental superstition and distributed among the rabble a pamphlet in which the Jews are accused of the murder of Christians. The count had received this pamphlet, snorting hatred, from his clerical friends for the purpose of distribution, [...] and there it is clearly asserted that the Jews need the blood of Christians for the celebration of their Passover Festival." 37 A Capuchin monk had lost his life in Damascus, and now the Jews were being tortured in that city in order to force confessions of murder from them. These events were shockingly analogous to the story, set in the Middle Ages, of Der Rabbi von Bacherach that Heine had been working on since the winter of 1824/25. He put it aside for some months after his Christian baptism in the summer of 1825 and had to reconstruct it from his notebooks upon the loss of the manuscript in a fire at his mother's house in Hamburg in 1833. He published it finally in the year of the Jewish persecution in Damascus. Perhaps even more than by the events themselves and by the role 33 34 35

37

Ibid., 258. Ibid. Heine, V, 268. Published in book form in French and German as Lutice/Lutetia in 1854. Heine, V, 268f.

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played by a titled French civil servant in complicity with the Catholic clergy, Heine was struck by the "dismaying tepidity" of a politician such as the foreign minister Thiers, who was otherwise so loud in appealing to the humanitarian ideals of the French Revolution, and by the lack of solidarity on the part of the rich emancipated Parisian Jews, many of whom had been baptized and ennobled. But most of all, Heine was outraged because a great many Frenchmen are not disinclined to give credence to the bloody insult. [...] We ask ourselves in amazement: is that France, the home of the Enlightenment, the land in which Voltaire laughed and Rousseau cried?38 One would also like to know what the 22 year-old Karl Marx thought about the portent of Damascus. I know of no comment on it. What we know is that he was in Berlin at that time, preparing for his doctoral examination in Jena in 1841 with the dissertation Zur Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie and that he was collecting and writing commentaries on extensive excerpts: the Hefte zur epikureischen, stoischen und skeptischen Philosophie. Marx's tranquillity, if that is what it is, corresponds exactly to the ideas of the Stoics that he was then working on, and also to the physics of Epicurus. In his dissertation he came to the following - in a sense somewhat Hegelian - conclusion: For man to be able to become his only real object, he must have broken in himself his relative being, the power of desire and of mere nature. Repulsion is the first form of self-consciousness.39 This does not mean that Marx the doctoral student had not been kissed by Heine's muse. In the draft of a preface to his doctoral thesis (that he then omitted in favour of a very brief prefatory note), he attacked the seventeenth century French priest and natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi for his attempt "to accomodate Epicurus to the church." Marx's comment, inspired by Heine's figures of style and thought, was: "It is as if one wanted to throw a Christian nun's habit over Grecian Lais' blithely blossoming body. 40 The attraction that Heine's diction had always exerted on Marx did not diminish even while he was studying the ancient Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. But, regarding Marx's apparent indifference to that contemporary superstition, robed in Christianity and mortally dangerous to the Jews in the remote Orient, one can seek in vain any sign, both then and later, of doubt 38 39 40

Ibid., 309. Marx, MEW, Erg.-Bd. I, 284. Ibid., 261.

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about the irreversible humanitarian achievements of the Enlightenment. He never lost his belief, philosophically legitimated by Kant and speculatively ennobled by Hegel, in the unstoppable progress of mankind. He nevertheless was aware that this progress, however objectively necessary it seemed to him to be, did require subjective helping along, and so from the time of his doctoral examination on, he was busily concerned to recruit appropriate comrades-in-arms for the realization of this conviction and to provide them with the necessary intellectual armament. Heine was among the first that Marx courted for this project; the very man, that is, who had sharpened some of the intellectual weapons that Marx would use throughout his life. One of these weapons is the concept of emancipation, which Heine had used first, not only with respect to the Jews in particular, but as a universal category. In the third part of the Reisebilder of 1828 Heine asked: But what is this great task of our time? It is emancipation. Not just that of the Irish, Greek, Frankfurt Jews, West-Indian blacks and other such oppressed peoples, it is rather the emancipation of the whole world, particularly Europe, which has come of age and is now tearing free from the iron fetters of the privilege, the aristocracy.41 One can assume that such a thought had already been aired in the Berlin "Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums," to which the 22 yearold Heine belonged since 1821, for the two years he spent studying in Berlin, where he frequented Hegel's lectures and Rahel Varnhagen's salon. In 1844, through the death of one of the then most active members of this emancipation club, the historian of religion and "polyhistor" Ludwig Marcus, who had in the meantime also been cast into Parisian exile, the memory was awakened in Heine of the "soaringly great, but unfeasible idea" 42 that the society pursued, namely, the "esoteric aim" of a "consonance between historical Judaism and modern science, which one assumed would in the course of time attain world dominion."43 Heine - by now a friend of Marx - takes up in his obituary Ludwig Marcus Denkworte the socially critical ideas of his Shakespeare text - but only the optimistic visions - and in doing so refers to his reflections in the fourth part of the Reisebilder on the connection between the emancipatiön of the Jews and the development of modern capitalism, with England as his example - reflections from which Marx and Engels would profit:

41 42 43

Heine, II, 376. Heine, V, 179. Ibid., 183.

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Yes, emancipation will sooner or later be granted, out of the feeling of justice, out of cleverness, out of necessity. The antipathy to the Jews no longer has any religious roots among the higher classes, and among the lower classes it is transforming itself day by day more into the social resentment against the exuberant power of capital, against the exploitation of the poor by the rich. The hatred of the Jews now has another name, even among the rabble. 44 Marx shared this conviction, and he seems never to have gone beyond it. But not so Heine. One can, to be sure, still find in the Spätere Note of 1854 to his obituary of Ludwig Marcus a last echo of the view of the Jewish question that Heine had previously shared with Marx: The Jews could finally attain the insight that they can only become truly emancipated when the emancipation of the Christians has also been completely won and secured. Their cause is identical with that of the German people, and they should not desire as Jews what was due to them as Germans all along. 45 But this is not Heine's final word on the problem. The postscript ends, after an allusion to Psalm 34, verse 20 ("Why must the righteous suffer so much on earth?"), by noting the "too strong dose of doubt" that the Book of Job conveys. "This poison," writes Heine, could not be lacking in the Bible, in the great medicine chest of mankind. Well, just as he who is suffering must cry till the crying stops, so also must he doubt till the doubting stops, when he feels himself cruelly hurt in his claim to happiness in life; and the highest degree of doubt (Zweifel), which the Germans so correctly call despair (Verzweiflung), leads to a crisis of the moral attitude, as does the most intense weeping. But, hail to him who is healthy and needs no medicine!46 So religion may well be a drug, but it can certainly not be reduced to an intoxicant. It remains one of the strongest agents in the medicine chest of reflexion upon god and the world. The "godless self-god" Marx, specialist in skeptical philosophy, defiantly repudiated these insights of the dying Heine. After Heine's death Marx came across one of the numerous drafts of his will (the third, of 1851, in French) and made fun of it in a letter to Engels of May, 1856: Just seen Heine's will: Return to the "living God" and "apology

44 45 46

Ibid., 184; cf. Geständnisse, Heine, V, 189. Ibid., 190f.

VI/1, 484.

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before God and man" should he ever have written something "immoral!" 47 Marx, however, fails to mention that - precisely in the passage of this will that he incriminates and paraphrases so polemically — Heine expressly precludes a Christian burial, while also rejecting his former "philosophical pride" (orgeuil philosophique) and asks for forgiveness: "if I have unknowingly (ä mon insu) offended against good manners and morality, which is the true essence of all monotheistic faiths." 48 Marx did not notice that the meaning of this sentence depends on the inconspicuous formula "ä mon insu" - and that Heine thereby cunningly smuggles in his doubts about the rationalist belief in the omnipotence of consciousness. The letter of Marx just mentioned is, by the way, (apart from one other letter about the pension Heine was paid by the French government) the only textual evidence from his pen of any reservation toward the poet he still pays his respects to in 1867 in the first volume of Das Kapital, with mild irony, under the title "my friend Heine": "If I had the courage of my friend Heine, I would call Mr. Jeremias a genius in bourgeois stupidity." 49 I can only mention the fact that, just like in Marx's earlier works, several sections of Das Kapital — above all the famous chapter on "Der Fetischcharakter der Ware und sein Geheimnis" - also bear the mark of Heine, specifically in the combination of analysis, satire, and poetic phantasy. Heine is cited only once in Das Kapital, in the chapter on the credit system in the manuscript of volume three. 50 Heine is not mentioned by name, nor does Marx invoke him anonymously as "the poet" — an authority that Marx had often granted him earlier, analogously to the ancient and antiquarian paying of respects to Homer and Virgil. Two lines of a poem are interpolated, without any transition or commentary, into Marx's own text, as if Marx had made himself the organ of Heine and had at the same time made the poet his own. And what is this passage about? It is about the bill of exchange again, as in the text Zur Judenfrage: "How essential it is for a regulated course of business that good bills of exchange can be taken in payment everywhere and under all circumstances [...]." Marx goes on to support this claim with the following unacknowledged words of Heine: "If Tosafot Yom Τον is no longer valid, what else can be valid, brawl, brawl!" ("Gilt nicht mehr der Tausves Jontof, was soll gelten, Zeter, Zeter!") These verses (361 f.) come from the last poem in Heine's Romanzero, published in 1851, the Disputation,51 with which the Hebräische Melodien end. 47 48 49 50 51

Marx, MEW Heine, VI/1, Mara, MEW Marx, MEW Heine, VI/1,

29, 53. 542. 23, 637. 25, 555. 158-172.

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Interestingly enough, in the entire poem there is no mention of monetary transactions or bills of exchange. There is only mention of the confrontation between Judaism and Christianity. The words Marx cites are spoken by the Jewish protagonist of the disputation, "Rabbi Juda of Navarre" (v. 20), who is only moved to a fiery outburst of rage at the dear God of the Christians, with his champion Pater Jose, Guardian of the Franciscans, 52 when the latter curses the Mishnah commentary Tosafot Yom Τον. Marx's use of Heine's verses is a trick, a condensation. It suggests that law and Talmud are to be equated with the bill of exchange — a breath-taking ellipsis. As one can see, Marx has not departed one inch from the standpoint he had taken in Zur Judenfrage. The fact that Heine's verses have been torn by Marx out of their religious context, and put, so to speak, from their head onto their feet, makes something else clear too: namely, that Marx obstinately refused to take seriously the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, around which Heine's poem revolved, a conflict still being pursued in arguments and still unresolved in practice. The rather silly Queen Donna Blanka had been appointed judge of the disputation, and the humble opinion she offers, a caricature of a Solomonic judgment, Marx simply makes his own, as the exact repetition of her words elsewhere in his writings shows. Donna Blanka's naive verdict is: Who is right, I do not know But it simply seems to me, That the rabbi and the monk, That both of them they stink. 53 At the beginning of the poem it was said of the lady with the sensitive nose: "Beautiful, flighty flower - / May God have mercy upon her ~ . " 5 4 Marx's secularized use of the verses from Heine's Disputation in the third volume of Das Kapital, an excellent example of the demagogic twisting of a quotation, shows also that after he left Paris Marx by no means limited himself to the stock of Heine poems available by 1844, Heine's politically most active period, that is, the year in which he published Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, collaborated on the socialist German emigre newspaper "Vorwärts," and was friends with Marx. The letter to Heine of early 52

53

"[...] Liebegott der Christianer, / Dessen Kämpe Frater Jose, / Gardian der Franziskaner" (vv. 22-24). "Welcher recht hat, weiß ich nicht / Doch es will mich schier bedünken, / Daß der Rabbi und der Mönch, / Daß sie alle beide stinken" (vv. 437-440). "Schöne, flatterhafte Blume - / Daß sich ihrer Gott erbarme -" (vv. 55/56).

Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx

37

February, 1845, written shortly before Marx's move to Brussels on the way to his London exile, contains sentences of a warmth that are otherwise only to be found in the letters to his wife Jenny: Of all the people I leave behind here [in Paris], it is most unpleasant to leave Heine behind. I would like to take you along in my suitcase." 55 Heine's books, however, were of course taken along, although that was not strictly necessary, because Marx had already stowed away in his head this contraband that always travelled with him. His daughter Eleanor and friends of the family report that Marx knew most of Heine's poems and many passages of his prose by heart and quoted from them at the drop of a hat. For example, he used as an antidote to any manifestation of sentimentality in his vicinity the verse from Heine's SeraphineX of 1844: 56 Das Fräulein stand am Meere Und seufzte lang und bang, Es rühret sie so sehre Der Sonnenuntergang." 57 Marx continued to keep abreast of all Heine's publications, both the new ones and the reprints of earlier works. Even as an old man, marked by the death of his wife and by his own serious illness, he still asked a visitor to read aloud to him a few texts of Heine, "of which he said that they were the best that had ever been produced in any language. " 5 8 So, this most influential, famous, and notorious scholar ended his literary career with the admission that his model Heine remained unattainable. His career had also begun with precisely the same insight. His first literary attempts in 1836 had consisted of three volumes of poetry, which the 18 year-old sent from Berlin, where he was studying, to his betrothed, Jenny von Westphalen. He evidently wanted to outdo his dearly beloved poet at least in quantity, for he entitled his volumes Buch der Lieder I und 11. But he soon and suddenly realized that his talent did not lie in the field of verse. He described his renunciation of poetry in a confessional letter to his father in November, 1837 with the pathos of a religious conversion: "A curtain had fallen, my sanctum was rent, and new gods had to be installed." 59 To elect Hegel, who had died in Berlin only a few years earlier, as the new God, was 55

Marx, MEW 27, 434. 56 Neue Gedichte (Heine, IV, 322). 57 "The Miss stood by the sea, / Long and pained her sigh, / It moves her so much / The setting of the sun." 58 Henry Mayers Hyndman, in Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ed.), Gespräche mit Marx und Engels (Frankfurt/Main: 1969), 522. 59 Marx, MEW, Erg.-Bd. I, 8.

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the obvious choice, at least for local reasons. But at the first fragmentary reading, Marx was unpleasantly moved by the "grotesque craggy melody" of Hegel's philosophy. In the course of his own subsequent attempts at philosophical writing he landed without wanting to in the Hegelian system, and he was so angry about it that he ran around "as if mad in the garden by the Spree's dirty water, 'that washes souls and thins tea,"' as he reported further to his father. A modified Heine quote is embedded in this sentence. This is the earliest example in the extant oeuvre of Marx of a strategy he would later so often adopt. The lines are from the final passage of the poem "Frieden." This passage, which some editions omit, is one of the most biting in Heine's early works. In this poem, which mimicks Klopstock's style, Heine mocks the careerist, upwardly-mobile piety (Hinauf-frömmeln) that was rampant in Berlin: In the pious city where sand and religion blossom, and the holy Sprea's patient water washes souls and thins tea." 6 0 The "soul-washing" water is of course the baptismal water in especially great demand at that time among the Jews of Berlin (although being baptized with Spree water is, according to a local-patriotic saying, synonymous with being born in Berlin, quite apart from any religious affiliation). Characteristically enough, none of this is directly evident in the way the young Marx quotes the passage. The import would of course not have remained hidden to the addressee. For Heinrich Marx, a great admirer of the Enlightenment and of socially critical ideas, and therefore also of Heine, had had himself baptized a Protestant, like Heine, upon completion of his legal studies, but not - and in this like Heine too ~ out of any servile hypocrisy. He wanted to show his reverence for the state religion of Prussia, the only German principality in which certain French Enlightenment thinkers had, at least for a while, been granted civic rights, and he also wanted to be able to practice his profession as a lawyer on Prussian territory (the Rhineland became Prussian after the defeat of Napoleon). The conspicuous correspondences, but also the charged differences between his father and Heine, surely did not fail to impress themselves upon Marx, as much as the parallels between the son and the poet, who was also banned from publication and denied the privileges that come with the title of doctor. "In der frommen Stadt / Wo der Sand und der Glauben blüht, / Und der heiligen Sprea geduldiges Wasser / Die Seelen wäscht und den Tee verdünnt Reisebilder I, 1. Abteilung der Nordsee (Heine, II, 187).

Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx

39

Marx's father Hirschel (1787-1838) had had himself baptized in 1824 as Heinrich, as would Harry Heine the following year. The change of religion that Marx's father performed with wife and children, including the six yearold Karl, meant a radical break with the rest of their families: both Heinrich and his wife Henriette were the children of rabbis, and in line with orthodox tradition, many generations of ancestors had also been rabbis. In Heine's case it was not religious but financial reasons that were decisive in his conflict with his family. Heine, whose father and paternal relatives were not religious scholars but merchants (their ancestors had, as "Hoffaktoren," i.e. court agents, belonged to the more privileged Jews), was descended on his mother's side from a family of respected physicians, who were likewise virtually assimilated into their Christian surroundings. When Marx met Heine in 1843, Marx's father was no longer alive, and the 21 years older, renowned, and controversial writer must have represented for Marx something like an ideal father figure, a Rhenish Jew like himself, like his father, for whom the certificate of baptism had also not been an expression of a new religious confession but the means of access to the human rights of the French Revolution, or, as Heine put it, "the entry ticket to European culture," 61 a culture that Heine enriched so generously with his intellectual gifts. Also Marx's turn to Hegel, which he described so mysteriously, is, in the last instance, to be credited to Heine; and the Heine quote in the letter to his father is indeed to be read symptomatologically. For Marx's involvement with Heine's diction and way of thinking during his student years had survived undisturbed the "rending" of the "holy of holies." Heine was by no means a "new god" for him, but rather the oldest, in a certain way a representative of the god of his forefathers. Heine had not only animated Marx to lyric production, but had also put him on the trail of a new thought, namely the postulate of human "godlikeness." And, Heine also helped make productive his dissatisfaction with Hegel's idealism. Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland was published in 1835, a year after Marx finished school (Abitur), and when Marx entered the Royal University of Berlin one year later, Heine's book had already become a focus of identification among the more critical followers of Hegel, who, since the death of their intellectual master in 1831, had been fighting about exegesis and about new orientations. Heine had, as he himself declared, "divulged the school secret, which, wrapped in scholastic formulae, had only been known to the initiates in the top class," 62 but which not one of these initiates had made as comprehensible or presented as vividly to himself or to others as Heine did. In the Berlin "Doktorclub," led by Hegel's pupil

61 62

Aufzeichnungen (Heine, VI/1, 622). Geständnisse (Heine, V, 195), Briefe über Deutschland (VI/1, 460).

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Bruno Bauer, which Marx joined in 1837, Heine's book had already inspired a new current of thought, Young Hegelianism. This movement took up, even in the name it gave itself, trends set by a group of poets, founded at the end of the twenties, that became known beyond the student world under the name of "Junges Deutschland" and that was furiously combatted by the authorities because of its attacks on "throne and altar." Heine had also provided the "prototype" of this "way of thinking and writing" in the Buch der Lieder and in his Reisebilder, a book "which woke the German spirit out of its somnolency," as he himself wrote, without exaggeration, in the draft of the second French edition. 63 Heine was branded in particular as the "choir master of Young Germany" by the Teutomaniacs, and scheming Teutonic poet colleagues succeeded in having his entire oeuvre banned by decree of the Federal Diet in 1835, which completely deprived him of the possibility of earning his livelihood. 64 The instigator of the witch hunt was the Swabian poetic epigone Wolfgang Menzel, an enemy of Goethe, like his antipode Börne, who had dubbed him "Franzosenfresser" ~ to which Heine added: "he usually eats a Jew afterwards, to leave a nice taste in his mouth." 6 5 The scandal caused by the Reisebilder was however exceeded by that of Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. For here Heine prophesied "that the political revolution of the Germans will emerge out of that philosophy whose systems one so often decried as vain scholasticism," 66 as Heine put it in his Briefe über Deutschland, written in 1844 during his friendship with Marx (though never published by Heine himself). He added: It was easy for me to make that prophecy! Well, I had seen how the dragon's teeth were sown, out of which the men in armor rise up today, who fill the world with their uproar of weapons but who will also throttle each other, unfortunately! But Heine takes responsibility here not just for the prophecy but also for the program of this revolution: "I have dreamed and spoken of it long ago" ~ namely, in his demand for a human democracy of gods, that can be read by anyone, black on white, in De l'Allemagne. And it is precisely this demand, according to Heine, that Communism, now spreading "throughout Germany," aimed to realize, 67 led by Marx and other "Sturm und Drang men of the present. " 6 8

63 64 65 66 67 68

Heine. II, 683. Cf. Vorrede zu Salon III: Über den Denunzianten (Heine, V, 27). Briefe über Deutschland (Heine, V, 201). Ibid., 198. Ibid. Ibid. 200.

Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx

41

Heine certainly did not leave completely unpublished his new prophecy based on this assertion. He wrote in the Revue des deux mondes after Marx's departure from Paris in 1845, and with a sidelong glance at his friend, that the more or less obscure leaders of the German communists are great logicians, of whom the most powerful have come out of the school of Hegel, and they are, without any doubt, the most capable minds and the most dynamic characters in Germany. These doctors of revolution and their mercilessly determined disciples are the only men in Germany who have life, and it is to them, I fear, that the future belongs. 6 ^ Ten years later Heine returned to this premonition in the Preface to Lutece.70 This declaration that the future belongs to the communists, I made it in a tone of extreme apprehension and anxiety, and alas! it was in no way a guise! In fact, it is with horror and dismay that I think of the epoch where these sombre iconoclasts will come to power: with their callous hands they will break without pity all the marble statues of beauty, so dear to my heart; they will dash to pieces all these fantastical trifles and furbelows of art that the poet loved so much; they will destroy my laurel groves and will plant potatoes there; the lilies who neither span nor worked and who were nevertheless dressed as magnificently as King Solomon in all his splendor, they will then be ripped out of the soil of society, unless they are willing to take a spindle in their hand; the roses, those idle brides of the nightingales, will have the same fate; the nightingales, those useless singers, will be hunted, and alas! my Book of Songs will serve as paper bags for the grocer to pour some coffee or snuff into for the old ladies of the future. Still, Heine cannot deny himself some sympathy with these Old Testament iconoclasts: And yet, I admit it openly, this same communism, so hostile to all my interests and leanings, exercises upon my soul a charm I cannot defend myself against; two voices rise up in its favour in my chest, two voices which will not let themselves be silenced, which are perhaps at bottom only diabolic instigations — but whatever it is, I am possessed by it, and no power of exorcism would be able to master them. What are these two "diabolic instigations?" First, logic, the logic of law fiat justitia, pereat mundus ~ so the saying of Emperor Ferdinand I, who brought religious peace to Germany in the sixteenth century and whom Heine cited in conclusion on the matter. But second, the common enemy that links

70

In the book edition of the Aveux de l'auteur of 1855, Heine left out the parenthetic "I fear," Heine Säkular-Ausgabe, Vol. 17, 171. Heine, V, 224-226.

Renate Schlesier

42

Heine to the communists: "teutomaniac" German nationalism, whose destruction Heine believes will be assured by the communists' certain victory. He adds a limiting, self-ironizing religious reservation, which he however immediately relativizes: The communists, it is true, have no religion (nobody is perfect), the communists are even atheists (which is assuredly a great sin), but as principal dogma they profess the most absolute cosmopolitanism, a universal love for all peoples, an egalitarian confraternity among all men, free citizens of this globe. This fundamental dogma is the same as the Evangelist preached long ago, so that in spirit and in truth the communists are much more Christian than our so-called Germanic patriots, these narrow-minded champions of an exclusive nationhood. 71 One should not leave unmentioned the terse comments of the dying Heine in the Geständnisse of the same year, where he speaks with horror of the "fanatic monks of atheism" 72 and alludes with scorn to the Communist Manifesto of 1848 ~ "those metaphorical chains that the whole world now wears." 73 He indeed issues a bitter warning against the German communists, who are much superior to the levellers and the overtumers in other countries [...] because of their terrible doctrinaire determination; for in the madness that drives them there is, as Polonius would say, method. 74 For the German communists an eternal covenant really could not be formed with Heine the political analyst and prophet; of this Marx too was by now sure. But Marx continued to dream undeterred the dream he had shared with Heine of a future for humanity in which the oppositions between Judaism and Christianity would be truly resolved under the sign of communism. This dream was the secret of the elective affinity that bound the two men. It can be seen in Marx's ceaseless reworking, whether manifest or in camouflage, of Heine's words and thoughts. Marx remained the self-god of exile. Heine once called Judaism, in his "Zeitgedicht" Das neue Israelitische Hospital zu Hamburg, the "unheilbar große Brüderkrankheit" (fraternity's incurably great sickness). 75 Marx, for his part, did not succeed in making this "sickness" disappear from his life and work; to deny that it was "incurable" had to fail. Heine's language 71

Ibid. 226.

72

Heine, VI/1, 466.

73

Ibid., 470. Ibid., 471.

74 75

Heine, IV, 421.

Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx

43

remained for Marx the paradigmatic articulation of that aporia. For these problems he received no reliable help from Hegel but from Heine, the Jew and "secret Hellene." 76 Marx was very serious about his dreams of the future. He despised all sentimentality and let no tears well up. And it was Heine who could always provoke him — as Marx himself wrote, in words reminiscent of Heine, 77 ~ to burst into "Homeric laughter [...] by the rivers of Babylon."78

76 77

78

Heine, IV, 39 (Börne). Marx, letter of February 1, 1851 to Hermann Becker in Cologne, MEW 27, 544: "Homerischem Gelächter [...] an den Gewässern von Babylon." I am indebted to Mark Gelber for the invitation to the conference he organized at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva in April, 1990. During this event, I delivered an earlier draft of this paper, translated from the German by Jonathan Kaltner (Vienna/Beersheva) whom I also wish to thank for his prompt help. I owe special thanks to Simon Srebrny (London/Berlin) for the final English version of the text.

Julius Η. Schoeps

Under the Influence of Heinrich Heine: Aron Bernstein as a Writer and Literary Critic

It is a well known fact that by the late twenties and early thirties of the 19th century, Heinrich Heine was praised by preciously few major figures, such as Varnhagen von Ense and Immermann, 1 and by some of the Jungdeutschen such as Laube, Lyser, and Wienbarg, who called him "einen großen DichterProsaisten." 2 Initially, Heine had been viewed quite favorably in Germany, but that changed very quickly. After the publication of Heine's famous Reisebilder (1826-1831), opinions about his works began to diverge, and the fronts hardened even more after Heine moved to Paris. Heine was exposed to increasingly malicious criticism published in the form of reviews and commentaries in contemporary papers. It became a habit to make derogatory comments about his style, his amorphousness, and his political views. He was reproached for having written "unerträgliche Gemeinheiten." 3 The Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung accused Heine of degrading literature as a whole to the level of a "chronique scandaleuse. " 4 There was talk about his "literarische Liederlichkeit" 5 and "unflätigen Plunder," 6 against which German youth would have to be protected as vigorously and as effectively as possible. One of the few who did not join the ranks of Heine's critics was the young Aron Bernstein (1812-1884). Best known today as the author of two much read ghetto-novellas, Vögele der Maggid and Mendel Gibbor,7 he was also one of the founders of the Reformgemeinde in Berlin. His first literary works, which were published under the anagrammatical pseudonym "Rebenstein" in Gubitz's Gesellschafter and Alexis's Freimiithigen in the early thirties, prove 1 2 3

4 5 6 7

Der Gesellschafter, (1836). Ludwig Wienbarg, Ästhetische Feldzüge (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1834), 284. Cf. Karl Theodor Kleinknecht (Ed.), Heine in Deutschland. Dokumente und Rezeption. 1834-1856 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), XVIII. Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung (1835), 361. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 160. Cf. Julius H. Schoeps, "Bilder aus dem Ghetto. Aron Bernsteins Novellen 'Vögele der Maggid' und 'Mendel Gibbor,'" in Hans Otto Horch und Horst Denkler (Eds.), Conditio Judaica. Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Zweiter Teil (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 234-246.

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that he was a follower and admirer of Heinrich Heine. Aron Bernstein, born in the Jewish quarter of Danzig as a son of poor parents, belonged to Heine's more distant entourage. Having received an orthodox Jewish education, which was restricted almost exclusively to studies of the Bible and the Talmud, he decided in 1832 to move to Berlin. As to his motives for this step, one can only guess. There is much to be said for the idea that like many other Jews at that time, he hoped to have better chances to improve his living conditions if he resided in the Prussian capital. However, at first life was not easy. In a letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz, he later described his experiences during his first weeks in Berlin: "Mein Vermögen bestand bei meiner Ankunft aus 17 Silbergroschen.... Drei Wochen lebte ich nur vom schwarzen Kaffee und trockenen Brot. In den ersten Wochen ging es sehr gut, ich war in vieler Hinsicht glücklich und philosophierte über die Bedürfnisse der Menschen." 8 Less than two years later, the former student of the Talmud, who upon his arrival in Berlin still had problems with the German language, and who was forced to eke out a living in a time-consuming way as a Hebrew teacher in small prayer-rooms, was able to write essays on all sorts of topics, as he himself put it. In doing so, he was supported by such distinguished men as Adalbert Chamisso, Willibald Alexis-Häring, Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz, Karl Holtei, and Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. The essays and criticism he published in Gubitz's Gesellschafter and Alexis's Freimüthigen show the young Bernstein to be not only a keen observer of the spiritual and political currents of his time, but also show that often enough he himself was the topic of the day in the intellectual circles in the Prussian capital. From the beginning, Bernstein was very outspoken whenever he had the chance to comment on some ethical or political problem or on a topic in connection with the philosophy of history. In 1835, for example, Bernstein published an essay with the title "Das junge Deutschland," 9 which aimed at supporting some writers who were largely unknown at the time, 1 0 and had, to his mind, received less recognition than they deserved. In this essay he casually followed in Hegel's footsteps, without giving up his own skepticism about the latter's philosophy of history. He wrote: "In der neueren Zeit, wo sich die Macht des ewigen Wechsels so großartig im ganzen Gebiete der geistigen Menschheit dem geistigen Menschen offenbarte, ist man ... auf die 8

9

See letter from Bernstein to Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz, April 15, 1837 (Lessingsche Autographensammlung, Krakau). A. R[ebenstein], "Das junge Deutschland," Der Freimilthige, oder Berliner Conversationsblatt( 1835), 12-14, 16-18, 20-22. In this essay the following are mentioned: Robert Bürkner, Erst Keil, Franz Kugler, and Robert Reinick. Bernstein explains: "Poesy in Germany has ceased to be aristocratic, and that is very, very significant progress! Lyric Poetry has now become the property of the people!" (ibid., 14 [1835], 59.)

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Wahrheit der Geschichte, der Entwicklung gekommen." 11 The young Bernstein was concerned with the tensions existing between tradition and progress, continuity and radical change. He was interested in the effects these tensions had on everyday life, and especially on literary life. In a number of essays he tried to make a distinction between a present and a historical truth, 12 to elaborate on the difference between contemporary writers and writers of the past, using the works of Menzel and Goethe as examples. He defended Goethe against his critic Menzel. In his opinion, the former had stood above his time, had been, as he put it, "ein scharfer Zertrümmerer, 13 der vor der Zeit revolutioniert, im Geiste... die Weltgeschichte verstanden" 14 - this, in contrast to the latter, the editor of the literary supplement of the Cottaschen Morgenblattes. These statements indicate further that Bernstein was a knowledgable participant in the literary, philosophical, and political discussions of those years. At the same time, his interest in the philosophy of history led him to write an article with the pretentious title: "Plan zu einer neuen Grundlage für die Philosophie der Geschichte." 15 In this article, which was published in book form together with some of his other works in the spring of 1838, 16 Bernstein attempted to outline his misgivings regarding Hegel's philosophy of history. He had certain doubts about Hegel's statement, that the freedom of man was the final purpose of all historical events, freedom not only as a state of being, but also as a state of mind aware of itself. Bernstein thought that the freedom of the individual was irreconciliable with the principle of necessity, which dominated history. "Die Geschichte," he wrote in his essay, "ist nicht jener deus ex machina, der die menschliche Freiheit, wie ein Roß vor seinen Siegeswagen, gespannt hat, genau weiß und voraus bestimmt, wo er hinaus will...." 1 7 There is no need to elaborate on the question to what degree the young Bernstein understood Hegel in the first place. Like many of his 11

A. R[ebenstem], Das junge Deutschland , 50. Α. Rebenstein, "Von dem sittlich-religiös-poetischen Bettlermantel oder Goethe und Menzel redivivus," Der Freimüthige, 158 (1835), 50. 13 Ibid., 159(1835), 638. 14 Ibid., 158 (1835), 634. 15 A. Bernstein (Rebenstein), Plan zu einer neuen Grundlage für die Philosophie der Geschichte. Wissenschaftlicher Versuch neben einigen literarischen Studien (Berlin: 1838), 11-24. ^ This book, which is dedicated to K.A. Varnhagen von Ense and F.W. Gubitz, contains, in addition, the following essays: "Rationalismus und Judentum" (27-43), "Adalbert von Chamisso" (44-68), "Der Goethe'sche Wagner, oder Muster der Charakterbildung für junge Poeten" (69-77), "Schönbom, Goethe und ihre Zeitgenossen" (75-96), "Über den Einfluß der deutschen Studien auf E. L. Bulwer" (75-105), "Coleridge und Goethe, oder ein englischer Faust" (105-111). 17 Ibid., 19. 12

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contemporaries he was fascinated by the Berlin philosopher. It was good form to admire Hegel's philosophy and Bernstein was no exception to the rule. In Gubitz's Gesellschafter, a paper to which Bernstein contributed so regularly at one point that the public thought him to be a member of the editorial staff, he published a column under the pseudonym of Eduard Braun (.Zeitlosen und Zeitrosen, aus einem Tagebuch ), which illustrates just how fascinated he was by Hegel's way of thinking and his diction. For example, he wrote: "Wann wird unsere Zeit aufhören, inconsequent zu sein? Dann, wenn sie wird aufhören, consequent sein zu wollen." 18 In a letter to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, whom he highly admired ("Ich habe nirgend edlere Motive und reinere Liebe zum Guten gefunden als eben bei Ihnen"), Bernstein admitted that he was in favor of spreading Hegel's philosphy and making it popular: "Eben weil ich nicht Philosoph bin, und dennoch philosophische Beruhigung in mir trage, bin ich auch der Überzeugung, diese (Beruhigung) allen anderen, die dieser ... bedürfen, mitteilen zu können." He was convinced that Varnhagen would understand, "weil es mir war, als müßten Sie selber schon einmal den Wunsch gehabt, philosophische Resultate verallgemeinert zu sehen, und besonders Hegel dem Leben näher zu bringen...." 1 9 It may seem peculiar in this context that Bernstein was in favor of spreading Hegel's philosophy, because, at the same time, he criticized the paper Junges Deutschland for showing an exaggerated enthusiasm for the philosopher. What irritated him most was the unhistorical approach of some of its champions, who were incapable of self-criticism. Again and again he lamented that the Jungdeutschen neglected the present for the future. Bernstein criticized their "Lebenskälte" and the lack of poetic charm in their literary works. "Ihre Poesie," he lamented, "ist ihnen abhanden gekommen, ihre Illusion ist in Hegelianismus erfroren ...." Moreover, the Jungdeutschen incurred his displeasure by not adhering to the traditional aesthetic rules, to the well-known forms of literary art. "Originale," he complained, "nichts als Originale wollen sie sein. Was nicht aus ihrer Clique, es sei, wie es wolle, erscheint, wird zerrissen." 20 The fact that it was Bernstein who took sides with Heine, when the dispute about him started, is probably not of great importance for Heine's reception history. On the other hand, it proves that Bernstein had recognized Heine's importance at a very early stage. In July, 1834, he published an hommage, 18 19

20

Der Gesellschafter, 129 (1837), 643. See letter from Bernstein to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, January 29, 1837 (Sammlung Varnhagen von Ense, Jagelionische Bibliothek Krakau). A. Rebenstein, "Das junge Deutschland, oder Ein Wort zur Zeit," Der Freimüthige , 227 (1835), 911; excerpted in French translation in Novelle revue germanique , IV (1835), 202-207.

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"An Heinrich Heine," in verse form in Alexis's Der Freimüthige.These lines praised the poet Heine in an effusive, clumsy, indeed, almost sloppy, manner: "Dein Lied hat einen wundersamen, / Tiefen, geheimnisvollen Klang, / Nennt jedes Herzen leis'ste Namen, / Singt jeder Brust geheimsten Sang." 21 It is highly probable that is was Ludwig Börne's biting review of Heine's De l'Allemagne, a critique that was published in August, 1835 in German in the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung,22 which prompted Bernstein to take sides publicly with Heine and to write his article, entitled "Die jüngst ausgebrüteten Anti-Heinianer. " 2 3 In this essay Bernstein defended Heine against Börne's attacks, treating severely the behaviour of some of the Jungdeutschen, although he did not mention any names. He wrote: "Wenn ich so dann und wann diese Helden mit sich selber und ihrer Größe und Ruhe kiketieren sehe, wenn ich sie von 'Heine-Jammer' verabsprechen höre, wenn ich oft lese, wie denn eigentlich Heine nicht nur NICHTS, sondern GAR NICHTS ist, dann packt mich baß ein Mephisto, diesen Leuten einmal Stellen aus ihren eigenen Aufsätzen und Büchern zu zitieren und sie zu fragen, wo sie dieses ohne Heine gesagt hätten. Sie mögen sich in der Tat ein wenig hüten, daß nicht jemand so klug ist und Stellen und Schilderungen, die buchstäblich Nachahmungen Heine's genannt werden können, zur Seite mit dem Original abdrucken läßt. Die Leute haben in der Tat vergessen, bei wem sie SCHREIBEN gelernt, wer sie SPRECHEN gelehrt, und endlich, wer sie AN SICH SELBER hat glauben machen." 24 But, the young Bernstein was not only interested in Junges Deutschland. In his literary criticism he dealt also with other contemporary writers who cannot be categorized with the Jungdeutschen, for example Heinrich Heine's friend Karl Immermann. Immermann's novel Die Epigonen (1837) is an imitation of Goethe's works and reflects the spirit of the time. Its appearance prompted Bernstein to write a succession of articles for the Gesellschafter,25 in which he expressed his admiration for Immermann, indicating at the same time that the "Unentschiedenheit und geheime Zwiespältigkeit" 26 of the novel caused him problems. Although Bernstein was very taken with Immermann's 21 22 23

24

26

A. Rfebenstein], "An Heinrich Heine," Der Freimüthige, 134 (1834), 575. Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung (1835), 217-220. In 1894, the editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (AZJ) considered it timely, in wake of the many unsuccessful attefnpts to erect a Heine monument in Germany, to republish Bernstein's essay, because, "[er] so klingt, als wäre er gestern geschrieben und für die Köpfe unserer Zeit berechnet...." See "A. Bernstein über Heinrich Heine. Eine litterarhistorische Reliquie," AZJ, 58 (1894), 307. A. R[ebenstein], "Die jüngst ausgebrüteten Anti-Heinianer," Der Freimüthige, 192 (1835), 769 f. A. Rebenstein, "Karl Immermann, das deutsche Publikum und die 'Epigonen,'" Der Gesellschafter, 117-120(1836). See Hans Mayer, Das unglückliche Bewußtsein. Zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte von Lessing bis Heine (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 544.

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attempt to combine "Goethe'sehe und romantische Poesie," 27 he complained that only a very limited part of the public paid any attention to the much praised Familienroman. He linked this to political indifference, that is, to Immermann's inability to really make his "Weltanschauung" clear. "Das Publikum," as Bernstein put it, "hat seinen eigenen Egoismus, einen edlen, es will LERNEN, und nicht nur BEWUNDERN ALLEIN; es will einen Fortschritt in seiner Erkenntnis, nicht nur einen Gegenstand seiner Verehrung haben." 28 Bernstein also became interested in Adalbert von Chamisso. Bernstein did not conceal his opinion, that the author of the fairytale novella Peter Schlemihl was an outstanding poet. He published an essay in the Gesellschafter, in which he interpreted this story about a man who sold his shadow in terms of Chamisso's lack of a real homeland. 29 He thought that this motive went through all of Chamisso's works. To his mind it was foolish to admire Chamisso uncritically for having circumnavigated the earth, because, as he saw it, Chamisso did not start his three-year journey in 1815 out of curiosity or a spirit of adventure, but because he felt homeless everywhere, because he had no real homeland. Bernstein visited Chamisso in his house shortly before the latter's death. They spent the hot summer afternoon talking about questions that preoccupied both of them. Bernstein recorded these conversations and he later published some passages from their talks with the exact wording. 30 This material is very revealing, mainly because it enables intimate acquaintance with the person of Chamisso. But, at the same time it gives us an impression of the detached attitude the old Chamisso had towards the literature of his time. For example, during his conversation with Bernstein he made the following ironical and brilliant comment on Ludwig Uhland, whom in reality, he admired very much: "Es kommt mir vor, als ob der Uhlang [sie] zwischen zwei Spiegeln stände. Im Spiegel ist ein Uhlang, und dann weiter wieder ein Uhlang, und dann wieder einer und wieder einer und so immer weiter. Ah, das sind lauter Uhlangs, aber schade, sie werden immer ein bißehen blässer, bis sie sich ganz verwischen. 31 His preoccupation with contemporary literature obviously prompted Bernstein to try and write poems and novellas himself. In a letter to Otto and Elisabeth Lewald, which he wrote much later, he admitted that writing belletristic literature gave him much satisfaction. 32 However, his early 27 28 29 30 31 32

A. Rebenstein, "Karl Immermann...," Der Freimäthige, 118 (1836), 586. Ibid., 587. Α. Rebenstein, "Adalbert von Chamisso," Der Gesellschafter (1836), 99-103. A. Rebenstein, "Mein letzter Besuch bei Chamisso," Der Gesellschafter , 34, 35 (1839). Ibid., 34(1839), 170. See letters from Bernstein to Otto Lewald, June 23, 1857; and to Elisabeth Lewald, January 7, 1858 (Nachlaß Lewald-Stahr, Staatsbibliothek unter den Linden, Berlin).

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51

attempts at writing did not meet with more than moderate success. All the material at our disposal shows that the literary circles in Berlin took a favorable view of his works; yet, he failed to win the appreciation of the general public. A brief consideration of his small volume of "Minne"poems, 33 which was published in 1834 and contains among other poems some of Bernstein's "Lieder an Bertha," explains why he did not meet with the success he had hoped for. The major reason is, most probably, the lack of quality. The verses are mostly naive and not very ingenious.34 Karl Emil Franzos was right, when he stated that Bernstein's verses are not only of poor quality, but they also are lacking in content. "Die Verse," he wrote, "die in der Tonart hilflos Heine nachstammeln, sind nur für den Ex-Talmudisten, den im Geschmack ungefestigten Autodidakten charakteristisch, nirgendwo für den späteren Dichter." 35 The volume Novellen und Lebens-Bilder,36 which was published in 1840, does not show any indication of a more than mediocre poetic talent. The structure, style, and content of these works differ, but they are all of mediocre quality, and, one must keep in mind that they were not all written at the same time. Bernstein obviously tried to create his poems on the model of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Zschokke, Ludwig Tieck, Jean Paul, and Heinrich Heine. "Selten," judged Franzos, "mag ein Buch solche Gegensätze vereinen." 37 Most of the Novellen und Lebens-Bilder are set in the milieu of Bernstein's home town of Danzig. There are a number of remarks on Danzig in the book which have a very personal character and which are clearly autobiographical. Bernstein endows the town with a character which is unmistakable. In Novellen und Lebens-Bilder, the text reads at one point: "Die Geschichte Danzigs war von jeher eine INDIVIDUELLE. Niemals hing von ihrem Schicksal das Geschick anderer ab, das machte es, daß diese Stadt von je abgeschlossener als jede andere war." 38 Furthermore, Bernstein claims in the book that the fact that Danzig was not a cosmopolitan town explained why there was as much open-mindedness as intolerance, as much education as lack of education, as much splendor as filth, and as much justice as deception. Being a commercial town on the coast of the Baltic Sea made it an im33

34

35 36 37 38

See Nachklänge (Lieder von F. Brunold, Ε. Ferrand, W. Jäger, L. Kossarsky, A. Rebenstein), (Berlin: 1834). Although Ί have not managed to locate the text, a further bibliographical reference may be reported: Bernstein, [Blumen-Sprache, oder] das Buch der Blumen (Berlin: 1834). Gutzkow mocked the "Pommersche Dichterschule," as he called the authors of this volume, in his literary magazine, Phönix (30 [1835]). He accused them of imitating Heine: "Heine heißt ihr Unglück." Karl Emil Franzos, "Über A. Bernstein," AZJ, 59 (1895), 117. A. Rebenstein, Novellen und Lebens-Bilder (Rettin·. 1840). Franzos, ibid. A. Rebenstein, Novellen und Lebens-Bilder, 25.

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portant town, but it did not have any bearing on the spirit or the atmosphere of Danzig. Proud of its status as a free city, Danzig preserved its isolation, "jenes Selbstbewußtsein, das den Schritten der Cultur am hinderlichsten ist, und das zu vernichten wohl der fortschreitenden Zeit noch lange schwer werden wird." 3 9 The most remarkable part of the Novellen und Lebens-Bilder is entitled "Vier Stunden." 40 It is a kind of poetic autobigraphy, in which Bernstein describes in a somewhat encoded, but nevertheless recognizable way, his own youth and development, as well as the tasks of a literary man in general: "Der Dichter gibt uns das Leben wie es sein könnte, [...] dann [...] die Welt, wie sie ist." 41 Bernstein refers to himself - the reference to his own person cannot be overlooked: "Leben und Dichtung - wie soll das einst mit mir werden? [...] Soll ich die Augen schließen und das Leben über mich hinwegströmen lassen, oder soll ich mich einspinnen lassen [...] und [...] ins Leben hinein, mitstürmen und fallen mit der großen Masse der Menschheit, [...] meinen Nacken freiwillig ins Joch der Gesamtheit beugen, um mit zu leiden, mit zu schaffen, mit zu siegen und mit unterzugehen?" 42 Furthermore, Bernstein comments on the financial difficulties a young writer had to cope with in those days. What he says sounds like a genuine letter from the former student of the Talmud to his family in Danzig: "Mein Einkommen ist so beschränkt, daß ich selbst das kleinste Vergnügen, das ich mir für Geld erkaufen soll, mir versagen muß, wenn ich nicht in Geldverlegenheit geraten soll und dennoch lebe ich sehr zufrieden und glücklich [...]." 4 3 The early works of the young Bernstein do not yet show the unmistakable, characteristic artistic hand he possessed after 1848, when he wrote the two ghetto-novellas, Vögele der Maggid and Mendel Gibbor or the texts dealing with scientific or political topics. Karl Emil Franzos was right when he criticized his earlier attempts at writing literature, saying that they were epigonous, mediocre, and strictly speaking, unworthy of being mentioned in connection with literary history — unlike his lite'rary criticism which did deserve further analysis. These shorter pieces prove that the young Bernstein was an attentive observer of the literary scene of the thirties and early forties and that he possessed the intuition and a feeling for quality in literature, especially in his assessment of contemporary writers such as Immermann, Chamisso, and, in particular, Heinrich Heine.

39 40

41 42 43

Ibid., 27. Bernstein had already published this text five years previously. Cf. A. Bernstein, "Vier Stunden aus meinem jungen Leben," in Literarischer Zodiacus. Journal flir Zeit und Leben, Wissenschaft und Kunst (Leipzig: 1835), 379-402. Rebenstein, Novellen und Lebens-Bilder, 256. Ibid., 258. Ibid., 246.

Lothar Kahn and Donald D. Hook

The Impact of Heine on Nineteenth-Century German-Jewish Writers

This paper deals with the personal reactions of some nineteenth-century German-Jewish writers to Heinrich Heine, who was not seen at all as the virtuous Jew, whom some Germans had come to expect after Moses Mendelssohn. Heine became a symbol of German-Jewish attitudes towards GermanJews themselves, as well as towards their host country. To refer to some of the following literary figures as "lesser writers" is to accept the judgment of following generations who do not grant them the familiarity or luminosity of Heine himself on the world literary stage. The attitude of these writers toward the phenomenon of Heine throughout the nineteenth century and including the pre-Hitler period is intermeshed with Heine's own attitude toward his Judentum and his Deutschtum. With exceptions, the writers of liberal disposition, that is, those at peace with a religious Jewishness that is of mostly little significance, and who try to demonstrate that they are indeed deserving of the German label, fault Heine, seeking to dissociate themselves from him, while looking upon him as a dire threat to their continued well-being in Germany, and even rejecting him as a poor representative of German-Jewish intellect. Then again, with exceptions, there are those who care about their religious, or cultural, or national Jewishness and display a "take it jir leave it" attitude toward Germany, while praising Heine, often with genuine conviction, but sometimes for unspecified reasons. Heine's reputation frequently suffered because of unworthy attacks and feuds from many sides, quarrels over money with publishers, relatives, and wealthy Jews, even inconsistencies and contradictions, and sometimes dubious taste. Several Jewish contemporaries ~ Michael Beer, Ludwig Robert, and Hermann Schiff among them — were embarrassed by Heine and apologetic toward Germany. Writers of the next generation, Gabriel Riesser and Berthold Auerbach, for example, who fought diligently for Jewish emancipation, feared that their efforts were endangered by Heine's image, and they vigorously attacked him, though they were hardly apologetic. Some writers came to the fore who looked upon anti-Semitism not as a Jewish, but as a German, problem. For these writers, Jews, like others, were entitled to have imperfect human beings among them. They admitted, but minimized, Heine's blemishes and underscored his unique lyric and satiric

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gifts. It becomes apparent that in vigorously championing Heine's greatness, the writers Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, Fanny Lewald, and Leo Berg, among others, were answering both apologetic Jews and anti-Semitic Christians. Thus, even among Jewish writers Heine proved as much a bone of contention as he was among German Christians. It is widely known that the German-Christian reception of Heine has been split historically along sociopolitical lines, with little regard for the literary merit of his oeuvres. It is less widely known that the German-Jewish reception has also been divided, again with minimal consideration for his artistic achievement. Among Christians, approval or disapproval of Heine has usually hinged on the conservatism or liberalism of the critics. Among Jews it has been the critic's sense of security as a Jew and his eagerness to be accepted by Germans that has been the decisive factor. Where the eagerness to be fully accepted, integrated, or assimilated into the society has been zealous, the displeasure with Heine has been pronounced. Where the Jew was secure in his Jewishness or where he had renounced any expectation of being fully accepted by gentile society quite independent of his actions, the Jewish critic stood up in defense of Heine, his controversial co-religionist, and sometimes chanted his praises in excess and in obvious defiance. Stated differently, where the Jew was fundamentally apologetic for his Jewishness, he regarded Heine as an obstacle, as an impediment to his goals, an Unbequemer — that is, an uncomfortable, inconvenient presence whose notoriety wrought havoc with the concomitant demonstration of Jews as people of virtue. But where the Jewish critic was aggressive towards Jews and Germans alike, he tended to look upon Heine as a kindred spirit, a naughty idol, but an idol nonetheless. The apologist preferred to wish Heine out of existence and to restore as the symbol of German Jewry the pure, idealized figure of Moses Mendelssohn. How much better an emblem of German Jewry! Lessing had idealized him as the incarnation of the virtuous Jew. A quiet, soft-spoken individual, blameless in his personal life, he was admired widely by German intellectuals, and he became the epitome of great Jewish potential. A man of God, of tolerance, and of goodness, who had displayed admirable restraint even when Lavater had provoked him, Mendelssohn was indeed, in this sense, the ideal figure at the gate through which culturally retarded, ritualridden German Jews could march on the road to a new place in the German sun. What a difference between Mendelssohn and Heine, the most visible man to march through that gate! Initially, the new strains of the Buch der Lieder had charmed and delighted. Then came the ignominious Platen affair, the excesses of Heine's attacks, and the perception of not only the man but the lyrics changed as well. In the lyrics the impure eroticism now caused disgust; in the man they saw, increasingly with time, the less than admirable person

The Impact on 19th-century German-Jewish Writers

55

forever in need of funds, and willing to undertake questionable acts to obtain them. His quarrels with publishers, relatives, friends, and erstwhile patrons, many conducted in public, lent credence to the assumption that he was in the hire of Louis-Philippe or Adolphe Thiers or others across the Rhine. It became known that he threatened the Rothschilds with unpleasantness unless they offered him certain advantages that only they could grant. 1 His changing political affiliations did little to enhance his credibility. All of these transgressions, whether real or imagined, caused Heine to be disliked by many of his peers. This man of high profile and high visibility, this object of feuds and both open and secret denunciations, was not the type of Jew whose name apologists or fighters for emancipation were comfortable with. But he lived and wrote, and all that the preachers of Jewish virtue could do - if given only half a chance - was join, in their own distinctive way, in denouncing him. Even among Heine's early Jewish contemporaries, three of whom died in 1832-33, there was some discomfiture over his actions in the Platen affair. For example, Michael Beer: Wenn Heine Sie wiederum fragt, ob Sie Antwort von mir erhalten, und auf welche Weise ich seiner erwähnte, so sagen Sie ihm, er sollte sich erinnern, wie oft er mir gesagt, dass ich die meisten Dinge mit Glacehandschuhen anfasste. Ich hatte mir diese Handschuhe bei Lektüre seines [re: Platens] Buches angezogen und wäre noch immer der alte Schwächling, der eine so derbe Kost wie seine Satyre nicht ohne Indigestion vertragen könne. Mit einem Worte, es wäre mir etwas übel dabei geworden. 2 Beer did not break with Heine over the Platen affair, and he urged Karl Immermann to assure Heine of his continued good will. Relations between the two men were strained, and Heine, in his correspondence with others concerning the affair, does not appear as the more honest or honorable man. Similarly, Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, in some ways, even less an angel than Heine and far less talented, could not tolerate Heine's immoderate attacks on Börne, with whom he disagreed politically more than with Heine. In both instances it was Heine's style and, occasionally, his borderline taste that caused revulsion and rejection. Ludwig Robert, Rahel Varnhagen's brother, was a more genuine convert than most and, politically, a conservative who moved towards the center in

' 2

Philip Kossoff, Valiant Heart·. A Biography of Heinrich Heine (New York: Cornwall Books, 1983), 116, 144. Michael Beer to Karl Immermann, April 11, 1830. In Michael Werner (Ed.), Begegnungen mit Heine: Berichte der Zeitgenossen (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973), 1:191. Original source: Michael Beer, Briefwechsel (Ed., Eduard von Schenk), (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1837), 182.

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the end. A man of limited talent, he had difficulty gaining acceptance and did not enjoy being bracketed with Heine as a purveyor of Jewish humor. Toward the end of Robert's life (1832) there were rumors, all unverifiable, of a break with Heine, presumably over politics. On the whole, Robert was more irate at Börne's sans-culottism than with facets of Heine's make-up, beliefs, or political positions. Thus, the early attitudes toward Heine on the part of other German-Jewish writers, mostly converts to Christianity, related more to individual likes and dislikes than to Heine's reputation, as it affected their own personal and professional losses or gains. They knew that Germans classified them as Jews or former Jews, and that the best-known among them, clearly Heine, would have an impact on their own lives and careers. This was not true of writers born in the new century. Heine's main foes were the novelist of German village life, Berthold Auerbach, and the "tribune," Gabriel Riesser, the most eloquent Jewish spokesman of the nineteenth century for emancipation and equal rights for Jews. Auerbach had planned to pursue a rabbinical career, but involvement in a liberal demonstration ruined forever any chance he had. His first two literary efforts dealt entirely with Jewish matters, and it appeared that he would become a chronicler of Jewish history and life. In 1836, he wrote Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur, which he later declined to include in his collected works. Yet, it is precisely here — much more than in his vapid Spinoza or his equally weak account of the life and career of Moses Ephraim Kuh in Dichter und Kaufmann - that Auerbach's views on Heine can be found, along with isolated reviews and comments sent to his cousin Jakob Auerbach, with whom he maintained a lifelong correspondence. Before examining Auerbach's hostility to Heine, it is necessary to examine his overall views on Germans and Jews. While still young, Auerbach signed a contract to write a biography of Mendelssohn, whose upright, honest, and decent character he revered, along with the latter's philosophical contributions. Fifty years after Mendelssohn's death, Auerbach was still intent upon proving the "virtue" of Jews. He felt their claim to emancipation and citizenship was founded on the notion of virtue, even more than on the Enlightenment ideal of the rights of all people. This quality is the one he most missed in Heine. Heine, to whom everything seemed for sale in return for a joke, was repugnant to Auerbach, who suspected that with this type of personality everything about him must be repugnant to Heine. Auerbach wrote: "Long ago I learned from Meissner that Heine had said he had reserved a special gallows for me because of his Börne book in 1840." 3 Eleven years after Heine's 3

Berthold Auerbach, Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach (Frankfurt/Main: Rütten & Loening, 1884), letter of Mar. 2, 1867, 1:324.

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German-Jewish

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death, Auerbach reaffirmed a statement he had previously made in Deutsche Abende: "Er [Heine] ist ein Phänomen, ein Dichter und ein Erzlump [italics mine] dabei." 4 In addition to this lifelong personal antipathy to Heine's character, and especially his public persona - witness Auerbach's need for calm versus Heine's inability to elude controversy — there were more substantive sources for Auerbach's disapproval. It is quite clear that his "Streitschrift," Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur, was written in defense of Jews and aimed at countering the attacks of Menzel and other Judenfresser against Jews. In this short work, Auerbach assailed the notion that "Young Germany" consisted only of Jews, and pointed out that the four writers singled out by the government — Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Laube, and Mündt were not Jewish and had no special Jewish connections. 5 Nor were the views of the group Jewish. The alleged supremacy of pure reason among these figures was not in any way Jewish. Above all, he rejected the idea that Börne and Heine, whose views were anathema to some Deutschfiihlende, should be viewed as Jewish. In fact, he denied Heine the right to speak as a Jew, especially since Heine, when it suited him, did not want to be known as ever having been a Jew. "Where is there," Auerbach asked in his "Streitschrift," "one stroke of Heine's pen, which is an integral part of Judaism, a single word that he could not also have written as a born Christian?" 6 Auerbach distinguished between Börne, for whom words must lead to action, and Heine, to whom they are of value in themselves. Börne attacked the lords of this world and let people themselves deal with the Lord in Heaven. Heine was indecisive and vacillating about the lords on earth, but he certainly wanted to chase God out of Heaven. 7 But, even if these former Jews stirred things up a bit, neither is representative of Judaism as a whole. Auerbach found Börne's political attacks less offensive and threatening than Heine's sorties against Christianity. Largely because of Heine, many Germans have made the mistake of attributing all anti-Christian remarks to Jews. What about the French Encyclopedists and, in fact, Frederick the Great? Börne, the mightiest paladin of his former co-religionists, summoned the most profound sounds from his breast to prove that Jews, even if not better, were certainly no worse than Christians. His words found an echo in

4

5

6 7

Ibid. Yet, later, in the twilight of his years, Auerbach softened his remarks. In his younger years, so he wrote, he had said some pretty damning things about Heine and he conceded that perhaps he had been a bit harsh. Berthold Auerbach, Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur. Kritischer Versuch (Stuttgart: Fr. Brodhag'sche Buchhandlung, 1836), 56-57. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 46.

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the hearts of many Christians who had cast away their prejudice and found their hearts beating in unison in a conciliatory embrace. 8 Not so with "the modern Prometheus, the all-knowing Heine. " 9 Auerbach thought it interesting to set side by side everything that Heine had written relevant to Judaism, but, as he put it in his Judenthum: "Such a lack of appreciation of Heine's poetic genius is not my intent." 10 For him it is also ridiculous whenever Heine tries to borrow for himself the old, revered formula of a reckless inspiration, when he sees himself as the "official" of an idea, as its executive power, which is subordinate to a higher legislative power. 1 1 Heine perhaps recognized that "his personality was not sufficient, and he then affected a providential mission." ("Could pure sensualism be such a mission?") 12 Auerbach denounced Heine's sensualism, which had no place for spiritualists, as the latter called Christians, and Deists, and as he called Jews. In fact, Heine had no use for any human being who strove for moral perfection — neither Christians of whatever stripe, nor orthodox or reform Jews; everything and everyone had become a target of his wit. 1 3 Karl Gutzkow was foolish enough to think that the religious and spiritual elements of his time had developed to such a point "that he could and had to make those abnormalities a norm for later modern times." 14 Yet, unlike Heine, many contemporary Jewish thinkers held no animosity toward Christianity, as long as Christianity did not put obstacles in the way of the free evolution of Judaism. In fact, many felt that Judaism resembled Christianity in terms of its stress on human decency. Auerbach's Judaism is purely religious and devoid of any national elements. He is a German of the Jewish faith. Like Gadhi in Michael Beer's drama, Der Paria, a Jew may utter a quiet, but eloquent plea for recognition of the Jew as a human being, desiring by the strength of his person and talents to contribute his full share to the common good. 1 5 Accordingly, Auerbach asked for Jewish involvement in the cultural life of the German nation: Wir stützen uns auf die in der Nation lebende Sitte, ja! Wir achten und lieben deutsche Sitte und deutsches Herz, denn es ist auch unsre Sitte, unser Herz. Ich lebe der frohen, zuversichtlichen Überzeugung, die Gesinnungen der ganzen jungen Generation der Juden auszusprechen, wenn ich hinzufüge: 8

Ibid., Ibid., !0 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 14 Ibid. 15 There

9

47-48. 48.

49. is an echo in the play of the challenge of the emancipation-Jew from Mendelssohn

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59

Erprobet uns in der Feuerprobe der Gefahr, und ihr werdet uns rein finden, rein von allen Schlacken des Egoismus und raffinierter Unsitte; gebt uns das Vaterland, dem wir durch Geburt, Sitte und Liebe angehören, und freudig legen wir Gut und Blut auf seinen Altar; vergesset und lasset uns vergessen der finstern Scheidewand, die uns trennte, und ersparet uns die schmerzliche Mühe, gegen euch in die Schranken zu treten, weil ihr so oft euren vaterländischen Bestrebungen den Dämon des Judenhasses beigesellt. 16 These words, in less emotional language, could have come from the pen of Gabriel Riesser, with one of whose verses Auerbach ended his Streitschrift. Many years later Riesser was to comment on this long essay. Though the two men, in matters Jewish, had a great many ideals in common - and also many of the same foes and betes noires — there were clear differences. Auerbach was a gifted storyteller, and his essays or reviews were a sideline. Riesser, by contrast, rarely indulged in belles lettres and was prosaic to the core. His negative attitude toward Heine had at least partial roots in his valuation of morality over aesthetics, of thought over feeling, of seriousness over wit. Actually, Riesser, an aggressive fighter for Jewish emancipation and equal rights, and courageous in his own way toward anti-Semites and opponents of his program for Jews and Germany, accused Heine of using his exquisite wit — which Riesser was willing to concede - to undermine both Judaism and Christianity, thereby offending people whose religion was dear to them. And all for what purpose? For a joke or a humorous jibe, which he simply could not resist. Like Auerbach, Riesser rejected Heine, whom he disliked, and Börne, whom he respected though faulted for speaking out for all Jews. After all, they had left Judaism and thereby renounced any right to speak on behalf of the Jews collectively. Certainly, Jews should not be held accountable for the excesses of their abandoning Judaism. But that is exactly what Gustav Pfizer did, when he referred to Heine's scoffing of Jews, and thereby implicated all Jews in a tasteless, unwarranted attack on Christianity and Christian Germany. There is no doubt that Heine missed few opportunities to satirize one facet or another of Judaism. Perhaps he did it only because he thought he knew the Jews best and felt secure in mocking them. Even when Riesser praised Heine's poetic talent, no one could possibly think that this praise was a direct, or even oblique, approval of Heine's mocking contempt of religion. Fundamentally, any statement of his on Heine made it clear that Heine had nothing to do with Jews, and Jews had nothing to do with him, as a collective whole. Riesser demonstrated very

16

on: "Stellt mich euch gleich und seht, ob ich euch gleiche!" Ibid., 67.

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little sympathy for Heine's literary personality, so that his voice is one of the coolest towards this writer, who is not lacking in panegyrists. In addition to reading the sensuous, immoral, religion-scoffing Heine out of the Jewish ranks, and rejecting his right to speak for Jews, as well as denying Christians the right to consider him a Jew, Riesser believed that Heine had far more admirers among Christians than among Jews: Das einzige Wort des Lobes, das darin über Heine vorkommt, besteht in Folgendem: nachdem ich, um das Gewebe unsinniger Bösheit, welche Heine's literarische Sünden dem Judenthum aufbürden wollte, zu zerstören, beispielsweise auf Clauren und auf den Übersetzer des Casanova hingewiesen hatte, setze ich hinzu, dass eine Zusammenstellung Heines mit solchen Namen ein unverzeihliches Unrecht gegen seinen Geist, wie gegen seinen Charakter sei: eine Behauptung, für welche ich die Verantwortlichkeit, zwar nicht als Jude -denn als solchen geht mich dieser ganze Zweig der Literatur nichts an - aber als Kritiker sehr gern übernehme.^7 An aesthetic appraisal of Heine was not part of Riesser's critical obligation, as he saw it. Though he valued poetry, the noblest moral concerns always occupied a higher rank in his scheme of things. Riesser appraised both Dr. Alexandre Weill's and Auerbach's Streitschriften of 1836. He was especially struck by Weill's remark that "Heine seems to hate in Christianity only the daughter of Judaism, whereas Voltaire by contrast hated in Judaism only the mother of Christianity." Making fun of Jews - an activity hardly fraught with danger - served him as a prelude to his later assault on Christianity. His overall assessment and protest were almost identical to Auerbach's: "...als Schriftsteller hat er nie mit einem Worte jüdische Gesinnung vertreten oder ausgesprochen, und die rein zufallige, seiner literarischen Wirksamkeit fremde Thatsache seiner Abkunft gehörte im Grunde der Öffentlichkeit nicht an." 18 Much as Riesser faulted Pfizer's broad attribution of Heine's misdeeds to Jews in general, he conceded certain Jewish criticisms of Heine as just: his considerable ability was placed in the service of self ("er huldigt nur sich selbst"); his subjects existed only for him to practice on them his wit and rare verbal dexterity; he did not serve the subject he dealt with, which was to be subjugated to his talent, to be exploited for his sake. 19 Auerbach and Riesser, total opposites of Heine, had less talent, but all the more principle and conviction. If Heine's inner life had been in greater Gabriel Riesser, Jüdische Briefe. Zur Abwehr und zur Verständigung, in his Gesammelte Schriften (Ed. M. Isler), (Frankfurt/M.: Verlag der Riesser-Stiftung; Leipzig: Belckmar, 1867-68), Vol. 4, 83-84. 18 Ibid., 87. 19 Ibid.

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harmony with the thrusts and goals of Jews in general, he would have been a different person and there would be a different story to tell. The ruthlessness which characterized his wit would probably have been hemmed in. Riesser believed in this case that his talent, however, would have suffered. Riesser concluded as follows: Das ist alles, was ich Dir über die Stimmung der Juden in Betreff Heines zu sagen wusste. Anerkennung seines Talents, Ergötzen an seinen Scherzen, wo sie harmlos sind, wenn sie uns auch selbst ein wenig verwunden, aber völliger Mangel an Sympathie mit ihm als Charakter, völlige Gleichgültigkeit gegen seine Richtung und Gesinnung, und nicht der mindeste Schein, der je bei einem redlichen Manne die Täuschung hatte veranlassen können, als wenn wir ihn wie den Unseren betrachteten. 20 After the appearance of Heine's Börne book, Riesser's distaste for Heine reached alarming proportions. Riesser had admired Börne, though he harbored serious reservations about his critiques of Germany written from Paris. He considered Börne a man of probity, genuinely concerned with the future welfare of Germany. But, in German as well as in Jewish matters, Riesser did not think of Börne as a suitable spokesman for German Jews. In spite of his admiration, he did not want Börne's wit automatically linked in German minds with Heine's, for what bothered Riesser most was the equation of the Jews with Heine, an equation found in the hateful writings of Wolfgang Menzel, but even characteristic of important and well-intentioned, but somewhat uninformed critics like Hermann Marggraff. It is obvious that Riesser, the fighter for emancipation, saw Heine as a threat. Riesser was not interested in literary merit, which he quickly conceded and then minimized; rather, his concern was for the good name of the Jews, which he needed to preserve, if his efforts for equal rights were to bear fruit. Though Riesser, in the Hamburger Correspondent, appeared to be understanding of Heine to a degree in the Jeanette Wohl-Strauss affair, it is quite evident that he now believed Heine to be a liar, a slanderer of innocent people still alive, and the destroyer of the memory of Börne, whom Rieser revered, though with reservations as to tone, style, and emphasis. 21 Perhaps Riesser became extreme in his despair over Heine, when he offered to engage Heine in a duel as a result of this affair. At any rate, he was genuinely shocked by what he regarded as the sheerest calumny on Heine's part. If Riesser appeared at times a bit self-righteous, it must be imputed to his genuine dislike of Heine and his lack - his protestations notwithstanding - of any literary sense. But, like Auerbach, he was a man of probity.

20 21

Ibid., 98. Hamburger Correspondent,

July 23, 1841, no. 172.

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Those who remained in the Jewish fold, like Beer, Auerbach, and Riesser, and those who were eager to achieve equal Jewish rights and combat antiSemitism were more incisively critical of Heine than those who had left Judaism and were merely concerned about being remembered as Jews. There was one writer of the mid-century, however, who converted early but sought nevertheless to combat all forms of prejudice, whether it was against women or Jews. This writer, who did not need special events like the Hep! Hep! riots of 1819 or parliamentary debates about Jews to raise her voice, was Fanny Lewald. Coming from a wealthy family in Königsberg, where her father was a freethinker and devoted to the ideals of the French Revolution, Fanny Lewald converted to Christianity in her teens without any religious conviction at all. But, oddly, at no time in her rather long life - she died in 1889 at age 78 — did she articulate any radical political positions. In fact, in her last years she supported Bismarck's foreign, as well as many of his domestic, policies. Lewald remained largely faithful to her early convictions that women, Jews, workers, and others were not inferior, nor should they remain permanently without rights or privileges, or forego equality under the law, or lose opportunity. Lewald, like George Sand - she was often called, but without full justification, "the German George Sand" ~ recognized that many of the same principles were operative in the continued subjugation of women as in that of Jews and workers. Those holding the upper hand continued to attribute to their dominated group certain qualities ~ some real, some imagined - for the obvious purpose of keeping these groups on the lowly level on which they were functioning, thereby enabling themselves to maintain their own privileged position. While most of her fiction deals with women, one book, Jenny, deals in the main with Jews. In this novel the heroine has left Judaism without religious conviction. She is dominated entirely by her liberal thought. Although Fanny Lewald's satire was aimed at both sides, she took a clear position against hatred of Jews. Lewald belonged to that innocent age which, like Auerbach's, believed that education was the answer to prejudice, that more education would materially reduce the foolishness that makes Christians imagine themselves superior to Jews or their religion superior to Judaism. She did not hide her distaste for religious proselytism or for the conceit of the well-born, that is, for their belief that they were on a higher rung of the ladder of human value than those born into other, disadvantaged groups. Her defensive positions on Heine, though not formulated without reservations, are to be found in her Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine, which is based on a visit to him in Paris in the company of her husband. In Heine, Lewald

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treasured the great poet, the revolutionary of language, who had cast off the confining shackles of Goethean Zwangsherrschaft. She deplored the fact that instead of receiving Heine with open arms, people, in the name of a narrow patriotism, seized upon his allegedly un-German love of Napoleon. She conceded that Heine had many flaws, but chided Germans for allowing themselves to forget that he was indeed their greatest poet. In contradistinction to her enthusiasm for Riesser, whom Fanny Lewald applauded as a great liberator and emancipator of Jews, as well as a vital voice for freedom in Germany as a whole, she defended Heine's political role circumspectly. She compared Heine's difficulties with Germany to those of a lover in a youthful love affair. Later in life, a lover may judge the object of one's early affection with greater clarity and objectivity. In other words, over time it may be possible to recognize all the former lover's faults, without ever being able to slander the object of early love or lose all feeling for him or her. She granted that Heine had praised France at the expense of Germany, and even made fun of Germany in comparison with France, but everyone of sound mind had to do this, in her opinion. No matter how deficient the political freedoms were in France, they were like pure gold in relation to "ours," according to the "German" Lewald. Fanny Lewald credited both Heine and Börne with having told Germans since the July Revolution or even before it: "Wir [Jews] sind Knechte und Ihr [Germans] mit uns." Again, before and up through 1848, she lauded the roles of Riesser, Johann Jacoby, and her own cousin, Heinrich Simon. These Jews seemed to confirm Jesus's assertion that "der Stein, den die Bauleute verworfen haben, ist zum Eckstein geworden," 22 as Lewald reports in her Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine. Yet, a word of warning is in order. While many of her statements about Jews, individually and collectively, are instructive, little can be made of Lewald's Jewish interests. Regarding Heine personally, she found him an attractive figure; she remembered in detail the visit in Paris, along with some of his witty observations. In her Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine, she made it clear that she did not share his views about most things, conditions, or persons. She recalled how her father and friends, then in their forties, were in harmony with Heine's attacks on the political conditions in Germany, notably in Prussia, but they themselves found the tone of the Reisebilder often insulting. While the Reisebilder belonged to books "with seven seals" for young girls, her resistance to Heine abated as dissatisfaction with socio-political conditions in Germany increased. When her future husband, Adolph Stahr, met her in Rome, he was shocked that a woman of her idealism could admire Heine.

2 2

Matt. 21:42.

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Lewald allegedly heard Heine say that he often read the Bible, whose poetic beauties he understood better than most, and that he just as often spoke about God and immortality. But, the liberal Lewald, in this period of Heine's alleged return to Judaism, was assured that his freedom of conduct remained intact, and that even when he showed a certain Gläubigkeit, he remained conscious of his freedom. In short, in the most important matters, she felt reassured that he remained the same. But there may be some basis to the suspicion that she jotted down only those remarks by Heine that were in line with her own image of him. If one last figure deserves mention in the context of this paper, it is the vigorous advocate of modernist trends, the critic Leo Berg (1862-1909). In general, he applauded only writers who apprehended a new reality, being sharply critical of the dominant cultural currents of his time. For example, he detested the cult of Wagner, the nation worship, the tendency to submit to authority, and all unwarranted optimism. He disliked the youthful Nietzsche, in whom these manias were clearly manifest. Berg was appreciative, however, of the older Nietzsche who had made an about-face. This Nietzsche keenly sensed the malaise of his time, signalized by Deutschtümelei, Philistinism, and romantic claptrap. Berg realized that the fifty-year-old battle on German soil against Heinrich Heine had been fought acrimoniously. Whereas Otto Brahm worshipped the chauvinistic Kleist and shrugged off the democratically-minded Schiller, Berg leaned towards the latter ~ but even far more towards Heine. Earlier than most, Berg praised in Heine a true modern who understood better than most the complexity of life and the inability to categorize it or submit to any allembracing doctrine. Heine recognized these simplifications as false idols, and Berg approved of Heine's devastating assault on prejudice and coercion. Berg's Heine worship was also manifested, perhaps, whenever he referred to Durch, the literary club he directed, as "Das jüngste Deutschland," reminiscent of the movement to which Heine was sometimes said to have belonged. Berg sought to enter the minds of conservative critics like Goedeke and Treitschke, inveterate foes of Heine. "German literature," so Berg might have imagined their thought processes, "is in a terrible state. What has happened to the good old poetry from Goethe to Uhland? Who ruined it? The Jew Heine, of course. Oh, these Jews who indiscriminately apply their disreputable wit to everything, who know neither reverence nor morality, this homeless, pitiable people!" The Jewish critic saw in Heine's enemies the many faces of Jew-hatred. Similarly, Hauptmann and Ibsen were threatened by the same combinations of nationalism and conservatism that arrogantly claimed the right to be the guardians of public morality.

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Is it true that the resistance to Heine was a symptom of assimilationist ambitions? Jeffrey L. Sammons thinks so. He states that it is particularly noticeable in the case of Auerbach and "probably true that the later more positive reception is a symptom of a more comfortable Jewish location in German society." At the same time, though, he thinks "the Jewish reception mirrors the general reception [and that] the view of Heine taken by Auerbach and Riesser was the majority one well into the 1860s. In the Empire, however, Heine attracted a great deal of support, despite the nationalist and anti-Semitic resistance, and the more positive Jewish reception mirrors this trend. For example, Fanny Lewald's attitude is a harbinger of it." 2 3 Heine's writing reflects the manifold nature of the man. Imbued with both classic and romantic literary traditions, a prickly wit, an incisive but embittered criticism of romanticism, English, French, and Jewish components, Judaic and Christian thought, and a nationalistic as well as an international orientation, it was inevitable that this poet, critic, satirist, and abrasive, liberal political figure would stir up strong feelings among those who knew him and read his works. We who look back on Heine's life and achievements would do best to assist in sorting out those who admired him and those who detested him, letting stand the judgments of both groups, while allowing the scales to tilt now in one direction, and later in another.

23

Jeffrey L. Sammons to Donald D. Hook, letter of Feb. 14, 1990.

Sol Liptzin

Heine and the Yiddish Poets

Heine's international vogue exceeded that of any German poet except Goethe. Upon Yiddish literature his impact was even greater than that of Goethe. Though Heine hoped to be remembered primarily as a warrior of the pen, a warrior for the liberation of man, posterity remembers him more often as the symbol of the Jew in literature. In the land of his birth, he has been a controversial figure and attitudes toward him have been colored by German reactions toward the Jews. Upon Yiddish literature, however, he exerted only a benign influence. His apostasy has been brushed aside as the regrettable aberration of a young person who saw in Christianity a necessary ticket of admission to society and who atoned for this aberration by the intensely Jewish poems of his later years, the "Hebräische Melodien" of Romanzero. The pioneers of Yiddish poetry, who in the closing decades of the nineteenth century supplanted the Badchonim and Yiddish folksingers, were more original in their poems of social protest, inspired by Heine, than in their love lyrics that followed in his wake. Yiddish poetry of preceding centuries, reflecting the reality of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the heartland of Yiddish, was not as rich in love lyrics as were other European literatures. Parents, often with the help of Shadchonim, (matchmakers), arranged marriages for their children. Folksongs of budding desires, frustrated longings, and unhappy marriages did well up from the folksoul. The dramas of Abraham Goldfaden and the sentimental novels of Jacob Dineson did champion the demands of the heart as against the conventions of tradition in the imposed choice of mates. The Yiddish writers who pioneered with love poems had no tradition to guide them. Hence, they turned to Heine for models. The Heine-tone is all too evident in the comparatively few love poems of a century ago. They do not, however, equal the poems of social protest based on Heine. Two of the most popular poets of the 1880s may serve as illustrations: David Edelstadt and S. S. Frug. Edelstadt was born in 1866 and died at the age of twenty-six. His birthplace Kaluga in the heart of Russia was far from the Jewish Pale. But when at 14 he visited his brothers in Kiev, he heard pogrom-hordes crying

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for Jewish blood. He felt degraded and dreamed of escape from the land where he was not wanted to a land that welcomed the huddled masses yearning to be free. He later embodied this dream in a lyric based on Heine's "Ein Fichtenbaum." Heine sings of a fir tree that stands lonely in the icy north and that dreams of a palm tree in a distant land warmed by the sun. By means of these tree symbols, Heine gives expression to a lover's frustrated love for his beloved, who is far beyond his reach. Edelstadt, however, in his recasting of this poem, saw mirrored in it his own desolate fate and that of his suffering Jewish people. In his poem, "Der Zelner," a Jewish sentinel stands lonely on guard in Russia, covered with snow and shivering with frost. He dreams of his brothers who live in a free world under a warm sun and amidst green fields. To the two stanzas based on Heine, however, Edelstadt added a third stanza which contradicts Heine's pessimistic mood. The Jewish sentinel stands proudly amidst the storm, gun in hand. He does not despair. A free land beckons to him. Among the poems in which Edelstadt acknowledges his indebtedness to Heine is the hymn which begins with the words: "I am the sword. I am the flame." He awakens his people to battle against the unjust establishment. All battles demand sacrifices and he sees about him the blood of warriors. But there is no time for tears. The war must go on until the world is cleansed of enslavement. Though we may fall in the struggle, mankind will be liberated. Edelstadt's poem "Die Hungrigen un die Satten," in which the hungry cry out for bread while the sated philosophize, is reminiscent of Heine's "Die Wanderratten." Edelstadt's most famous poem, inscribed on his tomb and sung by Jewish workers for decades, resounds with the rhythm and throbs, with the feeling of Heine's "Die Grenadiere." It concludes with his message to posterity: "When I die, carry to my grave the flag reddened with toilers' blood and sing my free song of the enslaved Christians and Jews. I shall bear it in my grave and shed tears for them. But, when there resounds to me the clash of swords in freedom's final battle, I'll sing from my grave and courage to the people's hearts." Upon Edelstadt's death in 1892, Joseph Bovshover, who had exchanged Russia for America during the preceding year at the age of eighteen, composed an elegy lamenting the loss of the warrior-poet of the working class, an elegy which immediately established him as Edelstadt's successor. In a dream-vision, entitled "Licht und Shatten," he conjured up Heine from the grave and walked with him through the streets of New York, the only city which had erected a monument to the much maligned poet. Through the lips of Heine, Bovshover voiced his own anti-religious bias, his own hedonist philosophy, his own cynical approach to the existing order.

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In recasting the opening poem of Heine's "Die Harzreise," Bovshover does not end, as does his model, with the traveller's desire to climb up to the mountains and look down with laughter upon the polished but heartless ladies and gentlemen below. The Yiddish poet rather climbs the barricades, gun in hand, and fires bullets at the stony-hearted philanthropists, with their black frock coats and lacquered shoes, who dance at charity-balls. In Bovshover's essay on Heine, he contrasts him with Goethe. He finds Heine's love poetry less healthy for youth. On the other hand, Heine is far superior as a warrior for human freedom. Edelstadt and Bovshover were followed by other immigrant poets, radicals, anarchists, and socialists, who aroused Jewish sweatshop workers to unite against economic exploitation and who inspired them with militant songs during strikes and on the picket lines. For many of them Heine was the model of a revolutionary poet. In the free political atmosphere of America, a poet could denounce in strident verses the land which had lured them from far off Russia with golden visions and which had entrapped them in abysmal tenements and enslaved them to the heartless machines. Their contemporaries in Russia, however, had to be more circumspect in denouncing the oppressive Czarist regime. This can best be illustrated by the case of Frug, the most popular Yiddish poet of the pogrom years that followed in wake of the reign of Czar Alexander III. Frug was a trilingual poet who began with Russian and ended with Hebrew, but who reached the summit of his fame with his Yiddish lyrics of the 1880s. The satirical Heine was the model for Frug's ironic ballads and his bitter songs of disillusionment. This is illustrated by a comparison between Heine's ribald "Disputation" and Frug's milder "Disputation," which owes its inspiration to the German poet. Heine's "Disputation" (1851) was the last and most vitriolic of his "Hebräische Melodien." It depicts a verbal tournament in medieval Toledo between Caputian monks led by Brother Jose and Jewish champions led by Rabbi Judah of Navarre. The question to be decided is whether the Trinitarian God of the Christians or the Unitarian God of the Jews is the true one. If the Christians win the debate, the Jews are to accept baptism. If the Jews are declared the victors, the monks are to undergo circumcision. The king and queen and a large audience attend the disputation, which Brother Jos£ opens by exorcizing the devils who are invisibly helping the Jews. He then continues with vituperations of the obstinate Jews, who still do not accept the loving son of God. Rabbi Judah counters with a denial that God had a family and an affirmation of the might and majesty of the one and only God who created heaven and earth and who on Judgement Day will reward his followers with slices of delicious Leviathan: "Was Gott kocht, ist gut gekocht." The monks, however, are not tempted and the rabbi then also resorts to maledictions. The dispute goes on

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for twelve hours with neither side gaining the upper hand and finally nauseating the delicate queen. Frug's "Disputation," composed a generation later and under a more oppressive regime, is a much milder satire. He dares not echo Heine's ribald verses which calumniate Christianity, the religion of the Czar, and he does not want to present the Jewish faith in an unfavorable light. He therefore subtitles his poem a "Phantasy," a tale of long, long ago told by a grandfather to entertain children, a story of events that did not really happen. The adversaries confronting each other are the Catholic monk Diego and the Jewish rabbi Joseph, each a leader of his community. They apparently lived as good neighbors, except when they discussed religious questions about which so much blood has been shed throughout the ages. Then a gulf would open up between them. In the course of time, both aged and died. Their disembodied souls winged their way to heaven. There they expected final answers to religious questions. Each was certain that his belief would be vindicated. En route to heaven, Fra Diego readies arguments that will annihilate his opponent, while Rabbi Joseph expects to land in "Gan Eden," paradise, where God, freedom, and peace prevail, and where the most learned sages, inspired by the "Shechina," interpret the Torah and give final answers to troublesome questions. At heaven's gate a stroke of lightning dazzles and confuses both disputants. Fra Diego is the first to recover and he asks God to hurl the lightning of his wrath upon the accursed Jew, who regards himself as belonging to a Chosen People, preferred by God because it was the first to receive the Torah. Perhaps this was once so, but now, and ever since the exodus from Egypt, all mankind can testify that Jews have become wicked and hence accursed unto eternity. Though they are comparatively few and weak, they cause much damage: so much fuel has been expended for their burning at autos-da-fd, so many prisons had to be built to confine them! Judges, jailors, hangmen, and free graves had to be provided for them, as well as convents to lodge their widows and orphans. Instead of thanks for such kindness in trying to save their souls, the Church has had to endure their curses. Fra Diego continues his long discourse, raging and thundering before the heavenly Seat of Judgment. When he concludes, the Supreme Judge turns to Rabbi Joseph to present his side, but all that the rabbi replies is "Shma Yisrael, Hear, Ο Israel, the Lord is One." The decision of the Court is that the monk be repaid and with interest for the faggots, whips, chains, and instruments, which he used for torturing and burning others. As for the rabbi, he is to be reembodied and returned to earth, there to continue his wandering and to keep on proclaiming "God is One, eternally One." Unlike Heine, Frug sensed the immediate danger to himself, were he to voice a single complaint against the spokesmen of Christianity. In his poem,

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he mirrored not only Jewish sorrow and enforced silence, but also his own personal tragedy. He had the misfortune to fall in love with and marry the daughter of a Greek Orthodox priest. Czarist regulations forbade her conversion to Judaism, and he did not want to become an apostate. His bitter sorrow was compounded when his efforts to implant in his only daughter a love for the Jewish people were frustrated by her priestly grandfather, who often took her to church for indoctrination and, after Frug died had her interred according to Christian ritual. Frug's indebtedness to Heine was exceeded by that of his contemporaries David Frishman and Y. L. Peretz. Frishman had been persuaded by Sholom Aleichem to use not only Hebrew but also Yiddish as his poetic medium. He published his longest Yiddish poem, "Ophir," in the annual Yidishe Folksbibliotek for 1888, the same annual in which Peretz's "Monish" appeared and which established the reputation of both as outstanding Yiddish writers. Frishman's "Ophir" paralleled Heine's "Bimini." In subect-matter and structure both poems developed along similar lines the search for the fountain of eternal youth. Heine's adventurer Ponce de Leon and Frishman's scholar Reb Getzel grew older and older as they continued their quest. Finally, Heine's hero found the island of Bimini and its river Lethe, whose waters bring forgetfulness and release from the burden of existence. Frishman's Reb Getzel also concluded his lifelong search for fabled Ophir, when he finally closed his enfeebled eyes and entered into the true Ophir, the eternal realm beyond life. Frishman, in his Yiddish translations of Heine, gave preference to the political poems, introducing some of them by referring to their enduring relevance. Thus, the anger and the protests of the Silesian weavers, as embodied in Heine's poem, applied also to the weavers of Lodz, Frishman's native city, and to those of Bialystok, as well. Similarly, Heine's "Die Wanderratten" applied with even greater cogency to the communists of the twentieth century than to those of Heine's day. Peretz's lyrics, even as those of Frishman and Frug, are also replete with echoes of Heine. Peretz's "Romanzero" reveals its indebtedness in its very title. Heine's "Lyrisches Intermezzo," in which the young man voices his longing for the girl and his frustration in being unable to win her, is, however, reversed by Peretz in his cycle of love poems, as the longing of the girl for the young man and her frustration because of her feelings carry little weight with her parents, who make the decision as to whom she is to marry. Her heart weeps within her, when she is forced to part from him who is the center of her life; she will cherish her love until her last breath. When her mother tries to comfort her that there are other grooms for a girl so young and so beautiful, she replies that life without her beloved will always be joyless and only death will be sweet. The young man, rejected by her

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parents, roams far and wide but finds no happiness anywhere. He returns to her, alas, too late. She has been already married off. In the Heinesque ballad entitled "In the Grave," Peretz returns to the theme of a boy and a girl who love each other. However, the boy is poor and the girl has a rich father who will not accept a poor mate for her. A Jewish girl has to obey her father. When she is led to the wedding canopy, the lovelorn youth in his cellar-dwelling pines away. She hears of his death and makes her way to his grave. It opens up and she is drawn into it. She kisses the dead eyes of her beloved. His dead hand embraces her and the grave closes over both of them. Though Peretz's poem, "Er und Sie," is supposedly based on an old Spanish tale, Peretz prefaces it with the Heine-verses: "Es ist eine alte Geschichte. Doch bleibt sie immer neu." In the poem "An Edom," Peretz acknowledges his indebtedness to Heine's lyric with the same title. Edom, brother of Jacob, is the symbol for the hostile non-Jewish world. Edom accepts the fact that the descendants of his brother still draw breath, while these accept Edom's insane rages. Sometimes, Edom is friendly and massages his brother's wounds. At other times, he uses Jewish fat to light his lamps and flays Jewish veins as wicks. But the friendship is becoming stronger, and Edom's brother, too, is learning to develop such insane rages, perhaps even greater ones. Peretz's disciples, especially Abraham Reisen and Yehoash, also follow Heine as a model in their lyrics, and they also rework these models to accord with the Jewish reality of their generation at the end of the nineteenth century. For example, Reisen's Jewish "Azra," like Heine's "Asra," also turns pale and paler every evening when seen at the fountain. However, he is dying not of unrequited love, but of hunger. In his early lyrics, Reisen, following in the path of Frug, Peretz, Frishman, and numerous other Yiddish poets, also succumbed to the spell of Heine's Buch der Lieder, but he soon realized the falseness of presenting the budding love of a Jewish boy or girl in a flirtatous or ironic vein. Jewish reality demanded a different approach, because love was still a fresh experience for the Yiddish lyric. A cynical tone was most inappropriate. The imagery of the Song of Songs could better serve as a starting point. Hence, Reisen avoids sophistication. The melody of love that floats between his timid lads and chaste maidens is the same melody that angels sing in heaven's tents, and God is its composer. Of each kiss a new angel is born. A single caress is like a ray of sunshine breaking upon a dreary day or like a refreshing oasis in a parched desert. A moment of love is a moment of relief from the silence and loneliness that are ultimately inescapable. The mature Reisen, therefore, emancipates himself from Heine's cynicism and buries his individual sorrow in the sorrow of his people.

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The impact of Heine upon Yehoash was far stronger than upon Reisen. He follows the trail of the German poet, not only in his love lyrics, but also in his ghostly ballads, in his nature poems, and in his versified legends. In an essay on Jewish demonology, Yehoash, like Walter Pater in England, appropriates Heine's idea, expressed in Götter im Exil, that the demons who peopled Christian imagination were pagan Gods exiled from their original shrines and degraded in rank by their successors in the Christian pantheon. Hence, some Christian demons still retain beautiful and helpful characteristics. Elves and dwarfs are especially helpful to man. Yehoash points out that since Jews worshipped only a single god, and have until now remained faithful to him, friendly demons could not develop. Jewish demons were in their origin wicked spirits and not dethroned Olympians. They can hurt but not help, with the single exception of the Golem, who is, however, only a temporary creation and without a will of his own. Adoration of Heine reached its peak among the poets of "Die Yunge," the literary movement that burst upon the American Yiddish scene in 1907 and that dominated it for more than a decade. Its leading poets participated in a complete translation of Heine's works in eight volumes. These poets, many born in the eighteen-eighties, were not political or social revolutionaries, for they had been disillusioned by the failure of the abortive Russian uprising of 1905 and by the pogroms that followed and from which they sought refuge in the New World. New York received these young, romantic, dream-drenched immigrants and fed them into sweatshops and cavernous tenements. But, their vitality seemed inexhaustible. Their hunger for intellectual activities after a day's hard physical work was insatiable. They used their few free hours for literary expression and their last pennies to publish their lyrics in collections and ever new periodicals in which translations of Heine were numerous. In 1918, these translations were included in the complete edition of Heine's works. The chief participants in this enterprise among "Die Yunge" were Mani-Leib, Reuben Iceland, Zisha Landau, Moshe Leib Halpern, Naftali Gross, I. J. Schwartz, Mark Scheid, Joseph Rolnick, and Lilliput. Of older poets, Bialik contributed a translation of "Prinzessin Sabbat," Pinski a translation of "Disputation," David Frishman translations of many of the "Zeitgedichte," and Abraham Reisen most poems of "Lamentation" and "Lazarus." Nachman Syrkin, ideologue of Socialist Zionism and an American leader of the "Pdalei Zion," wrote the lengthy introduction to the complete works. He portrayed Heine as perhaps the most tragic Jewish poet of all generations, tragic even when he laughed at God, the world, and himself. Syrkin stressed Heine's Jewishness and dismissed Heine's baptism as having occurred in a moment of weakness, need, and despair, and as having been followed by a

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lifetime of regret and atonement. In analyzing Heine's Jewish poems and polemics in great detail, Syrkin sought to convince readers that apostasy weighed heavily upon the poet's soul and that all his twisting and turning, blasphemies and reconciliations with God and the Jewish people, stemmed from the deepest layer of his being, the Jewish layer, and that he deserved to have "Kaddish" said for his lacerated soul. Among "Die Yunge," Moshe Nadir, in his life, poetry, and "Weltanschauung" shared the most affinity with Heine. His youthful poems, filled with "Weltschmerz," were already reminiscent of his adored German poet and his final volume, entitled Mode Ani (I confess), has much in common with Heine's Bekenntnisse. Early on, he mastered Heine's technique of reversing the flow of emotions in the course of a single short lyric, of shocking trusting readers with sobering irony, just as they were succumbing to sweet sentimentalism. This mixture of gentle lyricism and biting sarcasm remained with him throughout the four decades of his creative career. He acted the clown, the lover, the intoxicated idealist, the despairing cynic, and all his poses were assumed to be genuine. In the deepest reaches of his soul, however, he found life empty, barren of meaning, a vanity of vanities. From abysmal loneliness and nihilistic moodiness, he fled to communism, even as Heine, after personal disappointments, had fled to the Utopian socialism of St. Simonism. For a time, communism brought him relief from deepest pessimism. But, when his idealized communists entered into a pact with Nazi Germany, he recognized late in life that he had been led astray by a Utopian will-o'-the wisp, and, in his confessions, he pleaded for an understanding of his predicament: "For every drop of blood that I drew with my pen, I paid with two drops of my heart's blood. This is no excuse for all those I attacked with such blind fanaticism and my heart weeps because of my deeds." His last poems echoed those of the disillusioned, dying German poet to whom he had repeatedly paid tribute and whose fate he likened to his own. Like Heine, this penitent Yiddish poet also sought to make his peace with the God of Israel, from whom he had been estranged. He realized in the hellish flame of a world conflagration that force, bloodshed, revolution, and dictatorship of right or left could not create a better society, but that only through a long process of education in democracy, humanism, and tolerance could man ascend to a higher stage of civilization. Broken-hearted, the most talented humorist and satirist among "Die Yunge" bade farewell to God and man in his last poems, including the poem entitled "Heinrich Heine." In this poem, Nadir hails the German poet, whose book of gold and gall accompanied him since his boyhood and whose dreams he shared. He claims that he too was seared in freedom's battle and now weeps for a shattered world. He also gave his heart to hangsmen's daughters and fat Mathildas, and he now experiences hours in a mattress-grave, hours

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that drain his brain. As for his final resting place, he does not know whether it will be in a desert, in the deep sea, or in Brooklyn. A decade earlier he stood at Heine's grave, and he still hears the lyric cooing of Heine's doves. Generations come and go and each kisses the songs of this, his most beloved poet. While most poets of "Die Yunge" spent their formative years in Russia, Nadir stemmed from a Galician townlet, but emigrated from it in 1900 at the age of fifteen, too early to participate in the literary circle of the Galician Neoromanticists, whose most productive years began in 1904. The central figure of this circle was Shmuel Jacob Imber, son of the minor Hebrew poet Shmaryahu Imber and nephew of the Hebrew - Yiddish poet Naftali Herz Imber, author of the "Hatikva." S. J. Imber translated Heine and often imitated him in lyrics that abounded in doves and nightingales, reluctant damsels and lovelorn knights, but the profundity of the martyr of Montmartre eluded him. David Koenigsberg referred to Imber as the head of "Young Galicia" and to himself as its heart. His translation of Buch der Lieder remained unpublished; he, as well as Imber and other members of the Lemberg Circle, were murdered in the Nazi purge of Galicia's Jews. Still, Heine's influence upon him was as powerful as upon Imber, especially in his first volume, simply entitled Lieder (1912). Another member of the Lemberg Circle was young Melech Ravitch, who roomed with Imber, hungered with him, and was stimulated by him to aim at lyric perfection. Ravitch's early verses betray the influence of Heine, Imber's own master. They overflow with "Weltschmerz," sweet melancholy, and sentimental love for all mankind. As Yiddish literature matured beyond the pioneering generation and its flowering that began in the 1880's and ended with the death of its classical triumvirate during the first World War, it threw off the hegemony of Heine. Besides, greater dispersion of its writers and contacts with ever new literary currents enriched it immeasurably with new themes and new stylistic possibilities. The "Khaliastra," led by Uri Zvi Greenberg, Peretz Markish, and Melech Ravitch in Warsaw, the "Insichism" of Jacob Glatstein, GlanzLeyeles and N.B. Minkoff in New York, and the Soviet poets centered in Kiev, Minsk, and Moscow sought to give new structures to the multiplicity of ever changing social and cultural phenomena. Heine was accepted as the great poetic exponent of the world of yesteryear with a remarkable prophetic insight into a revolutionary order, which would shatter the beauty so dear to his heart, uproot the lilies, fell the laurel, and plant potatoes therein. The Heine vogue ebbed, but it did not fade away. The finest Rumanian Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger, still wrote in the 1920s ghostly ballads in the style of Heine. In Minsk, Moshe Kulback completed in 1933 his "Disner

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Childe Harold," a satire on the degenerate German bourgeoisie. It owed its title to Byron, but was more closely modelled after Heine's "Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen." In Moscow, Shmuel Rossin translated Heine's lyrics, and in booklets of the 1920s sang of love's longing, of tears and kisses, of the blossoming of lips in spring and the pain of parting in autumn. But, he was a rare exception among Soviet Yiddish poets. In Warsaw and Bialystok, Zysman Segalowitch, who began to write under the spell of Heine with verses about nymphs, the great God Pan, and the loveliness of dew-drunk flowers, changed his tender when bombs rained down upon his readers. In the "Elegies of Dorten" (1944), he depicts with nerve-wracking intensity the hell in which his Jews, yellow-badged and branded like cattle, were being burned, not figuratively but literally, by other human beings, fashioned not in the image of God, but in the image of devils. In New York, Eliezer Greenberg, after the Holocaust, spoke in a poetic monologue through the voice of the dying Heine, who asks his Jewish friend Karl Marx: "O, Marx, how could we flee from our own stricken people and purchase our safety with baptism?" The Heine wave spent its force after the First World War and has been ebbing away, as Yiddish poetry became more preoccupied with such themes as the visions and carnage of the Russian Revolution, the pogroms that followed in the wake of militant communism, the upheaval of the shtetl-culture, the Stalin purges, and, above all, the Holocaust and the rise of Israel. Yet, Heine remains a world classic and is likely to experience a revived vogue, as we near the bicentennial of his birth before the end of the present decade. Germans may have regarded their finest nineteenth-century poet, their wittiest prose writer, as a stepchild. But, the Jews, with rare exceptions, have tended to view him, despite his aberrations, as their son, flesh of their flesh and soul of their soul. When Heine lamented that no mass will be sung for him and no "Kaddish" will be said for him, he was only half right. No mass is being sung for him. However, every Jew who has survived the lure of alien hearths and who has come home to his ancestral fireside recalls with poignant sorrow this early victim of a mirage that dazzled millions of Jews throughout two centuries, the mirage of Germanization, Russification, Polonization, or assimilation to Anglo-Americanism - a mirage from which Heine emerged, crippled in body, wounded in his pride, but clear in thought. On his "Jahrzeit," "Kaddish" ought to be said for Heinrich Heine, this son of Israel, who, despite temporary alienation, atoned by the creation of literary masterpieces that are treasured as supreme products of Jewish genius and that will continue to inspire Jewish poets and thinkers in Yiddish, Hebrew, and other tongues.

Sander L. Gilman

Freud Reads Heine Reads Freud

Of all the creative writers whom Sigmund Freud read and quoted, none has quite as unique a place in his mental library as does Heinrich Heine. Although when Freud was asked in 1907 to compile a list of "good books," he did not include any by Heine, he did include Heine as the only German author on his (admittedly short) list of "favorite" books. 1 Freud neither quotes Heine more frequently than Goethe nor does Heine have as central a position in Freud's world of metaphors as do the Greeks. But Freud's reading of his "favorite" German writer, Heinrich Heine, reflects Freud's confrontation with the literary representation of the Jewish cultural voice in a way not paralleled by his reading of any other writer. The reason for Freud's fascination with Heine's world of words is quite simple: Heinrich Heine was the exemplary cultural Jew for late nineteenthcentury Austria. 2 And Sigmund Freud works out some of the implications of Heine's fin-de-siöcle image as the touchstone for questions of AustrianJewish identity through his poetics of quotation. This poetics of quotation reflects Freud's reading of Heine as an encoded response to the "meaning" of Heine in Freud's time. 3 1

All of the Freud references are to Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Ed. and Trans., J. Strachey, A. Freud, A. Strachey, and A. Tyson, 24 vols.; London: Hogarth, 1955-74), hereafter SE; here "Contributions to a Questionnaire on Reading" (1907), 9, 245: "You did not even ask for 'favorite books', among which I should not have forgotten Milton's Paradise Lost and Heine's Lazarus." For the general context see Ernst A. Ticho, "Der Einfluß der deutschsprachigen Kultur auf Freuds Denken," Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 19 (1986), 36-53; and Renate Böschenstein, "Mythos als Wasserscheide. Die jüdische Komponente der Psychoanalyse: Beobachtungen zu ihrem Zusammenhang mit der Literatur des Jahrhundertbeginns," in Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (Eds.), Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 287-310.

2

See Robert Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization; Oxford University Press, 1989), 181. On the complexity of reading Freud reading see Avital Ronell, Dictations: On Haunted Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and on the general parallels which make Freud's reading of Heine more than superficial see the first-rate dissertation by Michael G. Levine, "Writing Between the Lines: Heine, Freud, and the Effects of Self-Censorship," (Diss. The John Hopkins University, 1986).

3

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Freud's reading of Heine was very much within the late-nineteenth century image of Heine as the essential erotic and/or ironic writer. 4 This image was either used as a club to attack Heine as the "Jewish" poet par excellence or as the means of glorifying the poet as not "Jewish" at all, but rather decadent, or European, or ... , and here one can fill in the blank, anything but Jewish. Freud's reading of Heine falls within this view and as such forms a natural counter-reading to his Viennese Jewish contemporary Karl Kraus. 5 Freud's counter-reading is not random. Both Kraus and Freud were Ostjuden transplanted into Vienna, but each attempted to acquire social status through different modes of self-definition - Kraus as a "writer" and Freud as a "scientist." Freud's quite different perspective on things "erotic" and "Jewish" is to no little degree formed by his self-chosen professional identity as a "physician-scientist." Freud presents a reading of Heine bounded by the sense of "Jewish" identity present in this thought-collective, the shared assumption of nineteenth-century biological science that the biology of race was central to any definition of the human being. 6 Thus, the meaning associated with the erotic and the ironic or sexuality and humor (those global categories which span Heine's late nineteenth-century image) can be clearly contextualized within the special discourse on race and disease held by late nineteenth-century Jewish physicians. Sigmund Freud's reading is that of a late nineteenth-century Austrian-Jewish physician highly attuned to the politics of his own science. Sigmund Freud's reading of Heinrich Heine reveals the core contradiction of the late-nineteenth century Jewish scientist-physician. It is how one can simultaneously be "subject" and "object," how one can be the subject of scientific study at the same time that one has the role of the observer. For the Jewish physician in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, the ability to enter into the sphere of "science" meant acknowledging the truth of the scientific project and its rhetoric. No finer an observer of European Jewry than Leopold von Sacher-Masoch makes this the centerpiece of his tale of Austrian Jewry included in his "ethnographic" account of European Jewry. 7 In his story we observe the confrontation between the "scientific" Jewish physician and his primitive, miracle-working counterpart. Only science can 4

5

6

7

On the overall history of Heine's reputation in the nineteenth century see Gerhard Höhn, Heine-Handbuch: Zeit, Person, Werk (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987). See my "Karl Kraus's Oscar Wilde: Race, Sex, and Difference," Austrian Studies (Cambridge), (forthcoming). William F. Bynum, "The Great Chain of Being after Forty Years: An Appraisal," History of Science 13 (1975), 1-28. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, "Zwei Ärzte," in his Jüdisches Leben in Wort und Bild (Mannheim: Bensheimer, 1892), 287-298. On the context see Hans Otto Horch, "Der Außenseiter als 'Judenraphael,' Zu den Judengeschichten Leopolds von Sacher-Masoch," in Horch and Denkler, op. cit., 258-286.

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win and religion must bow gracefully to its preeminence. Sacher-Masoch's tale of science and the Jews reflects the siren song of the Haskalah, which perhaps even more than the general Enlightenment saw science as the path of the escape from the darkness of the ghetto into the bright light of modern culture. It was a modern culture defined very much by d'Alembert's understanding of science and technology as the tools for the improvement of the common man. But science, especially applied science such as medicine, implied the ability to enter into the mainstream of the so-called "free" professions. 8 It implied a type of social mobility increasingly available to Jews, especially in Austria, over the course of the nineteenth century. 9 For the late nineteenth-century Jewish scientist, especially those in the biological sciences, the path of social and cultural acceptance was complex. It entailed, more than in any other arena of endeavor, the acceptance of the contradiction between being "subject" and "object," as one of the basic premises of nineteenth-century biological science was the primacy of racial difference. For the physician-scientist the case became even more complex. It is not merely that there is a hierarchy of race, with each race higher (or lower) on a "great chain of being," but that the very pattern of illness varied from group to group and marked the risk which each group had in confronting life, especially "modem" civilized life. The Jewish physician was both the "observer" of this form of disease, and also, because he (and he was almost always male until the very late nineteenth century) entered into the competition of civilized society (i.e., the public sphere of medicine), he was precisely the potential "victim" of exactly these illnesses. The demands of "scientific objectivity" could, therefore, not be met by Jewish physicians, and they were forced to undertake complex psychological strategies to provide themselves with an "objective" observing voice. Sigmund Freud attempts to resolve this problem of the identity of subject and object not within the context of the biology of race but of gender. And it is this movement from the rhetoric of race to the rhetoric of gender which marks Freud's citation of the "voice" of Heinrich Heine as the exemplary "Jewish" figure of the time. Drawing on earlier work published in 1925 and 1931, Freud wrote about the role of the scientist in resolving the question of 8

9

See Monika Richarz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974). On the social history of the Jews in this context see George E. Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, 1880-1980 (Cambridge, MA: Abt/Madison, 1988); William O. McCagg, Jr., A History of Habsburg Jews. 1670-1918 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989); Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak, Gerhard Botz (Eds.), Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna (London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, Revised Edition (London: Peter Halban, 1988); Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 189.

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gender in his comprehensive New Introductory Lectures on (1933 [1932]):

Gilman

Psychoanalysis

Today's lecture, too, should have no place in an introduction; but it may serve to give you an example of a detailed piece of analytic work, and I can say two things to recommend it. It brings forward nothing but observed facts, almost without any speculative additions, and it deals with a subject which has a claim on your interest second almost to no other. Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity — Häupter in Hieroglyphenmützen, Häupter in Turban und schwarzem Barett, Perückenhäupter und tausend andre Arme, schwitzende Menschenhäupter... Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem - those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply - you are yourselves the problem. When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is 'male or female?' and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. Anatomical science shares your certainty at one point and not much further. 10 For the anti-Semitic Aryan 11 Austrian, as well as for the self-styled "Eastern Jew" longing to erase his origins, Heine's references would evoke quite a different set of associations. They would read the oriental turbans, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the sweat of ghetto poverty, the wigs of the shaved heads of orthodox Jewish brides, as hidden signs of racial, not merely sexual difference. This argument can be read as part of a rhetoric of race. First, let me translate this problem, which Freud articulates within the rhetoric of gender science, into the rhetoric of racial science: "There is an inherent biological difference between Jews and Aryans and this has a central role in defining you (my listener) and your culture." The "you" which the "I" is addressing is clearly the Aryan reader, for the Jewish reader is understood as but part of the problem. The Aryan is the observer; the Jew the observed. Upon seeing someone on the street the first distinction "we" (the speaker and his listener as Aryans) make is to ask: "Jew or Aryan?" and that distinction can be made

10 11

SE 22, 113. I am using the self-consciously ethnological term "Aryan" as the antithesis to "Jew" rather than the more evident term "Christian." What I am stressing is the racial definition of the "Jew" in the nineteenth century. It is clear that the terms "Jew" and "Christian" take on racial as well as religious significance during this period. The debate about the nature of race is reflected in the very use of the terms "Aryan" and "Jew" which reflect the ideology of the science of race. See Mauricen Ölender, Les Langues du Paradis: Aryens et Semites - un couple providentiel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

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with certainty based on inherent assumptions about differences in anatomy. This biological distinction can be clearly and easily "seen" even through the mask of clothing or the veneer of civilization. As the German ethnologist Richard Andree observed concerning the conservative nature of the Jewish body and soul: No other race but the Jews can be traced with such certainty backward for thousands of years, and no other race displays such a constancy of form, none resisted to such an extent the effects of time, as the Jews. Even when he adopts the language, dress, habits, and customs of the people among whom he lives, he still remains everywhere the same. All he adopts is but a cloak, under which the eternal Hebrew survives; he is the same in his facial features, in the structure of his body, his temperament, his character. 12 The false assumption in Freud's text is that the uniformity of the identity of all "males," as opposed to all "females," can be made in terms of the form of the genitalia. 13 Freud continues his argument to show that this physiological determinant is central is any discussion of the nature of sexual difference. He identifies himself as a male in this text, quoting a male author (Heine), about the impossibility of "knowing" the truth about the "dark continent" of the feminine. 14 The voice in Freud's text is that of a male and a participant in the central discourse about gender science of the scientific thought-collective. In my racial rereading, the voice would become that of the Aryan and part of the Aryan thought-collective. The fantasy of Freud's identification with the aggressor in my retelling of this passage as a passage about race seems to be vitiated when Freud transforms the problem of the relationship between the subject and the object into a question of sexual identity. The "male" is the "worrier" (read: subject) and the "female" is the "problem" (read: object). But this assumes that Freud's definition of the male body as uniform and constant is the norm within his fin-de-sifecle scientific thought-collective. There is an anatomical (read: sexual) distinction which sets the male Jew apart from other "males." It is the practice of circumcision which defines the body of the male Jew, at least within the discourse of science. Freud replaces the racial perspective inherent in the science of his time with the perspective of gender. But the central problem the impossibility which the Jewish male has as being both the "object" of study - inherently different in a way 12

14

Richard Andree, Zur Volkskunde der Juden (Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1881), 24-25, cited by Maurice Fishberg, "Materials for the Physical Anthropology of the Eastern European Jew," Memoires of the American Anthropological Association 1 (1905-1907), 6-7. On the background for this idea of the homologous structure of the genitalia see my Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: Wiley, 1989). SE 25, 212.

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marked on his body — and the observer, neutral, identical in form and voice with all other disembodied voices of science. The Jewish male is not quite a "whole" male; he is different and his difference is what marks the entire category of the Jew. We can find in the work of the Italian physician-scientist Paolo Mantegazza, one of Freud's and the fin-de-sifecle's most often cited sources on sexual anatomy, a typical non-Jewish response to the nature of the Jewish, male body. 1 5 Mantegazza's discussion of the Jews turns into an Enlightenment polemic against the perverse practices of that people out of their correct "space" and "time": Circumcision is a shame and an infamy; and I, who am not in the least anti-Semitic, who indeed have much esteem for the Israelites, I who demand of no living soul a profession of religious faith, insisting only upon the brotherhood of soap and water and of honesty, I shout and shall continue to shout at the Hebrews, until my last breath: Cease mutilating yourselves: cease imprinting upon your flesh an odious brand to distinguish you from other men; until you do this, you cannot pretend to be our equal. As it is, you, of your own accord, with the branding iron, from the first days of your lives, proceed to proclaim yourselves a race apart, one that cannot, and does not care to, mix with ours. 1 6 It is circumcision which sets the (male) Jew apart. In his dissertation of 1897, Armand-Louis-Joseph Bdraud notes that the Jews needed to circumcise their young males because of their inherently unhygienic nature, but also because the "climate in which they dwelt" otherwise encouraged the transmission of syphilis. 17 The Jew in the Diaspora is out of time (having forgotten to vanish like the other ancient peoples); he is out of his correct space (where circumcision had validity). His Jewishness (as well as his disease) is inscribed on his phallus. But what does circumcision mean for a Viennese Jewish scientist of the fin-de-siöcle such as Sigmund Freud? The debates within and without the Jewish communities concerning the nature and implication of circumcision surfaced again in Germany during the 1840s. German Jews had become acculturated into German middle-class values and had come to question the absolute requirement of circumcision as a sign of their Jewish identity. Led 15

16

17

On Mantegazza see Giovanni Landucci, Danvinismo a Firenze: Tra scienza e ideologia (1860-1900) (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1977), 107-128. The relevant passages in the German edition which Freud knew, Anthropologischkulturhistorische Studien über die Geschlechtsverhältnisse des Menschen (Jena: Hermann Costenoble, [1891]) are on pp. 132-137. All of the quotations from Mantegazza are to the English translation: Paolo Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind (Trans. Samuel Putnam; New York: Eugenics Publishing Co., 1938), here p. 99. Armand-Louis-Joseph Beraud, Etude de Pathologie Comparee: Essai sur la pathologie des semites (Bordeaux: Paul Cassignol, 1897), 55.

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by the radical reform rabbi Samuel Holdheim in Germany and responding to a Christian tradition which denigrated circumcision, the debate was carried out as much in the scientific press as in the religious one. There were four "traditional" views of the "meaning" of circumcision since the rise of Christianity. 18 Following the writings of Paul, the first saw circumcision as inherently symbolic and, therefore, no longer valid after the rise of Christianity (this view was espoused by Eusebius and Origen); the second saw circumcision as a form of medical prophylaxis (as in the writing of Philo, but also in the work of the central German commentator of the eighteenth century, Johann David Michaelis); the third saw it as a sign of a political identity (as in the work of the early eighteenth century theologian Johann Spencer); and the fourth as a remnant of the early Jewish idol or phallus worship (as in the work of the antiquarian Georg Friedrich Daumer — this view reappears quite often in the literature on Jewish ritual murder). In the medical literature during the course of the fin-de-sifccle two of these views dominated. They were the views which bracketed the images of "health" and "disease." These views saw circumcision either as the source of disease 19 or as a prophylaxis against disease. 20 Mantegazza notes that the hygienic value of circumcision has been exaggerated by the historians of Judaism. It is true enough that the circumcised are a little less disposed to masturbation and to venereal infection; but every day, we do have Jewish masturbators and Jewish syphilitics. Circumcision is a mark of racial distinction; [...] it is a sanguinary protest against universal brotherhood; and if it be true that Christ was circumcised, it is likewise true that he protested on the cross against any symbol which would tend to part men asunder. (98-99) The opposing view of circumcision in the scientific literature of the time saw circumcision as a mode of prevention which precluded the spread of sexually transmitted diseases because of the increased capacity for "cleanliness." It is classified as an aspect of "hygiene," the favorite word to critique or support the practice. 21 This view is closely associated with the therapeutic use of cir18

There is no comprehensive study of the German debates on circumcision. See J. Alkvist, "Geschichte der Circumcision," Janus 30 (1926), 86-104, 152-171. 19 See for example the discussion by Em. TCohn in the Mittheilungen des Ärztlichen Vereins in Wien 3 (1874), 169-172 (on the Jewish side) and Dr. Klein, "Die rituelle Circumcision, eine sanitätspolizeiliche Frage," Allgemeine Medizinische Centrai-Zeitung 22 (1853), 368-369 (on the non-Jewish side). 2 ® See the discussion by Dr. Bamberger, "Die Hygiene der Beschneidung," in Max Grunwald, Die Hygiene der Juden. Im Anschluß an die internationale HygieneAusstellung (Dresden: Verlag der historischen Abteilung der internationalen HygieneAusstellung, 1911), 103-112 (on the Jewish side) and W. Jammer, "Zur Beschneidungsfrage," Zeitschrift für Bahnärzte 1 (1916), 254 (on the non-Jewish side). 21 Alfons Labisch, "Die soziale Konstruktion der 'Gesundheit' und des 'Homo

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cumcision throughout the nineteenth century as a means of "curing" the diseases caused by masturbation, with, of course a similar split in the idea of efficacy: circumcision was either a cure for masturbation as it eliminated the stimulation of the prepuce and deadened the sensitivity of the penis or it was the source of Jewish male hypersexuality. Circumcision became the key to marking the Jewish body as different within the perimeters of "healthy" or "diseased," and Freud eventually responded to this label of difference. Let us turn to Freud's discussion of the nature and meaning of circumcision in Moses and Monotheism (1939 [1934-1938]). Here circumcision becomes one of the signs which marks the Egyptian body. The Jews, in order to acquire the higher status of the Egyptian, incorporate the act of male infant circumcision into their newly evolving religious practices. Freud states the case in the following manner: On no account must the Jews be inferior to them. He [Moses] wished to make them into a "holy nation," as is expressly stated in the Biblical text, and as a mark of this consecration he introduced among them too the custom [circumcision] which made them at least the equals of the Egyptians. And he could only welcome it if they were to be isolated by such a sign and kept apart from the foreign peoples among whom their wanderings would lead them, just as the Egyptians themselves had kept apart from all foreigners. Freud footnotes the following to document and explain his comments on the sexual self-selection and isolation of these newly defined Jews: Herodotus, who visited Egypt about 450 B.C., enumerates in his account of his journey characteristics of the Egyptian people which exhibit an astonishing similarity to traits familiar to us in later Jewry: 'They are altogether more religious in every respect than any other people, and differ from them too in a number of their customs. Thus they practise circumcision, which they were the first to introduce, and on grounds of cleanliness. ...They look down in narrow-minded pride on other people, who are unclean and are not so close to the gods as they are.' ... And, incidentally, who suggested to the Jewish poet Heine in the nineteenth century A.D. that he should complain of his religion as 'the plague dragged along from the Nile valley, the unhealthy beliefs of Ancient Egypt'? 22 The act of circumcision sets the Jewish male apart (in that he is no longer fully a male). This becomes part of the discourse of biological difference. For Freud, the symbolic context of the sexual organ - the difference in the biological construction of masculinity and femininity ~ is the basis for the

22

Hygienicus'," Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3/4 (1986), 60-82. SE 23, 30-31.

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basic symbolic language of difference: In the antithesis between fire and water, which dominates the entire field of these myths, yet a third factor can be demonstrated in addition to the historical factor and the factor of symbolic phantasy. This is a physiological fact, which the poet Heine describes in the following lines:Was dem Menschen dient zum Seichen Damit schafft er Seinesgleichen. The sexual organ of the male has two functions; and there are those to whom this association is an annoyance. It serves for the evacuation of the bladder, and it carries out the act of love which sets the craving of the genital libido at rest. 23 Here again it is the image of the "male" as a uniform category. The circumcised phallus has, as we have discussed, another function, at least within the scientific discourse of the nineteenth century: a prophylaxis against disease. Freud presents his discourse as a unified, univocal discourse of "male" sexual difference with reference to the poetry of Heinrich Heine. In all of these cases, it is the poetry of Heine which links the ideas of sexual difference and the discourse of psychoanalysis. It is in the poetry of Heine that the "appropriate" words of difference are to be found which encapsulate, for Freud, the difference between subject and object, between the male body and that of the female. It is evident that quoting Heine, especially in these contexts, is not merely evoking any poetic voice of the nineteenth century. It is citing the exemplary Jewish (and therefore, erotic) writer of Freud's time. Hidden within the poetics of quoting Heine is the distinction made by Freud's contemporaries between the Jewish body and the body of the Aryan. Freud's citation of Heinrich Heine in these contexts provides a key to reading Freud's repression of the implications of the biology of race. Heine is cited as an authority, a voice of culture which speaks to the universality of the truths which Freud presents. Freud merges Heine's voice into his own text. The confusion between the roles of "observer" and "observed" is eliminated. And Freud, like Heine, becomes a commentator. His role as the object of study, as the pathological specimen under the microscope, is eliminated. It is within the "voice" of the poet, in the texts cited by Freud, that the authority of culture is evoked. The ironic tension in Freud's reading of Heine is generated by the conflict between the universal claims of German culture and the parochial, "Jewish" role attributed to Heine. 24 The shift from ironic 23 24

SE 22, 192-193. Heine's own awareness of this problem complicates this question. See Norbert Altenhofer, "Chiffre, Hieroglyphe, Palimpsest. Vorformen tiefenhermeneutischer und

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observer to the object of analysis, from the "Aryan" to the "Jew" is reflected when Freud confronts this transformation. The distanced, ironic poet who is at the same time the subject of his own poetry becomes for Freud the voice which marks the movement of the category of race into the category of gender. But it is important to note that the representation of Heine is not only that of the "Jewish" and "erotic" poet, but also that of the "diseased" poet. There is rather a complex interrelationship between ideas of disease (Heine's image of the Jewish disease, Judaism, which Freud evokes in Moses and Monotheism), the nature of the Jewish (male) body, and the discourse about all of these present within Freud's thought-collective. These representations are linked within Freud's work by the quotation of Heine's ironic voice in his texts, as from Freud's "favorite" work of Heine, the section of Romanzero called "Lazarus," which directly evokes Heine's own disease and decay. The image of Heine as an "ill" poet is linked in the nineteenth century to the idea of Heine as the syphilitic, as the unclean figure whose eroticism is spoiled by his dangerous, pathological state. 25 The debate about the "meaning" of circumcision and its relationship to syphilis is evoked by the image of the dying Heine. Freud's quotation from Heine in Moses and Monotheism is taken from Heine's poem on the dedication of the Jewish Hospital in Hamburg, a hospital supported by Heine's uncle Solomon (with whom Freud was evidently related). 26 Heine's image of the three-fold Jewish disease: poverty, illness, and Jewishness, comes to reflect Heine's own status as the syphilitic Jew. For syphilis, like the leprosy which the Jews brought back from Egypt along with monotheism, is a marker of the sexual difference of

25

26

intertextueller Interpretation im Werk Heines," in Ulrich Nassen (Ed.), Texthermeneutik: Aktualität, Geschichte, Kritik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1979), 149-193. See Manfred Windfuhr, Heinrich Heine: Revolution und Reflexion (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976), 109 and Gerhard Höhn, Heine-Handbuch, op. cit. 114. Freud presents an image of Heine in the context of his family and relates this to Freud's own family to document the context of the Hirsch-Hyacinth "pun" which will be discussed later in this essay. What he does not note is that his wife's family, the Bernays, were also related to the Heines [See David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Van Nostrand, 1958), 196], Thus the story about "family" is also a narrative which reflects the medical view that "inbreeding" (read: incest) was the source of madness among the Jews: "I recall a story told by an old aunt of my own, who had married into the Heine family, how one day, when she was an attractive young woman, she found sitting next her at the family dinner-table a person who struck her as uninviting and whom the rest of the company treated contemptuously. She herself felt no reason to be any more affable towards him. It was only many years later that she realized that this negligent and neglected cousin had been the poet Heinrich Heine. There is not a little evidence to show how much Heine suffered both in his youth and later from this rejection by his rich relations. It was from the soil of this subjective emotion that the 'famillionairely' joke sprang." Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, SE 8, 141-142.

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the Jew. 2 7 This image of the syphilitic becomes one with that of the poet. The association between the image of corruption, especially sexual corruption, and creativity dominates the late nineteenth-century idea of the poetic. 28 In his work Sigmund Freud evokes the image of disease as the concomitant to the image of the creative. He stresses the centrality of the link between the pathological and the creative which haunted the late nineteenth century: A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love. This follows somewhat on the lines of Heine's picture of the psychogenesis of the Creation: Krankheit ist wohl der letzte Grund Des ganzen Schöpferdrangs gewesen; Erschaffend konnte ich genesen, Erschaffend wurde ich gesund. We have recognized our mental apparatus as being first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. 29 The link between the creative and the corrupt is found in Heine's "god-like" voice. Here, too, there is a rationale for the disassociation between the "subject" and the "object" of scientific study. In common discourse about Heine in contemporary, anti-Semitic commentators, such as Adolf Bartels, there is the link between Heine's corrosive style and his racial identity. 30 By implication, this identity is manifest in Heine's corrupt and corrupting sexuality. This is clearly labeled as degenerate, as not real poetry, but rather a pathological sign of the Jewishness of the poet. Freud attempts to undermine this association between "Jewish" creativity and disease in his own studies of creativity (from his study of Leonardo through to that of Schreber). In all of these cases, the wellspring of creativity is the pathology of sexuality, not of race, and none of his "subjects" are Jews. There is neither a study of Heine nor of Spinoza. Freud manages to avoid this association completely, for he sees Heine not through the lens of the biology of race but rather as a Jewish 27 28

29

See my Sexuality: An Illustrated History, op. cit., 258-260. See Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). SE 14, 85. This is clearest in Bartels' programmatic pamphlet on the nature of criticism: Kritiker und Kritikaster: Pro domo et pro arte, mit einem Anhang: Das Judentum in der deutschen Literatur (Leipzig: Eduard Avenarius, 1903), see esp. pp. 103-115.

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anti-Jew, a fellow unbeliever: Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow-unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret: "Den Himmel überlassen wir/ Den Engeln und den Spatzen." 31 The appropriate voice in this context is that of Heinrich Heine, who becomes here "one of our fellow-unbelievers." The very term as well as the quotation is from Heine. Heine had coined it in his discussion of Spinoza. Freud's own oppositional position to religion is well known. Indeed Peter Gay can evoke Freud as a "godless" Jew. 3 2 This seems to be a contradiction until we understand that the term "Jew" is neither a religious nor a social label, but a biological one for the late nineteenth-century scientist. What Freud (and Gay) cannot do is to remove Freud from the category of the biological and, therefore, potentially diseased Jew. And here the fellow disbeliever, Heine, the diseased Jew, becomes the double of Freud. The disease which Heine is reputed to have (syphilis) is not the disease which Freud develops (cancer of the jaw), but the idea of the disease of Judaism, the biological definition of the Jew, as the shared disease of the Jews, links both. Having set the context for the function which Heine's poetic citation has in determining the link between sexuality and race in Freud's text, let us turn to a still more complicated reading of this association. It is one of the few quotations from Heine to serve as the focus for an analysis on Freud's part. 3 3 This passage is to be found in his 1904 study of Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious: In the part of his Reisebilder entitled "Die Bäder von Lucca," Heine introduces the delightful figure of the lottery-agent and extractor of corns, Hirsch-Hyacinth of Hamburg, who boasts to the poet of his relations with the wealthy Baron Rothschild, and finally says: "And, as true as God shall grant me all good things, 31

33

SE 21, 50. See Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press [in Association with Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati], 1987), as well as the discussions throughout Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988). On Freud and humor see Elliott Cring, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); on the role of Heine quotations in Freud's study of humor see Peter Brask, "Rebekka, er det mig so taler?" Kritik 36 (1975), 103-126.

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Doctor, I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal - quite famillionairely." 34 This punning quotation delivered in Yiddish-accented German by the parvenu convert Hirsch-Hyacinth of Hamburg is, however, not our initial introduction of this text in Freud's study of humor. And it may be surprising to note that Freud evokes this joke not out of his own reading (and there are certainly sufficient examples of his own reading of Heine noted in this very volume), but because it is one of the central jokes — so central that it can be referred to without quoting it — in the psychological discourse about humor in the 1880s and '90s. 3 5 Freud cites it from an 1896 essay by G. Heymans on Theodor Lipps' theory of the comic. 36 Heymans refers to Lipps' use of this joke as a example of a meaningless error or malformation, which suddenly reveals itself as having a double meaning. It is the sudden awareness in the reader of the hidden double meaning which generates the comic response. This Kantian reading of the text goes against the initial reading of this passage by Lipps. 37 For Lipps, the form of an expression and its content are inherently bound together. The comic in Heine's text stems from the masking of this structural relationship and our sudden awareness of the external form of meaning as an absolute reflex of its content. The psychological power of this association remains for Lipps even when the external form (as in Heine's joke) becomes trivialized. What is striking is that Lipps, in his 1898 publication of his earlier essays on the theory of humor can respond to Heymans without even citing the passage from Heine. He comes to agree with Heymans, but places the moment of the awareness of the disparity between the "meaningless" word and its hidden meaning at a mid-point in the process toward the comic realization. The impact of the humor is the result of the hidden presence of the relationship between the form and the content of the expression, a relationship masked and then revealed by the pun. Lipps notes that "no one can doubt that Heine's joke is comic, only because we are aware or 'understand' that this 34

36

37

SE 8, 16. "Heymans (1896) explains how the effect of a joke comes about through bewilderment being succeeded by illumination. He illustrates his meaning by a brilliant joke of Heine's, who makes one of his characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth, the poor lottery-agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal ~ quite 'famillionairely'. Here the word that is the vehicle of the joke appears at first sight simply to be a wrongly constructed word, something unintelligible, incomprehensible, puzzling. It accordingly bewilders. The comic effect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment, by understanding the word." Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, SE 8, 12-13. G. Heymans, "Ästhetische Untersuchungen in Anschluß an die Lipps'sche Theorie des Komischen," Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 11 (1896), 31 43, 333-352. Theodor Lipps, "Psychologie der Komik," Philosophische Monatshefte 25 (1889), 139.

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word ['famillionairely'] should have this meaning, or more precisely, because it truly has, in our eyes, this meaning at that moment." 38 For Sigmund Freud, Theodor Lipps' study of the comic is the prime focus of his own work on humor. Indeed, except for his own publications, Lipps is the most frequently cited "authority" in Freud's study of the comic. Freud's own reading of the Heine passage incorporates Lipps' reading and departs from it. What is striking is that when we closely read Lipps' entire study of the comic, as Freud did, our focus is not the Jewish lottery-agent Hirsch-Hyacinth, whose mangled, Yiddish-tinged speech reveals him as a marginal Jew attempting to infiltrate Western cultural traditions. Lipps cites him and his discourse only in passing (unlike in Freud's study, which is truly a study of the Jewish joke constructed about material from and about Heine. 39 ) And, indeed, in the book version of his essays, Lipps does not even reproduce in full Heine's punning reference to the Rothschilds. Rather, there is quite another leit-motif in Lipps' work which Freud never mentions in his own study on humor. The "joke" or, in this case, the proverb, which ties Lipps' volume together is initially found early in his text and is used over and over again throughout it: "The peasant laughs about the black when he sees him for the first time." (30) Lipps' proverb stresses the role of the "subject" and the "object" in generating the comic. Let me summarize Lipps' view of the nature of the comic as it is represented in this proverb. It is the awareness of sameness in difference, the hidden essence of the humanness of the black hidden within his different colored skin, which Lipps stresses. For Lipps, it is the color of the skin which gives the human being special value. (70) It is not that this value is intrinsic to the color of the skin, but rather that society gives skin color value. "We" (Lipps and his educated reader) associate human form with white skin color. (153) And, therefore, we assume the color of the black skin not only to be comic but also ugly.(158) It is in the sudden awareness of the similarity between the black's body (56) and its association with "our own body" which creates the comic. The disparity which creates humor is the awareness that what seems to be different (the essence of the body and its relationship to the idea of "humanness") is indeed no different. Blacks are people just like - the peasant. But, it is only because of the naivitd (58) of the observer of the body of the black (68) which creates this comic awareness. The observer who is directly amused by the body of the black is either a child or a primitive. But, the true observer (Lipps) "knows" that the body of the black and the body of the Other are identical 38

39

Theodor Lipps, Komik und Humor: Eine psychologisch-ästhetische Untersuchung (Hamburg, Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1898), 95. See the following passages: Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, SE 8, 1213, 16, 25, 36, 39, 41, 47-48, 50-51, 69, 77, 78-79, 85, 87, 90, 114-115, 141-142, 145, 211, 212.

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and is amused only by the peasant's laughter at the black. 40 All of Lipps' comments about the aesthetics of blackness reflect his sense that these qualities are those of the "primitive" observer. The scientist is interested in the response of the observer and he is himself neutral in his response. At least, he does not find the body of the black comic. The "we" in Lipps' text distinguishes between the scientist-observer, who is neutral and objective, and the child-peasant, who is the object observed as it observes. This distance is clear in Lipps' writing. When we turn to Freud's reading of Lipps, this metaphor of the biological basis for the comic, the perception of the body as the locus of difference, is displaced. It is not the body - either of the Jew or of the black - which is the seat of the idea of difference. Given the view in the scientific thoughtcollective in the nineteenth century that the Jew was black, 41 Lipps' placing of the locus of the comic in an understanding of the black body as the object of the comic gaze has specific meaning for the Jewish reader. Just as the black is not quite a "whole" human being because of his black skin (in the eye of child and the peasant), the male Jew is also not quite a whole human being because of his circumcision (in the eye of the scientist). The "damaged" Jewish phallus becomes the Jew. The relationship between the "body" and the "phallus" is not a post-facto analogy. The thesis of the "bodyas-phallus" within the symbolic language of psychoanalysis was put forth by Victor Tausk and was used by him to counter the rather simple reading of Heine's "Lorelei" presented by Hanns Sachs to the Wednesday night circle on February 15, 1911. In Tausk's reading the phallus is represented by the body of the boatman swallowed by the waves. This image "could convey the notion of the whole body engulfed by the organ of the superior female." 4 2 The link between the black and the Jew can be found throughout Viennese culture in Freud's day. The Austrian exile novelist Jakov Lind puts into the mouth of his father in the 1930s: "Vienna is Vienna and Jews are Jews. Black is black and Jew is Jew because we could not afford to be anything else. " 4 3 Freud's revision of this association is highly sublimated, but is also to be found in the joke book in the context of his reading of Heine (and Lichtenberg):

40

41

42

43

On the function of the idea of Blackness and the body of the black as a marker within German aesthetic theory see my On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany, Yale Afro-American Studies (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982). See my Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 29-35. See the commentary with quotations by Mark Kanzer, "Pioneers of Applied Analysis: Vol. Ill of the Minutes," American Imago 32 (1975), 59-76, here 66. Jakov Lind, Counting My Steps: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1969), 55.

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"'My fellow-unbeliever Spinoza', says Heine. 'We, by the ungrace of God, day-laborers, serfs, negroes, villeins...' is how Lichtenberg begins a manifesto (which he carries no further) made by these unfortunates — who certainly have more right to this title than kings and princes have to its unmodified form." 4 4 Freud separates the Jew and the black into two parallel textual worlds: the Jew, Spinoza, within the discourse of the Jew, Heine; the black within the Enlightenment rhetoric of Lichtenberg. For Freud, the similarity between Jews, especially unbelieving Jews, and blacks as the object of study is eliminated through this device of citation. But for his thought-collective, Jews and blacks are identical because of their biology, which no subterfuge can alter. And, Heine becomes the marker for this sense of a difference which should not be a difference. Heine, about whom one laughs, with whom one laughs, is seen as the epitome of both subject and object, both the means of analysis and the object of study. Freud displaces the idea of the difference of the Jew into the realm of sexuality, evoking Hirsch-Hyacinth's essential Jewish voice in the joke discussed earlier in the text. But not the sexuality of the Jew. The question at the very center of the references to Heine is the placement of sexuality, deviant sexuality, or the sexuality of difference outside of the world of the Jew as the object of study. In Heine's world this image is projected upon the figure of the arch-Aryan as anti-Semite, the image of the homosexual August, Count of Platen (1796-1835), as Freud notes: Heine's "Bäder von Lucca" contains a regular wasp's nest of the most stinging allusions and makes the most ingenious use of this form of joke for polemical purposes (against Count Platen). Long before the reader can suspect what is afoot, there are foreshadowings of a particular theme, peculiarly ill-adapted for direct representation, by allusions to material of the most varied kind, — for instance, in Hirsch-Hyacinth's verbal contortions: "You are too stout and I am too thin; you have a good deal of imagination and I have all the more business sense; I am a practicus and you are a diarrheticus; in short you are my complete antipodex." "Venus Urinia" ~ "the stout Gudel von Dreckwall" of Hamburg, and so on. In what follows, the events described by the author take a turn which seems at first merely to display his mischievous spirit but soon reveals its symbolic relation to his polemical purpose and at the same time shows itself as allusive. Eventually the attack on Platen bursts out, and thenceforward allusions to the theme (with which we have already been made acquainted) of the Count's love for men gushes out and overflows in every sentence of Heine's attack on his opponent's talents and character. For instance: "Even though the Muses do not favour him, he has the Genius of Speech in his power, or rather he knows how to do violence to him. For he does not possess the free love of that 44

SE 8, 77.

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Genius, he must unceasingly pursue this young man, too, and he knows how to capture only the outer forms, which, despite their lovely curves never speak nobly." "He is like the ostrich, which believes he is well-hidden if he sticks his head in the sand, so that only his behind can be seen. Our exalted bird would have done better to hide his behind in the sand and show us his head." 4 5 Here, Freud moves with Heine from the Jew to the homosexual, from Hirsch-Hyacinth, and his accented German, to the gay poet Platen and his Romantic poetry, to locate the idea of the sexually different as the object of study. The voice is that of the observing poet Heine as Hirsch-Hyacinth, the covertly observed "object," the gay poet von Platen. What Freud "hears" in Heine's description of von Platen is a series of anal images, all of which refer to von Platen's homosexuality. The tables here are turned: it is the Jew (Heine-Freud) who sees the "pathology" of the Aryan, his homosexuality. (Heine's own homophobia 46 is translated here into the reification of the early Freud's view [best expressed in his analysis of the Schreber autobiography] that homosexuality is a "disease" or at least, a pathological error in development.) In a real way, Heine's position in late nineteenth century thought parallels that of Freud within the scientific thought-collective of his time. And Freud sensed that doubling. He writes, calling upon Heine's "Gods in Exile," to describe the "uncanny" nature of the double, the sense of sameness in the concept of difference: But after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a 'double,' we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in this more superficial material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the 'double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted — a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The 'double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons. 47

45

^ 47

SE 8, 78-79. See Robert C. Holub, "Heine's Sexual Assaults: Towards a Theory of Total Polemic," Monatshefte 73 (1981), 415-428. Freud, "The 'Uncanny'," SE 17, 236. On Freud and Heine, see J.M.R. Damasmora, F.A. Jenner, S.E. Eacoft, "On Heautoscopy or the Phenomenon of the Double: Case Presentation and Review of the Literature," British Journal of Medical Psychology 53 (1980), 75-83.

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Heine's text functions for Freud as his own rhetorical double ~ the object of his study, as well as the voice into which he can slip. What is uncanny in Freud's text is the regularity with which Heine's voice appears in this manner. Freud's poetics of quotation reveal themselves to be a politics of quotation. His appropriation of Heine's voice in the "scientific" context of psychoanalytic theory reveals itself to be a dialogue with the voice of the Jew within a discourse initially labeled as scientific, but also understood by Freud and his thought-collective as Jewish as well. Heine remains for Freud the sign of the double bind of being both the authoritative voice of the observer and the ever suspect voice of the patient, a voice which remains one of the signs and symptoms of the disease from which both Heine and Freud suffered, their Jewishness.

Leo A. Lensing Heine's Body, Heine's Corpus. Sexuality and Jewish Identity in Karl Kraus's Literary Polemics Against Heinrich Heine

Karl Kraus's critical reckoning with Heinrich Heine, which culminated in the major essay Heine und die Folgen, remains one of his most controversial polemics. 1 Most commentators on this topic have either damned Kraus or tried to defend him. Heine's adherents have tended to emphasize the essay's obvious historical bias and to accuse Kraus of perpetuating an anachronistic neoclassical aesthetic. 2 Kraus's proponents have responded by interpreting the Heine essay as the turning point in his movement towards a satirical system based on the radical criticism of language. Neither side, however, has paid sufficient attention to the genesis of Kraus's critical attitudes in the ideologically charged atmosphere of fin-de-si&cle literary politics, or to the way in which issues of sexuality and Jewish identity, both apparent and submerged, contributed to the rhetorical vehemence of this particular text. 3 It seems reasonable to suggest that, to paraphrase Jeffrey L. Sammons, Karl Kraus belonged to those "opponents and critics" of Heine who, "whether radical, liberal, bourgeois, conservative, or reactionary, might have had a right to or a reason for their arguments." 4 This essay will focus on Kraus's problematic exercise of his right, rather than on his defensible reason. What Itta Shedletzky has determined concerning Heine's Jewish critics in general applies particularly to the case of Karl Kraus: his Jewish '

2

3

4

See especially Mechtild Borries, Ein Angriff auf Heinrich Heine: Kritische Betrachlungen zu Karl Kraus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971). For a thorough critique of Borries, see Helmut Arntzen, Karl Kraus und die Presse (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1975), 8794. See, for example, Bernd Kämmerling, "Die wahre Richtung des Angriffs. Über Karl Kraus': Heine und die Folgen," Heine-Jahrbuch 11 (1972), 162-69. An important exception is to be found in the chapter "Die Wunde Heine" in John Halliday's study Karl Kraus, Franz Pfemfert and the First World War: A Comparative Study of "Die Fackel" and "Die Aktion" between 1911 and 1928 (Passau: Andreas-HallerVerlag, 1986), 41-52. Although Halliday's main purpose is to document Pfemfert's reaction to "Heine und die Folgen," he also points out that Kraus's concern with privacy in the sexual sphere was one of the motivations for the essay. Furthermore, he gives a useful account of the problematic connection between Adolf Bartels and Kraus, but does not directly address the issue of Kraus's Jewish identity. Jeffrey L.Sammons, "Problems of Heine Reception: Some Considerations," Monatshefte 73 (1981), 384.

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background may have conditioned the intensity of his scrutiny of Heine, but it did not necessarily lead to a balanced view of his predecessor's life and work. 5 The actual degree to which Kraus's Jewish identity, however repressed or distorted, influenced his literary judgment on Heine remains an important open question. Kraus's radical reaction, of course, belongs within the larger context of the Jewish reception of Heine, which has only just begun to be investigated in depth. It is useful to know, for example, that one of Kraus's most questionable criticisms of Heine, the condemnation of his "French" style and its supposed deleterious influence on German journalism, was anticipated by Ludwig Philippson in 1858 in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums,6 Analyzing Kraus's position is complicated further by his sustained attempt to anchor his commitment to the power of poetic language in the rejection of conventional sexual mores. Given the influences under which he made this commitment, namely Strindberg and Weininger, it is hardly surprising that issues of sexuality and Jewish identity led to such a drastic formulation of Kraus's undoubtedly justified polemic against modern journalism. Heine und die Folgen has never been analyzed for the role it played in Kraus's development of a satirical persona, even though certain central statements in the text seem to invite such an interpretation. One of these is "Ein Angriff auf Heine ist ein Eingriff in jedermanns Privatleben" 7 : an encroachment especially, it might be added, on the lives of the broad Jewish reading public, who considered Heine, in the words of Moritz Goldstein writing in 1906, "the first great Jewish poet in Germany." 8 Kraus, who naturally also belonged to this Jewish readership, explicitly denies having succumbed to the sentimental rage of reading Heine during his impressionable youth (5 4 194). Nevertheless, there is sufficient reason to be skeptical about his disclaimer. In one of the earliest issues of the Fackel, Kraus documented the exclusion of Heine from the German reader used in Austrian secondary schools. He published the letter of a recent graduate who wittily observed that not until after his "Abitur" had he learned, "that the study of Heine was more important

5

Itta Shedletzky, "Zwischen Stolz und Abneigung: Zur Heine-Rezeption in der deutschjüdischen Literaturkritik," in Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (Eds.), Conditio Judaica. Judentum. Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, pt. 1, (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 204. 6 Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur. Die Literaturkritik der "Allgemeinenen Zeitung des Judentums," 1837-1922 (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1985), 110. 7 Karl Kraus, "Heine und die Folgen," in his Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, Schriften. 12 Vols., (Ed.), Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 19861989), 4: 194. Works, excluding Die Fackel and the Frühe Schriften, will be cited from this edition and abbreviated as S plus the volume number. ® Qtd. in the original German in Shedletzky, "Zwischen Stolz und Abneigung," 200.

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than the study of Johann Nepomuk Vogl." (F 11, 1899, l l ) 9 When Kraus, several issues later in his editor's column, reiterated the school system's neglect of Heine (F 22, 1899, 30), he may have been indirectly supplying material for his own intellectual biography. Reading Heine, the Fackel implies, constitutes an act of opposition to the cultural authority of the state. Thus, how Kraus himself read Heine from the outset of his literary career up until he began to write Heine und die Folgen in the spring of 1910 deserves closer inspection. 10 While Kraus's prt-Fackel journalism clearly owes a debt to the Viennese predecessors he admired -- Daniel Spitzer, for example, or Ludwig Speidel, who is accorded a prominent place in Heine und die Folgen (5 4 19If.) - it would have been difficult for him to avoid the model of Heine's satirical prose altogether. 11 Particularly the "Ischler Briefe," produced for various newspapers during Kraus's vacations in Bad Ischl, and the "Wiener Briefe," which he wrote for the Breslauer Zeitung,12 suggest some study of the open form and satirical wordplay that made the Reisebilder so influential. In the pamphlet Eine Krone für Zion , which is formulated as a summer correspondence from Bad Ischl, Kraus engages in a Romantic parody that is unthinkable without Heine's example. Citing the reluctance of wealthy Viennese Jews — not "das Volk von Israel" but rather "das Volk von Ischl" either to join the Zionists or to assimilate, he writes: Die Natur scheint ein besseres Anpassungsvermögen bewiesen zu haben. Als ich nämlich jüngst hinausgieng, konnte ich 9

Karl Kraus's Die Fackel (1899-1936) will be cited in abbreviated form as F, followed by the issue numbers, the year of publication, and the page numbers. ^ See Borries, Ein Angriff auf Heinrich Heine, 18. The only critic even to attempt such an investigation, Borries reaches conclusions based on an incomplete study of Die Fackel. She mistakenly believes that Heine is not mentioned until Die Fackel, No. 26, which appeared in mid-December, 1899, whereas he appears rather prominently in the first issue and is mentioned as least six more times before the twenty-sixth issue. 11 See Gilbert Carr, "Kraus's Reception of Satire in his Early Career," in Sigurd Paul Scheichl and Edward Timms (Eds.), Karl Kraus in neuer Sicht. Londoner KrausSymposium (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1986), 121f. Cf. Kurt Krolop, "Wechseldauer der Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben von Satire: Traditionswahl und Zeiterfahrung im Frühwerk von Karl Kraus (1892-1899)," brücken. Germanistisches Jahrbuch DDR-CSSR (1985-8). Although Krolop's purpose is to document the undoubtedly crucial model of Daniel Spitzer, he cites a judgement on Heine in Max Kalbeck's introduction to a Spitzer edition that had earned Kraus's praise in Die Fackel (F 124, 1902, 17): "Heines 'Reisebilder' und 'Salon' waren und sind noch heute geistige Mächte, denen kein beginnender Feuilletonist sich so leicht entzieht, und sie werden mustergiltig bleiben, so oft immer es sich darum handelt, der von den Pedanten der Schule eingeschnürten Sprache das Mieder zu lösen." (34, n. 41). Whether Kraus agreed with this or not, there can be little doubt that he reacted to it. Thus, he revises the corset metaphor in the famous aphorism about Heine loosening the corsets of the German language. These texts, published between 1895 and 1898, are collected in Karl Kraus, Frühe

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beobachten, wie sie mit der Zeit die Gewohnheiten der sie täglich besuchenden Menschen angenommen hat. Ich hört' ein Bächlein mauscheln, und da ich, darob erstaunt, in den Wald hineinrief, hat mir das Echo mit einer Frage geantwortet.... 13 Although Heine is not mentioned directly in the text of Eine Krone fiir Zion, this satirical evocation of the deformation of nature at the hands of Vienna's Jewish elite reads like an emphatic adaptation of his style. And, in fact, the phrase "Ich hört' ein Bächlein mauscheln" parodies the first line ("Ich hört' ein Bächlein rauschen") of one of the poems in Wilhelm Müller's Die schöne Müllerin, known now primarily, as it must have been in the 1890s, through Schubert's musical setting. 14 Heine himself had, as Michael Perraudin has recently demonstrated, used Müller as "both a model and a foil" for establishing himself as a poet of critical folk song. 1 5 Kraus would undoubtedly have thought of himself as doing as Heine did, not as Heine said, especially when he completed the parody of Müller with an allusion to the Jewish anecdote - of which there are several variants - about a Jew answering a question with a question. 16 Kraus thereby participates less in Heine's revision of the Romantic adulation of nature than in the latter's deeply ambivalent attitude toward Judaism and, through the key word "mauscheln," toward the predicament of the Jewish writer within German culture. However much one may disagree with Kraus's critique of Herzl, his early, subtle use of Heine shied away from the sometimes vehement appropriation that characterized the incipient Zionist reception of the poet. 17 Just how recognizable the connection between Kraus and Heine was, however, may be seen in a remark published in a society column, "News from Ischl," which ignores the main theme of Eine Krone für Zion and highlights the following: "Karl Kraus, der Ischler Heine, hat das Sätzchen geprägt: 'Ich hört' ein Bächlein mauscheln.'" 18 This Statement, one of the earliest notices of Kraus's literary activity, must have given the young writer pause. He can hardly have been satisfied with the role of a spa-bound Heine epigone who, like his famous predecessor,

13

15

16

17 18

Schriften II, (J. Braakenburg, Ed.), (Munich: Kosel, 1979). Karl Kraus, Frühe Schriften II, 313. Wilhelm Müller, Gedichte von W.M. (Ed. and with a biography by Gustav Schwab), (Leipzig: F.Α. Brockhaus, 1837), 8f. Michael Perraudin, Heinrich Heine. Poetry in Context: A Study of Buch der Lieder" (Oxford, New York, Munich: Berg, 1989), 37-70. See, for example, Max Präger and Siegfried Schmitz (Eds.), Jüdische Schwänke (Vienna: R. Löwit Verlag, 1928), 21. See Shedletzky, "Zwischen Stolz und Abneigung," 203. An undated newspaper clipping containing this article, "Neuigkeiten aus Ischl," is in the Karl Kraus Archives (Druckschriftensammlung ) of the Vienna City Library, Konvolut L 137.742. The clipping is part of a file on Heine apparently kept by Kraus himself and in all likelihood dated from 1898.

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both understood and ridiculed the Yiddish-inflected German of the Jewish middle class. Kraus not only had to contend with benevolent comparisons; he also had to fend off attacks mounted against him in Heine's name. In 1899, Erwin Rosenberger, an associate of Theodor Herzl's and a contributing editor to the Zionist organ Die Welt, published Der Pinsel, a pamphlet calculated to criticize Kraus's anti-Zionist position and to exploit his success by cleverly parodying the Fackel's cover design. 19 In the second of the only two issues to appear, Rosenberger begins his polemic with a quotation from Heine's Atta Troll that allows him to assume Heine's persona in order to denigrate Kraus: Ja, das Schrecklichste auf Erden Ist der Kampf mit Ungeziefer, Dem Gestank als Waffe dient Das Duell mit einer Wanze...! 2 0 Rosenberger continues by accusing Kraus, whom he identifies as a Jew, of pandering to the anti-Semitism of his Viennese readers. By estranging Heine's verse from its context so that it equates the young Jewish satirist with vermin and bedbugs, however, Rosenberger indulges in rhetoric that sounds suspiciously like anti-Semitic rhetoric. This proved to be a polemical weapon that would backfire. Kraus turned this metaphor on both Heine and his followers when in Heine und die Folgen he ridiculed the journalistic piety that demands that every editorial office keep at least one bedbug from Heine's mattress grave (S 4 207). As these representative examples of positive and negative comparisons indicate, coming to terms with Heine meant confronting one's own status as a Jewish writer in German society. Given the extremes of opinion that attached to Heine's hotly debated place within German literary history, it would be surprising if Kraus had not been afflicted by a troublesome "anxiety of influence." 2 1 In the very first issue of the Fackel Heine figures positively in the oppositional program formulated by the young satirist. Kraus objects to the reduction of the poet's legacy to "wretched punning paired with pitiful verse routines" (F 1, 1899, 17) that characterizes the work of Julius Bauer, a journalist and successful librettist -of Jewish background, whom the local press periodically hailed as the Viennese Heine. 22 Kraus suggests that the 19

20

21

22

On Rosenberger, see Murray G. Hall, "Ein Zionist über die 'Krone für Z i o n , " KrausHefte, 42 (April, 1987), 1-4. Erwin Rosenberger, Der Handelsmann Karl Kraus, Der Pinsel, No.2 (Vienna: 1899), 1. These verses comprise the last stanza of Caput 11 of Atta Troll. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), especially the chapter "Apophrades of the Return of the Dead," 139-55. Bauer, whose satirical talents had actually impressed the nineteen-year-old Kraus, is

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real Heine, upon hearing of such a comparison, will not only roll over in his grave, but that he will also stop with his backside up as a sign of his judgment on such imitators (F 1, 1899, 22). This witty mobilization of Heine's corpse derives initially from Kraus's derision of such contemporary cultural pieties as leaving one's calling card on Heine's grave or of an actual Viennese initiative, sponsored by the City Council, to lay a wreath at the monument in Paris. When a reader deplored the protest of the anti-Semitic faction against this plan, Kraus replied: "Ich glaube nicht, dass sich Heine aus Kummer über die Resolution der Wiener Antisemiten im Grabe umgedreht hat; aber ich weiß, in welcher Lage er die Wiener Freisinnigen empfangen wird...." (F47, 1900, 27f.) In response to the agitation for a Heine monument in Germany that intensified in 1906, during the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the poet's death, Kraus imagines three handfuls of dirt flying from Heine's grave back at the spectators who piously gather at his tomb on the Montmartre (F 199, 1906, l ) . 2 3 The many Jewish readers of the Fackel would have recognized in this comic, grisly gesture a satiric reversal of the widespread Jewish custom of having every man present at the funeral throw three handfuls or shovelfuls of earth into the grave. 24 The rather daring parody of the burial rite, an intriguing if inconclusive indicator of Kraus's familiarity with Jewish culture, links him with, rather than differentiates him fronj, Heine, who used Jewish religious motifs in similar ways. Although Kraus usually mobilized Heine's remains against liberal Jewish disciples of the poet, he was also capable of wielding equally shocking corporeal metaphors against anti-Semitic critics. After the infamous Adolf Bartels had exploited the anniversary year of 1906 by vilifying the poet in a polemic entitled Heinrich Heine, auch ein Denkmal, Kraus dismissed its author as "HenAdolf Bartels known for the Germanic endurance with which he relieves himself at Heine's grave." (F217, 1907, 30) There can be little doubt that Kraus consciously separated the issues of Heine's Jewishness and the influence of his poetry in his own critical mind, but the preoccupation with the apparently trivial question of Heine's grave resulted in a metaphorical conflation that suggests unconscious motives behind his increasingly negative appraisal of Heine's literary legacy. In the es-

23

24

ridiculed in a similar manner several times in the Fackel. See Hans Eberhard Goldschmidt, "Satirenanthologie und Cafehausbeleidigung. Zwei Briefe an Julius Bauer," Kraus Hefte 8 (October, 1978), 2-4. See Dietrich Schubert, "'Jetzt wohin?' Das 'deutsche Gedächtnismal' für Heinrich Heine," Heine-Jahrbuch 28 (1989), 43-71. Patricia Steines, "Judisches Brauchtum um Sterben, Tod und Trauer," in Hansjakob Becker, Bernhard Einig, and Peter-Otto Ullrich (Eds.), Im Angesicht des Todes: Liturgie als Sterbe- und Trauerhilfe, Vol. 1., Pietas Liturgica 3 (St. Ottilien: Eos Verlag, 1987), 144.

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say "Um Heine" of 1906, Kraus still defends the poet not only against the effusive praise of the liberal press, but also against the "Urteutonen" (F 199, 1906, 1) who deny him the right to a monument on German soil. At the same time, however, the journalistic commotion surrounding the Heine memorial apparently again summons up the symbolic attraction of the tomb in Paris, and for the first time the idea of a critical "Obduktion des Lyrikers Heine" (F 199, 2) surfaces. While still at work on the manuscript of Heine und die Folgen in September, 1910, Kraus published a gloss in the Fackel in which Heine's corpse is finally given a voice. A report about yet another Viennese journalist who had deposited his calling card at Heine's tombstone provokes Kraus into having Heine speak from the grave: "Goldenstein, sagen Sie's auch den andern, ich lass' mich verleugnen." (F 307-08, 1910, 33) This satirical ventriloquist act is of course directed primarily against the importunate pieties of Heine's feuilletonistic imitators, but the journalist's obviously Jewish name and the use of "verleugnen" also strongly suggest "das Judentum verleugnen." Thus, Kraus implicitly denies Heine's controversial "return," his late positive re-evaluation of his Jewish heritage. 25 The insinuation that Heine renounced Judaism in order to be rid of his journalistic followers prefigures an important event in Kraus's own life. Less than a year later, he himself was baptized in the Karlskirche in Vienna. Once Kraus had published Heine und die Folgen in brochure form late in 1910 and begun to take stock of initial reactions to its provocative ideas, he returned to the image of Heine's corpse yet again. This time, however, instead of allowing Heine's shade to speak, he claims to have granted him eternal rest: Sie spüren nicht, wie diese Heine-Polemik innerhalb meiner Schlachtordnung spielt und wie sie als organische Zusammenfassung meiner selbst organisch zusammenfaßt, was in der Zeit vorhanden ist, möge es dieser auch gelingen, ein versäumtes Heine-Denkmal nachzuholen. Es ist aber ungerecht, den Totengräber des Mordes zu beschuldigen: sie fürchten für ihren Heine, und ich habe ihm nur Ruhe verschafft; ich habe in dieser Schrift nicht Heine erledigt, aber mehr. (F 315-16, 1911, 53) The thrust of the body/corpse metaphors leads Kraus to understand the Heine essay as an organic product of his satirical personality. He implies that the consolidation of his own literary identity demands the disintegration of Heine's. Again, this is a strategy that Kraus could have borrowed from the predecessor against whom he uses it. Heine, after all, explained his treatment of August Wilhelm Schlegel in the Second Book of the Romantische Schule 25

Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine. A Modern Biography (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 305-10.

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in quite similar terms: "[...] in der Literatur, wie in den Wäldern der nordamerikanischen Wilden, werden die Väter von den Söhnen todtgeschlagen, sobald sie alt und schwach geworden." 26 Although Kraus specifically denies murdering Heine and even claims not to have finished him off, but rather what is later called "Heineismus," (F 315-16, 1911, 52) he clearly begins to identify the poet's corpse with the poetic corpus. As powerful and as witty as this satirical reduction of Heine's reputation and reception may have once seemed, it is necessary to see it today as participating in what Sander Gilman has called the "medicalization of the discourse" on the Jews that began as early as the Middle Ages. 2 7 At the same time, Kraus's focus on the "body" of Heine allows him to bring the even more powerful fin-de-si£cle discourse on sexuality and sexual taboo to bear on the issue of Heine's intellectual progeny. Near the beginning of Heine und die Folgen, Kraus uses a metaphor of sexual pathology to describe those consequences: the feuilleton, which embellishes factual reporting with literary pretensions, is called "die Franzosenkrankheit, die er [Heine] uns eingeschleppt hat" (i. e., syphilis, S 4 186). Sexual metaphors in fact dominate the text much more strongly than do references, veiled or otherwise, to Heine's Jewishness. Moreover, Kraus tries to distract the reader from the Jewish issue by mocking the narrowminded hatred of Heine, which is supposedly directed at the Jew and leaves the poet untouched (5 4 196). This emphasis enabled Kraus to suppress their common predicament of a problematic Jewish identity and to attack Heine on another, more vulnerable front. By this time, Kraus had already established himself as a formidable critic of the double standard prevailing in the legal treatment of prostitutes and of the social hypocrisy involved in male attitudes towards female sexuality. 28 Even though his conclusions about the sexual liberation of women, especially his belief in a fundamental dichotomy between male intellect and female sexuality, seem regressive today, they did contain progressive aspects that underpinned the rhetorical equation of sexual issues with literary criticism in the Heine essay. The latter is accomplished on two levels. First, Kraus objects to what he perceives as an exaggerated male pose in the Buch der Lieder, a judgement that is not without its parallels in recent scholarship. 29 In Kraus's view, this privileging of the masculine voice in an 26

27

28

29

Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland / Die romantische Schule. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 8/1, (Manfred Windfuhr, Ed.), (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1979), 165. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), X. See Nike Wagner, Geist und Geschlecht: Karl Kraus und die Erotik der Wiener Moderne (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), 76-131. See, for example, Erich Mayser, H. Heines "Buch der Lieder" im 19. Jahrhundert

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accessible, democratic idiom results in the reprehensible manhandling of language. Thus, Heine becomes the Heinrich Heine, "der der deutschen Sprache so sehr den Mieder gelockert hat, daß heute alle Kommis an ihren Brüsten fingem können." (5 4 190) Although neither the sexist implications of a "Mieder" nor the class-bound prejudice suggested by "Kommis" are acceptable today, it is essential to stress that this metaphorical statement turns on the objection to sexual abuse, not to erotic stimulation. This drastic formulation reflects Kraus's abhorrence of Heine's sexual sensibility and helps to explain why the lyrical female poetic voice of Else Lasker-Schüler is pointedly contrasted in the Fackel with the ironic male voice of Heine. In 1910, before Heine und die Folgen appeared in print, Kraus declared that he would give more for Lasker-Schüler's poem, "Ein alter Tibetteppich," than for all of Heine. (F 313-314, 36) And, again in 1913 in the controversial essay, "Er ist doch e Jud," Lasker-Schüler as well as Peter Altenberg, whose literary otherness was often explained in terms of femininity, are held up as Jewish writers preferable to Heine. (F 386, 6-7; also in 54 331, 333) On a second and perhaps more convincing level, Kraus takes Heine to task for his denigration of August von Platen's homosexuality. Despite recent attempts to explain Heine's exploitation of the sexual lives of his polemical victims - Börne and August Wilhelm Schlegel, as well as Platen - as a strategy of "total polemic," 30 this proves to be a convincing point. Again, it is not merely Heine's own behavior, which Kraus finds reprehensible enough, but the fact that he can again point to the disastrous "consequences." Maximilian Harden's revelations in the Eulenburg affair ~ the accusations of homosexuality against Wilhelm II's inner circle - had already led to a sustained polemic against Harden, Kraus's former mentor and also an assimilated Jew. 3 1 From Kraus's perspective, the polemical burial of Heine, condemned for both his lyrical inadequacies and his unethical wit, follows naturally upon the "Erledigung" ( F 234-235, 1907, 1-36)) and the "Nachruf' ( F 242-243, 1908, 4-52) of Harden, the disseminator of sexual gossip and of a bombastic style pilloried in the Fackel as "Desperanto." (F 307-308, 1910, 42-50) In another gloss that is not integrated into Heine und die Folgen, Kraus reinforces his argument for the continuing influence of Heine's compromised polemics by contrasting him with Oscar Wilde, who had been vilified by

30

31

(Stuttgart: Heinz, 1978), 86f. Robert E. Holub, "Heine's Sexual Assaults: Towards a Theory of the Total Polemic," Monatshefte 73 (1981), 415-28. See the excellent study by James D. Steakley, "Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eulenburg Affair," Studies in Visual Communication 9, 2 (Spring, 1983), 20-51.

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Max Nordau in a manner that Kraus condemned as "die Bepissung von Dichtergräbern." (F 226, 1907, 14) Using Heine as a positive foil, Nordau, the physician and Zionist leader, had claimed that Wilde's Salorrw exhibits "the slippery impulses of a sexual psychopath." (F 226, 14) 32 Kraus exposed the defamation of homosexuality implicit in Nordau's "medical" treatment of Wilde's literary production and played off the persecuted, "perverse" genius against Heine, who was viewed as a "raving heterosexual." 33 Nevertheless, Kraus avoided responsibility for the inevitable connection between his own use of pathological metaphors and their anti-Jewish implications. Not only did he repeatedly cite reviews that denied any anti-Semitic motives behind Heine und die Folgen, but he also apparently suppressed critiques which expressly linked Heine's illness with his Jewishness. This is the case, for example, in a notice from the Berlin newspaper Die Post, which may be found in the Heine file in the Kraus Archives. 34 Although the pathological metaphor of the "Folgekrankheiten des Heineismus" ( F 311-312, 1910, 6) remained part of the Fackel 's discourse on the evils of modern journalism, Kraus would have insisted on an essential difference between his polemic against Heine and the pathographies of artists being constructed by popular psychology. The public condemnation of Nordau the "Literaturarzt," as he had been called as early as Eine Krone für Zion,35 belonged to Kraus's vigilant campaign against various attempts to pathologize artistic creativity. He was also well informed about such tendencies in the emergent pyschoanalytic movement and found out almost immediately that he himself had been the object of a paper entitled "Die 'Fackel'-Neurose," which the young physician Fritz Wittels read at the meeting of Freud's Wednesday Society on January 12, 1910. 36 It was during this time that Kraus began to write Heine und die Folgen, and there is considerable evidence that

32

As early as 1901, Kraus had questioned Nordau's Zionist promotion of Heine, "den deutschen Dichter." (F 87, 20f.) 33 This is the phrase of Sander L. Gilman, "Karl Kraus's Oscar Wilde: Race, Sex, and Difference," Austrian Studies I (1990), 12-27, here 24. The place of homosexuality in Kraus's sexualized aesthetics still awaits thorough study. The situation is complicated by the homoerotic feelings Kraus seems to have aroused in some members of his circle. 34 This notice, dated October 9, 1911, was acquired from Klose & Seidel, a newspaper clippings service in Berlin. The author cites the divergence of Kraus's criticism from the usual glorification of Heine "durch fremdblütig geleitete Zeitungen und Zeitschriften" and emphasizes two phrases from "Heine und die Folgen": "zwischen Kunst und Leben ein gefährlicher Vermittler, Parasit an beiden" (5 4 186) and "die Franzosenkrankheit, die er uns eingeschleppt hat." (5 4 186) See the Konvolut L 137.742 in the Druckschriftensammlung of the Vienna City Library. 35 Karl Kraus, Frühe Schriften II, 314. 36 See Herman Nunberg and Emst Federn (Eds.), Protokolle der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung, Vol. 2, 1908-1910, (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1977), 346-51.

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a critical reappraisal of Freud and psychoanalytic theory belongs to the previously unrecognized motivations behind the essay. Even before Wittels's presentation of the "Fackel Neurosis," Kraus had gotten wind of the manuscript of the satirical novel Ezechiel der Zugereiste. In this crude roman ά clef, Wittels, also a former contributor to the Fackel, ridiculed Kraus by means of anti-Semitic caricature and casually revealed a venereal infection in a character based on the young actress Irma Karczewska, whose erotic affections they had shared. 37 Determined to prevent publication of the novel, Kraus sent his lawyer to Freud with the threat of an all-out campaign against the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. While Freud unsuccessfully tried to dissuade Wittels from letting the novel go into print, Kraus gave the Psychoanalytic Circle a sample of what he might do, with this aphoristic characterization of their scientific activities that appeared in the Fackel of April 9, 1910: "Eine gewisse Psychoanalyse ist die Beschäftigung geiler Rationalisten, die alles in der Welt auf sexuelle Ursachen zurückführen mit Ausnahme ihrer Beschäftigung." (F 300, 1910, 26) 38 In the same issue, the Heine essay is mentioned for the first time as "Gegen Heinrich Heine (Aphorismen zum Sprachproblem)" (F 300, inside cover), which was scheduled for the program of Kraus's first lecture to be held in Vienna on May 3. When the Psychoanalytic Society met on April 13, the "Kraus Affair" was on the agenda. Freud enjoined his colleagues to avoid any further discussion of Kraus's attacks with this admonition: "Es gebe für die Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung keine 'Affaire Kraus.'" 3 9 This official repression of Kraus's critique of psychoanalysis duplicated the conspiracy of silence against the satirist maintained by the Viennese press. Their tactics of "Totschweigen," which Kraus often criticized in the Fackel, make the proximity between aphorisms against Heine and aphorisms against psychoanalysis look more planned than coincidental. Kraus's perception that Freud had condoned the public examination of his private life and of the psychological origins of his literary activity must have further shaken his belief in the value of psychoanalysis. As Gilbert Carr has shown, Kraus had responded positively in the Fackel to Freud's dream theory and had apparently found common ground between his own practice of satirical wit and the investigations in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbe-

37

For a detailed account of these events and their contribution to the intense interaction in Vienna between psychoanalysis and literature, see Leo A. Lensing, "Geistige Väter' & 'Das Kindweib': Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus & Irma Karczewska in der Autobiographie von Fritz Wittels," FORUM 36, 430/431 (October/November 1989), 62-71. 3 ® The translation is from Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths. Selected Aphorism (Ed. and Trans. Harry Zohn), (Montreal: Engendra Press, 1976), 78. 39 Protokolle, Vol. 2, 439.

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wußten.40 It may have been Kraus's interest in Freud that initially led him to encourage Fritz Wittels's contributions to the Fackel, which included both fiction based on so-called "Freudian mechanisms" 41 and polemical applications of psychoanalytic theory to social and sexual issues. As early as the summer of 1908, however, Kraus had begun to suspect Wittels of misunderstanding the Fackel as being merely a forum for anti-corruptionism and of exploiting psychoanalytic theory for journalistic purposes. In fact, several aphorisms which explicate the problematic relationship between "character" and "talent" or between an "original" and his "imitators" can be read as referring both to the Heine problem and to Wittels's intellectual servitude to Freud and Kraus, (cf., for example, F 266, 1908, 21; 24-25; F 277-78, 1909, 59; and F 285-86, 1909, 31) While Kraus remained remarkably unwilling to attack Freud by name, he did not shrink from criticizing his helpers and followers, whom he ridiculed as "Zwangshandlungsgehilfen" (F 387-88, 1913, 21) - a pun which combines the psychoanalytic term "Zwangshandlung" with "Handlungsgehilfe," the German equivalent of the "Kommis" or salesman whose maltreatment of language is excoriated in Heine und die Folgen. (S 4 190) There is also reason to believe that the Heine essay entails a covert reckoning with Freud and his veneration of Heine, a project given added polemical energy by Kraus's indignation at the public analysis of his artistic personality in terms of an oedipal revolt against the Jewish liberal press. In 1906, Freud had responded to a survey sponsored by the enterprising Viennese bookseller Hugo Heller, with the information that Heine's "Lazarus" cycle was one of his favorite works of literature. 42 Heller had published Freud's answer along with those of Altenberg and Schnitzler, as well as other Viennese and foreign intellectual notables in a slender volume entitled Vom Lesen und von guten Büchern. This publication caught the disapproving eye of Karl Kraus, and in three successive issues of the Fackel in 1906 (F212, 14; F 2 1 3 , 15-17; F214, 6) he took issue with the project as a whole, which he decried as an "orgy of snobbism" (F 212, 14), while reserving particular disdain for the contributions of Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. It is quite likely, however, that at this juncture Kraus would have noted with approval Freud's choice of "Lazarus," since in Heine und 4

® Gilbert J. Carr, "Karl Kraus and Sigmund Freud," in Gilbert J. Carr and Eda Sagarra (Eds.), Irish Studies in Modern Austrian Literature (Dublin: Trinity College, 1982), 130. 41 Wittels's own phrase, quoted in Lensing, "Geistige Väter," 62. 42 Sigmund Freud, Briefe 1873-1939 (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1960), 268. The letter was a pamphlet entitled Vom Lesen und von guten Büchern. Eine Rundfrage veranstaltet von der Redaktion der "Neuen Blätter für Literatur und Kunst" (Vienna: Hugo Heller, 1907). The commentary to the letter omits important bibliographical information and thereby fails to mention the involvement of the cultural entrepreneur Heller.

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die Folgen he himself is still willing to praise what he calls the lyrical poetry of Heine's dying: "parts of Romanzero, Lamentations, Lazarus." (5 4 205) Once the conflict with Freud over the "Fackel Neurosis" had broken out, Kraus would undoubtedly have recalled Hugo Heller's role in publicizing Freud's veneration of Heine, especially since he must have known that Heller belonged to Freud's Wednesday Society and had attended the session during which Wittels presented his controversial analysis of the satirist. 43 In any case, as Kraus prepared to write Heine una die Folgen, he would certainly have reconsidered the generous discussion of a whole range of Heine's works in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, including Die Bäder von Lucca, in which Heine ridiculed Count Platen's homosexuality. Along with Lichtenberg, Heine is in fact the writer whom Freud most often cites in his book on jokes. Not surprisingly, in Heine und die Folgen Kraus singles out some of the same key phrases and quotations that Freud had examined. Freud, for example, is much more admiring of the blasphemous wit in Heine's purported last words ("Dieu me pardonnera, c'est son metier," as quoted by Kraus, [S4 206]) than Kraus is prepared to be. While Freud understands metier as "Geschäft oder Beruf' 4 4 and is clearly impressed by the bravura with which Heine compares God to a workman or doctor hired to perform a task, Kraus belittles the blasphemous thrust of the comparison and insists that even in matters of faith Heine cannot get beyond business aspects. Later, Kraus would refer to "the dying Heine's suicidal joke" and translate "metier" unambiguously as "Geschäft." (F 462-71, 1917, 23) Of particular interest is the famous pun "famillionär" from Die Bäder von Lucca, which concerns Freud at length. For the psychoanalyst and amateur theorist of wit, "famillionär" is not only an excellent pun for explaining the technique of jokes (IV, 20-24); it also suggests the psychological connections between the poet's work and his difficult family life and even provides an opportunity to establish a personal connection to Heine in print. (IV, 132-34) Freud relates an anecdote about an aunt of his who had sat at the same table with the poet in Hamburg without knowing who he was. (IV, 133) Whatever Freud's motive for including this reminiscence, the text itself betrays a decided sympathy for Heine and shows that for his generation Heine was a living presence, rather than just another name in literary history. For Kraus, on the other hand, "famillionär" is but one example of the "schlechte Witze" (S 4 43

44

On Heller's participation in Viennese cultural life, see Michael Worbs, Nervenkunst: Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1983), 143-148. Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Umbewußten, in his Studienausgabe, Vol. 4, Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Eds.), (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1970), 108. Further references will be abbreviated as IV plus the page number and cited in the text.

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203) that issue from "schlechte Gesinnung." (S 4 203) He, in fact, interprets these puns as examples of bad Jewish jokes, which belie Heine's boast of wielding a good Protestant house ax, even though Kraus realizes that they are motivated by their origin in the comic imagination of the Jewish character, Hirsch Hyacinth (S 4 204). In contrast to Freud, who sees among other things Heine working out his aggression towards his rich uncle Salomon, Kraus perceives irresponsible punning, which includes the denigration of Platen's poetry as "Saunetten" (S 4 203; a pun on sow and sonnets). That this interpretation is not only directed against Heine but also aims at revising Freud seems even more probable in light of a passage in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, in which Heine and Kraus are actually brought together. Freud alludes to Kraus twice in his book: at first by name in the discussion of an anti-journalistic pun in the Fackel (IV, 30); 45 and then indirectly with reference to a joke made at the expense of Kraus, whose susceptibility to physical attacks was common knowledge in Vienna: "Wenn der X das hört, bekommt er wieder eine Ohrfeige." (IV, 75) Freud interprets this as an example of "omission": what is omitted is that X, having heard about a certain matter, will write a "biting" article to which the only response will be a physical attack. One of the further examples of this technique that follows immediately is taken from Heine: "Er lobt sich so stark, daß die Räucherkerzen im Preise steigen." (IV, 75) Whether Freud consciously or unconsciously pits Heine against Kraus and refers obliquely to what had long since become one of the cliches of Kraus criticism, the stench of his exaggerated self-praise, is less important than the textual proximity and the description of the satirist's reaction to the misdeeds of his opponents as a "bissigen Artikel." (IV, 75) As careful a reader as Kraus would have recognized in the repetition of this formulation an allusion to the earlier characterization of Count Platen's satirical attack on Heine. In an earlier section of his study, Freud quotes Heine's criticism of Platen's "biting satire": "Diese Satire wäre nicht so bissig geworden, wenn der Dichter mehr zu beißen gehabt hätte." (IV, 39) Rather than examining the implications of this judgement or of the reprehensible homosexual jokes in Die Bäder von Lucca, Freud simply goes on to another "good example of play upon words." (IV, 39) As part of his own extended analysis of Die Bäder von Lucca, Kraus cites the same passage and pointedly criticizes its

As a matter of fact, Kraus's name does not appear in the text until the 1912 edition; but, given the fanatical precision with which the Fackel was read, it is unlikely that Freud's reader would not have recognized the author of the pun. That Kraus is identified as the author in 1912, at a time when Freud cannot have felt well disposed towards him, suggests that Kraus may have demanded this correction during the negotiations concerning the "Fackel Neurosis."

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faulty wit: "wer die Armut seines Gegners verhöhnt, kann keinen besseren Witz machen als den: der Ödipus von Platen wäre 'nicht so bissig geworden, wenn der Verfasser mehr zu beißen gehabt hätte'." (S 4 203) Whether these pointed parallels in Heine und die Folgen are seen as conscious corrections of Freud or not, it seems plausible that in defending Platen Kraus also sensed the need to defend himself against the reductionistic explanations of psychoanalysis. If Heine und die Folgen can indeed be understood as revising Freud's image of Heine, then the key statement "Ein Angriff auf Heine ist ein Eingriff in jedermanns Privatleben" may also be interpreted as a satirical message to the founder of psychoanalysis. The word "Eingriff can have the very specific meaning of a surgical procedure or operation, and Kraus had already expressed reservations about the "medical movement that applies the technical terms of surgery to psychological phenomena" ("eine medizinische Richtung, welche die Fachausdrücke der Chirurgie auf Seelisches anwendet." [F 256, 1908, 19]) This medical movement was, of course, psychoanalysis. By parodying its technical language, Kraus may have also been directing his critical operation against the founder of the movement, who in a private letter made available for publication had named Heine one of his favorite writers. For Kraus, this same writer had come to represent the evils of modern journalism. In any case, there is no doubt that in retrospect Kraus saw a continuity between Heine's consequences and those of Freud. In a 1922 gloss on an article describing how Freud had become the latest intellectual fashion in Paris, Kraus articulates this diagnosis directly: "Die Kreise, die ehedem im Banne der Heineschen Lyrik standen, sind jetzt einem [Freud] verfallen, der schon weiß, was soll es bedeuten." (F 588-94, 1922, 41f) With this simple reversal of the line from Heine's "Lorelei" poem - "ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten" — which becomes a leitmotif of the Fackel's critique of psychoanalysis, Kraus questions the value of a therapeutic approach that claims to explain everything. Taking Platen's side in Heine und die Folgen meant incurring the suspicion of condoning the anti-Semitic slurs that had contributed to Heine's decision to write Die Bäder von Lucca in the first place. That Kraus was sensitive to this problem is clear from his reprinting reviews, such as the one by the Swiss writer J. V. Widmann, in which Kraus is said to be completely free of the prejudices that mark the Heine polemics "von Antisemiten und von Deutschtümlern." (F 317-18, 1911, 43) It is also characteristic of Kraus's strategy of controlled publicity that he is willing to cite the opinion of a German nationalist newspaper that praises not only his attack on Heine, but also Kraus himself as a "fanatisch in sich vergrabenen Juden." (F 331-32, 1911, 55) And, in 1913 he still feels compelled to insist that Heine und die Folgen is more dangerous than any anti-Semitic critique of Heine. (F 372-73,

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31) This obvious anxiety about the essay being misread is understandable in light of the aphoristic statement in the final paragraph: Heine war ein Moses, der mit dem Stab auf den Felsen der deutschen Sprache schlug. Aber Geschwindigkeit ist keine Hexerei, das Wasser flöß nicht aus dem Felsen, sondern er hatte es mit der andern Hand herangebracht; und es war Eau de Cologne. (S 4 209) Without trying to disentangle all of the ideological implications of this identification of Heine with Moses, it is safe to say that it reflects Kraus's need to disassociate himself from Heine's Jewishness. Read from this perspective the phrase "Mosaik dieses Werks" in the prognosis: "Jeder Nachkomme Heines nimmt aus dem Mosaik dieses Werks ein Steinchen, bis keines mehr übrig bleibt." (S 4 193) It acquires a double meaning. It seems to suggest that the "Mosaic" or Jewish element in Heine's work produces an oeuvre that is fragmentary and construed rather than organic and whole. It is important to stress that Kraus denied any intention of being fair to Heine. In an afterword that accompanied the publication of Heine und die Folgen in the Fackel, after the essay had failed to sell briskly in brochure form, Kraus contended that he had advanced the critique of a "Lebensform." (F 329-30, 1911, 4) He had not undertaken the evaluation of Heine's poetical works. What exactly this critique entailed is expressed quite openly in an unpublished letter of June 6, 1910 to Lion Goldschmidt, the representative of a literary society in Hamburg that had invited Kraus to give a lecture. Kraus describes the texts he would read and includes the following description of the Heine essay: '"Heine und die Folgen' (eine polemische Beurtheilung Heines als Ursprung des Feuilletonismus, eine Abhandlung über Sprache, über Lyrik und Zeitungsstil, also eben jenes Thema 'Moderner Journalismus', das Sie in der Harden-Sache vermuthen." 46 This forthright explanation, which is all the more convincing for its avoidance of the convoluted style peculiar to the correspondence of the Verlag Die Fackel, indicates that Kraus's purpose was hardly the "artistic and moral defamation" read into the essay by Mechthild Borries, the author of the only monograph on the polemic. 47 As this essay has attempted to demonstrate, Kraus's self-interpretation proves inadequate to the ideological tensions and rhetorical excesses which characterize the text. In conclusion, I would like to propose that both Heine and Kraus be seen as sufferers, who surmounted the fate of being German-Jewish poets. This Unpublished letter, June 6, 1910, Karl Kraus Archives, Vienna City Library. The reading in Hamburg did not take place, presumably because Goldschmidt and his literary society, which had been at the forefront of the campaign to create a Heine monument in Hamburg, learned just how polemical the essay was. Borries, Ein Angriff auf Heinrich Heine, 7.

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perspective follows the arguments of a little-known response to Heine und die Folgen by the Yiddish writer, Shlomo Bickel (1896-1969). In his Inzich un Arumzich, published in Bucharest in 1936, Bickel reads the essay as a powerful but flawed evaluation that overlooks the positive consequences of Heine's example: Wenn Kraus wüßte, daß auf der "jüdischen Gasse" Heine die große elektrische Lampe im Hintergäßchen literarischen Barocks war, daß beim Scheine dieser Lampe (obwohl einem nur äußerlichen) ein Peretz und ein Mosche Leib Halpern in sich und um sich herum schauen konnten, daß das scharfe satirische Wort bei uns, wie es scheint, ohne Heine . . . unmöglich war, wenn er das wüßte, er, die Zuchtrute Europas, vielleicht hätten sich ihm auch andere "Folgen" gezeigt. Ach wenn er, der Erbe aller unserer Propheten (es ist nicht Banalität, sondern Wahrheit!) "doch e Jud" wäre. 4 « This quotation and the context from which it is taken constitute a remarkable document in the complicated and tragic interaction between Jews and Germans in German literature. From the perspective of Yiddish, the endangered language that represented what would soon seem an impossible conjunction of German and Hebrew, Bickel attempts to mediate between two seemingly incompatible German-Jewish writers. The reference to "doch e Jud" evokes another polemic in which Kraus — as Bickel correctly surmises - ironically accepted his Jewish background. (5 4 327-334) The essay "Er ist doch e Jud" was first read at a lecture in 1913 under the title "Ich und das Judentum," a formulation which more aptly circumscribes the fundamental questions with which Kraus struggles in this text. Despite the intense, ambivalent discussion of his own position vis-ä-vis Judaism, which should give those critics pause who attempt to explain away Kraus's achievement in terms of "Jewish self-hatred," Kraus does abandon Heine to the categories of racist pseudo-science, as propagated by Lanz von Liebenfels, a forerunner of National Socialist ideology. (S 4 332f.) The polemics against Heine, the later phases of which deserve further study, are only one aspect of the complex interaction between Kraus's satirical achievement and his repressed Jewish identity. A literary biography will, I believe, come to the same conclusion about Kraus that Schlomo Bickel came to regarding Heine: that he was "ein glücklich-unglücklicher jüdischer Dichter. " 4 9 Schlomo Bickel, Irnich un Arumzich: Notizn fitn a polemist un kritishe bamerkungen (Bucharest: Editura "Shalom Aleichem," 1936), 177. The German translation of the Yiddish original is by Gabriel Rosenrauch, a Czernowitz lawyer devoted to Kraus's work and also personally acquainted with Bickel. Bickel's book contains an essay on Kraus, as well as a notice entitled "Heine und die Folgen," from which the quotation cited here is taken. Bickel, Inzich un Arumzich, 177.

Itta Shedletzky

Bacherach and Barcelona. On Else Lasker-Schüler's Relation to Heinrich Heine

At the outset, let me pose the following questions: What did Heinrich Heine mean to Else Lasker-Schüler? Was it more than just the fact, that she came to know Heine ~ like Goethe and Schiller — "already as a child in her parents' house."1 This piece of information, in itself, is not at all marginal in the case of Else. (I shall allow myself to use this intimate form to make a long name short.) Did their common German-Jewish background, even from the same region, have any significance for her? Do the two authors have more in common than their free play with the German language and with Jewish matters or their preference for assuming roles and undergoing metamorphoses? Can one speak about spiritual affinity inspite of obvious differences in time and temperament, mentality and gender? In Else's work and letters there are several allusions to Heine and quotations from his poems. From a first glance, mainly at the quotations, one has the impression, that Else was quite fond of Heine, but did not know much more about his work than a few of the most famous poems from Buch der Lieder. Thus, in a letter to Willem (Wilhelm) Schmidtbonn, she parodies the poem " Die Lorelei" in the dialect of her native city Elberfeld: Wo steckst De dann eegentlich, Willem? Etwa op däm Hunsrück on trägst eenen Muhlkorb? [...] Oder weilst De bei de Loreley on bricht Ding flammend Herz entzwei? Eck weess jedenfalls nich, wat soll et bedeuten on worömm eck so trureg bin, Du wackelst em Schaukelstuhle meck ömmer durch ming Sinn. Der Abend is kühl on et plätschert die Hände onterm Kinn, eck bin in Zürich et gletschert op eenmal - [...] 2 (Where are you hiding, WHlem? Are you on the Hunsrück wearing a muzzle? Or are you staying with the Lorelei and your flaming heart is breaking? I, in any case, do not know what it 1 2

Sigrid Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler. Ihr Werk und ihre Zeit (Heidelberg: 1980), 68. In Konzert (1932), dtv 10645 (München: 1986), 73. The quotations from Else LaskerSchüler's works are taken from the pocket-book edition of dtv: Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden (dtv 10641-10648), (München: 1986). The year in brackets after the title refers to the first publication. Quotations from Heinrich Heine's works are taken from the Insel edition: Heines Werke in zehn Bänden (Oskar Walzel, Ed.), (Leipzig: 1910).

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means and why I am so sad. You are shaking in a rocking chair always through my mind. The evening is cool and it babbles, hands under the chin. I am in Zurich and suddenly glaciers —

In the prose sketch Handschrift, Else refers to Heine's ballad "Belsazar" and cites the famous opening lines: "Die Mitternacht zog näher schon;/ In stummer Ruh lag Babylon." 3 In her drama "Ichundich," Else quotes the chorus line from Heine's ballad "Die Grenadiere": "Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser gefangen." 4 In her polemic against the publishers, "Ich räume auf," Else uses — slightly changed — the last two lines of Heine's poem "Und bist du erst mein ehrlich Weib," in order to claim the poet's legitimate need for appraisal: "Doch wenn du meine Verse nicht lobst,/ Laß ich mich von dir scheiden." 5 In Else's sarcastic criticism of the PEN club, whose members discuss publishing matters "ästhetisch am Teetisch," 6 the allusion is quite clear: Sie saßen und tranken am Teetisch Und sprachen von Liebe viel Die Herren, die waren ästhetisch, Die Damen von zartem Gefühl. 7 Else's second husband, who made her suffer by leaving her for another woman, receives the name of one of Heine's suffering lovers, in a manner of inversion typical of Else's writing. Thus, in her novel Mein Herz, Herwarth Waiden becomes Wilhelm von Kevlaar. 8 In another passage of this novel, consisting of letters to Norway, Else laconically writes to her addressees, Herwarth Waiden and his travelling companion: "Wenn Ihr eine Rose seht, sagt, ich laß sie grüßen," alluding to "Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt," not from the Buch der Lieder, but still one of Heine's most famous poems, set to music by Felix Mendelssohn. 9 In 1909, Else wrote in a letter to Jethro Bitell: "Sehen Sie wie Ratcliff aus? Ich finde den Sir Ratcliff von Heine, wenn er nicht so pathetisch geschrieben wäre, wundervoll." 10 Else was probably allu3

"Gesichte" (1913), Der Prinz von Theben und andere Prosa (dtv 10644), 153. Heine, Vol.l, 47. 4 "Ichundich" (written in 1940/41, publ. 1970), Die Wupper und andere Dramen (dtv 10647), 268. Heine, Vol.l, 39. 5 "Ich räume auf! Meine Anklage gegen meine Verleger" (1925), Der Prinz von Theben , 345. Heine, Vol. 1, 146. 6 "Gesagtes und Beantwortetes," Konzert, 77. 7 Heine, Vol. 1, 93. 8 Mein Herz (1912, dtv 10642), 59. In 1905, Else had dedicated her poem "Weltende" to Herwarth Waiden. In the collected edition of her poems in 1917, she changed the dedication thus: "H.W. Wilhelm von Kevlaar zur Erinnerung an viele Jahre." Else refers to Heine's poem "Die Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar." Heine, Vol.l, 168. 9 Mein Herz, 32. Heine, Vol. 2, 9. Lieber gestreifter Tiger. Briefe von Else-Lasker Schaler. Erster Band (Margarete Kupper,

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ding here to Heine's drama, rather than to the poem "Ratcliff' in the Buch der Lieder. So far for a first glance. It seems that Sigrid Bauschinger, in her book about Else, did not consider, except very superficially, her relation to Heine. She writes that she came to know "Goethe, Schiller, and Heine already as a child in her parents' house," in order to point out that Else did not have any thorough literary erudition, and that she was not a "poeta doctus." 11 In another chapter, dealing with Else's vague knowledge of Judaism, Bauschinger writes: "Die Mutter erzählte ihr von Goethe, Heine und Napoleon, aber nicht aus der Bibel." 12 Though Bauschinger does not state her sources, she surely relates here to the following passage from Ich räume auf, Else's polemic against her publishers: Nichtlesen war immer mein Manko. Heute noch. Desto hingebender berauschten mich meiner Mutter Erzählungen, ihre Napoleonschwärmerei, der mit dem Schwerte den Völkern eine Weltgeschichte schrieb. Er war ihre große Liebe gewesen. Auch lauschte ich auf ihre Ehrfurcht zu Goethe und weinte, wenn sie mir von dem Hungertode Heinrich Heines erzählte. Sie war's, die den Keim vertrauend in mein stürmisches Kinderherz pflanzte, aufzuräumen! 13 Else often writes about her beloved mother's veneration for Goethe and Napoleon, 14 but this is the only passage where she explicitly mentions Heine as someone her mother admired and told stories about. In the context of Else's attack against her publishers, the "story-telling mother" is mainly mentioned for the sake of the argument leading to Heine, who according to Else, suffered as she did, from his publisher's bad treatment. Furthermore, "cleaning up," the way she does in her polemic, Else most probably learnt more from Heine than from her gentle mother. At the same time, the way Else describes her desolate reaction as a child to the story about Heine's famine seems to indicate that she had a more intimate relation to Heine than to Goethe and Napoleon, who were closer to her mother than to herself. How close she was to Heine, as a poet and as a human being, Else shows in her own way quite clearly in the tractate "Vom Himmel": Was wissen die Armen, denen nie ein Blau aufging am Ziel ihres Herzens oder am Weg ihres Traums in der Nacht. Oder die Enthimmelten, die Frühblauberaubten. Es kann der Himmel in

11 12 13 14

Ed.), (München: 1969), 30. The poem "Ratcliff" in Heine, Vol.l, 156; the drama "William Ratcliff" in Heine, Vol.l, 377ff. Bauschinger, 68. Ibid., 165. "Ich räume auf!", 321. The most significant story in this context is Else's Im RosenholzJcästchen. Zu Goethes lOOjährigem Gedenktag. See especially the opening sentence: "Meine von mir bewunderte Mama besaß neben ihrer Napoleonsammlung auch eine schwärmerische Verehrung

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ihnen kein Licht mehr zum Blühen finden. Aber Blässe verbreitet der Zweifler, die Zucht des Himmels bedingt Kraft. Ich denke an den Nazarener, er sprach erfüllt vom Himmel und prangte schwelgend blau, daß sein Kommen schon ein Wunder war, er wandelte immerblau über die Plätze der Lande. Und Buddha, der indische Königsohn, trug die Blume Himmel in sich in blauerlei Mannigfaltigkeit Erfüllungen. Und Goethe und Nietzsche (Kunst ist Reden mit Gott) und alle Aufblickenden sind Himmelbegnadete und gerade Heine überzeugt mich, Himmel hing noch über ihn hinaus und darum riß er fahrlässig an den blauen Gottesranken, wie ein Kind wild die Locken seiner Mutter zerrt. Hauptmanns Angesicht und auch Ihres, Dalai-Lama, wirken blau. Den Himmel kann sich niemand künstlich verdienen, aber mancher pflückt die noch nicht befestigte, junghimmlische Blüte im Menschen ab. Das sind die Teufel. Ihr Leben ist ohne Ausblick, ihr Herz ohne Ferne. 1 5 According to her premise, "Die Gottheit Himmel im Menschen ist Genie," 16 Else, in this passage, evaluates the relation of certain prophets and poets to heaven, in declining order from the highest level of inspiration to the lowest. After the prophets Jesus and Buddha, she names five poets: Goethe, Nietzsche, Heine, Gerhart Hauptmann, Karl Kraus (Dalai-Lama), and beneath him, the devils. Heine appears in the third place, after Goethe and Nietzsche, as a poet with an authentic and, therefore convincing, relationship to heaven. In the case of Hauptmann and Kraus, Else sees no more than a dim reflection of heaven, an artificial impression of inspiration; their faces are not actually blue, they merely give a blue impression. The tractate "Vom Himmel" is at its core a polemic against Karl Kraus. Else presents it in her novel Mein Herz (1912) as the copy of a manuscript she had sent for publication to Kraus, the editor of the periodical Die Fackel. In 1910 Kraus had published Else's poem "Ein alter Tibetteppich." In his famous footnote to the poem he plays off Else against Heine, very much to the latter's disadvantage: Das hier aus der Berliner Wochenschrift "Der Sturm" zitierte Gedicht gehört für mich zu den entzückendsten und ergreifendsten, die ich je gelesen habe, und wenige von Goethe abwärts gibt es, in denen so wie in diesem Tibetteppich Sinn und Klang, Wort und Bild, Sprache und Seele verwoben sind. Daß ich für diese neunzeilige Kostbarkeit den ganzen Heine hergebe, möchte ich nicht

16

für Goethe." Konzert, 57. Mein Herz, 46. Bauschinger quotes this passage, but her interpretation is rather out of context. She is not even aware of the central position among the inspired poets granted by Else to Heine: "Die fremden Religionsstifter sind für sie [Else] wie Goethe, Nietzsche oder sogar Gerhart Hauptmann und Karl Kraus, 'Himmelbegnadete,' große Künstler." See Bauschinger, 167. Mein Herz, 47.

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sagen. Weil ich ihn nämlich, wie man hoffentlich jetzt schon weiß, viel billiger hergebe.17 In December, 1910 Kraus decided to write all the articles for Die Fackel by himself without any other contributions. Else refused to accept this decision. She continued to hand in manuscripts for publication and resented their rejection by Kraus. 18 Therefore, in her tractate "Vom Himmel," Else aims to peeve Kraus by his own method. She evaluates poets as he does, "from Goethe downwards," but now she plays off Heine against Kraus, much to the former's advantage. But, Heine, of whom Else paints such a lively picture in her tractate, not only serves her argument against Kraus. The poet Heine, who "recklessly pulls God's blue tendrils like a child wildly tugging his mother's curls," appears here as a playmate of the poetess Else, who once in "Im Anfang" had been "God's rascal": IM ANFANG (Weltscherzo) Hing an einer goldenen Lenzwolke, Als die Welt noch Kind war, Und Gott noch junger Vater war. Schaukelte, hei! Auf dem Ätherei, Und meine Wollhärchen fütterten ringelrei. Neckte den wackelnden Mondgrosspapa, Naschte Goldstaub der Sonnenmama, In den Himmel sperrte ich Satan ein Und Gott in die rauchende Hölle ein. Die drohten mit ihrem grössten Finger Und haben "klumbumm! klumbumm!" gemacht Und es sausten die Peitschenwinde! Doch Gott hat nachher zwei Donner gelacht Mit dem Teufel über meine Todsünde. Würde 10 000 Erdglück geben, Noch einmal so gottgeboren zu leben, So gottgeborgen, so offenbar. Ja! Ja! Als ich noch Gottes Schlingel war! 19

18 19

Quoted in Else Lasker-Schüler, Dichtungen und Dokumente (Ernst Ginsberg, Ed.), (München: Kösel, 1951), 566. Bauschinger, 129-130. Styx (1902), Gedichte 1902-1943 (dtv 10641), 74.

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In Das Hebräerland (1937), Else calls her poem "Im Anfang" (1911) "meine Ballade, vom 'mir' handelnd."20 She cites it once more in her last, unfinished work, the drama "Ichundlch." Thus, Heine, the wild child playing with God, is part of one of Else's favorite and most personal legends. In her case, this can only mean that she felt very close to Heine, poetically and spiritually. When Else gave the title Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona to a story published in 1921, she alluded to the title of Heine's Der Rabbi von Bacherach. She chose Barcelona as an alliteration to Bacherach, thus hinting at the connection between the two stories which, in fact, reveals itself to the attentive reader. Otherwise, "Toledo" would have been more adequate. Heine's Rabbi Abraham studies there for seven years, and during this time he became acquainted with Don Isaak Abarbanel, the main figure in the third and last chapter of Heine's story. In the popular Jewish tradition, Toledo, more than other Jewish centers in Spain, is the legendary place of Marrano persecutions and tales of miraculous salvations. Else herself writes in Hebräerland : "Oft blickten beim Abendrot meiner Mama prachtvolle spanische Augen ganz weit in die Ferne ... ich glaube, nach Toledo." 21 It is easier to answer the question how Else read the Rabbi von Bacherach than to determine when she did it. It is unlikely that this story was read and told at her parents' house. On the other hand, Else might well have conceived the image of the miraculous rabbi in her childhood, the way she describes it in her story Das erleuchtete Fenster: Das dritte erleuchtete Fenster aber war ein großes Bogenfenster gewesen im Treppenhaus, vom Treppenhaus unserer Flur aus gesehen, über unsere Gasse hinweg in einem fremden Birnengarten. Mit Allerleifurcht blickte ich durch den mysteriösen Bogen, dahinter ein altes Mütterchen die Wäsche der Familie des Hauses wusch. Aber ich verwandelte die greise Wäscherin in einen Wunderrabbiner, von dem ich erst vor einigen Jahren ein Büchlein schrieb, in dem die Juden einen sicheren Palast Ihm bauten, dessen Kuppel Ihn schütze vor Ungemach.22 Right after this passage, Else continues: "Vierteljahrhundert gährte diese Dichtung in meinem Herzen, wurde ein Weinberg, alter, spanischer Wein, sternenjährige Judenrebe." 23 If we take Else at her word and count 25 years back from 1921, when the story was published, we come to the nineties of the last century, when Else came to Berlin and became acquainted with mem20

21 22 23

Das Hebräerland (1937, dtv 10646), 160. Else also included this poem in the second edition of her Hebräische Balladen (1913). Das Hebräerland, 96. Konzert, 119-120. Ibid., 120.

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bers of the Young-Jewish Zionist movement. The encounter with Martin Buber and his circle surely influenced Else's first poetic reflections on her Jewish origins and her relation to the Jewish people. Her earliest "Jewish" poems, "Das Lied des Gesalbten" and "Sulamith" were first published in 1901 in the newly founded periodical Ost und West. Monatsschrift für modernes Judentum, a year before they appeared in Styx, Else's first volume of poetry. The opening article in the first issue of Ost und West was Buber's programmatic essay, "Die Jüdische Renaissance." Buber also was one of the founders of the publishing house, "Jüdischer Verlag" in 1902. The fact that one of the literary almanachs and anthologies published by the "Jüdischer Verlag" contained poems by Else Lasker-Schüler may be connected to the relationship between her and Buber. 24 The Zionist movement also engendered a new evaluation of Heine as a Jewish national poet. 25 His Hebräische Melodien and Der Rabbi von Bacherach were celebrated above all as being the quintessence of "Jewish poetry." It might have been in this context that Else got to know Der Rabbi von Bacherach and that, while reading the story, the old image of the "Wunderrabbi" was somehow amalgamated with the figure of Rabbi Abraham and the rhythm and structure of Heine's tale. Else certainly read Der Rabbi von Bacherach, but she did not do so in the usual sense of the word "reading." At least in this respect we may accept the full validity of her often repeated avowal to illiteracy. 26 She read Heine's story as she read the Bible or Goethe's Faust or other works which inspired her own writing, for example, the Bible for her Hebräische Balladen and Faust for her drama "Ichundlch." She absorbed texts, as it were, straight into her own world, creating visions out of hints and gestures, transforming given metaphors into new images in an indigenous process of transmutation. In this context, the following passage from a letter to Paul Goldscheider is quite illuminating. Else probably wrote it during a railway trip: "Ich lese nie im Zug, ich lese überhaupt nur manchmal und dann gehe ich direkt mit dem Inhalt gemeinsam spazieren. Ich habe immer wenig gelesen, warum auch, da die Welt doch das große Bilderbuch ist. " 2 7 In her story Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, Else goes "directly on a joint walk with the contents" of the first chapter of Heine's Der Rabbi von Bacherach. She lets herself be guided by her own motifs, as if she were tracing them in the "read" text. Thus, she transmutes central as well as marginal

25

26 27

On the relationship between Else and Buber, see Jakob Hessing, Else Lasker-Schiller. Biographie einer deutsch-jüdischen Dichterin (Karlsruhe: Loeper, 1985), 77-86. Itta Shedletzky, "Zwischen Stolz und Abneigung. Zur Heine-Rezeption in der deutsch-jüdischen Literaturkritik," in Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (Eds.), Conditio Judaica. Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Erster Teil (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 208. See, for example, the two quotations in this paper (notes 13 and 27). Briefe (note 10), 199.

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matters from Heine's world and time into her own, often placing new or stronger accents. She tells a new story with a structure and a statement of its own, but at the same time manages to expose and illuminate hidden facets in Heine's story. 28 Else's preference for the visual must have drawn her attention to the eye motif in Heine's Rabbi and to the central role of the "eye-language" in the communication between Rabbi Abraham and his beautiful wife Sara. 29 Traces thereof may be found in Else's story in the "Jerusalemaugen" of the Jewish women of Barcelona30 and in the "Judenaugen," which, in the view of the Christians, symbolize the suspicious otherness of the Jews: Die Gebote der Gebetbücher der Juden wurden von außen nach innen gelesen, ihre Judenaugen mußten darum vom Beginn ihrer Ausgeburt anders wie die der gesamten Völker gerichtet worden sein. Augen, die sich nicht am Ziel zu bleiben getrauten, Augen, die sich versteckten in des Buches Heftung, sich flüchteten immer zurück in den Spalt. "Augen, die stehlen" - meinte der Bürgermeister betonend zu seinem erbleichenden Sohn. 31 Else surely was attracted by Heine's picture-book-synopsis of the Bible, that is, the way he presents it in his story as seen through the eyes of the beautiful Sara, who, at the Seder table, now and then glances at the pictures in her Passover Haggada. She notices: wie Abraham die steinernen Götzen seines Vaters mit dem Hammer entzweiklopft, wie die Engel zu ihm kommen, wie Moses den Mizri totschlägt, wie Pharao prächtig auf dem Throne sitzt, wie ihm die Frösche sogar bei Tische keine Ruhe lassen, wie er Gott sei Dank versäuft, wie die Kinder Israel vorsichtig durch das Rote Meer gehen, wie sie offnen Maules, mit ihren Schafen, Kühen und Ochsen vor dem Berge Sinai stehen, dann auch wie der fromme König David die Harfe spielt, und endlich wie Jerusalem mit den Türmen und Zinnen seines Tempels bestrahlt wird vom Glänze der Sonne. 32

28

29

30 31 32

As an aside and without giving much thought to the matter, Bauschinger mentions the possible influence of Heine's Rabbi on Else's "Wunderrabbiner," referring uncritically to the rather problematic article by Andri Meyer, "Vorahnungen der Judenkatastrophe bei Heinrich Heine und Else Lasker-Schüler," Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 8, 29 (1965), 7-27. See Bauschinger, 181. Heine, Vol. 5, 413-414, 416, 417, 419, 420. Thus, for example, in the most striking passage in this context: "Derweilen nun die schöne Sara andächtig zuhörte und ihren Mann beständig ansah, bemerkte sie, wie plötzlich sein Antlitz in grausiger Verzerrung erstarrte [...] und seine Augen wie Eiszapfen hervorglotzten, — aber fast im selben Augenblick sah sie, wie [...] seine Augen munter umher kreisten [...]." (417) Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, (1921) dtv 10644, 291. Ibid., 294-295. Heine, Vol. 5, 414.

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Several important allusions are made in Else's story to the Biblical Moses mentioned by Heine. For example: Es lebte eine Dichterin im Judenvolke Barcelonas, Tochter eines vornehmen Mannes, der mit dem Bau der Aussichtstürme der großen Städte Spaniens betraut war. Arion Elevantos im Wunsch nach einem Bauerben erzog Amram, seine Tochter, wie einen Sohn. 33 Amram was the father of the Biblical Moses. Like Jussuf and other names Else adapted for herself, this name is connected with the figure of a prophetic leader. In Else's story, Amram compares herself to Moses, who had killed the Egyptian, while telling her friend Pablo that she had "den Schneider mit ihrem kleinen Dolch ermordet und ihn in den Sand verscharrt." 34 This was his punishment for his assaults on Jewish children. The tale about Schneider, "den dünnbeinigen, knochigen Zuckerwarenhändler," who violated Jewish children in his cellar, is to be understood as Else's provocative, accusing inversion of the Blood Libel. According to Else's story, the Jews of Barcelona celebrate every year "am 7. des Monats Gäm" 35 the birthday of the "Wunderrabbi." This is probably an allusion to the 7th day of the Hebrew month of Adar, designated by the Talmud as the birthday and deathday of Moses, which, in the cabbalistic tradition, is celebrated as a holiday. The first sentence of Else's Wunderrabbiner touches on the sore spot in Heine's story: the absence of the Rabbi during the persecution of his community: "Die Bevölkerung von Barcelona befleißigte sich in den Wochen, die Eleasar in Alt-Asien in frommen Betrachtungen verlebte, die Juden zu verfolgen." 36 Interpreters of Heine have difficulties in coming to terms with Rabbi Abraham's secret flight from Bacherach, escaping the threat of a near pogrom without warning his community. Jeffrey Sammons speaks about an "unresolved tension" which, in his opinion, accounts for the aesthetic deficiencies of the story. 37 But, Rabbi Abraham's irritating behaviour definitely makes sense, if it is understood as a conscious or unconscious indication, that Heine, deep down and after all, considered his conversion to Protestantism as an act of treason and desertion. The unspoken question of guilt underlying Heine's Rabbi becomes the main issue in Else's story. Her Rabbi Eleasar is quite an ambiguous figure. The validity of his pious contemplations and prophetic gifts is seriously put 33 34 35 36 37

Der Wunderrabbiner, 292. Ibid., 295. Ibid., 291. Ibid., 290. Quoted in Hartmut Kircher, Heinrich Heine und das Judentum (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973), 200.

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into question by the obvious lack of real consideration for his endangered community. The Jews of Barcelona decide to inform their rabbi about their precarious situation, of which he is not aware, and they ask for his permission to emigrate. The "wonder rabbi" has nothing more to offer them than the rather elusive consolation: "Wer das gelobte Land nicht im Herzen trägt, der wird es nie erreichen." 38 At a later point, Rabbi Eleasar refuses to receive the mayor of Barcelona, thus giving the insulted population of Barcelona a reason to start a pogrom: "In der Nacht, durch die Weigerung des Wunderrabbiners aufgereizt, die Christen fühlten sich nun berechtigt, der Pogrom." 3 9 During the pogrom, Rabbi Eleasar sits in his palace "blättert im Atlas der Schöpfung" 40 and meditates about God's love for his chosen people. He persists in his fatal ambiguity: "Er hatte seine Menschen lieb und immer wieder beantwortete er ihre Frage nach der Heimat mit Ausflüchten." 41 With this background, the apocalyptic dimensions of the last scene in Else's story seem rather ironic. Rabbi Eleasar fights with God like Jacob and then dies like Samson, crushing the Christians of Barcelona under the ruins of his palace. 42 In the story Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, Else expressed her conflict with official Judaism and with leading figures like Martin Buber. Another reason for the striking implacability of this story, quite unique among Else's "Jewish" writings, might be connected with the impact of antiSemitism in the post-war period, mainly following the murder of the Jewish socialists Gustav Landauer, Kurt Eisner, and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919. According to Jakob Hessing, Else alludes to them when talking about those Jews of Barcelona "die sich mit ihrem Erlösergeist breit machen in den unteren armen Schichten der Stadt." 43 A letter to Karl Kraus reflects Else's mood at that period: Cardinal: Ich habe mich nun zum wiederholten mal erhängt - wer schnitt mich immer ab - kleine grobe Fäden hängen nun an mir mit dem Preis. Ich lach, ich bin nix mehr wert. Ich malte Ihnen mein Selbstportrait zum Neujahrsfest - soll ich es senden? Es ist gut. Ich bin alle, ich hasse das Erwachen am Morgen, da ich die Welt hasse, ich mag nicht schlafen, da ich von der Welt träume. Ich

38 39 40 41 42 43

Der Wunderrabbiner, 291. Ibid., 297. Ibid., 298. Ibid., 299. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 290. See Hessing, 144.

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hasse die Juden als David, ich erwürge den Christen als Indianerjude. Was soll ich? Jussuf. 44 But, already in 1914 Else had used similar terms in a letter to Martin Buber: Verehrter Herr von Zion. Ein Wolf war bei Ihnen - ein Oberpriester mit gepfeilten Zähnen, ein Basileus mit einem Wildherzen, eine Faust die betet, ein Meer ohne Strand, ein Bett das sich auftrank - und - Sie sprachen von Literatur - Sie lasen Gedichte und ich mag das nicht. [...] Ich hasse die Juden, da ich David war oder Joseph - ich hasse die Juden, weil sie meine Sprache mißachten, weil ihre Ohren verwachsen sind und sie nach Zwergerei horchen und Gemauschel. Sie fressen zu viel, sie sollten hungern. 45 In Else's story, the question of guilt also concerns the Jewish poetess, Amram, and her Christian lover, Pablo. As a result of their joint escape from Barcelona on a mysterious ship, the animosities against the Jews increase and turn into the most cruel persecution. One of the main victims is Amram's father, the master builder Arion Elevantos: Sie knebelten ihn; er aber lachte in seiner Bestürzung, wie er als Knabe aufzujauchzen pflegte, wenn ein Spielgefährte ihn packte im Räuber- und Gendarmspiel; bis das Weib des Bürgermeisters nahte und die schon betroffenen Leute aufpeitschte, den Vater der Judentochter, die ihren Sohn entführt habe, zu töten. Sie selbst riß dem unschuldigen Opfer das Herz aus der Brust, einen roten Grundstein zu legen, daran die herrenlosen Hunde ihr Geschäft verrichten sollten. Und die Juden, die an den Namen Jehovahs immer von neuem erwacht waren, lagen alle verstümmelt, zerbissen, Gesichte vom Körper getrennt, Kinderhände und Füßlein, zartestes Menschenlaub auf den Gassen umher, in die man die Armen wie Vieh getrieben hatte. 46 The big ship, which stood one day on the market place of Barcelona, 47 is Else's version of the boat on the Rhine, an allusion to the escape of Heine's Rabbi Abraham and his wife Sara to Frankfurt. Both Heine and Else projected the experience of early sorrow into the love stories of their tales as wishful ideals of happy fulfillment. Unlike Heine himself, Rabbi Abraham succeeds to marry his beautiful cousin, Sara, against the will of her rich father, and they become a happy couple. The fact that their marriage remains childless might indicate the chimeric quality of this love 44

45 46 47

Else Lasker-Schüler, Briefe an Karl Kraus (Astrid Gehlhoff-Claes, Ed.), (Köln, Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, [1959]), 88. Briefe (note 10), 117. Der Wunderrabbiner, 297. Ibid., 295.

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relation. In Else's idealizing picture of the love between the Jewess Amram and the Christian Pablo, the autobiographical context is more obvious and of greater significance for the whole story. Pablo and Amram get to know and love each other as children. One day, Amram climbs the scaffold of the "holy building," which her father constructs for the "wonder rabbi." She tumbles down, but Pablo is there to receive her lovingly: Beim Herabsteigen der Leiter, die von der noch unbefestigten Krone führte, stürzte die voreilige kleine Amram vom heiligen Bau auf sandigen Hügel, worauf Pablo, des Bürgermeisters Söhnchen, spielte. Und der Knabe dachte, die bleiche Amram sei ein Engel, der vom Himmelreich aus einer Wolke gepurzelt sei, und staunte sie an. Seitdem lächelte Amram im Traum, immer wenn Pablo an sie gedacht hatte. 48 In Else's childhood reminiscences, the fall from the tower has the significance of a traumatic experience, most probably connected with outbursts of anti-Semitism at school, which her parents, especially her mother, were not able to cope with. This conclusion may be drawn from the events Else describes in her autobiographical story Der letzte Schultag. The mother disappears one day and the little girl climbs to the tower of their house in order to look for her. She sees her deeply sad mother at a distance and jumps down towards her from the top of the tower. The girl becomes ill soon after and leaves school for good: Ich hatte den Veitstanz bekommen. Onkel Doktor meine: die Folge des Schrecks! Er nannte mich seitdem: "Springinsfeld!" Aber ich wußte, ich hatte den Veitstanz bekommen von etwas ganz anderem - vom ersten Schmerz meines Lebens, den auch das schönste Elternhaus nicht hat verhindern können. Aber - dafür brauchte ich nicht mehr - in die Schule gehen. "Von Schule gehen kann keine Rede mehr sein", sprach, sogar noch dazu im diktatorischen Tone, Onkel Doktor. 49 The same event is mentioned once more in Else's essay, "Der Antisemitismus": Ich erlebte als Schulkind schon einige antisemitische Aufstände auf dem Heimweg nach Schulschluß. Weinend betrat ich unser schönes Haus. Selbst meiner teuren Mutter Liebe vermochte mich nicht zu trösten. Doch von unserem hohen Turm wehte immer fröhlich die Fahne. Was mir schon damals in den Kindeijahren

48 49

Ibid., 292-293. Konzert, 112.

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auffiel, mir unverständlich, der Aufständischen banaler Grund der furchtbaren Grausamkeit.5" The imprinting substance of Else's early woe is not confined, as in Heine's case, to the private sphere of unhappy love. Rejected by the Christian environment, she was at the same time confronted with the helplessness of her parents vis-ä-vis anti-Semitism. There are historical reasons for the diverse substance of Heine's and Else's decisive childhood experiences. Around the year 1880, at the age of eleven, Else experienced anti-Semitism in a traumatic manner. In 1811, at the age of fourteen, Heine saw "with his own eyes" Napoleon's visit to Düsseldorf, which he described as a seminal event in his Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand.51 Although Heine anticipated in his later years the fatal course of German history, he did not personally experience the development from Stöcker to Hitler, as did Else. She was, so to say, a grandchild of Napoleon, daughter of a mother who, like Heine, adored Napoleon, but who was quite lost, when her belief in assimilation and integration of the Jews was shattered by the historical reality of modern anti-Semitism. To her much admired and beloved mother, who adored Goethe and Napoleon, Else dedicated her last work, the drama lchundlch.52 But, this drama seems to be an hommage to Heine as well. Along with Goethe, Heine probably inspired her with his Der Doktor Faust. Ein Tanzpoem. In a central passage of the fourth act of Else's drama, Heine is mentioned and quoted in connection with both Goethe and Napoleon. Right at the end of the drama, there is a most significant allusion to Heine, although it is implicit. It is quite possible, that not only the dance scenes in lchundlch, but also the appearance of King David, lead back to Heine; the latter figure appears in the following passage in the second act of the "Tanzpoem": Der Herzog wendet sich endlich gegen Faust und verlangt, als eine Probe seiner Schwarzkunst, den verstorbenen König David zu sehen, wie er vor der Bundeslade tanzte. Auf solches allerhöchste Verlangen nimmt Faust den Zauberstab aus den Händen Mephistophelas, schwingt ihn in beschwörender Weise, und aus der Erde, welche sich öffnet, tritt die begehrte Gruppe hervor: Auf einem Wagen, der von Leviten gezogen wird, steht die Bundeslade, vor ihr tanzt König David, possenhaft vergnügt und abenteuerlich geputzt, gleich einem Kartenkönig, und hinter der heiligen Lade, mit Spießen in den Händen, hüpfen schaukelnd einher die königlichen Leibgarden, gekleidet wie polnische Juden in lang herabschlotternd schwarzseidenen Kaftans und mit hohen Pelzmützen auf den spitzbärtigen Wackelköpfen. Nachdem diese

51 52

"Der Antisemitismus," Verse und Prosa aus dem Nachlaß (dtv 10648), 68-69. Heine, Vol. 4, 170-172. Ichundich, 237.

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Karrikaturen ihren Umzug gehalten, verschwinden sie wieder in den Boden unter rauschenden Beifallsbezeugungen.53 In the fourth act of Ichundlch, when talking about Goethe's encounter with Napoleon, Mephisto quotes the latter's famous exclamation: "C'est un homme!" Thereupon, Faust starts singing: "Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser gefangen!" Mephisto comments: "Ich sprühte weiland aus dem Moselwein, als der Edeljude, der Autor dieses Liedes, und es schmerzlich seine Freunde, Heines Heinrich, sangen." 54 At the end of the last scene of Ichundlch, in the garden of the eye surgeon Dr. Ticho in Jerusalem, the poetess dies. The journalist Adon Swet reports that she is dying, and the scare-crow, the alter ego of the poetess, adds the comment: "Und ohne Geistlichkeit, Rav, Scheik, Pastor." 55 These last words surely are an allusion to Heine's famous poem "Gedächtnisfeier" and its often quoted first stanza: "Keine Messe wird man singen, / Keinen Kadosch wird man sagen / Nichts gesagt und nichts gesungen / Wird an meinen Sterbetagen." 56 Only, in Else's case, as it suits the reality of Jerusalem, the representative of Islam is mentioned among the absentees. "One does not escape Jewishness." This is the title Hannah Arendt gave to the last chapter of her book on Rahel Varnhagen.57 The chapter ends with the encounter between Rahel and Heine in Berlin, a hundred years before Else published her story, Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona. Rahel, similar to Else, "hailed Heine with enthusiasm and great friendship." 58 Unlike Rahel, but similar to Heine, Else suffered the ambiguity of those who "wanted to be Jews and at the same time not be Jews." 59 Hannah Arendt defined "Heine's affirmation of Jewishness" as "the first and last resolute affirmation which was to be heard from an assimilated Jew for a long time." 60 In this sense, Else Lasker-Schüler's "affirmation of Jewishness," after that "long time," is indeed the last one, at the end of a violently closed chapter of German-Jewish history and literature.

53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

Heine, Vol. 10, 43. Ichundlch, 267-268. Ichundlch, 299. Heine, Vol. 3, 122. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess (London: East and West Library, 1957), 176. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 185.

Hamutal Bar-Yosef

The Heine Cult in Hebrew Literature of the 1890s and its Russian Context

What is the reason for the fact that the enthusiastic interest of Hebrew literature in Heine began only at the end of the nineteenth century ~ this, after fifty to sixty years of rather reserved reception? This question was asked by Moshe Zweik in a discussion of the Hebrew translations of Heine. Zweik wrote: "It is surprising that Heine is absent from the group of German poets who were translated during the period of the Enlightenment." 1 The surprise is especially strong, he explained, since it would be expected that during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Hebrew Enlightenment was encouraging translations of German literature into Hebrew, that Heine would also be translated. Heine was a famous poet in Germany and throughout Europe; nevertheless, only one of his poems was translated into Hebrew during his lifetime: "Frau Sorge" in 1853. During the next thirty-five years, only twenty more of his poems were translated. But, in the thirty years between 1888-1918, over two hundred poems by Heine were translated into Hebrew. 2 Zweik argues that Heine's virtual absence cannot be accounted for by his conversion to Christianity, since the people of the Hebrew Enlightenment were tolerant of religious issues. In Zweik's opinion the reason was two-fold: first, the florid rhetoric of the Enlightenment was not suitable for dealing with Heine's language, which was seemingly simple, though actually sophisticated and stylized. Second, Heine's poetry, especially his love poetry, was foreign to the spirit of the Hebrew-German Enlightenment. The representatives of Enlightenment preferred literature which could serve their educational aims and express the moral values which they accepted. 3 The language limitations can hardly explain the question of translation, since it would be wrong to say that Hebrew was a living language at the end of the nineteenth century. The difficulties in translating Heine's light and 1

2

3

Moshe Zweik, "Heine Ba-Sifrut Ha'Ivrit" (Heine in Hebrew Literature), Orlogin 11 (1955), 179-195. Shmuel Lachover, "Heinrich Heine Be'Ivrit — Me'ah Shana Le'Moto; 1856-1956. Bibliographia" (Heinrich Heine in Hebrew, 1856-1956. A Bibliography), Yad Lakoreh iv (1956-1957), 143-193. Zweik, ibid., 188.

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elegant style into the language of Hebrew poetry exist until the present time. Arieh Leib Mintz, who in 1888 completed excellent translations of eleven of Heine's poems, decided in the 1920s to translate Heine, but this time, when he translated 136 of Heine's poems, he translated them into prose (published in 1929). Language limitations were not the reason for Heine's distance from the representatives of Hebrew-German Enlightenment, who were not deterred from translating Goethe and Schiller into Hebrew. Language limitations certainly cannot explain the outburst of public interest in Heine towards the end of the century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Heine had been an embarrassing historical fact, whose existence seemed to demand apologetic explanations, for example those given by Graetz. 4 Sometimes, writers attributed their own opinions to Heine himself, as was done by Moses Hess. 5 Elazar Schulman's 1876 monograph on Heine, Mimkor Israel, was written entirely in an apologetic tone as part of the tendency towards clearing Heine's name of the profanation of morality and religion. 6 Contrastingly, representatives of the Hebrew-Russian Enlightenment — for example, Yehuda Leib Gordon (Yalag) - saw Heine as a lost treasure; if he had remained with the Jewish people, so Gordon claimed, he would have made useful contributions to the Renaissance of the national culture. 7 The public interest in Heine began to increase greatly towards the end of the eighties and reached its peak in the nineties and in the first decade of this century. 8 This was the time of the bitter debate over the "epidemic" fashion of imitating Heine's poems in Hebrew poetry. 9 The Hebrew newspapers took 4

5

6

7

8

9

Zvi (Hirsh Heinrich) Graetz, Divrei Yemei Hajehudim (The History of the Jewish People), (A. Y. Trivosh, Trans.), (Vilna: 1908-1909), 264-292. Moses (Moritz) Hess, "Du-Siakh be'Olam ha'Emet bein Heine u'Beme" (A Dialogue between Heine and Börne in the Next World), Ktavim Klali'im (General Writings), (Yeshurun Keshet, Trans.), (Jerusalem: Hasifria ha'Tsionit, 1955), 230-236. Elazar Schulman, Mimkor Israel (From Israel's Source), Part one: "Toldot Heinrich Heine" (The Biography of Heinrich Heine), (Vienna: 1876). Yehuda Leib Gordon (Yalag), "Hasfikhim" (After-Growths), Ha'AssifX (Warsaw: 1884), 172-176. Wolf Shor, "Heinrich Heine," Hayom (Petersburg: 1886), nos. 44, 52, 61, 68; Moshe Lilienblum, "Divrei Zemer" (Melodies), Luakh Akhiassaf, 5 (1898), 19-20; David Kabonovski, 'Heine', Leket Prakhim (A Collection of Flowers), (Gershom Bader, Ed.), (Warsaw: 1986), copybook two, 22-23; Kolmos, "Letoldot Heinrich Heine" (The Biography of Heinrich Heine), Hamelitz 131 (June 25, 1897), 2-3; Shimon Bernfeld, "Akh Rakhok" (A Distant Brother), Hashiloakh 3 (1898), 117-124, 216-223, 310-320; Reuven Brainin, "Heinrich Heine (Sirtutim Akhadim)," (Heinrich Heine [A Few Notes]), Hatsof eh, 22 (February 10, 1903), 181; David Frischman, "Heinrich Heine (On February 16, 1906)," Kol Kitvei David Frischman (Collected Works), (Warsaw: 1914), Vol. 3, 49-70. David Frishman, Mikhtavim al dvar Ha'Sifrut (Letters on Literature), (Warsaw: Akhiassaf, 1895), 1-20; Lilienblum, loc. cit.; Yosef Klauzner, "Shirei Ahava" (Love Poems), Ha'Eshkol 1 (1898), 54-71; "Mlekhet Makhshevet, Tkhiat ha'Uma" (A Work of Art, National Revival), Hador 1 (1901), 14, 10-12.

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a continual interest in the question of Heine's estate and reported in detail on the controversy in wake of the refusal of the town council of Düsseldorf to erect a memorial stone in Heine's honor. 10 Heine was mentioned in journalistic notes written by Sokolov as a natural part of the Jewish European cultural heritage. 11 The question of including him in the canon of Jewish literature was a subject of debate between Ahad Ha-am and Bialik. Ahad Ha-am claimed that the national literature of a people is limited to what is written in the national language, by which he meant Hebrew for the Jewish people, whereas Bialik demanded inclusion of Heine's work in the Hebrew literary canon. 1 2 An enthusiastic approach to Heine at the turn of the century was a salient feature of the new Hebrew generation in Russia. For the Hebrew Enlightenment in Russia, Heine was a famous Western European writer, whose Jewish origin was a source of pride and whose spiritual world was a point of identification. For example, in Gnessin's story, "Beterem" (Before, 1909), the young, enlightened hero quotes Heine's poetry, both as a natural part of his European education and as an expression of his world view. 13 Yet, the question remains: what did the Hebrew literature of "Hatkhia" (Revival, Renaissance) find of importance in Heine? In an essay entitled "The Biography of Heinrich Heine," published in Hamelitz in 1897, Yalag was quoted as follows: "A poem is like the manna eaten by our forefathers in the desert [...] each reader tastes in it what he wants to taste." The writer

10

11

12

13

Moshe Khaikin, "Matsevet Zikaron Le'Heinrich Heine" (A Memorial Monument for Heinrich Heine), Hatsfira 116 (May 27, 1897), 475; ibid., 118 (May 30, 1897), 484; Shimon Bemfeld, "Matsevet Zikaron Le'Heine" (A Memorial Monument for Heine), Hatsfira 157 (July 23, 1911). Nahum Sokolov, "Mishut Be'Eiropa" (Visiting Europe), Hatsfira 239 (November 13, 1896). Ahad Ha-am, "Tkhiat Ha'Ruakh" (Spiritual Renaissance), Kol Kitvei Ahad Ha-Am (Collected Works of Ahad Ha-Am), (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1947), 178; Haim Nakhman Bialik, "Hasefer Ha'Ivri" (The Hebrew Book), Kol Kitvei Η. N. Bialik (Collected Works of H. N. Bialik), (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1941), 198-199. Bialik's "The Hebrew book" is a lecture, published in two versions; the first in Hatsfira 1913, nos. 185, 186, and 191; the second in Hashiloah 29 (1913). In the first version Bialik calls Heine "a loyal son of his nation" and demands that his poetry be transla'ted into Hebrew as "a monument in memorial of our national geniuses." In the second version, however, he objects to the erection of a monument. He perceives Heine's ostracism as a symbol of the Jewish fate, but still recommends the translation of his poetry into Hebrew as a "wandering monument." See also Shmuel Verses, "Hasefer ha'Ivri - Shtei Girsaot u'Misaviv Lahen" (The Hebrew Book — Two Versions), Bein Gilui le'Khisui (The Explicit and the Implicit - Bialik in Story and Essay), (Tel-Aviv: Hakibutz ha'Meuchad, 1984), 117-118. Uri Nissam Gnessin, Kol Ktavav (Collected Works), (Dan Miron and Israel Zmora, Eds.), (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim and Ha'Kibutz ha'Meuchad, 1982), 290-292. See also Dan Miron's note on page 657.

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continues and says that in Heine's poetry critics also tasted whatever their particular class or political and poetic school dictated to them. 14 In fact, if we follow what was written about Heine in Hebrew by critics who lived in Russia during the seventies and eighties, the crucial years in which Enlightenment (Hebrew) literature gave way to the "Period of Revival," it is possible to see that the differences in their receptions of Heine were not only quantitative. Heine's personal and literary portraits were drawn according to different fashions, and thus reflected the changes in perspectives and tastes which were occurring during this period. For example, the above mentioned monograph written by Elazar Schulman in 1876 presents Heine as a warrior against tyranny and a fighter for truth and freedom. According to Schulman, "Heine never profaned pure love; he was unable to tread on the high ideals and lofty thoughts which are dear to everyone seeking justice and freedom." 1 5 Moreover, in the foundations of his soul he was a loyal Jew. For example, in his criticism of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, he battled for his people. Schulman's Heine is a "radical liberal," who dedicated his life to the battle for Romantic and national ideals. In an essay from 1884, Yalag expressed his appreciation of Jewish artists writing in German and Russian, among whom was Heine. Yalag commented: "All of my life I was saying sorrowfully: 'when will there stand among us a Hebrew poet like Heine, who would explain for his generation [...] [to the Russians] the toil of Israel and all its sufferings.'" 16 Yalag saw Frug as Heine's Russian parallel. According to Yalag, Heine was a poet who explained the sufferings and troubles of the Jews to the German people, and that, according to his perspective, was the true role of a poet — to reflect in his poetry the problems of society and to be, in this way, useful. Fourteen years later, in 1898, Lilienblum started at the same aesthetic position, namely, that literature must deal with general issues and be useful to society. From this point of departure, he attacked Heine's love poems and their imitations in Hebrew poetry of the 1890s. Lilienblum rejected the "Heine epidemic." 17 He wrote: "Poems of love [...] are only the private interest of a single person and have no place within general literature [...]. What do the readers of newspaper supplements and collections care about the private groanings [of poets]?" 18 Jews also have a love poem in their literature, he continued, "The Song of Songs, which was an ancient, but popular poem. Still, those who wish to belong to a developed culture, must also insist on usefulness and insist on some type of idea which can be useful for our 14 15 16 17 18

Kolmos, see note 8 above. See note 6 above, p. 15. Gordon (Yalag), see note 7 above. Lilienblum, see note 8 above. Ibid., 21-22.

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people." 19 According to Lilienblum, Heine was not a liberal freedom fighter, nor was he singing the plight of the Jewish people; rather, he was a poet who wrote lyric poetry, which was neither useful nor moral. Heine's portrait, as it was drawn in the Hebrew literature of the nineties, was being transfigured. Despite those who justified Heine the apostate and claimed that he had remained a Jew in his roots and soul (as Frischman tried to prove, when he published Heine's letters to Moser, and as Bialik tended to see him in his article "The Hebrew Book"), for the first time voices were heard that were prepared to receive Heine as a poet who had totally alienated himself from his Jewish roots. Bernfeld's extensive essay, which was published in Hashiloach (1898) in honor of Heine's one hundredth birthday, is a clear example of the new style of Heine's readers developing at the end of the century. Bernfeld's Heine was a decadent, as this term was understood in Russia at the time. He was introduced to the reader as an epicurean aristocrat, as a heretic "as long as it remained customary in the upper-class [...] but when other people began to believe similarly, the poet returned to his belief in God with all his heart." 20 This formulation is reminiscent of des Esseintes, Huysmans1 hero in A Rebours, which was considered the bible of French decadence. Bernfeld did not find in Heine any morality or national idealism. He wrote: "Heine lacked throughout his entire life the power to overcome his impulses, since he never would agree to losing his soul for some moral purpose." 21 Bernfeld also wrote that Heine knew all of the various impulses and desires, but none of the moral and national emotions. Unlike Börne, Heine was not a publicist who wrote about contemporary issues from the depth of his heart and with enthusiasm when needed." 22 He respected his people only for his own pleasure, and he hated the democrats with all his heart. He had a brilliant and cunning mind, but lacked warm emotions. Heine was a born pessimist and turned in his old age into a poet of "ennui." His perspective was always subjective. "He continually placed himself at the center of all the world's phenomena, and from his flesh he deduced predictions on the entire human race." 23 In Heine's words, it is possible to find egoism and self-glorification. Yet all of this ~ and even Heine's alienation from the traditions of Hebrew literature ~ did not diminish his greatness in Bernfeld's view. The opposite is true. These features allowed him to,find in Heine an expression of the fin-desiecle atmosphere that was the "dernier cri" in Russia at the beginning of the Age of Silver. Also Brainin, in an article published in 1903, called Heine 19 20 21 22 23

Ibid., 24. Bernfeld, see note 8 above, p. 314. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 318.

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"the modern of moderns" and emphasized that Heine's writings were esoteric and not meant to meet the needs of the people, nor were they so received by the German literary establishment.24 The change which took place towards the turn of the century in the reception of Heine is also reflected in the choice of poems which were translated. Until the end of the eighties, the only poems which were translated were meditative, with conceptual propositions which were rationalistic, as well as those poems which dealt with the rehabilitation of the Jewish cultural tradition. The excellent translations of Arieh Leib Mintz from 1888 are actually revolutionary. There are seven poems of love and desire, and these contain descriptions of sexual fantasies or of lovers lacking emotions. In the translation of "Das Meer erglänzte weit hinaus" ("Die Heimkehr, XIV"), Mintz does not flinch from using bold erotic expressions, unusual in Hebrew poetry of the time. Also included here is a translation of the poem "Auf ihrem Grab" ("Tragödie, 3"), in which Heine expresses identification with "the flower of sinful soul," which blooms where suicide victims are buried. Also, poems like "Die schlanke Wasserlilie" ("Neuer Frühling, 15"), and "Laß die heil'gen Parabolen" ("Zum Lazarus, 1") express direct denial of the moral world and the existence of God. 25 Lilienblum's protest against the "Heine epidemic" would probably not have erupted with such fury, had the translations and the Heine-like poems only contained love poetry in the Romantic sense. It was not love, but rather the denial of love as a spiritual and sacred emotion that shocked the enlightened Jews in Russia. No less shocking was Heine's denial of the trustworthiness of collective moral and national values, as well as Heine's "decadent" traits, which Bemfeld and others specified. In order to understand why the "decadent" Heine was so popular in Hebrew Renaissance literature we should turn to the Russian literature from which Hebrew literature of the second half of the nineteenth century developed. The first Russian translations of Heine appeared in 1844; the translators were Apolon Grigoriev and Mikhail Mikhailov.26 Grigoriev translated six poems, meticulously matching Heine's rhythm, and so contributed greatly towards the penetration of a prosaic style which later became a favorite of the Russian Symbolists and was called "pausnik" or "dol'nik." 27 In 1858, a collection of Heine's poems appeared, translated by Mikhailov. Mikhailov, a friend of Tchernikhovski, chose the poems and 24 25

27

Brainin, see note 8 above. Arie Leib Mintz, "Mishirei Heine" (From Heine's Poetry), Knesset Israel 3 (1888), 392396. Hermann Ritz, 150 Jahre russische Übersetzung ( Bern, Frankfurt/M: 1981). Viktor Zhirmunskii, Nemetskii Romantizm i Sovremennaya Mistika (German Romanticism and Contemporary Mysticism), (Leningrad: 1913), 180.

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adapted them, so that they received the social and humanistic purpose which is missing in the original. In the fifties and sixties a myth was created in Russia of Heine being a lover of his people, whose life was sacrificed for his love of truth and uncompromising justice. In these years Heine was often translated, and a fashion of imitations, which were translated adaptations, spread. The translations of Maikov, Mai, Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, and especially Veinberg contributed to the portrait of Heine as a liberal. The Jewish writer, Veinberg, who assumed the pen-name "Heine of Tambov," published a volume of translations of Heine in 1860, and, in 1866 he began to publish Heine's collected works in 12 volumes. Heine was also translated by Fet and Tiutchev. Their own work, which was influenced by German Romanticism, did not suit the "civic" poetics which ruled Russia at this time, but received the renewed admiration of Symbolists, like Afanasy Fet, a poet influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and who translated Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung into Russian. Feodor Tiutchev, who had close personal contacts with Heine during the twenties and thirties, when he stayed in Germany, was influenced by Heine's poetry and translated large portions of it. Tynianov, in his article "Tiutchev and Heine" (1922) 28 shows that despite the closeness between the two poets, Tiutchev, the Romantic, remained blind to the non-romantic elements of Heine's poetry. Tiutchev's first translations, which he completed in 1830, are partially translated adaptations and are considerably different from the originals. Although Tiutchev kept the artistic form of Heine's poems, the translations show the basic poetic distance which existed between them. For example, Tiutchev softens Heine's incisive endings, the sharpness of which is often caused by a sudden lowering of the diction of the language or a deviation from the accepted meter. He would sometimes exchange "I" for "We" and so achieve in the poem more of the characteristics of a lofty dramatic chorus and less of those of a light lyrical poem. Tynianov wrote that Tiutchev was unfamiliar with Heine's special irony, his special "Witz," which was close to the "esprit" of French eighteenth-century poetry. He explained Tiutchev's deviations from the originals on the basis of national tradition and the spirit of Russian literature. A considerable part of Tynianov's article is dedicated to his reservations about the popular belief that Tiutchev was an imitator of Heine. According to Tynianov, Tiutchev was closer to German Romanticism than Heine. Although Heine saw himself as a Romantic, and even used Romantic motifs in his poetry, he actually alienated himself from the Romantic experience and emptied it of its emotional and conceptual contents. Without explicitly saying so, Tynianov found in Heine's poetry the characteristics of European decays Ju. N. Tynianov, "Tiutchev i Geine" (Tiutchev and Heine), Teoria Literatury; (Theory of Literature, Cinema), (Moskow: Nauka, 1976), 350-395.

Kino

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dent poetry. He wrote, for example, that the Romantic ideals ~ infinity, God, love, nature — lose their value in Heine's poetry and become empty thematic schemes to be filled with "stylistic content." A dream in Heine's poetry is not an idealization of the phenomenal world, but rather a subjective revelation of consciousness. Heine relates ironically to the tendency of human consciousness to redesign the picture of reality according to its needs, illusions, and whims. Beneath the vital landscape in Heine's poems lies an inanimate landscape, barren and illusory, a lifeless scene, whose components build oxymoronic constructions. The landscape in Heine's poems does not reflect the poet's emotions. But, he does include macabre elements, as he sometimes describes the city as a place of shadows and graves. Love is occasionally a desire for a ghost or a statue. Heine's style testifies to an aestheticism alienated from emotion. Heine has the tendency to use an epithet, which creates a contradiction with the noun, or a series of epithets which do not connect with each other. His epithet does not present a coherent picture, but instead is the means of creating a formal musical game. Heine's use of motifs and forms from popular poetry is a stylization; its purpose is strictly formal. His poetry is full of parodic games and self parody. Heine prefers the aesthetic form over emotion. He occasionally exaggerates emotional expression as a means of destroying the emotional illusion. Similarly, his use of prosody is not expressive, but rather a manipulation of pure form for ornamental purposes. Tynianov's article, which was written during the period when Russian literature was rejecting Decadence and Symbolism, on one hand exposes the characteristics which caused Heine's popularity among the symbolists; on the other hand, it emphasizes his estrangement from the traditions of Russian literature and the spirit of the Russian people. Similarly, he compared Heine and Blok in his article "Blok and Heine" (1921). 29 There he wrote that although Blok translated Heine's poems and was greatly influenced by their rhythm, his translations contain fewer ironic closures and more emotional imagery. Both Heine and Blok lived during a revolutionary period and contributed to the struggle against the old order, but Heine's revolt was only literary and stylistic, and not experiential. Blok built his art from emotions, while Heine from the word as pure form. It is not the subject matter which is important for Heine, but rather its formal design. Heine destroyed the subject in order to destroy emotion. Form is his way of reaching the freedom of spiritual self-knowledge, while Blok's art is not emancipation, but rather work and sacrifice. Even though Blok, like Heine, used Romantic imagery and subjects only as a means of creating emotional effects, Blok's pictures are realistic, whereas Heine does not evoke clear images, but instead uses words 29

Ju. N. Tynianov, Blok i Geine (Blok and Heine), (Moskow: 1921).

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as the material for creating ornamental arabesques. He draws pictures of incongruent elements, which sometimes create comic effects. Tynianov's description shows that Blok continued the Romantic tradition, while Heine used the integrated Romantic tradition to destroy its emotional quality. In the conclusion to his article, Tynianov wrote that Blok's basic genre was Romance, a genre which developed in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages, whereas Heine's basic genre was the Eastern arabesque. That is the reason why there was so much debate over Heine, both in his lifetime and after his death, while Blok rose above all debate. 30 Tynianov's effort to clear Blok of any suspicion of similarity to Heine's poetics is contradicted by the impression which Blok himself gave two years before his death in his three lectures on Heine in 1919: "Heine in Russia," "Heine and Herzen," and "On Heine's Judaism." 31 All three are written in tones of admiration of, and identification with, Heine. In his first lecture, Blok attacked the liberal image which Heine enjoyed in Russian literature during the fifties and sixties. He spoke loathsomely of "the myth of a liberal Heine, a lover of his people," 32 and claimed that Mikhailov's translations were not really Heine, since they contained too much Romanticism, while lacking Heine's mercilessness. The humanistic tradition of the nineteenth century totally destroyed the language and true experience of Heine. Only now had the time come to begin to listen to the original and true Heine. Blok wrote: Heine in his element is anti-humanist [original emphasis], and therefore was continually persecuted, continually misunderstood, and continually adapting himself to reality. Now, the time has come to listen to Heine, when throughout the world the bells of anti-humanism are ringing and the world has removed its humanist costume. Now it is clear that man is a cruel animal or a vegetable without humanity. Now we can comprehend and Heine can be read in the context of Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Dostoievski - writers, who throughout the nineteenth century prepared us for the downfall of humanism. The man, whom these writers see as the aim of humanity is neither moral, humane, nor political, but rather a Man-Artist ["chelovek-artist"]. 33 Blok's conclusions were that Heine, who was first and foremost an artist, must be understood and translated as such, and not, as was the custom, to seek in him liberal, Romantic ideas. Blok strengthened this claim in his second lecture by quoting Herzen. According to Herzen, Heine did not know 30 31

32 33

Ibid., 264. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochinenii (Collected Works), (Moskow-Leningrad: 1962), T. 6, 116-125, 141-143, 144-150, respectively. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 125.

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the people, nor did the people know him. Blok quotes Herzen, saying that: "On the cold heights where he [Heine] sat, emotions could not reach, neither pain nor joy." 3 4 Furthermore, "Heine wrote out of limitless, stricken selflove." 3 5 He mocked "the movement of human foolishness, partly JewishRussian foolishness, that never stopped gushing over the brightest of the brilliant among the Jews." 3 6 In his lecture "On Heine's Judaism," Blok claimed that Heine was against Judaism. He explained that betrayal is in itself not a vulgar deed, but rather an act of religious significance. Heine belonged to the school of "cursed poets "(meaning, of course, the French pohes maudits). All great men of the humanities were traitors, suggested Blok, not out of humbleness, but in order to fulfill their greatness. It is easy to see that Blok identified with the perspectives which he assigned to Heine, and which he himself called "anti-humanist." He also found in Heine's works self-love, emotional alienation towards his people and mankind, and the dissolution of morality. This did not hinder him from seeing the greatness of Heine as an artist and as a religious man. In the portrait of Heine drawn by Blok, Nietzsche's influence is clearly recognizable. Nietzsche was at the center of Russian Symbolism and seminal in Blok's own work. Blok's positive attitude towards Heine's "immorality," his criticism of humanism, liberalism, and Russian nationalism, and his respectful attitude towards anti-humanistic writers, mainly the French symbolist poets are signs of the special spiritual climate of the Age of Silver in Russia at the turn of the century. Also characteristic is the attempt by Blok, who was the foremost representative of Russian Symbolism, to treat Heine's "immorality" as a kind of sacred religion, while at the same time negating his Jewish roots. Yet, it was the apostate Jewish writers in Russia who began, even before Blok, to draw the portrait of the new man, the decadent, the cosmopolitan, the self-aware egoist, aspiring to obtain an artistic, mystical experience and not an altruistic social stance. Minski's book Pri Svete Sovesti (By the Light Conscience, 1890) was the first Russian public manifestation of the new movement. Volynski, in his activities as an editor and publicist, helped to establish it. Volynski, who was Merezhkovski's partner in designing the mystical character of Russian symbolism, tried to present Heine as the outcome of his beliefs and personal destiny. In a lecture on Heine, he claimed that Heine's work expressed the common spiritual-rational denominator found in both Protestant Christianity, German Idealism, and ancient Judaism.

34 35 36

Ibid., 142. Ibid., 243. Ibid.

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Lev Shestov, the decadent-existentialist philosopher, wrote about Heine in 1907, two years before Blok began to translate Heine's "Die Heimkehr." Shestov considered Heine a declared skeptic and a moral relativist. According to him, Heine understood that passion and impulse, and not reason, rule man, and that philosophical "truths" are the result of a psychological situation. Heine's greatness was a result of his impudence, which testified to his pride, his self-conscious greatness, and his knowledge of his rights. Heine knew that his soul's redemption resulted from its victory over the spirit and its acceptance of a heavy yoke, "but he loathed such redemption and ridiculed philosophy, morality, and different religions." 37 The increased interest in Heine was, then, one of the phenomena which characterized Russian literature at the turn of the century, and it is directly related to the "decadent" roots from which the philosophy and aesthetics of the Russian Age of Silver grew, and which had special attraction for intellectual Jews at the time. The Heine cult in Hebrew Renaissance literature is part of a basic change which occurred in the 1890s, which was related to similar developments simultaneously occuring in Russian literature. Hebrew literature written at the turn of the century, commonly called "Hatkhia," is usually characterized by its Romantic features. Nevertheless, this literature was also influenced by Russian Decadence and Symbolism, which directly opposed the basic ideas of the Hebrew Renaissance movement, whose official slogan carried the signature of Romantic nationalism. The declared ideology of the Hebrew Renaissance literature, whose major representatives were Berdychevski, Bialik, Tchernikhovski, Gnessin, and Brenner, was an optimistic national ideology, which stood for the possibility of a Renaissance of the culture and moral spirit of the Jewish people. But, the Renaissance movement was active in Eastern Europe during a period in which the Romantic, liberal humanistic culture of the nineteenth century was collapsing. The major forces which were vying for influence were scientific materialism in its Marxist version on one hand, while, on the other hand, there were a variety of idealisms, whose origins could be found in the works of German philosophers, like Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, and Nietzsche. Russian literature of the period was influenced by French Symbolism and European Decadence, and the reception of these influences in Russia, taking into account the strong tradition of poetry with moral and social commitment, aroused agitation and stormy controversy, mainly because of the immoral and anti-humanistic character of these influences. Hebrew literature, throughout the second half of the nine37

Lev Shestov, "Tkhilat Dvarim Aharonim" (The Beginning of Last Words), ( U. N. Gnessin, Trans. [190]); see note 12 above, Vol. 2, 259. Originally: "Predposlednia Slova," Hachala i Kontsy (St. Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1908), 124-197.

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teenth century, grew under the clear influence of "cuvuc" and "narodnik" poetics and could not remain untouched by these new influences. Generally, it is possible to say that this is literature enveloped in a continual conflict between the optimistic belief in the national Renaissance idea, a basically Romantic ideal, and, between the pessimistic aestheticism of European decadence. Certainly, the responses were not uniform. They were mostly dependent on the background and education of the artist. Writers such as Frishman and Berdychevski, who received Western educations, and Gnessin, who achieved by himself the equivalent of a Western education, tended towards the decadent direction, whereas writers such as Brenner and Bialik, whose greatest source of external influence was Russian literature, gathered forces around an openly declared anti-decadent position, even though their work did not remain entirely free of the decadent experience. The basic claim of the opponents of the new European movement was that it was essentially foreign and contradicted the Jewish moral spirit, an idea which was formulated and established in articles by Ahad Ha-am and Klauzner. The interest which Hebrew literature took in Heine at the end of the century, that is, at a time during which he was considered in Russia to be a decadent poet, arose partially because of the great interest afforded Nietzsche, Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, and anything then considered modern. Furthermore, Heine aroused identification in those Hebrew poets in Eastern Europe, who, despite their writing in Hebrew, saw themselves as belonging to Western European culture and wanted to compete with worldclass writers. Heine's conversion did, in fact, bother the enlightened Jews of Russia, for, despite their religious tolerance, they still attributed sacred values to ideological and moral principles. During the Renaissance period there were writers, Gnessin for example, who thought that ideological, moral, and religious declarations were an insignificant, exterior part of the unchanging psychological nature of man. These were ideas that penetrated Hebrew literature through Russian literature at the turn of the century. Consequently, Heine's reception in Hebrew literature of this period was the result of the cultural fin-de-sitcle climate in Europe at the end of the century, which penetrated Hebrew literature through contacts with foreign literatures, and more importantly, through the processes which both thought and literature were going through during the Silver Age in Russia.

Mark Η. Gelber

Heine, Herzl, and Nordau: Aspects of the Early Zionist Reception

One of the problematical aspects inherent in Wolfgang Iser's formulation of the aesthetics of reader response, which is also characteristic of Hans Robert Jauss's theory of reception history, concerns the specific interaction of the reader with the text, that is, with the ineluctable and inescapable present, the here and now of the "reading reader." The concepts of the "horizon of expectation" and the fusion of horizons, presented by Jauss, 1 or the idea of reader mediation, formulated by Iser, 2 dictate, in effect, a degree of serious introspection and historical self-awareness on the part of the reader. Thus, one variety of reception aesthetics leads quite naturally to a heightened, and sometimes in practice, to an exaggerated critical self-consciousness, which is one of the controlling features of contemporary meditations on literature in general. Without belaboring the point unduly by foregrounding myself in the discussion, or by sketching the contemporary reception, or better misappropriation of Heine in Israel, which, accordingly, may have import for this presentation, a certain degree of self-consciousness must be incorporated into the discussion. Furthermore, some introductory words about the problematical features of the Zionist reception of German and German-Jewish writers in general provide not only a framework for the following assessment of the early Zionist reception of Heinrich Heine, focusing first on Herzl and Nordau, but also an important background or a context for understanding the contemporary cultural factors which pertain to ongoing Israeli readings of Heine. Since the modern Zionist movement was brought into existence by highly acculturated, literate, Central European, German-speaking Jews, Heine, as well as German literature in general, was already an intimate part of their individual educational and cultural experiences, before the specific conversion to Zionism took place. 3 This feature seems to be constant among ' 2

3

Hans Robert Jauss, "Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft," in his Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), 177 et passim. Wolfgang Iser, "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," in Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Eds.), Critical Theory since 1965 (Tallahassee: Univ. Florida Press, 1980), 379-381. On the issue of the specific "conversion" to Zionism, see Max Nordau, Erinnerungen

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prominent Zionists. For example, both Herzl and Nordau had read Heine early on. They wrote about Heine, they quoted him in letters, and admired his cosmopolitanism. They imitated not only his poetry, but also his journalism and travel literature. 4 They adopted his ironic style. Like Heine, they resided in Paris and wrote for German newspapers. They "identified" with him, in the sense that Iser employs the term: they established affinities between themselves and Heine, a familiar ground on which they were able to experience the unfamiliar. They utilized "identification" as a strategem, by which they themselves as authors stimulated approving attitudes in their respective readers. 5 Thus, the issue of an early Zionist reception on the part of Herzl and Nordau would appear to benefit from an exploration of the divergence in the reception of Heine and German literature before and after the specific conversion to Zionism. According to the evidence at hand, however, there appears to be plain continuity between the readings of Heine by Herzl and Nordau, considering their "pre-Zionist" and, later, "Zionist" writings and utterances. Their early enthusaism for Heine is matched by their continuing high regard for him late in their careers, after embracing the Zionist cause; no palpable divergence is measurable. This general issue of a possible distinction between pre-Zionist and Zionist readings appears to be related to the overall problem of considering every reception by a Jewish reader as a specifically Jewish reception, a problem exacerbated in this case by the fact that Zionism in its various expressions as a Jewish-national movement, (sometimes the Jewish-national movement) aims in theory at an all-encompassing vision, that is, at the broadest, most inclusive definition of Jewish peoplehood. Zionism as an ideology claims as a rule to represent all Jews, no matter how far they are positioned from the various centers of Jewish life, including geographical centers, religious centers, that is normative Judaism, or other Jewish spiritual centers. The Jewish-national aspect of Heine, which, it appears, came to dominate the agenda of many Zionist readers and commentators, did not always or mostly concern Herzl, Nordau and others, although they did respond sometimes to this issue. Herzl's feuilleton, "Heine und die Liebe," which was written on the 100th anniversary of Heine's birth, avoided any reference to Jewish aspects, focusing instead on Heine's love life or, better, the role of

4

5

(Leipzig, Wien: Renaissance Verlag, 1928), 178 ff. In 1865-66, the young Nordau wrote a long satirical poem, comprised of 750 verses in 10 "Gesänge," modelled after Heine's "Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen." See Nordau, ibid., 26. For evidence of the importance of Heine as a model for the young, aspiring Herzl, see Theodor Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher I (Ed. Johannes Wachten, et ed.), (Wien: Prophyläen, 1983), 273, 605, et passim; and Alex Bein, Theodor Herzl (Wien: Fiba Verlag, 1934), 29, 8-91, 114-118. Iser, ibid., 387-390.

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the poet's loves in his poetical creation.6 Also, Nordau's speech, delivered in 1906 at a public ceremony dedicating the Heine monument at the Montmartre cemetery (the text of which appeared in the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna, as well as in Ost und West, the Jewish magazine affiliated with cultural Zionism), similarly makes no mention of Jewish aspects: "Heine hat für sein Vaterland Grosses, Ewiges gethan...Er ist der lyrische Botschafter Deutschlands...er hat das deutsche Wort geadelt."7 In Montmartre, Nordau proclaimed: "Wir stehen hier auf Menschheitshöhen."8 Stated simply, Jewish aspects of Heine (or of German literature) do not always or mostly concern Jewish readers, even those with a Jewish-nationalist orientation. In this vein, it is my contention, nonetheless, that these "nonJewish/Jewish readings," or "non-Zionist/Zionist" readings, fall into the purview of the Zionist reception, and in this way they can be accounted for sensibly. These readings belong to the category of universal, non-particularist Jewish or Zionist concerns. It must be emphasized that Zionism intended from the beginning to provide a forum and context for addressing a wide range of universal issues, and the early Zionist reception of Heine reflects this tendency, as well as the particular Jewish-national one. Yet, the impact of a non-Zionist/Zionist reading of Heine in the Neue Freie Presse is considerably different from the impact of that same reading in a cultural Zionist magazine like Ost und West. The particular packaging or contextualization is of paramount importance. Nordau's speech, as it appears in Ost und West, for example, is framed by Nathan Birnbaum's essay on the significance of the Maccabean struggle for freedom and by Berthold Feiwel's poem "Wacht auf, ihr Schläfer in tiefer Nacht!"9 The refrain of Feiwel's poem reads: "Das Volk der Juden ist erwacht/ Und ruft nach seinen Söhnen." Given this particular contextualization, the reader of Ost und West would be strongly encouraged to read into the essentially "non-Zionist" essay on Heine by Nordau a particularist, Zionist message as well. In this sense, Heine was another wayward son, whom Zionism would recover and press into purposeful, national service. The conversion to political Zionism brought Nordau and Herzl into contact with a broad spectrum of Jewish expression at the end of the century, some of which figures in this discussion. In addition, the dynamic aesthetic and cultural energies unleashed by political Zionism itself produced new 6

7

8 9

Theodor Herzl, "Heine und die Liebe" in his Feuilletons I (Wien, Leipzig: Wienverlag, 1904), 245-255. Max Nordau, "Das Heine Denkmal," Ost und West, I, 12 (1901), 908. Cf. Paul Elio, "A La Memoire de Henri Heine," Le Journal (Paris), Nov. 25, 1901; and Charles Chincholle, "Le Monument d'Henri Heine," Le Figaro, Nov. 25, 1901. Nordau, "Das Heine Denkmal," 910. Berthold Feiwel, "Wacht auf, ihr Schläfer in tiefer Nacht!" Ost und West, I, 12(1901), 911-912.

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literary and cultural tendencies. Contemporary observers, who were affiliated for a time with Zionism, like Samuel Lublinski and Stefan Zweig, noted that the aesthetic impulses in Zionism were much stronger and more compelling than the purely political ones. 10 Also, the early Zionist scene was characterized by some bitter divisions, the cultural implications of which pertain to the reading of German-Jewish authors, like Heine. In this context, perhaps the most important conflict concerned the resistance to Herzl by the cultural Zionists. Cultural Zionism is in itself a complex phenomenon. The variety espoused by Ahad Ha-am and some followers, which trumpeted a renaissance of Hebrew letters, dismissed preemptorily the very possibility of Jewish national literature in any language except for Hebrew, and therefore Heine was only a peripheral issue among this group. Yet, a German-language variety of cultural Zionism, influenced decisively by the work of Nathan Birnbaum (especially its Jewish-racialist aspect) and spearheaded principally by Martin Buber, Berthold Feiwel, and Ephraim Moshe Lilien, presented in practice a different view. 11 In his essay, "Die jüdische Renaissance" written in 1900, Buber affirmed the importance of Hebrew culture in Zionism. 12 The rejection of Jewish life in the diaspora expressed in this essay is complemented by a sense that the Jewish creative spirit might realize its full potential harmoniously only in the Jewish homeland ("die harmonische Entfaltung seiner Kräfte"). However, the inauguration of modern Zionism signalized for Buber a propitious moment for Jewish artistic expression, even in the diaspora and in non-Jewish languages, like German, because Zionism appeared to be an extraordinarily potent, liberating aesthetic force. Buber's emphasis on harmony, on the harmonious unfolding of original and creative energies, can be linked in this context to the rejection of Heine in various neo-Romantic circles, Jewish and non-Jewish, precisely because of his Zerrissenheit, his disharmony, his inner artistic fragmentation. The critical categories established by Buber, which follow in the main the deterministic methodology of Hippolyte Taine, allow at the same time for a more positive Zionist reception of Heine, one more dependent on historical and racial considerations (Taine1 s "moment" and "race"). The language issue, however, appears to be one key to understanding the early Zionist reception. Herzl and Nordau came to Zionism as ethnic and cultural pluralists, perhaps owing something to their Austro-Hungarian back10

11

12

See Samuel Lublinski, Die Bilanz der Moderne (Berlin: Siegfried Cronbach, 1904), 108. Cf. Stefan Zweig, "Einleitung," in Ε. Μ. Lilien. Sein Werk (Berlin: Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler, 1903), 19. See Mark H. Gelber, "The 'jungjüdische Bewegung': An Unexplored Chapter in German-Jewish Literary and Cultural History," Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute XXXI (1986), 105-119. Martin Buber, "Die jüdische Renaissance," Ost und West 1, 1 (1901), 10.

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grounds. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl, as is well-known, rejected Hebrew, envisioning a language-federalism ("Sprachenföderalismus") in his Jewish State, utilizing Switzerland as his model. Herzl wrote: "Wir werden auch drüben bleiben, was wir jetzt sind, sowie wir nie aufhören werden, unsere Vaterländer, aus denen wir verdrängt wurden, mit Wehmut zu lieben." 13 Thus, by extension, for Herzl it is quite conceivable that a figure like Heine would remain at the center of cultural life in the future Jewish State for those Central European Jews who would naturally continue to nurture their specific culture alongside other cultures, from which Heine would ostensibly be missing. Love of the original culture and homeland would persist, but for just how long is uncertain. Consequently, there would be no need to reject Heine or German culture in general in order to realize fully Herzl's Zionist goal and its cultural implications. For Nordau, the language issue is somewhat more complex and deserves special consideration. As late as 1885, in his book Paradoxe, Nordau continued to view language as the chief determinant sine qua non of nationality. 14 For that very reason, according to this view, the Jews could not be a nation. Nordau's conversion to Zionism, in wake of the Dreyfus affair and Herzl's championship of the idea, led him to revise his understanding of the role of language in terms of national identity. In his subsequent works, Nordau seemed perplexed about language and he agonized about this topic. In his book, Der Sinn der Geschichte (1909), he affirmed tentatively the notion that language, together with other factors, helped to form the particular Volksgeist. That is, language was but one of several factors; although, at the same time, language had to fulfill the role of giving expression to the Volksgeist.15 Thus, even without one specific Jewish language, the Jews could still be considered a nation by virtue of the other constitutive features. For example, Nordau, who was well versed in the popular Völkerpsychologie of the day, believed that Jews possessed a specific Volkspersönlichkeit. To the extent that Heine, or any other figure, shared in the specific traits which characterized the folk personality, he belonged to the Jewish nation and his literature was perforce Jewish. Nordau was buttressed in this notion by the concomitant view of one of the towering figures of Heine scholarship of the generation, Gustav Karpeles, the editor of Heine's collected works. Karpeles saw Heine's chutzpah and wit as quintessentially Jewish. 16 In Heine's "Lieder," according to Karpeles, "the innermost life and being of the Jewish Volksseele came to its innermost ex13 14 15 16

Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Wien: R. Löwit Verlag, 1933), 93. Max Nordau, Paradoxe (Leipzig: B. Elischer, 1886), 339. Max Nordau, Der Sinn der Geschichte (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1909), 140. Gustav Karpeles, "Heinrich Heine and Judaism," in his Jewish Literature and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1895), 354-356.

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presssion" ("das innerste Leben und Wesen der jüdischen Volksseele [kommen] in seinen Liedern zum innigsten Ausdruck"). 17 "The spirit of Jewish History revealed itself' 1 8 to Heine and he conveyed it in his work. In these views, Karpeles was probably paraphrasing Heine himself, who in a letter to Moses Moser dated June 25, 1824 had written (in connection with his work on Der Rabbi von Bacherach): "Der Geist der jüdischen Geschichte offenbart sich mir immer mehr und mehr, und diese geistige Rüstung wird mir gewiss in der Folge sehr zu statten kommen." 19 For Karpeles, Heine was "the pride of our people." At this point, a methodological problem arises. One specific limitation in utilizing reception aesthetics in connection with early Zionism is that reception theory in general tends to focus on the particular reading of individual texts and sees the meaning of individual texts revealed or unfolding in successive readings over time. The early Zionist response to Heine focuses in general less on specific works than on Heine as a literaryhistorical phenomenon, on the personality and mythology of Heine, on his racial Jewishness and conversion to Christianity as abiding factors in the identity debate. Heine was a touchstone for what Martin Buber called "die persönliche Judenfrage," which, for Buber, was the root of all Jewish questions. In "Das Judentum und die Menschheit," Buber saw the striving of the Jew for unity as the essential feature of the phenomenon of Jewry: "Das Streben nach Einheit. Nach Einheit im einzelnen Menschen. Nach Einheit zwischen Teilen des Volkes, zwischen den Völkern, zwischen der Menschheit und allem Lebendigen. Nach Einheit zwischen Gott und der Welt." 2 0 Two specific references to Heine by Herzl are worthy of consideration in this context. The first reference appears in a short autobiographical statement, which Herzl wrote in 1898 for The Jewish Chronicle in London. In this sketch, Herzl depicted his writing of Der Judenstaat during his last two months in Paris: I cannot remember ever having written anything in such a mood of exaltation. Heine tells us that he heard the flapping of eagles' wings above his head when he wrote certain stanzas. I too seemed to hear the flutter of wings above my head while I wrote "The Jewish State." I worked at it daily, until I was completely exhausted. My one recreation was on the evenings when I could go to hear Wagner's music, and particularly "Tannhäuser," an opera which I go to hear as often as it is produced. And only on those 17 18 19

Gustav Karpeles, "Heinrich Heine," Ost und West, 6, 1 (1906), 28. Karpeles, ibid. In Heinrich Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (Berlin: Schocken Verlag und Jüdischer Buchverlag, 1937), 76. Martin Buber, "Das Judentum und die Menschheit," in his Reden über das Judentum

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evenings when there was no opera did I have my doubts as to the truth of my ideas. 21 This intimate reference to Heine and Wagner places Herzl squarely within the German Romantic or Neo-Romantic tradition, a tradition which characterized his Zionism as well. For Herzl, Zionism was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. By recalling Heine's depiction of his exalted state during artistic creation, Herzl forged his identity with him. This moment is not a specifically Jewish one, despite the fact that Herzl's work was designed to refashion the nature of modern Jewry. That Wagner's music could serve Herzl in an important way at this time appears to be a corollary to the proposition that the particular sources of Herzl's Zionism were not exclusively or primarily Jewish, and therefore he was encouraged in his Jewish work by non-Jewish artistic expression in various forms. That Wagner's opera owed much to Heine's poem, "Tannhäuser," seems to me to be beside the point in this context. Another pertinent reference to Heine appears in Herzl's Utopian Zionist novel, Altneuland (1902). Well into the second visit to the land of Israel, that is towards the end of the novel, projected twenty years into the future in 1923, the protagonist Friedrich Löwenberg visits Jerusalem, after landing in Haifa and celebrating Passover in Tiberius, all the time marvelling at the extraordinarily enlightened and technologically advanced society which has blossomed in the interval. On the way to the rebuilt Temple — the Sabbath is approaching - Löwenberg passes the "Friedenspalast" in the old city of Jerusalem, the Palace of Peace, which functions as a center for international disaster aid and world peace. The rebuilt Temple and its revived, sacred rituals are much less important in the novel than the internationally oriented Palace of Peace, and this feature is characteristic of Herzl's true or ultimate allegiances. When the Jewish Temple is finally reached, the prayer service begins. While the congregants recite the appropriate Hebrew prayers, Löwenberg is transported back to his distant childhood. The text reads: "Ihm...kamen schöne deutsche Verse in den Sinn, die Hebräischen Melodien von Heinrich Heine. Da war Prinzessin Sabbath wieder...." 2 2 Next follow the temple singers, chanting the familiar "Lecho Daudi." Yet, it is Heine's German version from "Prinzessin Sabbath" which Herzl supplies in the novel. The narrative voice explains: "Ja, Heine fühlte als wahrer Poet die Romantik, welche im Schicksale seines Stammes enthalten war. Und daß er die innigsten deutschen Lieder sang, hinderte ihn nicht, auch die Schönheit der

21

22

(Frankfurt a. Main: Rütten & Loening, 1923), 27. Theodor Herzl, "Selbstbiographie," in Leon Kellner (Ed.), Theoder Herzl's Schriften (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Jüdischer Verlag, n.d.), 18. Theodor Herzl, Almeuland (Haifa: Haifa Publishing Co., 1962), 186.

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hebräischen Melodien zu finden."23 That Löwenberg should recall Heine at this emotional moment in the novel, rather than the Hebrew prayer, accords well with the sense of self projected by the protagonist, as well as with Herzl's intimate relationship to Heine, which may be documented from other sources. That the narrative voice comments on Heine's true poetic stature at this juncture by way of explanation seems reasonable also. And, that Heine could sing the most authentic German Lieder, while at the same time perceiving the beauty of the Jewish tradition also reflects similar early Zionist beliefs about the ability and success of Jews in contributing to non-Jewish society and culture, when encouraged or permitted to do so, without their having to compromise or abandon their essential Jewishness — this, notwithstanding the record of Heine's own experience. In fact, Nordau had expressed this view precisely, mentioning Heine in a lecture delivered in Berlin in 1898, "Der Zionismus und seine Gegner. " 24 However, this shift in Herzl's text to Heine represents a kind of tyranny on the part of Heine over Herzl, characteristic of Herzl's reception of him. Herzl's identification of the poet of "Lecho Daudi" in the novel as "Salomon ben Halevey" represents another example of this tyranny. Even Herzl knew well enough that Heine's identification of the author of "Lecho Daudi" in "Prinzessin Sabbat" was poetical fancy: "gedichtet von dem grossen,/ Hochberühmten Minnesinger/Don Jehuda ben Halevy."25 Yehuda Halevi was not the author of "Lecha Daudi." Yet, Herzl's own "Salomon ben Halevy" is almost as fanciful, owing its onomastic form, particularly the inserted "ben," to Heine's incorporation of the same in "Jehuda Halevy's" name. The true author of Lecho Daudi was not Shlomo Ben Halevi, but rather Shlomo Ben Moshe Halevi Alkabetz, the 16th century Hebrew poet and kabbalist.26 As a Zionist, Nordau realized that it was a delusion to believe that love of Heine could make one a good Jew,27 and even Nordau sensed that Herzl's most authentic interests before his conversion to Zionism "showed not a spark of Judaism."28 Nevertheless, in his address at the 7th Zionist Congress in Basel in 1905, which was a moving tribute to Herzl, who had died the year before, Nordau placed Herzl in a private, personalized pantheon of

23

Ibid. Max Nordau, "Der Zionismus und seine Gegner," in Max Nordau's Zionistische Schriften (Köln, Leipzig: Jüdischer Verlag, 1909), 188-214. Heinrich Heine, "Prinzessin Sabbat," in Romanzero, (Heinrich Heine's Werke 2 [Basel, Stuttgart: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1956]), 300. 2 6 See "Alkabetz, Solomon ben Moses Ha-Levi" (1505-1584) in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2, 635-637. 2 7 Max Nordau, "III. Kongressrede," in his Zionistische Schriften, 89. 2 ® Max Nordau, "Trauerrede auf Herzl," in his Zionistische Schriften, 159.

24

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noble Jewish figures. These included: "Judas Maccabaeus, Bar Kochba, Jehuda Halevy, Spinoza, and Heine." 29 Nordau's reception of Heine was an attempt at a kind of apotheosis, which required qualification. The seminal text in this connection is Nordau's continuation of Heine's Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, entitled "Ein Nachtrag zu Heinrich Heines Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen." It was included in his collected Zionist writings, published by the Jüdischer Verlag in 1909. 30 Nordau wrote an additional Caput, Caput XXVIII, comprised of 21 quatrains in the form Heine's ballad stanza, which amounts to a reading and performance of Heine's poem. In Nordau's verses, the dead poet, primarily Jewish in his identification, is resurrected: "Er zog mit jüdischem Wanderstab / Umher in deutschen Landen." 31 Heine seeks a final resting place, but seven German cities have no need for a Jew. Finally, he is granted a place of honor in Greece, in a pantheon of fellow heroes, his true equals, including Apollo, Homer, Achilles, and Ulysses. Although not explicit in the poem, this honor may be a result of Heine's own affirmation of Hellenentum. In any case, his Jewish fate pursues him, and ultimately he is rejected as well from this last resting place. As a reading of Heine's poem, Nordau's "Nachtrag" represents the imaginative imposition of early Zionist concerns, principally, in this sense, because the poem does not lend itself easily to Jewish or Jewish-nationalist readings. For example, in the forward to Heine's poem, Heine had expressed certain contentment with the "free air" of Paris, while the cries of those "pharisees of nationalism" were condemned.32 The Germans and French, and not the Jews, were identified ironically as the chosen people of humanity. Heine's poetic persona spoke on behalf of the Germans collectively, as well as on behalf of the German soul. The persona was the son of the father Rhein, the prodigal son returned home to Germany. In the section praising the publisher Campe, God was praised ironically as the creator of oysters in the sea and Rhinewine on the earth. Hammonia, the protector goddess of Hamburg recognized the poet as her lover. The metaphorical identification with the Christian Jesus was echoed in several places. Yet, Nordau's poetic reading willfully neglects all these aspects, responding instead to a general feeling of the eternal outsider, of the melancholy, irreverent exile, and of the ironic revolutionary expressed in this poem. Nordau identified this complex as essentially characteristic of Jewish life in exile.

29

Ibid. ® Max Nordau, "Nachtrag zu Heinrich Heines 'Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen,'" in his Zonistische Schriften, 399-402. 31 Ibid., 399. 32 Heinrich Heine, "Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen," in Werke 2, 93. 3

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Nordau's poem accords, by and large, with the Zionist reading of Heine as a Nationaljude, preferred first by Max Jungmann in 1896,33 and followed to some degree by other Zionist commentators. Robert Jaffe's jungjüdisch assessment of Heine, published in 1899 in Die Welt, (which emphasizes Heine's Jewish-racial background),34 as well as Nathan Birnbaum's appraisal of "Heinrich Heine, der Jude," published in Die Welt in 1906, 35 are especially pertinent in this regard. Yet, the early Zionist reception of Heine was complicated by the fact that Jungmann's contention, amplified by Jaffe, Birnbaum, and others, was not accepted across the board by the spectrum of Zionist critics. For example, writing also in Die Welt, in 1900, Ludwig Hirschfeld commented on the issue of the Heine monument, writing that it made no sense to designate Heine a Jewish-national poet: "Er fühlte sich immer als Deutscher. Freilich steht er uns sehr nahe, durch die Abstammung und durch die 'echt jüdische' Verfolgung, die er erlitt. Wir mögen ihn bewundern, wir mögen uns freuen, mit ihm verwandt zu sein; zum JüdischNationalen, zum Zionisten dürfen wir ihn nicht machen." 36 Many articles concerning Heine, which appeared in Die Welt during the first decade of its existence, that is, including the 100th anniversary of Heine's birth, as well as the 50th anniversary of his death (or in Ost und West up through 1910), reflect a relatively wide range of views and interests that militate against the notion of a uniform "Zionist appropriation of Heine." 37 Again, Zionist interest in Heine often corresponded to universalist concerns within the movement. For example, following the assassination of Empress Elisabeth in 1898, several articles touched upon her enthusaism for Heine, since he was her favorite poet, and much was written about her meeting with Charlotte Embden, Heine's sister, who had presented the monarch with original copies of Heine's letters. Evidently, Crown Prince Rudolf had once given Empress Elisabeth the original manuscript of Buch der Lieder as a present. Significant space was devoted in Die Welt to the death of Heine's sister at 99 years of age in 1899. An article on Bismarck's 33

34 35 36 37

Max Jungmann, "Heinrich Heine — ein Nationaljude," Zion 7/8 (August 30, 1896), 215228. Cf. Jungmann, Heinrich Heine ein Nationaljude. Eine kritische Synthese (Berlin: Siegfried Cronbach, 1896). Robert Jaffe (Max Aram), ""Ghettodichter," Die Welt, 3, 24 (1899), 11-13. Nathan Birnbaum, "Heinrich Heine der Jude," Die Well, 10,9 (1906), 14-15. Ludwig Hirschfeld, "Eine Judenverfolgung," Die Welt, 4, 6 (1900), 6. I think it is important to distinguish between a Zionist appropriation, on one hand, and a possible Zionist misappropriation of Heine, on the other. See Jeffrey L. Sammons: Heinrich Heine: The Elusive Poet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 446-465. Both Jeffrey Sammons and Leo Lensing write of a "Zionist appropriation" in their essays, included in this volume. See Sammons, "Jewish Reception as the Last Phase of the American Heine Reception"; and Lensing, "Heine's Body, Heine's Corpus: Sexuality and Jewish Identity in Karl Kraus's Literary Polemics Against Heinrich Heine."

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admiration of Heine appeared in Die Welt in 1898; he especially liked Atta Troll. Furthermore, Bismark was reported to have denied any connection to the opponents of the Heine monument.38 In this context, it is pertinent to note that the interest in European aristocracy characteristic of Die Welt corresponds exactly to the elitist and aristocratic attitude, which Herzl endeavored to cultivate within Zionism in general. For example, in Der Judenstaat, he favored a democratic monarchy or an aristocratic republic for his Jewish State, which corresponded, so he claimed, to the proud demeanor of the Jewish people. 39 His interest in European royalty and his belief that winning its support would be crucial for the success of the Zionist movement were cornerstones of his political work. Concomitantly, Heine's own aristocratic posturing, as well as his popularity in some royal circles, must have appeared worthy of journalistic exploitation. Several articles concerning the Heine monument controversy appeared in Die Welt, as did reports of the dedication ceremony in New York in 1899. Herzl himself had taken a stand against a Heine monument ("it was not possible or necessary") in an article published in the Berlin Tageblatt in 1887, that is, well before his conversion to Zionism. 40 The monument controversy gave Zionists a timely opportunity to assess the desirability and feasibility of appropriating Heine altogether. The Zionist reception of Heine and of German literature entered a new phase after the radicalization of German Zionism had been accomplished, shortly before the first World War. Following the lead of other Zionist leaders who rejected diaspora Jewry and its variegated literary and cultural expressions out of hand, Kurt Blumenfeld insisted on the rejection of German culture within Zionism as one of the prerequisites of Zionist affiliation, after assuming the post of secretary-general of the Zionist Federaton of Germany. 41 Thus, a new phase of the Zionist reception of Heine was inaugurated, which, by and large, amounted to an non-reception. Heine never disappeared completely from the German cultural Zionist scene, but his presence in the second phase was negligible and his marginality was not conducive to providing a substantive basis for a discussion concerning Jewish identity and culture. Despite the importance and influence of Blumenfeld's rejectionist stance during his active political career over several decades, it must be stated, even 38 39 40 41

"Heine und Bismarck," Die Welt, 2, 40 (1898), 8. Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 91. Quoted by Alex Bein, in Theodor Herzl, 90. Joachim Ginat, "Kurt Blumenfeld und der deutsche Zionismus," in Kurt Blumenfeld, Im Kampf um den Zionismus (Miriam Sambursky and Joachim Ginat, Eds.), (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1976), 7-37. Cf. Kurt Blumenfeld, Erlebte Judenfrage (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1962).

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if it is quite ironical, that the problem of Heine virtually obsessed Blumenfeld toward the end of his life, after he retired from public life. In a way, Heine became a symbol for Blumenfeld of all the failings of the movement. In a letter to Lilli Mendelssohn dated February 5, 1947, Blumenfeld mentioned Heine in connection with the failure to realize the kind of secular striving for freedom he had envisioned in Zionism. 42 In a letter to Hannah Arendt, dated Nov. 5, 1954, Blumenfeld recalled the "genuine representatives of the German-Jewish symbiosis," admitting that what he once believed to have been their weaknesses, that is no doubt their lingering Germanic qualities and predilections, were really but a desperate attempt at self-assertion. 43 In a letter to Ernst Simon from this time he linked Heine to Herzl, claiming that given certain conditions, Heine, too, would have transformed his unfulfilled desires into action, the way the "technical romantic" Herzl did. 4 4 In a letter to Hans Tramer dated March 1, 1961, Blumenfeld insisted that "...[we] are Heine's contemporaries. In our time, conversion has been replaced with the leap to Zionism." In a way, "Heine unmasked German Jewry." 4 5 This attempt to employ Heine as a sign for the political and social discontent with Zionist reality around the time of the founding of the State of Israel and afterward may be documented in other places. In 1954, Henry Hurvitz wrote in the Menorah Journal: The question is no longer whether the State is to exist. The question is what kind of a State it will turn out to be. What a paradox is here! In all the countries of the West Jews have been and continue to be in the forefront of liberalism. There have been myriads like Heine, soldiers and leaders in all the struggles for intellectual and spiritual liberation. This contribution of ours to Western civilization is one of the glories of the "Diaspora." Yet, when Jews have gotten a chance to run a State of their own, look at it! ... We rub our eyes, some of us who were lifelong Zionists, and we hang our heads in shame. 46 The priviliging of this aspect of Heine and diaspora Jewry in this specific context represents in fact a serious challenge to Zionist cultural politics.

42 43 44 45 46

Kurt Blumenfeld, Im Kampf um den Zionismus, 210. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 292. Quoted in Gary V. Smith, Zionism. The Dream and the Reality (New York: Bames & Noble, 1974), 7.

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Recently, a new Hebrew edition of Heine's poetry has been published 47 and there have been several references to Heine in the Israeli press. Some unlikely quotations and intertextual associations give some credence, perhaps, to the belief that Heine is not to be written off entirely in Israel in the future. It is possible that a Zionist or at least an Israeli reception will continue. Not that this newest phase is unproblematical. In the latest examples, Heine has become transformed unwittingly into a Jewish sage, whose words of wisdom concerning the Jewish people are quoted out of context. For example, in an editorial, entitled "Pesach 5750" in the Passover edition of the Jerusalem Post published only two weeks ago, a portion of Heine's Geständnisse were quoted where he muses on the praiseworthy work of Moses in making the Jewish people into a nation: "Heinrich Heine wrote that Moses 'took a wretched tribe of shepherds and forged them into a nation that, like the Egyptian pyramids, was destined to live for milennia - a great people, an eternal one, a people dedicated to God, capable of serving as a model for all nations and an exemplar to all mankind. He created Israel.' " 4 8 An editorial comment follows: "It would be a pity were the Jews of the reborn sovereign Israel to forget or fritter away that glorious legacy of which Heine wrote, a legacy that has inspired all Western and many Eastern civilizations." It appears here that the Heine myth is taking a new and ominous turn. In conclusion, the implied reader of this text, my lecture, will not fail to understand it in terms of the current political and social crisis in this country, and in Zionism in general, in wake of the intifada. My comments on the topic of Heine reception in early Zionism should not be seen as a kind of escapism or nostalgia for what Max Brod lauded as "humane-universal humanistically orientated Zionism." 49 Yet, as hundreds of Jewish immigrants arrive daily in Israel from the Soviet Union, and as steady streams of Jewish refugees arrive monthly from Ethiopia, Argentina, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, the overall sense of Zionist purpose certainly deserves humane understanding. If Heine will continue to be received in Israel, let us appropriate him critically for this task.

47

48 49

Heinrich Heine, Mivhar Shirim Vmikhtavim (Trans. Shlomo Tanny), (Sefarim Reshafim: 1990). Additionally, in 1987, the popular Sfriyat Tarmil published a new Hebrew edition of Der Rabbi von Bacherach and Florentinische Nächte (Trans. Ya'akov Horwitz). "Pessah 5750," Jerusalem Post (April 9, 1990), 4. Max Brod, Der Prager Kreis (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 117.

Mirjana Stancic

Heinrich Heine's Jewish Reception in Croatia in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

A few words of introduction concerning the historical and cultural background of the Jews in Croatia, a province in Yugoslavia, and especially about the Zagreb Community seem to be necessary, since I shall be referring to certain historical aspects in the subsequent text. The Zagreb Jewish Community celebrated its 200th anniversary in 1986; Jews started to settle in Croatia towards the end of the 18th century. In 1806 they established a community in Zagreb and Varazdin. Aron Palota was the Rabbi of the Jewish Community in Zagreb in 1809. In 1840 the Croatian Diet decided that Jews should "gradually be given full equality." Some important dates regarding the emancipation of the Jews in Croatia follow: in 1843 the range of occupations was extended; in 1846 it became possible to buy freedom through the "tolerance tax"; in 1859 Jews were allowed to buy houses and land; in 1873 Ban Mazuranic signed the decree of full equality for the Jews; in 1880 there were 13,488 Jews in Croatia, and in 1900, 20,032. Although they made up only 1 % of the total population in Croatia, Jews represented, at the beginning of the 20th century, a disproportionate share in the industrial and wholesale branches of business. The Deutsch-Maceljski, Alexander, Priester, Ehrlich, and Schwartz families were among the wealthiest in Croatia. Within a little over 50 years, Jews in Croatia had become one of the most prosperous groups of citizens. More than anywhere else in Yugoslavia, there was a noticeable trend of upward mobility among Croatian Jews in the early 20th century, with a commensurate advance in the academic professions and in intellectual work. In 1940 there were about 11,000 Jews living in the capital city, Zagreb: 8,712 members of the ashkenazi religious community, 625 members of the sephardi community; over 2,000 Jews did not belong to either of these communities, but they all suffered persecution as Jews during World War II. Throughout the 19th century there was turmoil in the Jewish communities in Croatia. The prevalent conflict was due to the rift between the orthodox believers and the moderates, who were called "neologues." They even maintained separate communities. Among the spectrum of opinions and affiliations, yet another appeared at the beginning of the 20th century in Zagreb: Zionism. Although Jewish literary societies, an important part of Jewish cul-

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tural activity, had fewer members than the social ones, they were no less influential. What started as literary meetings of Jewish youth in Zagreb in 1898, eventually became a literary society, "Literami Sastanci," with ongoing activities, steady membership (about 100 strong), and serious programming, which remained active until World War II. In fact, numerous literary and art societies appeared, usually short-lived, but not without an impact. These included, for example, the Israeli Literary Society, the Student Society Esperanza, and Judaea te Omanut, the last being the most comprehensive and intellectually most ambitious society in the decade immediately before World War II. 1 Salom Freiberger was the leader of the Youth Club, "Literarni sastanci," 2 and Heine was often discussed in the meetings of this group. There is no exaggeration in the statement that Heine's Jewish reception in Zagreb, and in Croatia in general, underlines symptomatically the evolution (i.e.progress) of the Jewish Community itself and its striving for cultural acceptance and approval by the homeland. The culmination of the integration of Jews into economic, social, and cultural life was reached by the end of the 19th century and in the first three decades of the 20th century. Within Serbian and Croatian literature, Heine belongs to the most important literary examples or prototypes in modern times. Generations fulfilled their literary education with Heine, translating his poetry, as well as imitating his style. Since the beginning of the sixties there has been a remarkable fascination with Heine in Serbian and Croatian literature, which in Serbia has been given the special name "hajnejstvo" (Heine-manner, fashion), and which has developed into an authentic style of writing (mannerism). In the course of Heine's acceptance, especially stressed were translations of his lyric poetry. The number of translations (including Heine's fiction as well), which appeared in Croatian and Serbian periodicals and newspapers up to 1900 comes to around 700. Heine's poetry has been published in Croatia since 1842, especially in the magazine, Croatia, a cultural monthly which focused on the special interests of the fatherland, edited by Franz Suppan in Agram, from 1839 to 1942. The fact, on one hand, that Heine was read by the Bildungsbürgertum in German, and, on the other hand, that reading Heine was prohibited by the German Bundestag , might have kept the members of the Illyrian movement in Croatian literature during the thirties and the forties (the Illyrians ) from translating Heine into Croatian. Endeavoring to establish a totally independent national culture, they were extremely careful about their cultural policy. The very first translator of Heine into Croatian was a certain Edo 1

2

See Jews in Yugoslavia (Catalogue of the Exhibition),(Zagreb: Muzejski prostor, 1989); 200 Godina Zidova u Zagrebu (200 Years of Jews in Zagreb), (Zagreb: Jevrejska opcina Zagreb, 1988), 88ff. See 200 Years of Jews in Zagreb, 64-66.

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Iglic of Jewish origin, who translated 15 famous poems from "Die Heimkehr." 3 (Statistically, about two-thirds of all the following translators of Heine were Jews.) In the seventies a decrease of Heine's popularity in translation was registered in Croatia. However, the rise of the aesthetics of realism brought about an interest in Heine's fiction. In 1874 an important edition, including poems from Heine's early period, appeared, translated by Lavoslav Vukelic, another Jewish author with a Slavic name. Heine's reception in Croatia is thus unthinkable without the Jewish contribution. It was articulated foremost through translations, essays, and articles that were written by Jewish authors and published in their presses. 4 Heine's works were available in Zagreb bookshops and in private libraries owned by prosperous Jewish bourgeois families. In Zagreb, Heine's works were available at the same time as in the rest of Europe. A prominent Croatian 19th century intellectual, Imbro Tkalac, educated in Germany, wrote in his memoirs, Jugenderinnerungen aus Zagreb (published in 1894), that he had read Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and Börne in the forties, and he also wrote about the bookshop-owner, who set the tone in Zagreb, a Jew named Hirschfeld: Hirschfeld war aus Bremen gebürtig und war vor einigen Jahren als Gehilfe in Reichhardt's Buchhandlung nach Güns gekommen. Hier erfuhr er, daß in Agram keine nach deutscher Art eingerichtete Buchhandlung bestehe, und beeilte sich, diesen Umstand auszunutzen. Gründete in Agram eine Buchhandlung, die in direkter Beziehung mit Leipzig stand. Er führte auch verbotene Bücher, aus dem Verlag Hoffmann und Campe, Otto Wigand, Tipografia Elvetica. 5 Without any doubt, Heine was an important part of Jewish, as well as nonJewish, Geftthlskultur. Jewish translators of Heine into Croatian in the nineties and in the 20th century continued to publish their work: in 1892 by Franjo Ciraki, in 1922 by Ferdo Z. Miler, and in 1936 by Hinko Gottlieb. Not only did they contribute to the intensification of the Heine-cult; they contributed to the enrichment of the Croatian language, which almost half of them used as their mother-tongue. Writers of articles and essays about Heine pursued several approaches, most of them being - at least in the early period of Heine's reception biographical, sociological, and political. Later on, during the last decades of the 19th century, and especially in the beginning of the 20th century, the impact was more and more specific, targeting special topics, for example, the 3

In Slavonac, I (1863), Nr. 31, 34. See, for example: Zidov, Omanut, Zidovska zena, Jevrejski list. Jugoslawische Rundschau, Zsido Elet, Jüdisches Volksblatt, Pokret, Jevrejska tribuna. 5 Imbro Tkalac, Jugenderinnerungen aus Kroatien ( Leipzig: 1894), 191.

4

Jüdische

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Stancic

discussion of particular aspects of Heine's texts and their interpretation. This approach reached its culmination in 1936 through Hinko Gottlieb (18861948), translator, poet, and Zionist leader. He founded the Jewish monthly Omanut, which he edited from 1936 until 1941. A collection of his poems, J J AR, jevrejski maj appeared in 1935 in Zagreb. In the literary magazine Mladost (The Youth), edited by Croatian modernist writers in Vienna in 1898, the Jewish voice was represented by Oto Kraus, Mavro Spicer, Sime Hofmann, and their colleague, Adolph Donath, an outstanding Zionist, whom they adopted for their aesthetic program. The chief editor, Dusan Plavsic, a Zagreb banker and writer, wrote an essay about Heine in the first issue of the magazine, beginning with the most significant words: "In the whole history of German literature there is no poet, who has been hurt by the Germans more than Heine." 6 An essay written by the most talented author of Croatian modernism, Antun Gustav MatoS, depicts very illustratively one among various aspects of the Heine-cult in Croatia. It was written in Paris, in November, 1901, at Heine's grave on Montmartre: "Greek and Jew, pagan and Christian, German and French, liberal lover of the Middle Ages, romantic and realist, Napoleon-worshipper and republican, a man of past times and of the future at the same time, dreamer and rational and ironic, Pyrrhon and enthusiast, poet and journalist, Catholic and Protestant, and mystic as well, Heine is one of the richest souls in modern literature. [...] The Jews are really a chosen people, chosen for love. They have taught the rest of the world to love, to love monogamy, monotheism, and monopolism." 7 It is important to note that of the Jewish promoters of Heine, including the translators of his works into Croatian, most were not professional writers or otherwise professionally involved with literature. This testifies to the importance of Heine's acceptance among Croatian Jews at large. The most important Jewish promoters of Heine in Croatia published translations and essays in Jewish magazines and newspapers, as well as in the Croatian daily Obzor and in the Agramer Tagblatt (1886-1922, from 1922 the Zagreber Tagblatt, and from 1926-1941 Morgenblatt), which was published in German and paid great attention to Heine. This may be explained to a certain extent by the fact that both were under the control of the Jewish and Masonic lobby. In Obzor, in 1906, for example, in an anonymous article, adapted from some German magazine, the following concerning Heine was published: And the meritorius fathers of the nation, fat and dull, shake smartly their bold heads when they hear his name and say very 6

7

Dusan Plavsic, "Heineovoj stogodisnjici" (Heine's 100th Birthday), Mladost (Youth), I (1898), 49-51. Antun Gustav Matos, Complete edition, Vol. III (Zagreb: Liber/Mladost, 1973), 313314.

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knowingly: it's a pity he was a Jew. And the Jews, his fellows by blood, wash their hands, when they even hear the conversation about the renegade from the religion of their fathers and the poet who wrote magnificent apotheoses to Christ.[...] And the servants and disciples of Christ cannot forgive him his cynical approach. [...] He had many enemies in his life; it means he deserves to be worshipped. 8 Heine was a self-evident part of Jewish Gefühlskultur in Zagreb, a city with a long cultural tradition itself. Some representative examples follow. In the library left behind by Dr. Lavoslav Sik, a prominent Zagreb pre-war lawyer, who did not survive the Holocaust, there are over 35 (as recorded in the catalogue) titles by Heinrich Heine, including separate editions and the complete works. Dr. Sik's library, now owned by the Jewish Community in Zagreb, was no exception among Jewish intellectuals in Yugoslavia. Heine was also a concern of the Zionist leaders in Zagreb. Aleksander Licht (1884-1948), a prominent Jew, was a spiritual leader of the Zagreb School in Yugoslav Zionism. As a young man he was elected chairman of the Jewish Youth Circle (Literarni sastanci), which soon thereafter became a Zionist society. In Vienna he was the chairman of Bar Giora. He edited Zidovska smotra (The Jewish Review). In 1909 he was elected secretary of the Zionist Organization of the Southern Slavic countries. He later died in Geneva. In the literary supplement of Zidovska smotra he discussed a new book, Das jüdische Element in Heines Werken, by Dr. M. Bienenstock, subtitled, "ein kritisch-ästhetischer Beitrag zur Heine-Frage" (Leipzig: 1910). From his Zionist point of view he writes: Nothing seems to be more natural than searching for Heine's connections with Judaism. Heine's Judaism seems to be a stumbling block for Heine's opponents. His worshippers must show these connections. The author of the book quoted has judged the importance of the Jewish element in Heine's work, but he has failed to fill the gap,which can as well be identified in other Heine biographies. In 250 pages we search in vain for the deeper psychological analysis of this Jewish element and come to the conclusion, that other biographers succeeded in characterizing Heine's spiritual connection with Judaism better than the author of this book. The literature about Heine would not have lost much, if this work, this "critical-aesthetical approach" - with very little criticism and aesthetics — had not come to light. [···] The very method of this "criticial research" is empty. As for the mere Jewish themes, which are equally representative for Byron and Herder, there is nothing specifically Jewish in Heine's poems. Without a doubt: Heine is with his poetry a true son of his tribe. The way he articulates his attitude towards Jewish themes, his frequent recalling of Judaism - all that reveals a Jew, but only from the outside. From a truly critical analysis we expect 8

Obzor, 47 (1906), 6.

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discoveries of deeper, psychological connections between the poet and his being a Jew. The author repeats the well-known biography of Heine, mentioning his youth, his Jewish education, his relationship with Rahel Varnhagen, his regrets about his conversion. Heine is a Jew. His Jewishness manifests itself in his self-understanding, in his feelings, regardless of whether he is singing about Halevy or the lyrical intermezzo. Nevertheless his Jewishness cannot be "provod" by looking for what inspired Heine to write the poem "Belsazar," since we have the same right to ask what inspired Byron to write a poem with the same motive. In one word: unneccessary work, which does not deserve further waste of words. 9 Jewish authors, who published in the Jewish press, were mostly interested in the following topics in their articles about Heine: Heine's biography (such as Heine in Paris), his love-affairs, 10 his relationship with his mother, problems concerning the Heine-monument in Düsseldorf and Hamburg. There were also reviews of books written about Heine by M. Bienenstock, Μ. Kaufmann, C. Mauclair and Η. H. Houben, S. Rahmer, H. Wendel-Krinitz, as well as discussions of individual works and comparative studies. 11 A notable specialist on Heine, Ernest Bauer, published comprehensive essays on Heine in the Croatian press. In "Heine i danaSnja Njemacka" (Heine and Modern Germany) published in Hrvatska revija in 1936, he wrote: No German poet has expressed the whole problem of the German spirit as clearly as Heine did, although he, we must admit, learned here from Fichte. Heine is no "impertinent little Jew" or "the traitor paid by France" [...]. After revealing the flow of Heine's thoughts and their limited development we have realized ~ to our surprise ~ that this poet had anticipated in his mind the future Germany, that he had, as a visionary, foreseen its future destiny and comes very close to the theory of the newest political events .... In 1923, the national-socialist writer, Dietrich Eckart, severely attacked Heine in his article, "Heine als Prophet." Today, German writers are much more careful. That is why we nowadays witness a certain concealment of Heine's name, more often than direct attacks. It is wrong, although it can be often heard, that Heine's Jewish origin should be the main reason for the disapproving attitude of official Germany towards Heine. It is 9

Aleksander Licht, "Das jüdische Element in Heines Werken," Zidovska smotra (Jewish Review), 5 (1911), 6, 102. As for example, Antonija Gerba, "Heinrich Heine i Matilda Mirat," (Heinrich Heine and Mathilda Mirat) Narodne novine ( People's Newspaper), 71 (1905), 98, 1-2. v For example: Pavao Jehuda Wertheim, "Heineov 'Rabbi von Bacharach,'" Zidov (The Jew), 13 (1929), 2, 2-3; Avram Pinto, "Heine als Dichter der Proletarier," Volksslimme, 18 (1936), 14,2; 15,2; Vallentin Antonina, "Heine-prorok" (Heine as Prophet), Jevrejski narodni kalendar, 2 (1936-37), 169-174 ; Ernst Elster, "Heines Testament," Agramer Tagblatt, 21 (1906), 38, 2-4; Otto Wilhelm, "Heines Charakter," Agramer Zeitung, 77

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not that easy to cut out of one's literature its best lyrical poet, and not even Germany can do it without certain regrets. 12 From another essay by Ernest Bauer, a fundamental text for scholars concerned with Heine's acceptance in Yugoslavia, "Heinrich Heine kod Hrvata i Srba" (Heinrich Heine in Croatia and Serbia), published in Obzor in 1932, the following may be quoted: Heine started to influence other poets with his poetry, later on with prose. This tradition has been continued .... The prose is nevertheless the clearest expression of Heine's art, and if there were any prose translations in Croatian, we could have really enjoyed them. [...] Heine died in Paris in 1856, but before his death translations of his work were published. But, since the whole tendency of the literary direction of "Junges Deutschland" during his lifetime was rather difficult for our people to understand, our literary public was not familiar with his social and literary ideas, and consequently attention was paid only to his lyrical work. [...] After some initial influences of Heine's poetry on Vraz and some other Illyrians, the first representative author of Heine's style in Croatian literature was Antun Nemcic, with his Putositnice. This book of travels in feuilletonistic manner was written as an imitation of the famous examples of this genre, such as Sterne's Sentimental Journey, and some works by Jean Paul and Ludwig Börne. [...] The whole strategy, and especially the discussion of the cultural and social questions of foreign nations, all this is very close to Heine's Französische Zustände and Über Deutschland [...]. Heine's "Witz" and his irony, his weapons against the reactionaries, remained and will remain the example for modern writers. Problems and interests have changed, but the weapons are still the same. 13 In the Sarajevo magazine Jevrejske glas, Salamon Ternbach from Zagreb published a comprehensive article "Heinrich Heine. Prilikom 75. godiSnjice smrti" (Heinrich Heine, the 75th Anniversary of the Poet) and insisted on Byron's influence on the German poet: "Heine cannot be really understood without Byron. In the time when Heine lived, many excellent texts and stinging criticism were written. Nowadays, only Feuerbach and Schopenhauer are being read outside of Germany, foremost for their freedom and original style. As far as poetry is concerned, they read only Heine." 1 4

12

13

14

(1902), 14, 1-2. Ernest Bauer, "Heine i danaSnja Njemacka" (Heine and Modem Germany), Hrvatska revija ( Croatian Review) IX (1936), 12, 643. Emest Bauer, "Heinrich Heine kod Hrvata i Srba" (Heinrich Heine in Croatia and Serbia), Obzor LXXIII (1932), 291, 5. Salamon Ternbach, "Heinrich Heine," Jevrejski glas (Jewish Comment), 3 (1930), 9 (99), 3; 10 (100), 3-4. Here: p.3 in 9(99).

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In Zidov, Paulina Albala published the article "Savremenost Hajneova" ("Heine's Modernism") in 1938. She shows a typically feminine touch for practical judgement: Like most intellectuals, he has limited himself to the vast preaching of democratic principles, but he has no ability to fight for them with other, perhaps more efficient methods. With Heine, the idea is not followed by any activity. It is not in his nature to be the martyr, to sacrifice himself. Still, since he could not bare the idea of living according to the rules of severe Prussian discipline, he decided to leave his country. 15 Next to Bauer, the most significant promoter of Heine in Croatia was EliSa Samlaic, who wrote numerous articles in this connection. In "Heine i muzicari" (Heine and the Musicians) published in Omanut, he wrote: Heine is a name which will never cease to interest us. A warm lyricist, excellent essayist, cynical critic, and above all a man of high spirit, he left in his works such a great variety of views, that they will always be full of vigor and interesting. His attitude towards musicians is also worth mentioning. 16 In another article, "Gottlieb kao prevodilac Heinea" (Gottlieb as Translator of Heine), Samlaic reviewed Hinko Gottlieb's newly edited anthology of Heine's poetry in Croatian. EliSa Samlaic is full of approval for Gottlieb's endeavor: "These translations did not receive the attention they deserve. They belong to the best translations of Heine in the entire Croatian and Serbian literature." 17 The author further compares the earlier Croatian and Serbian translations with those of Gottlieb, and comes to the conclusion that Gottlieb's verses were smoother, more elastic, and fluent: Out of 25 translated poems, 13 have already been translated by other poets, some of them [have had] up to 6 translators, which proves Gottlieb's good taste: he has translated the lyrical poems of Heine, which he considered the best, the most beautiful, and the most popular. There are still 12 translations that he was the first to complete. In these poems we must search for the personality of the translator. He insists upon the statement that "the choice of the poems which make up this little selection were not according to any system and with no [political] 'tendency,"' but with a little attention you will realize his 'tendency' in

15

16 17

Paulina Albala-Lebl, "Savremenost Heineova" (Heine's Modernism), Zidov , 22 (1938), 9, 7. Elisa Samlaic, "Heine i muzicari" (Heine and the Musicians), Omanut III (1939), 6, 92. EliSa Samlaic, "Gottlieb kao prevodilac Heinea" (Gottlieb as Translator of Heine), Omanut III (1939), 7-8, 98.

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translating. First of all, the Jew Gottlieb aimed to present us the Jew Heine, editing him in this Jewish edition." 18 Among non-professional Heine devotees there were many doctors. One of these was an outstanding member of the Zagreb Jewish Community, Dr. Lavoslav Giesinger. He published a comprehensive article, "Heineov posljednji lijeinik" (Heine's Last Physician), in Omanut in 1939. Glesinger wrote: Recently we can notice the increase of interest in Heine. It is above all to the merit of Hinko Gottlieb, this excellent Heine translator, whose translation has already been discussed by E. Samlaic in a profound and extremely interesting way. [...] Heine's work implies various approaches. It could be worthwhile to research Heine's attitude towards medical doctors and illnesses.19 The author depicts precisely Heine's own illness and the methods of treatment, quoting essays written by S. Rahmer and M. C. Cohn, and J. Chalupetzky, which referred specifically to Heine's illness. His own concern is the biography and the social context, both medical and historical, of Dr. David Gruby, Heine's last doctor, who was bom in Backo Dobro Polje in Yugoslavia in 1810. Dr. Glesinger is proud of his discovery: the golden ring, a gift Heine gave to his favorite doctor, was still at that time in the possession of Gruby's nephews in Yugoslavia, and "it is nevertheless the only relic of Heine in our country." 20 This article is a paradigmatic example of Heine being a legend among non-literary Jews. In conclusion we might say that there was a noticeable love-hate relationship between Croatian Jews and Heine. Heine transcends the Jewish self-understanding as outcast and insider at the same time. He is a genius, but still a traitor, dangerous in his impact, belonging to the Jews, but misbehaving, a prophet and visionary, worthy of being translated into Croatian, still a difficult and uneasy task. Heine is a symbol, but not a figure of identification. A weird mixture of paradoxical capabilities, Heine exuded Jewish self-confidence. In the late thirties he was already understood as a prophet; thus he was a genuine part,of Jewish destiny, as an author who was always plotting between aesthetics and politics. A phenotype of reception, Heine was, with few exceptions, judged extremely affirmatively in Croatia.

18 19

20

Ibid., 116. Lavoslav Glesinger, "Heineov posljednji lijecnik" (Heine's Last Physician), Omanut III (1939), 11-12, (172-177), 172. Ibid., 177.

Wulf Koepke

Lion Feuchtwanger's Discovery of Himself in Heinrich Heine

World War I changed Lion Feuchtwanger's life. After his short French captivity in Tunis in 1914, he never escaped the grip of political power. It drove him from Munich to Berlin, into his French and American exiles, and it kept him from ever visiting his homeland after 1945. Before 1914, however, he felt free. Paradoxically, he also felt closest to Heinrich Heine, a GermanJewish writer and exile before him, and a permanent victim of politics, before he knew what fate had in store for him. Feuchtwanger's writings in exile routinely mention Heinrich Heine as an exemplary writer in exile, but unlike Ludwig Marcuse or Hermann Kesten, Lion Feuchtwanger never really focused on Heine in his later years. 1 One of the literary plans of his last years was a series of stories on famous exiles. 2 Maybe Heine would have been one of them. But, there is a closer, inner connection. After the three novels on the time of the French Revolution, his trilogy on revolution, Feuchtwanger returned to the re-creation of Jewish legends: the Jewess of Toledo and Jephta and his daughter. A return to Jewish themes, in a double sense: both novels describe a return to one's Jewishness at the expense of one's happiness. To regain one's identity after being involved in a foreign world comes at the expense of personal happiness or even one's physical existence. Feuchtwanger's version of the Raquel story introduces a variation of the Messiah idea: her son (and the king's!) survives; he is hidden in the Jewish communities of Europe, but he could be (or one of his descendents could be) the ruler in the coming age of eternal peace. Heinrich Heine, in Feuchtwanger's mind, was very much concerned with the end of the persecution of the Jews. After having tried, in an exemplary manner, to bridge the gap between Jews and Germans, and to help inaugurate 1

2

One example, Feuchtwanger's "Der Schriftsteller im Exil" of 1943: "[...] der elegante und tödliche Haß Heinescher Gedichte, das alles ist nicht denkbar ohne das Exil der Autoren." Centum opuscula, repr. under the title Ein Buch nur für meine Freunde, Fischer Taschenbuch 5823 (Frankfurt: 1984), 533. Subsequent quotes from Feuchtwanger's essays will be from this edition. Beside Ludwig Marcuse, also Max Brod and Antonina Vallentin wrote books claiming Heine for their cause, and, of course, numerous essays appeared. Lothar Kahn, Insight and Action. The Life and Work of Lion Feuchtwanger (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 345.

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the age of reason that would eliminate anti-Semitism, Heine, according to Feuchtwanger, returned to Judaism on his sickbed and recognized that his idealistic hopes had been mere dreams. Feuchtwanger's early Jewish heroes had anticipated this return: Jud Süß Oppenheimer gave up his political gambles for Jewish martyrdom; Flavius Josephus died and disappeared in the Jewish earth. The image of Heine did not contradict such a search for a Jewish identity; rather it confirmed it. There are two central points on which Feuchtwanger based that conviction: Heine's modernism, and, that he, a notoriously "bad" Jew, could not escape his heritage. The most revealing document of Feuchtwanger1 s early preoccupation with Heinrich Heine is his article, "Heinrich Heine und Oscar Wilde," written in 1908, at a time when a scholarly career seemed still in the cards for Lion Feuchtwanger. 3 The article is subtitled "Eine psychologische Studie," a rather provocative declaration at the time of the controversies about Freud's discoveries and theories. Oscar Wilde was then considered a prototypical "modern" writer; 4 his Salomi had enthused the young generation. In the article, Feuchtwanger wanted to make two points: he declined to look for possible "sources" of Wilde in Heine's work. Thus, he repudiated conventional philological-scholarly methods; but he wished to point out an inner affinity between the two writers, and thus he viewed Heine, following Nietzsche, as a prototypical modern writer, similar in may ways to Oscar Wilde. What Feuchtwanger attempted can be called a variety of Geistesgeschichte, if taken in a larger sense. It corresponds to the new criticism coming out of Austria after the turn of the century, written by Hofmannsthal, Kassner, Simmel, and the young Lukäcs. Feuchtwanger considered the two writers artverwandt. He sees a tragic conflict as their innermost being, a conflict between the desire to believe in great ideals, and the resigned knowledge that those hopes are illusory: "Dieser unselige Zwiespalt zwischen dem Willen und dem Unvermögen zum Glauben an ein allversöhnendes Ideal macht Heinrich Heine und Oscar Wilde zu Wesensverwandten." 5 Both of them are important artists in a monumental way: "Heine und Wilde sind klein in allem Großen, groß in allem Kleinen. "(24) They are masters of artistic form, and they are great in the small genres, but they cannot sustain the pace of an epic or dramatic work of large proportions. Also, they considered their art a game; they divorced art from life. "Dies ist das Gemeinsame ihrer Kunst: sie ist nicht Poesie des Herzens, sondern Poesie des Hirns. "(26) Heine and Wilde also maintained that there 3 4

5

Lothar Kahn, 39-40. Cf. "Von den Engländern war damals Oscar Wilde der meistgelesene. Salomä spielte in der Phantasie der Heranwachsenden eine ungeheure Rolle." Feuchtwanger, "Selbstdarstellung," (1933), 357. Quoted from Ein Buch nur für meine Freunde, 17-30, here p. 21.

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was no connection between moral character and the artistic talent. A criminal may be able to write perfect prose or poetry. Both the artist and the criminal are romantics; both are cosmopolitan. Indeed, they belong to the elite of European Romanticism: "Als die Gipfelpunkte dieser europäischen Romantik aber ergäben sich die Namen Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde." (29) Indeed, for Feuchtwanger: "Wilde vollendet, was Heine begann." (29) Feuchtwanger quoted Heine, saying that the poetry of certain writers was really "eine Krankheit." (30) Is that not typical for both Heine und Wilde — and the modern age? Thus, Heine was seen by Feuchtwanger with Nietzsche's eyes as the great European Romantic, with all the virtues and limitations of Romanticism. Lion Feuchtwanger, the aspiring dramatist, steeped in the atmosphere of the true Boheme of Schwabing, saw himself at that time as the successor of Wagner and Nietzsche, as a new poet "des Hirns" at the time of Stefan George and the early stirrings of Expressionism. Previous to this study, which was published in Feuchtwanger's very own short-lived literary journal Der Spiegel, he had written a dissertation entitled "Heinrich Heines 'Rabbi von Bacherach.' Eine kritische Studie." 6 The dissertation caused the very critical Franz Muncker to urge Feuchtwanger to pursue a scholarly career in the study of German literature, even though Jews were still barred from becoming professors in Bavaria. He began to work on a Habilitationsschrift on the origins of jounalistic prose in German literature, but ultimately preferred the life of a writer and critic. Pieces of the new study appeared, mainly for financial reasons, in the Frankfurter Zeitung J Feuchtwanger's dissertation contains three parts: first, the Entstehungsgeschichte, that is, the reconstruction of when and how Heine wrote this abortive historical novel; then, second, an analysis of the text and its presumed continuation; and, finally, a critical - very critical ~ evaluation. I tend to agree that the author of this dissertation comes through as arrogant and too sure of himself, 8 but he does not have to worry about much previous scholarship, and he is, indeed, very familiar with Heine's life and works, as well as with Jewish history. The real subject was evidently close to his heart: the twisted relationship of an emancipated, even assimilated, Jew to his Jewish heritage. Heine, he found out, really tried what Feuchtwanger would do later himself.

6

'

8

The dissertation has now been reprinted as Fischer Taschenbuch 5868, (Frankfurt: 1985), together with Heine's text. For instance, "Was bedeutet journalistisch?", "Die deutschen Reimchroniken des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts," "Die politischen Sprüche und Lieder der Deutschen im Mittelalter," "Die Ahnfrau des modernen Feuilletons." All are reprinted in Ein Buch nur für meine Freunde. That is the assessment of Lothar Kahn, ibid., 39; but Kahn's point is the contrast between Feuchtwanger's assertiveness in his dissertation on paper and his dubious role in society.

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Stimulated by Walter Scott, Heine wanted to write a historical novel on the persecution of the Jews in the late Middle Ages, shifting to the problems of Jewish identity and the difficult question of conversion to Christianity. The extant fragment, published much after its original conception and writing, offers somewhat disjointed fragments of both aspects. There may be conviction or tactics behind Feuchtwanger's evaluation. In any event, he saw Heine's concept and project in larger proportions than others have done, and consequently, he viewed the actual achievement as so much smaller, criticizing even the style of the first two chapters, and considering only the third chapter as brilliant prose. By contrasting the gap between plan and achievement in such a manner, Feuchtwanger pointed his finger at a task still waiting for its realization. Feuchtwanger's sober dissertation, in its own way, contributed its share to the revival of Jewish self-awareness at the beginning of the new century. Feuchtwanger traced in detail the genesis of Der Rabbi von Bacherach; he provided his reader with glimpses of the emancipated Jewish circles in Berlin, and of the many and changing inner conflicts of Heine embodied in this tale. Feuchtwanger offered an idea of what the novel could have been, but cautioned that Heine was not the type of writer who could really have emulated Walter Scott, as opposed to Willibald Alexis and others. Feuchtwanger unfolded the psychological and cultural, as well as political problems Heine faced at the beginning of his career, when he felt deeply that he had to champion the Jewish cause, i.e., to generate more understanding and acceptance of the Jewish character by showing how it was shaped by incessant persecutions. Feuchtwanger gave good reasons to show how Heine finally became wise and decided against publishing what would have been a most controversial story. Feuchtwanger surmised that Heine had almost completed a version of his novel, the manuscript of which was destroyed when the apartment of his mother in Hamburg burnt down. 9 Between the lines of the sober scholarly study, regret is clearly perceivable. Perhaps it is regret that the great novel on anti-Semitism was never written, or regret that the manuscript, as it existed, was lost. Perhaps it is regret that Heine was not, and could not be, a German or a Jewish-German Walter Scott. Heine, much more than the distant and abstract Moses Mendelssohn, remained the pivotal legitimizer of German-Jewish cultural symbiosis and of the fundamental fact that a writer's identity remained tied to his language. Thus, Feuchtwanger reiterated throughout his exile that he could never cease to be a German writer, and he insisted that it would be futile to look for

9

Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Heines Rabbi von Bacherach, 25; this is one of the points of controversy; later scholarship mostly disagrees with Feuchtwanger.

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common "Jewish" traits in Jewish writers of different ages and different languages. 10 A critical evaluation of Feuchtwanger's scholarly contribution to Heine research is not called for in this context.11 However, it is obvious that behind the objectifying style, and in spite of his adherence to the prescribed mode of presentation and procedure, Feuchtwanger was very much addressing himself to personal concerns. This is what makes his style so much livelier than the usual German dissertation of the time, containing tortured academic language of false modesty, flattery of professors, and overblown claims of new discoveries and insights. Most likely, Feuchtwanger was familiar with much of the material before he began the specific research on this particular topic, the most "Jewish" text of Heine. Thus, he had more insight than other young academics in those circumstances, and he wrote faster. Feuchtwanger knows and understands well the material of his dissertation. He is familiar with the literature on Jewish history, and he knows why Heine felt obligated to write this book, and why he finally did not really complete and publish it. In a sense, Feuchtwanger uncovered a whole minefield of problems and complexities among assimilated Jews. Heine, if we want to believe young Lion Feuchtwanger, would have brought out into the open the very deep and troubling problems of the identity of German Jews. If we want to adduce later evidence from Feuchtwanger's own novels, not his essays, we find that in all cases, from Jud Süß to Die Geschwister Oppermann to his last novels, assimilation is depicted as tempting, almost inevitable, but always doomed. While Feuchtwanger kept praising the Jewish mentality and the Jewish way of life as necessary bridges between Europe and Asia, his unconscious self, expressed in his literary works, knew that the symbiosis would not work. Ό Cf. "Die Veijudung der abendländischen Literatur," (1920), ibid., 432, or "Bin ich ein deutscher oder jüdischer Schriftsteller?" (1933), ibid., 362-364. 11 E.g. Ludwig Rosenthal, Heinrich Heine als Jude (Frankfurt, Berlin: Ullstein, 1973); Hartmut Kircher, Heinrich Heine und das Judentum (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973); or S.S. Prawer, Heine's Jewish Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). One is struck by the fact that the discussion still argues the same points as Feuchtwanger did in 1907. There has been new evidence, such as the connection of the publication of the Rabbi in 1840 with the Damascus pogroms and their repercussions in France; or some controversy about the significance of the manuscript of the second chapter written on French paper, i.e., around 1840, meaning: it was written in 1840, or rewritten, or only copied. But, on the whole, there are still the same disagreements on Heine's achievement, on the glaring gaps in the extant narration, and on the unity of the project. Recent scholarship gives Heine somewhat higher marks than Feuchtwanger did (possibly influenced by Muncker or displaying youthful arrogance?). Also, as noted above, nobody seems to believe that an actual manuscript of the nearly completed novel was lost in Heine's mother's apartment fire. Scholarship on the Rabbi has been limited; in addition to the above books, one should add studies by Franz Finke (on the manuscript of the second chapter) and Jeffrey Sammons (on the unity of the extant text).

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This leads us back to Feuchtwanger's diagnosis of Heine's Zerrissenheit. For Feuchtwanger, Heine was the typical Jewish intellectual who lived for a future age of peace, harmony, and progress, where reason had overcome prejudices, such as anti-Semitism, but who knew, in his heart of hearts, that such an ideal was an illusion, and possibly a dangerous one. Heine was also the prototypical Jewish writer, who wanted to explain himself and his heritage both to the Jews and the gentiles, and who failed on both counts. In the end, Heine realized this, and he kept his late, innermost thoughts on Jewishness mostly to himself. Feuchtwanger would not be so wise. He exposed all those problems that Heine, apparently, had tackled in his novel fragment. And, Feuchtwanger had to learn that his defense of Jud Süß Oppenheimer would draw the attention of anti-Semites, and eventually it brought about the infamous film that is not based on Feuchtwanger's novel, but would have hardly happened without the international fame of Feuchtwanger's book. 1 2 It appears that Feuchtwanger's characters voice his ideas and concerns, but, it is futile to look for an alter ego in Feuchtwanger's novels — Tüverlin in Erfolg included. Josephus may come closest to a confessional book, but even there the traces of autobiography are carefully covered up. In Feuchtwanger's early works and pronouncements, he was more direct. It is obvious and somewhat trite to affirm that he molded Heine's image after himself. What is more interesting in such a statement is that Feuchtwanger insisted so very emphatically on a split in Heine's personality and world view. And, indeed, such a split, as opposed to the somewhat barbaric wholeness depicted in the Germans, especially Bavarians, is characteristic of Feuchtwanger's Jewish characters, not just the protagonists, but also the supporting cast in novels like Erfolg or Exil. There is another aspect of Feuchwanger's early image of Heine worth mentioning. It is the troubling definition of him as a poet "des Hirns." Feuchtwanger agreed here with the many anti-Semites who denied Jews the capacity for real emotions, and, by extension the capability of being a true poet of the heart. The conventional image of Heine claimed that in his poems he built up emotions only to mock them afterwards. But this is not what Feuchtwanger means. He says that Heine (like Oscar Wilde) filtered his true emotions through his brain in such a way that they became art. Artistic expression in the modern age required such cerebral filters. Feuchtwanger, so very different in his procedures from Heine, insisted on the same process. So much in his plots and character constellations was cerebrally calculated. He did not pursue his original visions in the manner of Alfred Döblin, who 12

Friedrich Knilli and Siegfried Zielinski, "Feuchtwangers 'Jud Süß' und die gleichnamigen Filme von Lothar Mendes (1934) und Veit Harlan (1940)," in Lion Feuchtwanger, (Heinz L. Arnold, Ed.), (München: text&kritik, 1983), 99-121.

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would never know where they were taking him, but he did his utmost to control them. And, in so doing he created the layers of texture and objectivity that cover the original imagination standing at the origin of his works. In other words, Feuchtwanger did everything not to parade his intuitions, his Einfülle, as Heine would have done or Döblin did. He was reluctant to trust his own spontaneous impulses. Heine, on the other hand, turned such impulses into artistry. The reason for this difference is historical: beginning with World War I, Feuchtwanger was convinced that psychological, aesthetic, and erotic problems and conflicts were secondary and sometimes even irrelevant. The world, according to his view, was ruled by economic laws and dominated by mostly irrational ideologies and political power plays. It was the involvement of individuals in such political mechanisms that was relevant, not their personalities as such. Feuchtwanger did not write purely to express himself, definitely not after 1933, but rather to serve a larger cause, the cause of the progress of reason against stupidity. He fashioned political messages that more often than not stand in some contradiction with the inner development of the protagonists. One can venture the thesis that Feuchtwanger denied to himself that side of his personality and artistic expression which were close to Heine, the decadent European Romantic, preferring to be the objective chronicler of the age of transition that should, as he never ceased to believe, give birth to the age of reason. Close to the end of his life, Feuchtwanger had one more occasion to make a significant comment on Heine, albeit indirectly. On December 14, 1953, Arnold Zweig wrote Feuchtwanger from East Berlin that, among many other plans, he wanted to publish a collection of essays for which he should write one more essay on Heine. Feuchtwanger answered on December 29, 1953: Und lassen Sie doch die "Spirale" ohne den Heine-Aufsatz in die Welt gehen. Über Heine ist gerade auch in den letzten Jahren so schrecklich viel geschrieben worden, das meiste unnötig, ich gebe es zu, aber auch einiges, was mir recht gescheit schien." The word "gescheit" is high praise from Feuchtwanger. Obviously, he was familiar with a good deal of writing about Heine. Heine had remained a pivotal figure, a legitimizing authority for the German exile, just as Spinoza continued to legitimize independent Jewish thinking for other exiles. But, not every German-Jewish writer had to publish his thoughts on these figures. Feuchtwanger refrained from writing such an essay, although he was familiar with the literature. Feuchtwanger, the critic and scholar, disappeared, in his later years behind his fiction. Most of his occasional writings were more 13

Lion Feuchtwanger - Arnold Zweig Briefwechsel 1933-1958, (Η. v. Hofe, Ed.), (Berlin: Aufbau, 1984), II, 222f.

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personal in nature, even when he recommended books. In a way, this is regrettable. We would have liked to know more about the insights of the older Feuchtwanger on Heinrich Heine and the German-Jewish tradition. But, then, that was a very painful subject, and Feuchtwanger would have preferred to filter it through a fictional context. Later, he did not want to write about Germany anymore, and the nineteenth century seemed to be too close for his historical imagination. Feuchtwanger shared his affirmation of Heine as a prototypical GermanJewish exile writer with the rest of the German literary exile. Whereas many leading writers questioned their intellectual roots in Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, for Feuchtwanger, the question of Heine was essentially different. With all his problems, Heine was one of them, troubled, as much as they were with the "German" philosophy of Hegel, the German penchant for dangerous demonic myths, and the political danger for the rest of the world posed by a unified and powerful Germany. Heine also had another virtue; he was totally unorthodox; he was even unreliable. He was not one of those straight moralists who could ruin a just cause. He was thoroughly human and humane. There remains one more aspect of Lion Feuchtwanger's connection to Heine worthy of inclusion here. Much of the thrust of Feuchtwanger's political criticism was directed against the role of intellectuals. He was convinced that intellectuals had ruined the Bavarian revolution of 1918, if not the German revolution as a whole. He supported Stalin against Trotsky, thinking the former a man of common sense, as opposed to Trotsky the intellectual.14 Although Feuchtwanger felt the urge to get involved politically, and especially to fight fascism and Hitler's Germany, he limited himself to writing. He insisted that he was not a political man ~ a point incessantly reiterated by Marta Feuchtwanger. He was just a writer, who wanted to contribute to the progress of humankind and to the advent of the age of reason. In this respect, Feuchtwanger identified with Heine (in contrast to Ludwig Börne, for example). He insisted that the awareness of his limitations helped him to stay with his real mission, as did Heine. There was one significant difference, however. Feuchtwanger believed he had succeeded where Heine failed. For Feuchtwanger had managed to convey convincingly the troubled past of European Jews in exemplary fictions that did not simply retell the past, but helped to shape the future. Feuchtwanger took up the task where Heine had left it, when he abandoned his Der Rabbi von Bacherach. If Heine's romantic modernity and subjectivity prevented him from presenting the Jewish cause to the world, Feuchtwanger overcame (or repressed) his I am referring, of course, to Feuchtwanger's book Moskau 1937. Cf. my study "Das dreifache Ja zur Sowjetunion," in Exilforschung I (1983), 61-72.

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romantic self to be a realistic witness of his age and its antecedents. Feuchtwanger's rather harsh judgment on the novel fragment may have been motivated by the half-conscious feeling that Heine had failed in his selfimposed mission. Although Heine was a great writer, he did fail to write the great works that his talents demanded from him. Feuchtwanger's famous work discipline implied a moral judgment on others, like Heine, but, then, Feuchtwanger's critics could argue that he denied himself his highest achievements, by repressing his spontaneity. Either way, Feuchtwanger, who was neither a poet nor really an essayist or journalist, has a much closer kinship with his forerunner than one may at first assume.

Margarita Pazi

Max Brod's Presentation of Heinrich Heine

Max Brod's biography, Heinrich Heine. The Artist in Revolt, was published in Amsterdam in 1934 by Allert de Lange, who brought out many books in the following years written by authors who could no longer publish in Germany under the Nazi regime. The year before, Brod had decided not to publish his novel Die Frau, die nicht enttäuscht with Paul Zsolnay Verlag in Vienna, his publisher up until that time. Both the subject matter of that novel and Brod's decision to switch publishers shed light on his motivation in writing the Heine biography. Heine, "the artist in revolt," was for Brod less the poet who had written inspired and inspiring political poems and scorching satires about people, institutions, and the German nation. Rather the "revolt" Brod wanted to explore and comment on was Heine's revolt against the role of an outsider imposed on him by a society that, while admiring him as a poet and writer, never forgot that he was also a Jew. In 1933, in his above mentioned novel, which was viewed and judged by the reading public to be a novel in the same tradition of those he had written previously, Brod had tried to impart a perception of what he regarded as extremely important for the emotional coexistence between Jews and non-Jews. He envisioned an emotional relationship that makes love possible, even though true closeness and ultimate understanding are precluded. In the novel, he depicts a conscious spiritual separation from the partner, defining this emotion as "Distanzliebe," love from and at a distance. In 1913, Brod had proclaimed himself to be a "Jewish writer in the German language," and two decades later he not only still adhered to this definition, but had become sure of his place and role as a Jew and a writer. He later explored the nature of the "New Judaism" he had discovered for himself, and set out in 1921 to present his findings to his contemporaries. Those discoveries were delineated in his "confession of faith," HeidentumChristentum-Judentum, a work that was to become, as Robert Weltsch commented in his Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture on Max Brod in 1970, "one of the most interesting documents of the Jewish crisis at the time .... It is with this book in mind that we may speak of the 'age of Brod' in the context

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of the transformation of Jewish consciousness." 1 Weltsch's evaluation should be viewed in the context of opinion on the depth of the "crisis" among that generation of Jews, voiced at the time by various Jewish thinkers. Representative are remarks by Gustav Landauer, for example: "They have left and outgrown their family, there is no social structure to which they belong, no belief that envelopes them in power and rapture, no people they feel themselves to be a part of, to assume its leadership, no goal, no future toward which they aspire." 2 There can be no doubt that Brod's Heidentum-Christentum-Judentum had an enormous impact on thousands of young Jews of the post-assimilated generation. Brod derived the norms by which he evaluated Jewish problems from the message and ethical teachings of Judaism. This was the yardstick he applied to every Jewish scholar, writer, or critic, and to every Jew about whose life and work he wrote. It was from this point of view that he approached Heine. In Brod's analysis, the source of Heine's troubled life was his misunderstanding of the Jewish faith and his inability to accept his Jewish identity. Brod, as a Jewish writer in the German language, might have been in a better position than many other critics and scholars to understand Heinrich Heine. By 1934 the situation in Germany had become much worse than a century earlier, and as Robert Weltsch suggested: "As an episode in Jewish history, the Prager Kreis appears not much different from the way we see today the Kulturverein of 1820. Actually, these two small circles which hold their place in Jewish ideological and intellectual history have something in common, both with regard to the type of membership and the scope of their interests. From the Jewish point of view, the Prager Kreis with perhaps more centrifugal tendencies, prevailed." 3 Although he did not regard himself as a polemicist, Brod certainly thought polemics were necessary. However, he tried to keep them within the bounds of more of less amicable debate. He repeatedly stressed his own "Zweigleisigkeit," his "two-track" approach, the polar perspective with which he tried to view problems. That polarity and his polemical way of thought are reflected in much that he wrote, especially in his biographical works. His biographical method set out to illuminate the "dark side" of the subject, to probe the roots of the personality he was trying to interpret. This approach is reflected in his biography of Karl Sabina as well, written three

1

2

3

Robert Weltsch, "Max Brod and His Age", Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 13, Leo Baeck Institute, (New York: 1970). Gustav Landauer, Der werdende Mensch. Aufsätze über Leben und Schriftum (Potsdam: 1921), 342ff. Weltsch, ibid.

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decades after the Heine biography. (In the Sabina biography, he attempted to clear Karl Sabina of all accusations by delineating his troubled life.) 4 Brod's Heine biography, and especially its slightly different English version published in 1956, should be understood as an attempt to place Heine within Jewish literature and Jewish historical consciousness. In the preface to the English translation, Brod noted: In 1934, my biography of Heine was published by Allert de Lange (Amsterdam). A second revised edition appeared in 1935. Both editions remained unknown in Germany. For this English translation, the publication of which is timed to coincide with the centenary of Heine's death, I have had to make a number of alterations necessitated by the tremendous events we have witnessed since 1935. Not only did much factual matter have to be revised, but it was inevitable that a whole outlook and sense of history should be affected.... Nevertheless, I found myself able to say that I have not been obliged to make any major modification in the general thesis of the book. 5 In this biography, Brod concentrates on the stations in Heine's life that seem to him to be decisive. In the same broad-ranging manner as in his historical novels, here too he treats in detail the "primal influences" which shaped Heine's development. He describes the impact that the "discovery" of the notebook of his maternal grand-uncle, Simon de Geldern, made on Heine as a young boy. To the reader's relief, he does not dwell on speculations about such matters as the "correct" date of Heine's birth and the specific reasons about the confusion, which Heine "did not want to mention," as he wrote later to his sister. Brod points here to a small but salient detail that may have been of some importance for Heine's ambivalent attitude toward Judaism. While Heine's mother changed her name Peira (Zippora) to Betty quite early on, his father retained his quite Jewish first name, Samson, until his death. In respect to the question of the discrepancy between Heine's memories of his father and the findings of research (and here Brod has mainly the studies on Heine by Gustav Karpeles in mind, which he quotes in detail), Brod arrives at the conclusion that Heine's autobiographical statements should be given greater credence. Still, the critic's opinion always tends to decide against the autobiographer in cases of doubt, guided by a desire "to seem wi4

Brod attempts here to clear up and refurbish the rather tarnished image of the man accused of being an anarchist, spy, and traitor, and who then gained some modicum of fame as the writer of the libretto for the best known of all Czech operas, The Bartered Bride by Smetana. In the biography, he portrays Sabina in much the same way as the latter presented his protagonist in the libretto, revealing a quite different side to his actions. This effort on Brod's part to clear Sabina's name in fact had a certain amount of success.

5

Max Brod, Heinrich Heine, The Artist in Revolt (Trans. Joseph Witrol), (New York: New York University Press, 1956).

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ser, or at any rate more conscientious, more objective than the autobiographer." 6 Brod views the Hamburg years, from 1816 to 1818 as decisively important for Heine's life, especially because of his hopeless love for his cousin Amalie. In Brod's opinion, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of this love in Heine's life. It determined the direction his life was to take. It was the cause of his resentful attitude throughout life, and Brod is convinced that this disappointed love is at the root of Heine's "pernicious talent for mockery and frivolity." Furthermore, it led him to a chain of unsatisfying affairs, similar to the way in which Byron's escapades and Italian adventures had been predetermined by his unhappy love for his sister Augusta. Added to this was the social gulf many of those around Heine repeatedly made him feel; Brod sees Heine's sense of social alienation as the basis for his drive to prove himself. Here, Brod brings in the problem of Jewishness, felt by Heine in Hamburg far more palpably than in the French Rhineland. It was the Jewish problem which poisoned the atmosphere in Hamburg for the nineteen year-old Heine. His letter of October 27, 1816, to his friend Sethe makes this abundantly clear: "... there is a rather sticky tension prevailing between the baptized and unbaptized Jews. I call all Hamburgers Jews. The ones I refer to as baptized Jews, to differentiate them from the circumsized ones, are termed in popular parlance: Christians." 7 In this "most un-Jewish period of Heine's life" in Hamburg, one can find the powerful influences that, in Brod's view, later made it possible for Heine to undergo baptism troubled by few scruples, either moral, religious, or psychological. 8 In a letter to Sethe, Heine admitted: "[...] I must have a madonna. Will the heavenly replace the earthly madonna for me? I want to drug my senses. Only in the infinite depths of mysticism can I cast off my infinite pain." 9 Brod is certain that in his later confession abjuring Voltairism, Heine is referring to this phase in his life, by pointing to the repeated allusions to the madonna in his early poems, "[...] which in later collections [he] eliminated with ridiculous care." 1 0 Although Heine's feelings of pain, clothed in lyrical form and preferred so openly for all to see, were often thought to be insincere and a kind of coquetry, Brod viewed them as a quite understandable attempt to parry pain, to ward it off by using an artistic medium. Motivated in this way, Brod also attempted to interpret Heine's irony along the same lines. In Brod's view, 6 7 8

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 50. Most revealing is Heine's letter to Moritz von Emden of May 3, 1823, in which he calls himself an "indifferentist" concerning religious questions. He explains that his faithfulness to Judaism ("Anhänglichkeit an das Judenwesen") has its roots in his deep antipathy toward Christianity.

9

Brod, 52.

10

Ibid., 53.

Max Brod's Presentation of Heinrich Heine

Yll

Heine at this point in time was using irony only in cases "of subsidiary importance." It can be assumed that Brod, in this specific connection, was making good use of his interest in and knowledge of Eastern European Jewish culture and literature, something he often emphasized in the 1920s, although he did not specifically refer here to the typical Jewish form of ironic response in order to conceal pain that is characteristic of such culture. Heine's years in Berlin, his turn to Jewish studies, and renewed interest in religion (while perhaps a reaction to the pronounced irreligiosity of Hegel, whom he still deeply admired), were seen by Brod as an almost exact reflection of the situation in Prague in the first quarter of this century. Probably, Brod finds the Berlin Jewish women and their salons, so much admired by Heine, ridiculous, because Brod experienced this same situation himself. When the corresponding wave of assimilation reached Eastern Europe some one hundred years later, and Brod had an opportunity in Prague to meet the almost adult daughters of the Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing from the pogroms, he noted "a quite similar intellectual style to that which may have characterized Jewish women in Berlin during the period of Heine." Not without justification, Brod describes the Jews of Berlin in that period, using more or less the same words with which he describes Jewish life in Prague at the beginning of the 20th century in his essays and letters to Franz Werfel. In this connection, Brod refers to the often overlooked words of Rahel Varnhagen that she added to her well-known and much-quoted remark: that now, at the end of her life, she would not have wanted for anything in the world to miss the "enormous sense of shame" and the "bitter suffering and unhappiness" that her being Jewish had meant. But this confession of faith loses much of its "pro-Jewish" meaning, if one includes the "simile" (as she terms it ) in which she seeks consolation: she hopes that some day she will "rise up" from the sufferings of illness - and this experience, too, she would not want to miss! One cannot overlook her equating her Judaism with her mortal illness — and the similarity with Heine's famous "hospital poem," his reference to Judaism as the "scourge of the family illness a thousand years old" ("das tausendjährige Famileniibel"). In this presentation of Heine, the interpretation is dominated largely by the perspective of the early influences, especially those of Berlin. The process of dissolution engulfing Berlin Jewry^ its sense of hopelessness in view of the emancipatory vehemence of a David Friedländer, on the one hand, and the more than hesitant readiness on the part of the Christian environment to foster these efforts, on the other, were neutralized in the salons of the Berlin Jewish benefactresses of culture. There Heine met the towering intellects of his time, and there was an echo of his gratitude for this opportunity in his reverence for Rahel.

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Yet, there was no basis here for an inner support, a hold, the possibility of sinking roots, of strengthening a feeling of identification. This was the generation Zalman Shazar termed "the first to lose their Judaism." 11 In his words, that generation was "not equal to their task.... It is against this murky background that Heine must be viewed! Only then can his greatness be appreciated. In absolute terms, Heine is anything but a Titan. Compared to his Jewish contemporaries, however, he appears a larger-than-life, astounding figure .... He walked out of the Jewish Middle Ages into the modern era laughingly, even to a certain extent frivolously, and yet succeeded in preserving his continuity with living Judaism." 12 Brod underpins this unusual perspective with a number of arguments, in which Heine's thorough study of the Bible is given a decisive role. A comparison with Börne, "who saw in the Bible nothing but jejune tales, a parody in the style of Blumauer," 13 serves Brod, whose sympathies are clearly with Heine, as a means to stress the outstanding intellectual greatness and independence of Heine's thinking. Correspondingly, in his review of Brod's biography, Marvin Lowenthal underscored that "writing at the dawn of the Nazi triumph, Brod was bound to stress in Heine's life, character, and times, the forces as well as the tragic contradictions which had swelled to tidal proportion in the Nineteen Thirties...." 14 Brod viewed Heine's conversion from the same perspective: "It was a simple matter of expediency. Not one iota of conviction did he bring to his profession of Christianity." 15 It is possible to disagree with Brod's certainty on this point; yet, there is much in Heine's life that would appear to bear Brod out. And, such an eminent Heine scholar as Dolf Sternberger, writing four decades later and proceeding from a quite different point of departure, arrives at a surprisingly similar view. In his book on Heine, Sternberger espouses a perhaps even more apodictic view: Heine gave up Judaism, the "great misfortune," the "lost cause" ~ yet without innerly accepting Christianity even for a moment. He did not permit himself to become a believing Christian, and he probably did not believe a single baptized Jew to be sincere, even if he claimed he was a believing Christian. Although he thought for a long time that he had managed to go beyond Judaism, he always observed in the case of others that one cannot ever escape Judaism. As he demonstrated in satirical form concerning the Jewishness of the figure 11

12 13

Zalman Rubaschoff (Shazar), "Erstlinge der Entjudung," Der jüdische Wille (Berlin: 1918/1919). Brod, 120. Ibid., 121; Johannes Aloys Blumauer (1755-1798) was known for his parody of the Aeneid.

14

Marvin Lowenthal, "Still Read with Passion," New York Times Book 2, 1958.

15

Brod, 232.

Review,

February

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Gumpelino - the "deserter" who "still wears his uniform" - after all, "it's grown on, a part of him." 1 6 To substantiate his own opinion, Brod quotes, among other things, the well-known remark in Heine's letter of December 14, 1825 to Moser, in which one might even perceive an avowal of guilt rare in his letters, when he begs Moser not to view his conversion in a favorable light, because "had the law permitted the stealing of silver spoons, he wouldn't have been baptized." One can gather from a letter written to Moser two years previously that his family did not object to this step. In that letter, the question of baptism was raised for the first time, and, as it is stated ironically: "none of the family are against it, except me." For a certain time, he might have cherished the hope that he had done the right thing for his career. However, in a letter to Moser from England, dated June 9, 1827, Heine is pleased and proud about the great success enjoyed by his Reisebilder, and especially by Ideen. Das Buch he Grand : "I've gained an enormous following and popularity in Germany as a result of this book .... I will obtain a quite extraordinary professorship here in the university of sublime spirits." Of course, he was never given a professorship at any German university. Eduard Gans had achieved that aim with his baptism, but Heine could not. It is highly probable that the success enjoyed by Gans contributed to Heine's preoccupation, bordering on an obsession, with the man Gans and his conversion. That preoccupation is an element neglected almost completely by Brod. Heine argues with Gans (or is it perhaps with himself?) in the letters to Moser, and in the famous poem "Einem Abtrünnigen" of 1825. In the poem, however, there is an abrupt transition from second person in the first two lines to third person indefinite in the last line, where Heine may well be referring to himself. 17 His remark in a letter from the spring of 1826 would seem to point very clearly to this: "I think of him [Gans] often because I don't want to think of myself." Much later, in the memorial essay for Ludwig Marcus, Heine criticized Gans, saying his apostasy was all the more despicable because he had assumed a leading position in the Kulturverein and, as Heine remarked, "the captain should be the last to leave the ship." 16

Dolf Sternberger, Heinrich Heine und die Abschaffung der Sünde (Hamburg: 1972), 173. (Fanny Lewald-Stahr, who was personally aquainted with Heine, also spoke about the impossibility of a Jew ever believing in'Christian dogma, even decades after she had been baptized.) 17 " o des heiigen Jugendmutes! / Ο, wie schnell bist du gebändigt! / Und du hast dich, kühlem Blutes, / Mit den lieben Herrn verständigt. // Und du bist zu Kreuz gekrochen, / Zu dem Kreuz, das du verachtest, / Das du noch vor wenig Wochen / In den Staub zu treten dachtest! II Ο, das tut das viele Lesen / Jener Schlegel, Haller, Burke - / Gestern noch ein Held gewesen, / Ist man heute schon ein Schurke." In the English translation contained in Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine (Modem English Version. Ed. by Hal Draper [Boston: 1982]), this important differentiation is regrettably omitted. The pronoun "you" is used throughout.

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Heine would have settled for less than a professor's chair, but all his endeavors failed, and in Jauary, 1826 he complained to Moser: "I bitterly regret having been baptized. I don't see that things have gone better for me any way since then; on the contrary, I've experienced nothing but misfortune." Brod compares Heine's fruitless attempts to "sink vocational roots in Germany" with the futile efforts on the part of the land surveyor in Kafka's Das Schloß to gain the recognition of a normal middle-class activity, a normal occupation, which would have been so crucial for him as a sign of his integration into society. He underpins this comparison with reference to the security felt by other German writers, from Novalis to Grillparzer, as a result of their solid civil trades. In this case too, another letter by Heine to Moser is instructive; he writes about his intention to "say adieu to the German fatherland" and then enumerates his reasons: "What is driving me away from here is less the urge to travel and more the pain of my personal condition (for example, the Jew that can never be washed off)." Brod sees Heine so completely as a "Jewish writer in the sphere of German culture," 18 when evaluating the problem and meaning of the conversion to Christianity, that he overlooks the numerous and meaningful textual insertions in various Heine poems and the selection of motifs in others. One example of this would be the Biblical and Jewish influences in the "North Sea poems," the cycle that came into being during the period of his conversion. Heine's conversion took place on June 28, 1825; in August of that year, Heine began work on the first cycle of "North Sea poems," in which another aspect must be taken into account as well, the impact of Yehuda Halevi. 19 The lyrical description of a storm at sea is, after his poem in praise of Zion, Halevi's most celebrated poem. Heine's North Sea poems, "Sturm" and "Gewitter," exhibit an unmistakable similarity with Halevi's poem, in terms of motif development, structure, and metaphor.20 Heine's letters to Moser in 1824 and 1825 reflect his interest in and involvement with Spanish-Jewish literature. Heine mentions the poet Yehuda Halevi in particular, and this is also stressed in Brod's remarks. The symbols and similes in both Halevi's and Heine's poetry derive from Biblical imagery, and the arrangement of the statement via imagery is the same. In contrast, the reaction of these poets, when exposed to the forces of nature, is totally different: Halevi's poetry remains religiously rooted; God is the cause and source of all phenomena in nature; God alone can protect man and rescue 18

Max Brod, Heinrich Heine, (1936), 266. Yehuda Ben-Samuel Halevi, ca. 1080-1140, probably born in Cordova. Franz Rosenzweig, Sechzig Hymnen und Gedichte des Jehuda Halevi (Konstanz: 1924). Rosenzweig espouses the view that Heine's North Sea poems haunt "numerous translations [of the poem 'Sturm']" (168).

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Heine

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him from dangerous aspects of nature. Consequently, Halevi's poem ends with a prayer answered, that is, with rescue. The conceptual notions in Heine's poem are virtually identical, even though his helmsman does not beseech the help of a single God, but rather calls on the aid of Castor and Pollux. But there is no confidence that assistance will be forthcoming. In the poem "Der Schiffbrüchige," poetic anonymity is also abandoned within Heine's contrasting world view. Heine himself is a "desolate," shipwrecked man, whose "worthless own life" resembles water drawn from the sea and thrown back — a metaphor reminiscent of Ecclesiastes 1:7. Direct allusions to the Jewish scriptures can also be found in the poem "Die Nacht am Strand" in the words of the "nocturnal stranger," which have their parallel in lines 6:2 and 6:4 of Genesis. In the Bible, following this section comes the announcement of the great flood. In Heine, the unheroic human weakness of these sons of Gods is symbolized in the oxymorons of "god-awfulest cold" and "immortal cough." To cite another example, the title of the poem "Reinigung" draws an apparent conceptual link with the ancient Jewish custom of "tashlich" in the lines: "Und ich werfe noch zu dir hinab / All meine Schmerzen und Sünden." The "tashlich" service takes place on the first day of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, during which a prayer is recited at the edge of a stream or blody of flowing water. The appropriate prayer contains the last three sections of Micah, in which the sentence appears: "Once more thou wilt show us tender affection and wash out our guilt, casting all our sins into the depths of the sea." (Micah 7:19) Furthermore, Heine's poem "Fragen" evidences a clear similarity with a passage in the Mishnaic Pirke Avot (Sayings of the Fathers). Heine's lines read: "(Sagt mir, was bedeutet der Mensch?) / Woher ist er gekommen? Wohin geht er?" In the "Sayings of the Fathers," we find: "Wisse woher du gekommen bist und wohin du gehst." There is also a marked accoustic similarity between the Hebrew original and the German of Heine. Brod does not conceal the fact that Heine, quite aside from all practical considerations, also felt attracted by Christianity. This is likewise reflected in the North Sea lyrical cycle in the hymn "Frieden," though it is commensurately weakened by a comparison with pagan deities, the gods of ancient Greece. Yet, there is a poem that would seem to reflect a premonition of Heine's that the act of baptism might be far more than a mere secondary social gesture and might even affect his dreams. That poem is entitled "Almansor" and has a Moorish protagonist. Still, the Jew Heine probably had in mind is only barely disguised in Islamic trappings. The baptismal scene in that poem, in his dream repetition, may reveal an instinctive sense of guilt by its changes of verbal forms and adjectives, but most certainly gives expression to the humiliating effect of the act itself:

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Und sein Haupt, mit heiterm Antlitz, Beugt Almansor ben Abdullah Über den gezierten Taufstein, In dem Dome zu Corduva. In contrast, the image in the dream is presented as follows: Und er träumt: er stehe wieder, Tief das Haupt gebeugt und triefend, In dem Dome zu Corduva, Und er hört' viel dunkle Stimmen. 21 The significant contrast here is between the "bright" face and "ornamented" baptismal stone in the first passage, and his "deeply bent and dripping" head and the many "dark" voices in the dream image. 22 Like many other Jewish and non-Jewish critics, Brod does not accord the prose fragment Der Rabbi von Bacherach the importance it deserves in respect to its time of composition, comments on the work in Heine's letters, and especially concerning the figure of the "deserter," the baptized Spanish nobleman and former fellow student of the rabbi. Dolf Sternberger attributed to the fragment a greater centrality; the sixth chapter of his book on Heine is entitled "The Flight of the Rabbi of Bacherach." Sternberger points out the completely clear and obvious circumstance that Heine very frequently mentioned in his letters to Moser in 1825/26 his work on the Rabbi,23 Thus, he wrote on April 25, 1825 that the Rabbi is "lying heavily upon [his] soul," and on July 1 of the same year, three days after his baptism (which he does not mention in the letter), he hopes that the Rabbi — a work he plans to finish by the end of the year - will be a "book that will be cited as a source by the Zunzes of all coming centuries." 24

21

22

23

24

Mention should also be made in this connection of the poem "Donna Clara," about which Heine wrote to Ludwig Robert already in November, 1823 that it was not meant to be funny, and even less to have a mocking tendency, but rather was something "that was clearly reflected deep within [him]." In the English translation by Hal Draper (cf. note 17), the meaning is clearly rendered: "And Almansor ben Abdullah / Calmly bends his head above the / Omate font of holy baptism." In the dream, the text reads: "And he dreams: again he is standing, / Head bent low and hair still dripping / In the cathedral of Cordova / And he hears dark voices round him." (119) Very revealing in this connection are the letters Heine sent to Moser on June 24, 1824 and October 25, 1824, asking for information about the text of the Passover Haggadah and Spanish Jewish Literature. Sternberger is even tempted to say that Heine "clings to his Rabbi." (172) In this same connection, Sternberger mentions Erich Loewenthal, who referred in his epilogue to the 1937 Schocken edition of the Rabbi to the "strange lack of responsibility" of the protagonist-Rabbi: "in the hour of danger he abandons in secret his community to save his life and the life of his spouse." Sternberger adds the macabre remark that "the re-

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At the beginning of October, 1825 he sent Moser a poem, "An Edom," that can be seen, in this context, as containing more than a literary message. In this letter, he recalled the central figure of the episode he wanted to add to the "Rabbi": "a young Spanish Jew, a Jew with all his heart, yet one who gets baptized in a mood of luxurious high-spiritedness." This figure can be regarded as a literary embodiment of his own behavior, as well as a kind of self-rehabilitation. Brod defends Heine's irony and his verbal attacks, here and in other passages. For Brod they are a reaction typical of the Diaspora, one that must be evaluated in connection with the situation of the Jews at that time, as a means of concealing pain and a way to defend against attack. Both elements are evident in the reaction of the proud Spanish nobleman: the palest palor covers his face; derision struggling with pain trembles on his upper lip; "the angriest death grins from his eyes." His arrogant reply to the certainty with which the rabbi recognizes in him the nephew of the great rabbi Don Isaak Abarbanel is uttered in a completely changed, "ice-cold tone": "How can the fox judge the lion? Only one who feels like the lion can comprehend his weaknesses ...." Yet, the counter-question of the rabbi contains also, no less clearly expressed, Heine's reproachful criticism of Gans: "Was sollen erst die geringeren Tiere beginnen, wenn sich der verleugnet." Brod also evaluates Heine's friendships and personal feuds from the perspective of "Jewish fate as the fate of a poet." Indeed, this is the subtitle of the eighth chapter in Brod's biography. Following this line, Brod also tries to interpret Heine's attacks against Platen as an immediate reaction to the Jewish allusion by Platen in his work Der romantische Oedipus. Brod wrote: Heine had been touched on his sorest point ... the Judaism he had only just renounced. And so Jewish destiny again decided the course Heine's life was to take. In all likelihood, the whole distasteful polemic that now ensued and was destined to have such disastrous effects on Heine's contemporary and posthumous reputation would never have taken place had Platen attacked Heine at any other point than his Jewishness. 25 Yet, by no means does Brod accept Heine's explanations in his letter to Varnhagen of February 4, 1830: [...] when the clerics in Munich first attacked me and brought up my Jewishness, I laughed - [but] when I saw how the absurd ghost of my past gradually became a vampyre ... then I girded up my loins and hit out as hard and as fast as I could. Robert, Gans, Michael Beer and others, when they have been attacked as I have

25

search scientist Loewental — in contrast to Rabbi Abraham — had not left his community. For this he was murdered (1944) in Auschwitz." (Stemberger, 162). Brod (1956), 246.

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been, have always suffered in Christian fashion, have maintained a wise silence. I'm different and it's good that it's so.... Brod is unambiguous here and pointedly calls these remarks "untrue from beginning to end." However, on the next page, he softens his condemnation with the following explanation: "Heine's attack on Platen's politics is a classic example of polemical misunderstanding." Here, once again, the biographer is speaking on behalf of himself, as it were. Similarly he tries to play down Heine's admittedly tasteless allusions to Platen's sexual proclivities with a quotation from Heine's Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen, which refers to Jessica and in this connection seems rather dubious: "The Jews are a chaste, continent, I would say, abstract people, and in their moral purity they come closest to the Germanic races." Unlike many other interpreters of Heine before and after, Brod has nothing but admiration for Mathilde; intermixed in his appreciation of her is undoubtedly an element of the biographer's own feelings. Moreover, in his final evaluation of the poet on the biography's concluding pages, Brod sees Heine as a "conscious outsider," but he persists in evaluating the Jewish situation as being at all times a merely symbolic reproduction of the more general human situation. Brod, as Marvin Lowenthal commented in his review, sees "in this light the bitterness and sweetness, the charm and universal significance of Heine." 26

Marvin Lowenthal, ibid.

Joseph Α. Kruse

Fritz Heymann's Approach to Heine

The critical discussion of Heine has always treated one special topic with particular intensity: his Jewish origins and his attitude towards Judaism. This topic, inseparably linked with Heine's life, work, and reception, has always been an essential motivation for the involvement of numerous Jewish scholars and writers with him. David Kaufmann and Gustav Karpeles, Max Brod and Ludwig Marcuse, Erich Loewenthal and Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hirth, Alex Bein, Lew Kopelew, and Siegbert S. Prawer represent only a few of the many Jewish scholars who have dealt with Heine. For them, Heine was obviously not only an interesting example of the German-Jewish symbiosis, but, because of his universal reputation and recognition as a German poet, he represented one of the most established examples of the Jewish contribution to world literature and culture. Heine's closeness to and distance from Judaism, as well as his problems in connection with emancipation and acculturation, are understood by Jewish authors as a source of challenge to themselves and to Jewish consciousness itself. As is demonstrated by Heine bibliographies, scholarly involvement with his work, which often grew out of solidarity with him and his views, resulted in columns of feuilletons being written about Heine in eager imitation of his style. In this regard, the example of Fritz Heymann, who was active as a Jewish journalist from Düsseldorf during the twenties and thirties of this century, is conspicuous. He closely followed the newly revived plans to set up a Heine monument. He undertook genealogical studies and evaluated sources of Heine's family history. His great book about Jewish adventurers, entitled The Chevalier von Geldern: A Chronicle of the Adventures of the Jews, published by the Querido press in 1937 during his exile in Amsterdam, still attracts readers up to the present day. It is no coincidence that the story of Heine's great-uncle served as the title for the whole book. According to Hermann Kesten, this doctor of law, Fritz Heymann "himself," had become "a member of the [category of] Jewish adventurers as well as of the gallery of Jewish martyrs."1 1

In his foreward to the first reprint of Fritz Heymann's Der Chevalier von Geldern (Cologne: 1963), xvi. (cf. Note 4).

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As a gesture of remembrance, we shall now deal with Fritz Hey mann's predilection for, and work about, Heine, since Heymann is a good example of the German-Jewish Heine reception of that time. It was incidental and indirect, but learned and positive. Heymann utilized Heine as a frame of reference for his literary and historical interests. In a way, he wanted to be Heine's double, just as Heine understood himself to be the double of his great uncle, Simon van Geldern, who was so fondly described by Heymann. In spite of the fact that the number of his works is relatively modest, they are as a rule remarkable, and it speaks in Heymann's favor that for more than thirty years, he has been the subject of various essays at regular intervals. These never fail to mention his special closeness to Heine. In the fourth annual volume of the Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts, published in 1961, for example, Franz Kobler published a sympathetic characterization of Heymann and, at the end of his essay, called for Heymann's work to be preserved for the future. In this context, Kobler praised the Chevalier von Geldern as "one of the most unique works produced by German Jewry during the last hours before its demise." He described Heymann himself as "a fighter and a researcher." 2 The call was immediately heeded and the positive attitude towards Heymann which it initiated continued strong. Heymann's only book ("apparently," as Kobler expressed it) 3 was published in 1963 as a publication of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, at the publishing house of Joseph Melzer in Cologne. From then on it was subtitled: A Chronicle of the Adventures of the 7ewi.The volume was introduced by an enthusiastic essay, "The Luck of the Jews," written by Hermann Kesten, who had become acquainted with Fritz Heymann in Amsterdam. 4 In 1978, Ludwig Rosenthal, who was living as a refugee in Guatemala, and wrote occasionally as a critical positivist about Jewish history, as well as about Heine's Judaism and the "Chevalier von Geldern," paid tribute to his predecessor, Heymann. In an historical study, Heinrich Heine's Great Uncle Simon von Geldern, he utilized mainly unpublished source materials. The journalist and writer from Düsseldorf is said here to have "polished up" his sources - which he had every right to do - but never to have falsified a single document from which he quoted, in any of the examples investigated. 5 Heymann's Chevalier was published again in 1985 with an introduction by Julius H. Schoeps, subtitled Stories of Jewish Adventurers (Athenäum). In 2

3 4

5

Franz Kobler, "Fritz Heymann und seine Chronik der Juden," Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts, 4, (1961), 13, 44-55; quote, 55. Kobler, 44. Fritz Heymann, Der Chevalier von Geldern: Eine Chronik der Abenteuer der Juden, with a forward by Hermann Kesten (Cologne: 1963), x-xi. Ludwig Rosenthal, Heinrich Heines Großoheim Simon von Geldern: Ein historischer Bericht mit dem bisher meist unveröffentlichten Quellenmaterial, Publication of the Heinrich-Heine Institute, Düsseldorf (Kastellaun: 1978), 16-18, 18.

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1988 Schoeps also published the manuscript of Heymann's speeches called "The Marranos' Chronicle," with the title Death or Baptism: The Jews' Expulsion from Spain and Portugal during the Age of the Inquisition. The original manuscript had been given to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York by Heymann's mother in 1959. Also in 1988, Helmut Hirsch, who, like Heymann, was active in the resistance movement against Nazi-Germany (at times while residing in the Saarland), took an active interest in Heymann's journalistic work for the Düsseldorfer Lokal-Zeitung.6 In a not yet published essay, Julius H. Schoeps has made known the existence of two letters from Fritz Heymann to Hans-Joachim Schoeps. The essay is dedicated to Hans Keilson and has as its title a quotation from Heymann's letter to Schoeps of January 9, 1940: "Whoever strikes me on the right cheek, will get two from me on his left." The sentence is characteristic of Heymann, who is known to have been a particularly fearless man. Preceding this sentence is the following: "I am not a Christian," and more emphatically, "this is the way I've always been; I cannot and will not be anything other than what I am." 7 With his fighting spirit and determination never to yield to defeat, Heymann did indeed resemble Heinrich Heine, whom he tried to emulate. In fact, the histories of both families happened to cross at one point, 8 a fact which Heymann was proud of. This, however, cannot be considered unusual, since both were descendents of court banking families in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Heymann was born on August 28, 1897 in Bocholt, Westphalia, Neustraße 140, near the Dutch border. However, he was often considered a citizen of Düsseldorf from birth. 9 Data from files on the house at ® Helmut Hirsch, "Fritz Heymann und die Düsseldorfer Lokal Zeitung," in Gertrude CeplKaufmann and Winfried Hartkopf (Eds.), Das literarische Düsseldorf: Zur kulturellen Entwicklung von 1850-1933 (Düsseldorf: 1988), 117-124. 7 My thanks go to Julius Η. Schoeps for his friendly assistance; the citation is from the letters contained in Schoeps's introduction to the third new edition of the Chevalier von Geldern of 1985. 8 The three editions of the Chevalier have the same pagination; the chapter on Simon van Geldern comprises pp. 24S-3S9; for the rather competitive relationship between the Heine and Heymann families, cf. 253f. and 261; cf. Rosenthal, 17. 9 Cf. Bibliographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, Vol. I: Politik, Wirtschaft, Öffentliches Leben, direction and revision, Wemer Röder and Herbert A. Strauß (Munich, New York, London, Paris: 1980), 293; cf. Hans-Albert Walter and Günter Ochs (Eds.), Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland: Deutsche Literatur im Exil 1933-1945: Eine Auswahl-bibliographie (Gütersloh and Aachen, 1985), 150. The director of the City Archive Bocholt, Dr. Hans Oppel, graciously informed me that Siegfried Friedrich Heymann, of "Israelite" religion, was born in the apartment of his parents, Neustraße 140, first floor in Bocholt on August 28, 1897 at 11:00 p.m. No further records on Heymann are to be found in Bocholt. I am grateful to the City Archives of Düsseldorf and their records (the "Hausbuch" Grafenberger Allee 407) for important references: the father, Josef Heymann, Merchant (March 13, 1861 - May 9,1936) came from Geldern and died in Düsseldorf; the mother, Mathilde, ηέβ Rosenkranz, came from Kassel (bom Oct.17,1871). She is listed for the date Aug. 10, 1937 as having moved to

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Grafenberger Allee 407, which may be found in the historical archives of Düsseldorf, show that Heymann's parents, Josef and Mathilde, as well as his younger brother, Ludwig (born in Bocholt on October 24, 1898), had lived there since July 6, 1917, while his aunt, Amalie Heymann, and her housemaid, Bertha Zimmermann, had evidently lived at the same address since February 6, 1917. Fritz Heymann himself had been registered in Düsseldorf as arriving from Berlin on October 7, 1927; he was registered by profession as a merchant. Kobler draws attention to Heine's place of birth, which was falsely supposed to have been Heymann's place of birth as well, and even to the year of his birth, just one hundred years after Heine. 1 0 Heymann loved to refer to his ancestors, who in their early youth had been quite militant, and he explained his own conduct with reference to theirs. He wrote to Hans-Joachim Schoeps: "I am — and this is unusual among Jews ~ a soldier and front-line officer and that in the fifth generation in succession." 11 In 1914 he left school and joined the army as a volunteer. In 1917 he escaped from British captivity and was transferred by Emperor William II to the hussar regiment stationed in Düsseldorf. On March 1, 1919, he finally completed the requirements for his diploma (Abitur) from the Realgymnasium in Düsseldorf. During this year he also went into service as a volunteer free-corps officer in Berlin, Braunschweig, and Sachsen, fighting against the Spartacus movement. 12 He studied German literature and law 1 3 in Münster, Berlin, Bonn, and Heidelberg and was a member of a students' duelling society called "Sprevia." 14 A typescript of his dissertation, The Law of the London Corn-Contract and the War, written in Heidelberg, was apparently given by him personally in 1928 to the official County and City Library of Düsseldorf (Landes- und Stadtbibliothek). It does not contain his curriculum vitae or any further academic data. However, the year 1921 has been altered in a hand-written margin note from the library, indicating that

10

11 12 13

14

Amsterdam, "Prinzengracht 834." Heymann's brother's (Ludwig's) official departure date is noted as June 28, 1937 to Buenos Aires. Heymann's aunt Amalie (born Aug. 29, 1855 in Geldern) arrived in Rheydt on June 28, 1937. Fritz Heymann is first mentioned in the Düsseldorf Address Book in 1931; the final entry is from 1933 as "Dr. jur., Redakteur"; his father and brother are listed under the heading "Josef und Sohn" (profession: company representative) and both are listed under the same telephone number, 64279. Heymann's acquaintance from his time in Düsseldorf, Heinz Stolz, the well known researcher of regional literary history, wrote an evaluation "In Memory of Fritz Heymann" with reference to the new edition of the Chevalier von Geldern, which appeared in 1963: Rheinische Post, June 29, 1965 (No. 148). Kobler, 44. Not only here is Heymann described as having been born in 1898 (!) in Düsseldorf. Cf. e.g. Rosenthal, 17. Schoeps, Introduction to the Chevalier, IV. Cf. Hirsch, 121 and Schoeps, Introduction to the Chevalier, III. Kesten, Foreward to the Chevalier, IX.

Schoeps, ibid., III.

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the thesis dates from 1923. Today, this copy is filed at the university library in Düsseldorf. 15 According to his friend, George F. J. Bergmann, Heymann became the "director of rather shady enterprises in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Weimar, after his studies, which all came to an inglorious end after the stabilization of the Deutsch-Mark."16 Heymann's memories of his high-spirited, youthful days in Weimar at the age of 27, with their numerous love-affairs and grand life-style, are contained in a melancholic letter dated April 13, 1940 to his friend Franz G. Littmann from Jerusalem.17 Afterwards, Hey mann worked as an editor at the Düsseldorfer LokalZeitung which belonged to the Thalheimer family. From 1928 on, he was in charge of the trade section, as indicated in the masthead of the newspaper. However, he also wrote political articles and feuilleton pieces for the paper and proved to be a conservative journalist; but, he did support the republic. The chief editor, Siegfried Thalheimer, was his mentor. After their joint escape from Germany to the Saarland in the spring of 1933, (his official departure was noted as May 12, 1933 with the remark "auf Reisen"; his arrival in Saarbrücken as June 5, 1933), they co-founded the anti-Nazi paper, Westland, and later, Grenzland. Thalheimer composed the editorial section of the weekly paper, whereas Hey mann was responsible for the feuilleton. At the beginning of 1935, when the Saarland was annexed to Germany, he went on to Amsterdam. In the records of the archives of Düsseldorf, he is described as "reportedly in Amsterdam" from June 12, 1937. On December 3, 1936, his citizenship was officially revoked. In Amsterdam he finished his successful book about Jewish adventurers, and he also planned a sequel, as he says in his afterword, about Jewish women and contemporary Jewish adventurers. He also gave public speeches about the Marranos. 18 He undertook translation work from English for the publishers Allert de Lange and Querido. Four titles translated by him between 1937 and 1940 were published, one of which was Winston Churchill's Great Contemporaries.19

^ The title page contains the note "Heidelberg 1921," and the hand written addendum of the Düsseldorf library that it is a juridical dissertation from 1923. (call number: Diss. jur. 158; the acquisition number is: 28.G.458). 16 Schoeps, IV. 17 Ibid., IV. 18 Cf. Hirsch, 121 and Schoeps, III-V. 19 Cf. Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933-1945. Katalog der Bücher und Broschüren, Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main (Direction: Werner Berthold and Britta Eckert), (Stuttgart: 1989), 89, 205, 233 and 476. Here Heymann's original work and the four translations are listed. See also: Churchill, Große Zeitgenossen (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1938); John Gunther, So sehe ich Europa'. (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1937); Steven Henry Roberts, Das Haus, das Hitler baute (Amsterdam: Querido, 1938); and Walter G. Krivitsky, Ich war in Stalins Dienst! (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1940).

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In May, 1940 Heymann was forced to go underground. Courageously, he prevented his mother's deportation several times. However, she was finally sent to Theresienstadt, where she survived the war and finally returned to Amsterdam. 20 In the autumn of 1942 Heymann himself was conveyed by apparently one of the first transports to Auschwitz, where he died in 1943. His name was registered among more than 400 other victims of the same name in the Commemorative Book ("Gedenkbuch") of the Federal Archives in Koblenz, which was handed over to the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem in 1986. 21 Heymann was a brave fighter in life. His book about the Jewish adventurers gives testimony to his own courage and his challenge to Jewish consciousness. He quotes Benjamin Disraeli's remark: "Only belief in the heroic makes heroes!" 22 Heine's proud statement recorded in his Confessions of 1854 to the effect that his ancestors belonged to the noble house of Israel, that he was a descendant of those martyrs who gave the world a God and system of morals, and who fought and suffered on all the battlefields of thought, 23 must have been just to Heymann's taste. Heymann's interest in Heine was regional and Jewish, that is, determined by the fact that both men came from the same social and cultural background. 24 Heine was a figurehead. One had reason to be proud of him, especially those from the "Heine Town, Düsseldorf," a description of the poet's place of birth, which was the title of an article 25 by Heymann dated 1928 about the proposed Heine monument. Genealogical findings published in Heymann's presentation of Antonio from Portugal, King of the Jews indicate that a descendant of the King married a third cousin of Heinrich Heine. 26 Everyone and everything seemed related. No Jewish relations or origins were left hidden from Heymann's detective-like inclinations and deductive perception. This brings to mind the German anthropologist, Alexander von Wuthenau, who was born in 1900 and taught in Mexico; he maintained that Mexico's highly developed civilization was discovered in the fifth century before Christ by Jews, long before Columbus's discovery of America. Heymann would most probably have fancied

20

Julius H. Schoeps: "Wer mich auf die rechte Wange schlägt, dem haue ich zwei auf die linke," Unveröffentlichte Briefe des Schriftstellers aus dem niederländischen Exil (Typescript), note 8. 21 Gedenkbuch: Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der national-sozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933-1945, edited by the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz and the Internationaler Suchdienst, Arolsen (Koblenz: 1986), 569. 22 Heymann, Chevalier, 11. 23 Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften (Klaus Briegleb, Ed.), (Munich: 1968-1976), Vol. VI/1, 481. 24 Cf. Rosenthal, 15 and 17. 25 Unterhaltungsblatt der Düsseldorfer Lokal-Zeitung, 41, October 13, 1928. 26 Heymann, Chevalier, 103.

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this theory. During the twenties Wuthenau was, by the way, a member of the "Weimarer Bauhaus," with which Heymann was in contact. 27 Hey mann made use of Simon van Geldern's genealogical information in constructing a Heine family tree. 28 For his part, Simon van Geldern had hoped that his genealogical knowledge would be of help to him during his oriental and occidental Odysseys, expecting to be offered a temporary haven by distant relatives everywhere. Heymann's discovery and use of sources, neither found nor used by Heine-research up to that time, must have given him something of the rogue's sense of satisfaction. 29 Due to a lack of evidence, and in spite of Rosenthal's positive assessment, the question of how and where Heymann acquired his sources still remains unanswered. Being a fascinated reader of Heymann myself, I firmly trusted his findings when working on a family history of Heine's maternal ancestors, the van Geldern, characterizing Heymann in 1988 as a "journalist and scholar from Düsseldorf." 3 0 This description and judgement of Heymann was rebuffed by the antiquarian bookdealer, Louis Loeb-Larocque, of Paris. He was born in 1911 and was more than ten years younger than Heymann. He was a fellow member of the student society to which Heymann belonged, and he knew him in the Saarland. Loeb-Larocque said that "truly, Heymann was a gifted journalist and a thrilling narrator, but he could not be considered a scholar. I knew him well. When he was working on his book we talked with one another almost every day, but Heymann never wanted to speak much about his sources. At any rate, his imagination was given free reign and all that was written by him must be judged with the utmost caution [...]. Unfortunately, our correspondence was lost during the war as well as the manuscripts he gave me." 3 1 Heymann's own critical attitude towards his sources and Heine-research altogether is indeed remarkable. His ironical estimation of Gustav Karpeles's devoted judgement concerning Maximilian Heine's talkative and tiring

Rheinische Post (Düsseldorf) 3, from January 4, 1990 (section: Wissenschaft und Bildung). On Heymann's relationship to the Bauhaus, cf. above, the letter to Littmann from April 13, 1940 (note 17). 28 Heinrich Heine's geneological tree, in Jüdisches Archiv, Zeitschrift für jüdisches Musealund Buchwesen, Geschichte, Volkskunde und Familienforschung, (L. Moses, Ed.), Vienna, Aug.-Oct., 1928, Vol. 1, part 11/12, new series 5/6, 7-9. 29 Cf. Schoeps, Introduction to the Chevalier, VIII. 30 "Sehr viel von meiner mütterlichen Familie" (H. Heine). Geschichte und Bedeutung der van Gelderns, with 5 illustrations and 5 geneological tables, in Düsseldorfer Jahrbuch 61 (1988), 79-118, herep. 88. 3 ' Letter to the author from Paris, November 1, 1989. Louis Loeb-Larocque stresses: "He received word that the Chevalier was buried in Forbach/Lorraine, but we searched the entire cemetery in vain (1934) and found nothing, although the gravestones of this time were well preserved. It is, of course, possible that he is buried there, but that no one marked the grave with a stone." Heymann's studies are not necessarily contradicted by these recollections; cf. below, note 37.

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Memoirs is accurate. Heymann believed that the manuscript of Maximilian Heine's Memoirs, which belonged to Karpeles, had been lost after the death of the latter in 1909. Heymann possessed only a copy of the first few chapters and an introduction by Karpeles. 32 It is of note that Maximilian's manuscript somehow arrived at the library in Düsseldorf. Heymann quite correctly compared the vain and third-rate Memoirs with the style of the Gartenlaube. He stressed that when reading Maximilian one has to distinguish "most critically" between "fact and fiction." 33 One is inclined to ask whether the journalist himself proceeded as Maximilian did. But, not even LoebLarocque's friendly warning favors this interpretation. Regarding Heymann's work on the life of Heine's great-uncle, Rosenthal's reference to the use of the resources of the library in Darmstadt and his correspondence with the head librarian, Adolf Schmidt, convincingly indicate the extent of Heymann's knowledge. 34 Two of Heymann's receipts, dated May 29 and June 4, 1928, regarding the use of the Hüpsch Collection, (to be found under the call number Hs 3541, box 19), in which the material on Simon van Geldern is kept, are still preserved in Darmstadt. They attest to Heymann's circumspection and diligence. Apparently, the material was sent to the County and City Library of Düsseldorf where Heymann, according to his hand-written entry, used it from May 26, 1928. Also, in the City Archives of Düsseldorf, in addition to these two receipts, there still exists the three-page "List of Hebraica," concerning folder II of Simon van Geldern's literary bequest, which was typed on sheets with Fritz Heymann's letterhead. 3 5 In this connection, Heymann was helped by Professor Harry Torczyner from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 36 That Heymann's studies of Simon van Geldern were carried out in order to achieve a better understanding of Heinrich Heine is shown by the publication of his preliminary study, The Chevalier von Geldern, with the subtitle, Lost Documents on Heinrich Heine's Psychology, published in the Vossische Zeitung, Berlin, on July 31, 1927. Here, Heymann proceeds from the assumption that Simon died in the small town called Forbach (Lorraine) 37 in 1774, adding, however, that "his tombstone was never found." 32

33

34 35

36 37

"Heine's Bruder Max, aus ungedruckten Memoiren,"Unterhaltungsblatt der Vossischen Zeitung, 237, from October 9, 1927. "Jungen aus der Bolkerstraße," from the memoirs of Max Heine in Beilage zu den Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, Morgen Ausgabe, 40 from January 22, 1928. Cf. also his article, "Jugend im alten Düsseldorf. Aus den Memoiren Max Heines," in Unterhaltungsblatt der Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, 17, from January 10, 1928. Rosenthal, 17 and Rosenthal's note 23 (p. 169). Copies of both loan-notes and the list were graciously provided me in correspondence from December 6, 1989 by the Hessische Landes- and Hochschulbibliothek, Darmstadt. Cf. Heymann, Chevalier, Afterword, 476; Prof. Torczyner died in 1974 (Rosenthal, 18). David Kaufmann, Aus Heinrich Heine's Ahnensaal (Breslau: 1898), 157; Cf. LoebLarocque's letter, note 31.

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Furthermore, contrary to David Kaufmann's characterization, he sees Simon in an altogether positive and sympathetic light. In Heymann's book, another fourteen years of Simon's life are documented by historical evidence, the description of which is supported point by point by Rosenthal. Heymann saved the adventurer Simon van Geldern from moralizing accusations. Considering van Geldern's colorful life, the reader is given the opportunity to declare his solidarity with the younger poet, Heinrich Heine, whose own destiny reflects a similar development. Heymann follows Heine's attitude towards Judaism, which, especially in later years, was guided by greater solidarity with Jewish traditions. His reception of Heine was, therefore, one of solidarity and identification. Thus, Heymann's work was not a history without deeper significance or relevance to his time. That he named his entire book (published in 1937) on the "adventures of the Jews" after the "Chevalier von Geldern" may indicate an unspoken remembrance of his father, who had died in May, 1936 in Düsseldorf and who came originally from Geldern. His defense of Heine in Düsseldorf is demonstrated in some of his articles about the Heine monument, which he wrote during the late twenties. Here he was able to use a different tone; in his Chevalier he had used a tension-filled chronicler's style, which imparted a sense of the distant past and still provided for enlightened reflection. Facts and figures, as well as assumptions, are mixed here in such a way that "no story-book" was created, but rather "history, truth, and reality," 38 as he stated in his epilogue. In his satirical articles, written on the occasion of the revival of plans for a monument, he competed with Heine's own irony. In the beginning he criticized the plans favored by the writers, Hanns Heinz Ewers and Herbert Eulenberg, since he considered the whole matter too dubious and unsuited to Heine himself. He was especially critical of the advertising campaign of the famous "Gesolei" exhibition of 1926, which used Heine texts. ("Gesolei" stands for health care , social welfare, and physical training.) The small, embarassingly modest Heine-exhibit was almost completely hidden for alleged security reasons. In an article entitled "Salad," published in Hans Reimann's magazine, Das Stachelschwein, in 1927, he wrote under his pen name, Rudolf Bachner, the following: "Heinrich Heine has proved in the seventy years since his death that he can live without this ominous monument. Even the learned people of Düsseldorf know that apart from the inventors of the detergent "Persil," "Düsseldorf mustard," and the "tailor Wibbel," Heinrich Heine was also one of their fellow citizens." He ended his remarks by saying that "the commission in charge of the monument and the directors of the "Gesolei" did their utmost, even if there were to be no monument on the Napoleon-Hill. In 3

® Heymann, Chevalier, Afterword, 475.

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1998, however, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Heine's birthday, there will certainly be a monument in Düsseldorf. At the same time, a HeineMuseum will be opened, if Mr. Weidenhaupt, owner of the house where Heine was born, is able to move his bakery by that time." 39 Heymann proceeds here from the assumption that 1798 was the year of Heine's birth. His hope may perhaps even be fulfilled. In his study of 1928, "Düsseldorf, the Heine-Town," he summarized the problems concerning Heine, some of which still exist to this very day, and he came to the ironic conclusion that "the monument which the citizens of Düsseldorf did not set up has made them famous all over the world." The scholarly Heine-Collection of the County and City Library did not become a target of his derision, but was considered by him to be a positive element of the Heine reception in Düsseldorf. This Heine collection was part of the newer manuscript section of the library and later formed the basis of the library at the Heinrich Heine Institute. However, Heymann derided the commercialization of Heine at the "Gesolei" exhibition. He said that "no enterprise has ever kept its chief of propaganda so out of breath as the city of Düsseldorf has its departed son." Heine was also "utilized" in the rivalry between Düsseldorf and Cologne. This resulted in the following remark: "No matter what one thinks of Heine, Cologne does not possess such a stylish and effective advertisement." In this context, as already mentioned, Heymann looked most skeptically at the new plan for the proposed monument as favored by the authors, Ewers and Eulenberg from Düsseldorf. Heymann played off Heine's international fame against this provincial farce by writing: "There are supposedly people in Kansas City who do not know anything about Düsseldorf except this great story about the monument which was not built. They have never read a book by Ewers, they are not impressed by the Marx-House, but when they hear the name Düsseldorf, they think of Heine." 40 In his article entitled, "The Monument," signed with the signature "h," Heymann proudly reflected on the positive comments made by poets from all over the world concerning the honorary committee and the appeal to set up the monument. He quoted letters from America. One from Theodore Dreiser read: "I am glad to hear of the proposed monument to Heinrich Heine in Düsseldorf, and my chief concern ist [sic] that artistically it may be worthy 39

40

Berlin, Vol. 1927, February 1, 1927, 39. Hand-written cancellation of the pseudonym evidently by Heymann himself and copy given over very likely by him to the Heinecollection in the Landes- und Stadtbibliothek, Düsseldorf (acquisition number: 27.G.450), today in the Heine Institute. There is no record of Heymann's name in the visitors' book (now also in the Heine-Institute) of the Heine Room, which was kept in the Landes und Stadtbibliothek from June 2, 1907 to August 29, 1934. Cf. Joseph A. Kruse, Heine und Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf: 1984), 104f. and 177. Unterhaltungsblatt der Düsseldorfer Lokal-Zeitung, 41, October 13, 1928.

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of his genius. If you think it valuable to your projekt [sic], I am perfectly willing to have my name used on the Heine Monument Honorary Committee." Upton Sinclair stated: "I have your kind letter and I will be pleased to join the committee für [sic] the monument for Heinrich Heine, but the great poet will laugh at us from the Elysian vales where he waits, because [he wished to have] something to eat while he was alive." Thus, Heymann decides that if "all poets were millionaires, the monument would already have been in place. But we hope that the millionaires will think once in a while of the poet. And not only they, but also Heine's countless admirers all over the world, as well as people from all walks of life will contribute to the monument." In this regard, the Hungarian owner of a farm in the Pusta is supposed to have sent one hundred Marks in short, regular installments over the course of a year. 4 1 Owing to Hitler, the monument was not built at all. Heymann had to leave the beloved native country of his "ancestors from the river Rhine and Weser," as he stated in a letter dated January 9, 1940 to Hans-Joachim Schoeps. 42 Apparently, he was deeply disappointed, and he never intended to come back again. Heine's "Thinking of Germany at Night " probably signified to Heymann, as well as to so many other emigr6s, a bitter farewell melody. 43

41

42 43

Unterhaltungsblatt der Düsseldorfer Lokal-Zeitung, 46, November 16, 1929. Cf. Hirsch, who says that "only the initiated know that the great stylist, Fritz Heymann, is hidden behind the small 'h'" (117). Schoeps, Unveröffentlichte Briefe (cf. note 20). Cf. Joseph A. Kruse, Denk ich an Heine, Biographisch-literarische Facetten (Düsseldorf: 1986), 122. I would like to thank my translators, Hans-Jurek von Mallek, Düsseldorf, and Patrick C. McGrath, College Park. I owe special thanks to Patrick McGrath for his helpful discussions during the spring semester, 1990 at the University of Maryland on GermanJewish literary studies. - Partly even during the conference in Beer Sheva, having already finished the manuscript, I got to know some further important biographical data about Fritz Heymann. For example, it can now be added that his Family used to live in Düsseldorf since 1906 and that he was brought to the concentration camp Westerbork prior to his death in Auschwitz. These details and others were published in the historical journal of his place of birth Bocholt in a completely altered rather narrative version of my essay in hand. The revised version has the title: Joseph A. Kruse, "Auf den Spuren von Fritz Heymann (1897-1943). Ein Schriftsteller, Journalist und Heine-Kenner aus Bocholt", Unser Bocholt, 1990, 4, 27-32.

Jeffrey L. Sammons

Jewish Reception as the Last Phase of American Heine Reception

As my title indicates, I intend to assert that the reception of Heine by American Jews, primarily in the first half of the twentieth century, was the concluding phase of Heine's presence in American culture, and that at the present time there is no measurable Heine reception in the United States outside of academic scholarship and small numbers of interested persons, mostly of European Jewish background. However, to get to that point, I should like to sketch for a while the history of Heine's reception in America, which reaches back to the 1820s, to the earliest phase of his own career. This reception is a matter of three distinguishable, if overlapping, constituencies: immigrants and their descendants whose mother tongue is German; educated Americans whose mother tongue is English, but who are well acquainted with German language and literature; and, Americans deprived of these benefits for whom German writers must be mediated in English. It is worth remarking parenthetically that in the first two of these constituencies - the German-American and the German educated - Heine's Jewishness, as far as I have been able to see, hardly plays any detectable role at all. The only document of my acquaintance in which an anti-Semitic affect is alleged addresses the dispute, partly within the German-American community, concerning the erection in New York of the Lorelei Fountain, the Heine monument originally commissioned by the Empress Elisabeth and intended for Düsseldorf. The piano manufacturer, Steinway, intervened with a vigorous article in which he charged that only "considerations of aristocratic, political, and race animosity and sullenness, harbored against Heine because of the license of his pen and because of his Jewish birth, were exclusively accountable for the adverse decision." 1 On the other rare occasions when Heine's Jewishness is noted ~ I shall call attention to a couple of examples along the way - it is treated as a natural phenomenon, one of the determinants of his cast of mind, but by no means central. Why this is the case I could not say. There has always been anti-Semitism in America, and it became more explicit and virulent in the last quarter of the nineteenth 1

William Steinway, "The Heine-Fountain Controversy," Forum 20 (Sept. 1895-Feb. 1896), 740.

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century, at a time when German literature and culture, and with them Heine, reached their highest level of prestige among us. The American Heine reception went through phases when it was dependent upon German opinion, in which, of course, his Jewishness had always been a foregrounded issue, and yet that aspect is not prominently replicated. The only explanation that occurs to me is that, despite this intermittent dependency, the reception process was relatively remote from the immediate social and political context of German literature, which was imported, so to speak, on an ideal plane. However, this is just a guess. I can only report that, although there are many reception documents in which Heine is regarded with distaste and even detestation, and an occasional one in which stereotypical notions about Jews are applied to him, I have not found any of a distinctly anti-Semitic tendency. To be sure, this does not mean that they do not exist, especially in the first constituency of native German-speaking immigrants and their immediate descendants. Of the three constituencies, this first one may well have been the largest, but it is also the least researched. From what we do know, we can make out the lineaments of the situation fairly clearly: Heine was a lively presence among German-Americans and the attitude toward him tended to run along the ideological fault lines of the German-American community.2 Heine's works were sold in America at least from the 1830s.3 In 1855 a Philadelphia publisher put out an edition of the Reisebilder.4 This led to one of the spectacular episodes in the early history of his international reception: a Philadelphia pirate, John Weik, decided to bring out a collected edition. Heine and his publisher had long discussed a collected edition but had not been able to come to an agreement, so that when the Weik edition was completed, it was the first collected edition to appear.5 By 1864 it had sold 18,000 sets in the United States.6 It might be mentioned in passing that no 2

3

4 5

6

The one study that has been made of literary materials in German-American periodicals, concerning nineteenth-century newspapers in St. Louis, suggests that an exhaustive search would yield an unmanageable quantity of material. In those papers Heine was discussed more than any other German author except Goethe and Schiller; many of his poems appeared, along with thirteen parodies, more than of any other poet. There are passages from his memoirs and from current studies of Heine, anecdotes and gossip about his personal life. The quarrel about erecting a monument to him in Germany is closely followed, and the plan to erect the Lorelei Fountain in New York is noted. See Erich P. Hofacker, German Literature as Reflected in the German-Language Press of St. Louis Prior to 1898 (St. Louis: Washington University, 1946), 53-62. See Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984), 85. Cazden, 302, 309. A pirated edition had been begun in Amsterdam a year earlier, but the Philadelphia edition was completed sooner. See Cazden, 334, n. 55; see also Walter Wadepuhl, "Zur amerikanischen Gesamtausgabe von Heines Werken," in his Heine-Studien (Weimar: Arion, 1956), 174-80. Cazden, 312. The edition was also exported to Europe, where, despite his German

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work of Heine's sold that many copies in Germany during his lifetime, except probably the Buch der Lieder by the time it had reached its thirteenth edition at the end of his life; the circumstance suggests what his success in Germany might have been if it had not been for the censorship. In 1861 a seventh volume was added, containing a longish biography by Godfrid Becker. Like virtually all commentators before modern times, Becker deplored Heine's polemics against Platen and Börne but otherwise gave a generally positive account. 7 Becker was also an early propagator of what I shall call the victim topos. This is a device to explain Heine's almost universally assumed unreliability in moral, aesthetic, and, in some cases, political matters by the determinants of the oppressive time in which he lived. There was substantial negative opinion about Heine among GermanAmericans, as there was in the homeland. An article that appeared in a German-American encyclopedia in 1871, in addition to being very inaccurate, deplores all of Heine's works after the 1830 revolution, accuses him of frivolity and, in his last days, "raging invectives against Christianity." 8 In 1899, then falsely believed to be the centenary of Heine's birth, a conservative pillar of the German-American community, H. A. Rattermann, made a speech in which he praised Heine's lyrical poetry — indeed, the evening concluded with Lieder performances ~ but refused to discuss his life in France, accusing him of false wit, crudeness, subjectivity, superficiality, nihilism, and lack of principle or patriotism. 9 The most positive views of Heine are found, not surprisingly, on what today we would call the left. In 1872 there appeared in Boston an imitation of the "Wintermärchen," subsequently published in several formats and smuggled into Europe, that depicts Heine as returning to life after the

7

8

9

publisher's protests, it sold 1,500 sets. Heine, Sämtliche Werke (Philadelphia: Köhler, 1865), 7, LXXIV, CXIII, CXIII-CXXX. John Weik had gone out of business by this time and the edition had passed into other hands. Deutsch-amerikanisches Conversations-Lexicon (Alexander J. Schern, Ed.), 5 (New York: Gerhard, 1871), 239-40. The article may have been lifted from a German encyclopedia; it refers to Strodtmann's German edition but not to Weik's American one and also to an otherwise obscure Italian critical work. It is odd, however, that the Brockhaus contained an article five years earlier that, while not much friendlier, is much more accurate in regard to facts: Allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyklopädie für die gebildeten Stände: Conversations-Lexikon, 7 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1866), 765-66. Η. A. Rattermann, "Heinrich Heine als Dichter," Gesammelte ausgewählte Werke (Cincinnati: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1906-12), 9, 399-428. Rattennann, who named his son "Friedrich Schiller," was an "anti-slavery democrat," that is, an opponent of Lincoln and the Civil War and a supporter of Douglas, an opponent of religious freethinking and of women teaching school, indeed, of American women in general, whom he regarded as a major source of corruption in the nation. See Sister Mary Edmund Spanheimer, Heinrich Armin Rattermann: German-American Author, Poet, and Historian 1832-1923 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1937), 21, 34-35, 40, 50.

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founding of the Reich and discovering to his amazement that Germany is not a republic with a president but is ruled by a kaiser; he calls for the guillotine and predicts the uprising of the common people. 10 Another passionate admirer of Heine was the anarchist and radical free-thinker, Robert Reitzel. If he held anything against Heine, it was his baptism, which Reitzel defends on the grounds of insincerity, but regards it nevertheless as "dishonoring of himself and an example harmful to public morals." Reitzel insisted that Heine was no friend of the Jews. 11 In one passage Reitzel argues that the contempt in which the Jews are held is their own fault because of their clannishness and insistence upon holding to religious forms in which no modern man believes.12 It is plain, however, that his motivation is not anti-Semitic, but anti-religious. As a figure on the boundary between the first and the second constituencies we might consider the prestigious Harvard professor of German literature, Kuno Francke. In his Social Forces in German Literature, published in English in 1896, Francke develops an often admiring but ambiguous view of Heine. Among the questionable items Francke charges against Heine's character is his baptism, which he called a "fundamental falsehood" that poisoned his career. 13 Here, too, anti-Semitism is in no way involved; it is a question of integrity and consistency, seen from a typical nineteenth-century liberal, free-thinking perspective. Francke also has a version of the victim topos: "Is it too much to say that of all the writers of his time Heine is the saddest example of the intellectual degeneration wrought by the political principles of the age of the Restoration?"14 However, in his edition of the German Classics, the most ambitious effort of its time to make major texts of the German canon available in English translation, he accorded

10

11

12 13

14

Ein neues Wintermärchen; Besuch im neuen deutschen Reich der Gottesfurcht und der frommen Sitte (Boston: Expedition des "Pionier," 1872); the Yale Library also has a miniature, sold for five cents, with the imprint: "Herausgegeben vom Verein zur Verbreitung radikaler Prinzipien." The work is ascribed to the German-American radical Karl Heinzen by Carl Wittke, Against the Current: The Life of Karl Heimen (1809-80) , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 279, n. 11, among other sources, but it has now been identified as the work of a German radical, Otto Hörth. See Gerhard Friesen, "Heine II," in Raymond Immerwahr and Hanna Spencer (Eds.), Heinrich Heine: Dimensionen seines Wirkens: Ein internationales Heine-Symposium (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979), 96-113. Robert Reitzel, "Stunden der Andacht mit Heinrich Heine," Des armen Teufels gesammelte Schriften (Detroit: Reitzel Klub, 1913), 2, 228, 226-27. Reitzel's Heine essay is dated May 23, 1895 by Adolf Eduard Zucker, Robert Reitzel (Philadelphia: America Germanica Press, 1917), 60. Reitzel, "Stunden der Andacht," 2, 231. Kuno Francke, Social Forces in German Literature: Α Study in the History of Civilization (New York: Holt, 1896), 523. Francke, 526-27.

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over two hundred pages to Heine. 15 After World War I, when Francke's prestige and raison d'etre had been grievously battered both by anti-German sentiment and German-American resentment of his moderation, he was wholly positive toward Heine in a book in German on cosmopolitanism, locating him in the development of the German idea of humanity, and, incidentally, taking his Jewishness to be a quite natural determinant of his enlightened views. 16 The large amount of discourse on Heine in nineteenth-century America is embedded in the general interest in German literature and culture that governed American intellectual life for much of the century and up to World War I. Much of it, however, is more quantitatively broad than deep, and some of it is fairly repetitious. A great deal of it is found in general essaywriting in histories of German literature, some designed for school use. Evaluations were often dependent, though at a distance, upon contemporary German opinion. Thus, they are mostly negative at the outset, since Heine's reputation was at a low ebb at the time of his death and for about two decades afterward; it improves in the United States, as it does in Germany, later in the century. Partly, this is owing to improved information; one watershed was the appearance of Strodtmann's biography in 1867; a number of other German works were republished in the U.S. One very remarkable event was the appearance in 1892 of a translation of Heinrich Heines Familienleben, edited by Heine's nephew Ludwig von Embden, in which it appeared that Heine loved his mother, was kind to his sister, and affectionate to his wife. This news seems to have been received with astonishment and is constantly pointed out as a characteristic mitigating his sins. American opinion was also influenced by the British; in fact, at times it is difficult to separate the strands of American and British Heine reception. Especially important were George Eliot's famous essay, "German Wit" of 1856, actually a review of Weik's Philadelphia edition, 17 and an equally famous one by Matthew Arnold in 1862. 18 Both of these were republished in the United States. Also affecting the level of understanding was William Sharp's level-headed, sometimes sardonic biography, published simultaneously in 15

17

18

Kuno Francke (Ed.)., The German Classics , 6 (New York: The German Publication Society, 1914): 1-212. The section contains forty-seven poems and six prose pieces preceded by a longish biographical essay by William Guild Howard. Kuno Francke, Weltbürgertum in der deutschen Literatur von Herder bis Nietzsche (Berlin: Weidmann, 1928), 81-82. On Francke's position, see my essay, "Heine as Weltbürger? A Skeptical Inquiry," Modern Language Notes , 101 (1986), 612-13, also in Sammons, Imagination and History: Selected Papers on Nineteenth-Century German Literature (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, and Paris: Peter Lang, 1988), 100-101. [George Eliot], "German Wit: Heinrich Heine," Westminster and Quarterly Review , N.S. 9(1856), 1-33. Matthew Arnold, "Heinrich Heine," Cornhill Magazine, 8 (1862), 233-49.

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London, New York, and Toronto in 1888. 19 Much of the American discussion, however, was also limited in significant ways. It is noticeably marked by the puritanical streak that long survived in American intellectual discourse. Virtually all commentators, unsurprisingly, take offense at Heine's polemics against Platen and Börne, but many also find him a frivolous scoffer in matters of religion and morals and unsound in politics. Often, these strictures are modified by variants of the victim topos. Related to this gesture of rescuing Heine with the left hand is what I will call the splitting topos. Very common in Heine reception in Germany as well, it simply divides Heine's corpus and often also his personality into a segment that can be appreciated and one that is ignored or disdained. Characteristic of this view is the tendency to see him as an unresolvably contradictory or incongruent phenomenon; rarely is any effort made to seek coherence in him, largely because he is assumed from the outset to have lacked integrity. In general this is a matter of restricting appreciation to Buch der Lieder and the Reisebilder with occasional mention of Die Romantische Schule and the essay on religion and philosophy. Examples of splitting Heine could be multiplied almost endlessly. There were, besides, less ambiguously negative judgments, also in substantial numbers. On the other hand, there were his defenders. A Countess de Bury, evidently the Scottish wife of the critic Henri Blaze de Bury, wrote in 1856 a most vivacious and penetrating review of the French version of Lutezia, praising Heine's prophetic powers, his understanding of the July Monarchy and estimation of Thiers, and his unique sense of the potential of a military dictatorship. 20 However, most of the positive treatments tend to appear somewhat later. At least one commentator found occasion to point out in 1896 that Heine was an inspiration to socialists. The curious essay concludes with the remark that a Chicago anarchist recited "Die schlesischen Weber" on the night before he was hanged. 21 Beginning in 1886 and for decades

20

21

William Sharp, Life of Heinrich Heine (London: Walter Scott; New York: Thomas Whittaker; Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1888). [Review of Lutece], North American Review , 83 (July-October, 1856), 287-316. The author is identified and the essay commented upon by Gerhard Weiss, Die Aufnahme Heinrich Heines in Grossbritannien und den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (18281856): Eine Studie zur Rezeption des Menschen und Prosakünstlers (Diss. Mainz, 1955), 301-06. Further information from Dr. Volkmar Hansen of the Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Düsseldorf, from the forthcoming commentary to "Lutezia" in the Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Marion Mills Miller, "Heinrich Heine," The Bachelor of Arts , 2 (1895-96), 789-90. The Chicago anarchist was George Engel, hanged in 1887 for his participation in the Haymarket Riot. I have not been able to find confirmation of this story, but another of the anarchists, Michael Schwab, who was condemned but later pardoned, quoted the poem in his autobiographical sketch. See Philip S. Foner (Ed.), The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 111-12.

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afterwards, Heine texts were repeatedly edited for American students learning German. 22 Things become a little more interesting when we look at Heine's reception among writers. Longfellow, though often cited as one of the earliest American commentators on Heine, is not one of the more impressive and appears to be dependent on received German opinion. 23 Mark Twain, clearly an admirer of Heine, ventured a translation of the "Lorelei" poem, having also undertaken a hilarious demolition of another, botched translation. 24 Not surprisingly, Heine was greatly admired by Walt Whitman. 25 James Russell Lowell, Longfellow's successor as professor of modern languages at Harvard, tried his hand at translating Heine and admired him, though he was something of a splitter, referring to the sort of impropriety "which, if it makes Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to believe, makes other people hold their noses." 26 But the champion admirer among American writers was certainly William Dean Howells, who learned German in order to read Heine, who, he wrote, "dominated me longer than any one author that I have known"; "my literary liberation began with almost the earliest word from him"; "he undid my hands, which I had taken so much pains to tie behind my back." 27 Howells meant by this that Heine taught him that literature could be joined directly to life. Howells had some misgivings about Heine's more questionable side, but he was not a splitter: Heine "was not a very good Jew, but he asserted nobly the dignity of Judaism; he was a doubtful Christian, but he felt to the heart the beautifulness of Christ; he was a poor pattern of Protestantism, yet he was as far from being a Catholic as from being a pagan or a Puritan." 28 22

23

24

25

26

27

28

John Hargrove Tatum, The Reception of German Literature in U.S. German Texts, 18641918 (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, and Paris: Peter Lang, 1988), 89-92; some 45 text editions are listed on 245-370. Henry W. Longfellow, "German Writers: Heinrich Heine," Graham's Magazine , 20 (1842), 134-37. See also Η. B. Sachs, Heine in America (New York: Appleton, 1916), 14-18. The most judicious analysis of Longfellow's Heine commentary will be found in Weiss, "Die Aufnahme Heinrich Heines," 112-13, 133-42, 169-72. Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, Volume 1, Chapter 16, "An Ancient Legend of the Rhine," Author's National Edition (New York and London: Harper, [ 1920]), 3, 119-29. Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600-1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 466-67. See also Sachs, Heine in America , 71-72. James Russell Lowell, "The Dancing Bear," in The Complete Works (Boston and New York: no pub. [Fireside Edition], 1910), Poems 4, 184-85; "Lessing," Writings (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), 2, 170. William Dean Howells, My Literary Passions (New York and London: 1895), 125-30. For examples of poems of Howells quite evidently influenced by or, one should say, imitated from Heine, see Sachs, Heine in America, 172-81. [William Dean Howells], "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Monthly Magazine , 107 (1903), 483.

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Perhaps the oddest case of Heine reception among American writers is that of Ezra Pound, who published translations and adaptations of seven poems along with an ironic verse epistle in 1909. 29 How the anti-Semite and subsequent fascist collaborator came to be an admirer of a Jewish and politically radical poet is one of the incongruous puzzles of Heine reception. There has been some speculation about this, 30 but I think it is just a symptom of Pound's scavenging in the literary tradition and, in the case of Heine, a consequence of splitting, since it is hard to imagine that Pound would have continued to admire Heine if he had been able to see him whole. Pound's adaptations bring us to the topic of translation, the obvious link between the second constituency of readers competent in German and the third of those with little or no German. Heine ranked eighth in frequency among German poets translated from 1830 to 1864, and third, behind Goethe and Uhland, from 1865 to 1899. 31 In the fifteen years after World War II he was "by far the most translated German poet of the past century." 32 The challenge of translating his verse has continued to inspire efforts until the present day, and has not even been noticeably blunted by the appearance of Hal Draper's translation of the complete poetical works. 33 The Englishing of Heine's prose proceeded more slowly. The first item to appear in the United States was a fragment of the "Travel Pictures" taken over from the Athenaeum in London in 1828. 34 The first full work and, for nearly two decades, the only one to appear in American translation was of the preliminary version of Die Romantische Schule. It appeared in Boston in 1836 with the title Letters Auxiliary to the History of Modern Polite Literature in Germany in a translation by a New Hampshire banker named George Wallis Haven. 35 The early appearance of this work may account for its influence in the nineteenth century. Whether this was altogether advantageous to the American reception of German Romanticism is another question. The chief translator of Heine's prose was to be Charles Godfrey Leland. A kind of literary jack-of-all-trades, his main claim to fame was a long series of low-comic ballads written under the name of "Hans Breitmann" in a German29

Ezra Pound, Personae (New York: New Directions, 1926), 44-46. Peter Demetz, "Ezra Pound's German Studies," Germanic Review , 31 (1956), 279-92. 3 ' Pochmann, German Culture in America , 329-35. 32 W. Lamarr Kopp, German Literature in the United States 1945-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 67. 33 Hal Draper, The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982). 34 Scott Holland Goodnight, German Literature in American Magazines Prior to 1846 (Diss. University of Wisconsin, 1907), 162. 35 On Haven and the reception of this work, see Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, Manfred Windfuhr et al. (Eds.), (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973- ) 8/2, 1106-09. See also Sachs, Heine in America , 75, and Weiss, "Die Aufnahme Heinrich Heines," 94-95. 30

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English jargon. He began with Pictures of Travel, which came out in 1855 with the Philadelphia pirate Weik. This work went into nine editions by 1882.36 Heine got wind of the success of this translation and was greatly pleased. 37 Leland brought out a version of the Book of Songs in New York in 1864, then conceived the project of translating all of Heine's prose works. By 1905 he had, with the aid of others, produced a twelve-volume edition of Heine in English, published in London and New York. In the following year he brought out in New York a twenty-volume edition; though initially published for subscribers only, it became the standard English Heine and is, in fact, still in print. Although other translations of Heine's prose have been and continue to be sporadically undertaken, even today they are sometimes adaptations of Leland rather than fresh versions. This is unfortunate, for Leland was a more facile than gifted translator. He bowdlerized the text in places, causing one British reviewer to remark that "Heine is inexpurgable, and squeamish people had best have nothing to do with him." 38 It would be a great desideratum to be able to set beside Draper's complete poems a reasonably complete, modern edition of Heine's prose works in English. Such a project does not seem very likely at present, however. As we move through the turn of the century closer to our own time, an increasing Jewish preoccupation with Heine becomes noticeable. Like other features of the American reception, this development appears to reflect a process taking place in the homeland. Initially, the German-Jewish attitude toward Heine had been quite negative. Prominent Jewish figures in German cultural life, such as Berthold Auerbach, rejected Heine as materialistic, degenerate, and unpatriotic. His very first publication, Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur (1836) is highly critical of Heine and seems intended, among other things, to absolve the Jews of responsibility for him. The leading proponent of Jewish emancipation, Gabriel Riesser, even tried to challenge Heine to a duel in the aftermath of his book on Ludwig Börne. 39 In 1893 a rabbi was in the forefront of the agitation to prevent a monument to Heine from being erected in Mainz. 40 Gradually, however, the attitude of 3i

> Sachs, Heine in America, 81; Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, 7/2, 577. See also Weiss, "Die Aufnahme Heinrich Heines," 255-71. Weiss found twelve reviews bound in a printing of 1858 (260-64). 37 Heine to Michel Levy, October 4, 1855, Heinrich Heine Säkularausgabe, Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris (Ed.), (Berlin and Paris: Akademie-Verlag and Editions du CNRS, 1970-), 23, 461. 38 R. M'Lintock, review of the first volume of Leland's edition, The Academy, 40 (JulyDecember, 1891), 257; M'Lintock is very critical of the quality of the translation as well. 39 Jakob Venedey to Heine, August 17, 1841; Heine to Venedey, August 19, 1841, Heinrich Heine Säkularausgabe , 25, 334-35; 21, 413-15. 40 Ludwig Marcuse, Heine: Melancholiker, Streiter in Marx, Epikureer (Rothenburg ob der Tauber: J. P. Peter, Gebr. Holstein, 1970), 455.

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Jewish cultural spokesmen to Heine improved, a sign, perhaps, of the increasing confidence and sense of belonging among assimilated German Jews. 4 1 Gustav Karpeles was a lively admirer of Heine whose writings were also known in the United States. Major Jewish Heine scholars began to emerge such as Helene Herrmann and Erich Loewenthal (both of whom perished in the Holocaust). In time there was also a strain of Jewish appropriation of Heine. 42 It culminated in Max Brod's effort of 1934 to remove Heine entirely from German literary history and place him in an imaginary sequence of Jewish writers. 43 As far as I can see, Jewish commentators are not prominent in the American discussion in the nineteenth century, although what appear to be Jewish names occasionally turn up among the translators. There is one exception, however, who may be regarded as the pioneer of Jewish Heine reception in America: Emma Lazarus, who began to translate Heine at the age of fourteen, during the Civil War, and was much drawn to his melancholy and his dichotomy of Hellene and Jew. In an essay of 1884 she wrote: "He was a Jew, with the mind and eyes of a Greek. A beauty-loving, myth-creating soul was imprisoned in a Hebrew frame; or rather, it was twinned, like the unfortunate Siamese, with another equally powerful soul, — proud, rebellious, oriental in its love of the vague, the mysterious, the grotesque, and tragic with the two-thousand-year-old Passion of the Hebrews." 44 This is a quite original version of the victim topos, for she traces Heine's contradictions and dualities to this dichotomous heritage: "He was a changeling, the victim of one of Nature's most cruel tricks, and his legacy to the world bears on every page the mark of the grotesque caprice which had begotten him." 4 5 Lazarus herself seems to have been victimized somewhat by what has been called Heine's "Marrano pose," for she asserts: "We must go back to the Hebrew poets of Palestine and Spain to find a parallel in literature for the magnificent imagery and voluptuous orientalism of the 'Intermezzo.'... His was a seed sprung from the golden branch that flourished in Hebrew-Spain between the years 1000 and 1600. n 4 6 However, 4

' See Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur: Die Literaturkritik der 'Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums' (1837-1922), (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, and New York: Peter Lang, 1985), 104-15 and passim. 42 See my essay on this in Heinrich Heine: The Elusive Poet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 446-65. 43 Published in English as Max Brod, Heinrich Heine: The Artist in Revolt (New York: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1957), esp. 218-22. 44 Emma Lazarus, "The Poet Heine," The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine , 29, N.S. 7 (November 1884-April 1885), 210-11. 45 Lazarus, "The Poet Heine," 211. ^ Ibid., 212, 215. Her father was probably of Sephardic background; see Dan Vogel, Emma Lazarus (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 13. See also Philipp F. Veit, "Heine: The Marrano Pose," Monatshefte , 66 (1974), 145-56, one of the most illuminating essays on

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Lazarus does not wish to appropriate Heine for Judaism: "it would convey a false impression to insist unduly upon the Hebrew element in Heine's genius, or to deduce therefrom the notion that he was religiously at one with his people"; his was a "sympathy of race, not of mind," and "the deluded Jew who takes up his work to chuckle over his witty sarcasms against Christianity will be grievously disappointed suddenly to receive a stinging blow full in the face from the same merciless hand." 47 In 1866 she published, at the age of seventeen, fifteen Heine translations in a volume of poems and in 1881 a volume of Heine's Poems and Ballads, incidentally the first book of Heine translations to be republished after World War II. 48 Her own poetry exhibits many echoes of Heine. Η. B. Sachs remarks perceptively: "Very curious is the link between that bitter, mocking, cynical spirit and the refined, gentle spirit of Emma Lazarus." 49 This contrast is best illustrated by her effort to continue the project Heine began with his poem "Donna Clara," a poem in the Buch der Lieder, which was written at the time of his intensive Jewish studies in 1823 and images an elegant Sephardic gentleman masking his identity in order to seduce and then humiliate an anti-Semitic noblewoman.50 Heine wrote at the time that the poem was the first of a trilogy; in the second part the hero was to be scorned by his own child, and in the third, this child, having become a Dominican, has his brothers tortured to death. 51 Heine never wrote these two poems, but Emma Lazarus did, under the titles "Don Pedrillo" and "Fra Pedro," in unrhymed trochaic tetrameter, Heine's most supple meter, but one that in English, I am afraid, calls up irrepressible echoes of "Hiawatha."52 Lazarus followed Heine's description literally; nevertheless, there is something incongruous about the succession. For Heine's poem is marked by a spirit of vengeance and defensive malice; Lazarus's poems by helpless submission to persecution without a note of protest or rebellion.53 Here lies one of the problems of Jewish and particularly American Jewish appropriation of Heine, a point to which I shall return later on.

Heine's self-understanding; it has been almost totally ignored. Lazarus, "The Poet Heine," 216. 4 ® Emma Lazarus, Poems and Translations, printed privately in 1866, then in the following year in New York by Hurd and Houghton; Heine, Poems and Ballads (New York: Worthington, 1881); republished with illustrations by Fritz Kredel (New York: Hartsdale, 1947). See Kopp, German Literature in the United States , 69-70. 49 Sachs, Heine in America, 117. 50 Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1/1, 312-19. Heine to Moses Moser, November 6, 1823, Heinrich Heine Säkularausgabe, 20, 122. 52 The Poems of Emma Lazarus (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), 2, 21347

22. 53

Vogel, Emma Lazarus ,119, disagrees, finding the force of the poems in irony. The contrast with Heine's direct assault upon the sensibilities of the reader remains, however.

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A more insouciant indication of a tendency to appropriate Heine is an article in The Jewish Encyclopedia in 1904, which is admittedly confined to "considering Heine in his relations to Judaism"; here it is asserted that "His wit was essentially Jewish"; "the next eighteen years of his life [in Paris] were devoted in the main to a series of propagandistic efforts which were Jewish in method if not in aim"; he was a mediator between France and Germany, as the Spanish Jews had been between Christians and Moors; he had many Jewish acquaintances, and his brief stint as a student in Berlin with the Society for Culture and Science of the Jews "was deep enough to stamp his life with a Jewish note throughout his life" 54 ~ all highly debatable propositions. A somewhat different tone appears in Lewis Browne's biography, That Man Heine, of 1927. Browne came out of the liberal, progressive, and activist Jewish movement associated with the characteristically American figure of Rabbi Stephen Wise. Browne had been a rabbi at the Free Synagogue in Newark but left the rabbinate to devote himself full-time to writing. His biography was conceived out a lively contempt for literary criticism and scholarship, and shows it; 55 it is vivacious but not very precise or accurate. Virtually alone among Heine biographers, Browne finds him enduringly influenced by his Hebrew School experience, which steeped him in Biblical lore and made his soul "definitely that of a Jew" 5 6 — a notion oddly revived in the most recent Jewish-oriented publication of my acquaintance, translations of the Rabbi von Bacherach, the essay on Shylock from Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen, and the "Hebräische Melodien" from Romanzero, where support is claimed from an admittedly idealized painting of a cheder by Moritz Oppenheim made three-quarters of a century later. 57 To return to Browne: he develops a version of the victim topos in explaining the Platen polemic: "Christian Germany was largely to blame for the chapter. The Christian Germany that had fretted and harried and badgered the Jewish Heine until he had gone half-mad with hate." Browne's superintending thesis is that Heine was never able to belong to a community, even after his "return" to Judaism at the end of his life. 5 8 Browne's interpretation should probably be seen in the light of his reading of the modern Jewish situation, which was that the Jews should be excluded, by force if necessary, from their traditional commercial and bureaucratic 54

55

56 57

58

[Joseph Jacobs], "Heine, Heinrich," The Jewish Encyclopedia, 6 (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1904), 327-30. So Browne tells us in The Final Stanza: A Hitherto Unpublished Chapter of "That Man Heine" (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1929), III-IV. Lewis Browne with Elsa Weihl, That Man Heine (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 13. Elizabeth Petuchowski (Ed.), Jewish Stories and Hebrew Melodies by Heinrich Heine (Masterworks of Modern Jewish Writing Series, New York: Markus Wiener, 1987), 6-7. Browne, That Man Heine , 189, 368.

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occupations and enabled to take up the same variety of trades and vocations as gentiles. He invested hope in the settlements in Palestine, but also thought Stalin's policy of forced collectivization a particularly positive force in the endeavor. 59 As in Germany, there were significant contributions to Heine scholarship from Jewish sources. An important one was Rabbi Israel Tabak1 s study of Heine's Jewish knowledge, 60 a valuable beginning to an understanding of that question, for gentile German scholars found Judaic matters exotic and were often very uninformed about them; in fact, in my experience I find this to be once again the case among German scholars, who often seem to regard as esoteric and requiring explanation common Jewish matters that an American easily picks up from the environment. If Tabak makes too much of Heine's Biblical allusions — the stock in trade of any German-language writer - and adduces Talmudic parallels in unconvincing numbers, these are correctable faults and less important than his showing that Heine was often ignorant of or inaccurate about commonplace Jewish matters. Mention might also be made here of the Kohut-Rutra Collection that has made the study of Heine and his context so convenient at Yale. Rabbi George Alexander Kohut, who founded Yale's Judaica collection with the materials collected by his father, the Conservative rabbi Alexander Kohut, gave his collection of Heine books and manuscripts to Yale in the late 1920s, supplemented with a collection he purchased from the Munich dramatist Arthur Ernst Rutra, consisting largely of Heine's French editions as well as works of his contemporaries, especially Ludwig Börne and the Young Germans. These items, in many cases quite rare, have been of inestimable value to my own studies for many years. 61 In 1937 there appeared what probably became the most influential book on Heine in America in modern times: Louis Untermeyer's biography, published together with a volume of poem translations. 62 Untermeyer had been translating Heine's poems for a long time, at least since 1916. He had come to be known as the "American Heine," 63 and by 1937 he had produced a larger fraction of Heine's total poetic corpus than any other translator; this continued to be the case for forty-five years until the appearance of Draper's volume. It has been said recently that Untermeyer "tries to make Heine a little 59 60

61

62

63

Lewis Browne, How Odd of God (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 228-37. Israel Tabak, Judaic Lore in Heine: The Heritage of a Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948). On the Kohut-Rutra Collection, see Carl F. Schreiber, "The Kohut Collection of Heineana," Yale University Library Gazette , 6, no. 3 (1932), 49-53; and Hermann J. Weigand, "Heine Manuscripts at Yale: Their Contribution Concerning him as Man and Artist," Studies in Philology , 34 (1937), 65-90. Louis Untermeyer, Heinrich Heine: Paradox and Poet. The Life; Heinrich Heine, Paradox and Poet: The Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937). Kopp, German Literature in the United States, 70.

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less cynical"; 64 my own opinion, after having made a considerable number of comparisons, is that Draper's versions are regularly more vivacious, as well as more faithful. The biography has a number of virtues; it is well informed for its time, properly skeptical about anecdotal traditions, and judicious in its evaluations, and it brings a poet's sensitivity to the texts. However, there is something of a tendency to appropriate Heine for Untermeyer's own standpoint of wholly secular Jewishness. Concerning Heine's Jewish activities and studies in Berlin, Untermeyer remarks, not imperceptively: "It was wholeness that Heine wanted at twenty-five. He could bear the 'dark inheritance,' but not maladjustment; it was the sense of division which gripped him with secret terror." 6 5 The difficulty is, I think, that Untermeyer ascribes to Heine more of an undivided Jewish identity than he was actually able to achieve. He is said to be a "Jewish Jew," in Thorstein Veblen's phrase, "a disturber of the intellectual peace"; he endeavored to unite nationalism and universalism, like Isaiah; he was not a Nazarene but an "emotional, quick-tempered, transplanted Oriental: the true Semite, never so sensitive as when he covers his heart with a cynical shrug or a coarse witticism"; he possessed a "particularly Jewish wit"; in his late "Hebräische Melodien," "[background, diction and emotion are characteristically Jewish in the voluptuous use and celebration of the senses, in the hot colors and sharp flavors.... No Hebrew poet has ever been more unreasonably confident, more hand-in-hand with God." 6 6 In this last judgment Untermeyer's interpretive perspicacity seems to have broken down altogether, for it appears to me that the "Hebräische Melodien" show as clearly as any text Heine's position outside Jewish culture and tradition, to which he remains linked in fascination but which is distanced in its otherness. Only when he can revive the "Marrano Pose," in his identification with a refashioned Yehuda Halevi, can he imagine his way into the interior of a Jewish experience, but at a fantastic and impossible distance of time and place. Untermeyer's biography ends with a long poem that Heine is imagined to have composed at the hour of his death and that ends with the "Sh'ma Yisroel," a most improbable conceit. 67 This Jewish appropriation of Heine was never without its implicit or explicit resistance. During World War II Sol Liptzin endeavored to balance Heine's character as "a product of his Jewish heredity and his German environment" and to distinguish his shifting attitude toward Jewish religion from his continuous sense of Jewish fellowship. 68 After the Holocaust had 64

65 66 67 68

Andri Lefevere, "Why the Real Heine Can't Stand up in/to Translation: Rewriting as the Way to Literary Influence," New Comparison, No. 1 (Summer, 1986), 86. Untermeyer, The Life, 93. Ibid., 292, 293, 294, 303, 337-38. Ibid., 379-84. Solomon Liptzin, Germany's Stepchildren (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944), 68, 72.

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intervened, an article in Commentary attacked efforts to claim Heine for Judaism on the grounds that he had been an "inauthentic Jew," pursuing the illusion of a transcendence of Judaism in cosmopolitan humanism. His "return" to Judaism was not a choice for authenticity, but a choice not to be inauthentic any longer: "You cannot choose not to be a Jew, you can only choose to be an authentic or inauthentic Jew." 6 9 Like all arguments of this kind, this one runs the risk of accepting and reifying the categories of the oppressor. Among the publications objected to in this article was one edited by Hugo Bieber that had been originally been called "Confessio Judaica" when it was published in Germany in 1925 and then was republished in New York under the title Jüdisches Manifest.70 This is simply a chronological compendium of Heine's writings and other utterances on Judaism. It is interesting to observe, however, that when Bieber was asked by the Jewish Publication Society of America to compile a biographical anthology in English, he did not retain this format, but produced an entirely new book covering the whole of Heine's life. Overall it is balanced and perceptive. Bieber is critical of Heine's judgment as well as admiring of his struggle "for justice and freedom"; he devotes considerable space to Heine's Jewish interests and experience, but judiciously, observing, for example, that "he only gradually and with great difficulty attained to an independent judgment of Jewish history, in which, however, the traces of anti-Jewish influences never wholly disappeared"; and that "what allied him to Judaism without, however, uniting him with it, was his dislike for Christianity." 71 Bieber had earlier written an article in which he was quite critical of Jewish appropriations of Heine, and it may have been this insight that caused him to alter his biographical strategy. 72 Although it is a little bit out of my range of competence, I might venture one or two thoughts about this reception phase. In the first place, the appropriation of iconographic cultural figures is a common and, indeed, Martin Greenberg, "Heinrich Heine: Flight and Return. The Fallacy of Being Only a Human Being," Commentary , 7 (Jan.-June, 1949), 225-31. 7 ® Hugo Bieber, Heinrich Heine: Confessio Judaica (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1925); Jüdisches Manifest (New York: Mary S. Rosenberg, 1946). The new edition is augmented with materials Bieber found when editing Heine's conversations: Heinrich Heines Gespräche: Briefe, Tagebücher, Berichte seiner Zeitgenossen (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1926). This publication had the misfortune of appearing at the same time as Η. H. Houben, Gespräche mit Heine (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1926), and never achieved the same visibility. 7 ' Hugo Bieber, Heinrich Heine: A Biographical Anthology, English translations made or selected by Moses Hadas (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1956), 11, 30, 26. This is a posthumous publication, completed by Hadas after Bieber's death. 72 Hugo Bieber, "Recent Literature on Heine's Attitude Toward Judaism," Historica Judaica , 10 (1948), 175-83.

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understandable habit of ethnic groups in the United States. In Cleveland, where I grew up, there is a Poets' Garden, in which various of the ethnic groups in the city have each a plot to care for, and in which not only plants but also icons of the native culture are displayed. I was taken there as a boy by my school, which was less inclined to impose the notorious "melting pot" on us than to generate understanding and appreciation of ethnic differences. There, in the German garden, without, of course, recognizing its fateful portent, I caught my first sight of Heine: a bust set up by the Jewish community in 1932. To American Jews the equation must have presented itself in a relatively simple way: Heine, an internationally famous poet (though famous primarily "auf Flügeln des Gesanges," through the musical compositions of his early poetry) was a Jew, thus an ancestral figure. Furthermore, he shared some of the graver of the common Jewish experiences: vilification and repudiation in his own homeland and exile from it. He had a general, though not always precisely perceived, reputation as a fighter for freedom and democracy. There is, however, a considerable question as to whether Heine is well suited to the role of patron saint of American Jewry. For the effect is inevitably to liberalize and "gentle" him, to tame the savage belligerence that was his weapon as well as his weakness. Of course, there have been many kinds of American Jews and many phases in their history; in the main line, however, they have been marked by liberalism and a strong sense of civic responsibility, and by the conviction that it is possible to maintain more than one identity at the same time, to be Jewish and American, and to make these identities congruent without having to be fully integral and unalienated. To this extent they are the spiritual descendents of, say, Berthold Auerbach, not of the implacably nonconforming Heine. Nowhere is this domestication clearer than in the area of religion. One of the corollaries of religious tolerance in the United States is that religion itself is immune from criticism or attack. Some sort of religious commitment, no matter how attenuated, is an irreducible component of the patriotic civil religion of the nation. President Eisenhower once said: "Our government makes no sense, unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith — and I don't care what it is"; and it is no accident that this quote is taken from Arthur Hertzberg's recently published history of the American Jews. 7 3 The anti-clerical or anti-religious arguments that can appear in European public discourse are absent from public discourse in my country, and those who may hold such views are marginalized. Of all the bizarre forms that religious expression can take in the U.S., I think that none looks more peculiar in the public eye than our little band of militant atheists. Heine is difficult to adapt to this Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America. Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 323.

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context, and I submit that the chastened tone of his imitated voice in Emma Lazarus's continuation of the "Donna Clara" trilogy is symptomatic of this difficulty. His Jewish persona was militant, aggressive, rudely polemical toward Christian religion and gentile structures of oppression. Assertions that the Reform was an effort to establish "a little Protestant Christianity as a Jewish company, and they make a tallis out of the wool of the Lamb of God, a vest out of the feathers of the Holy Ghost, and underpants out of Christian love, and they will go bankrupt and their successors will be called: God, Christ & Co.," or, of Felix Mendelssohn: "If I had the good fortune of being a grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, I would certainly not use my talent to set the pissing of the Lamb to music," 74 were the last thing the Jews, seeking integration and tolerance, wanted to hear, either in Heine's own time or later, and thus this tone tends to be edited out of Jewish reception. In my opinion, the era of Jewish interest represents the last chapter of significant Heine reception in America. For one thing, the Heine discussion came to be even more internationalized than it had been before with the presence on the American scene of works imported from abroad, not only Max Brod's biography, mentioned earlier, but also one of the several incarnations of Ludwig Marcuse's, which appeared in translation in 1933. 75 There were also the popular biographies originally written in French of Antonina Vallentin and Frangois Fejtö, originally appearing in 1934 and 1946 respectively and then republished most recently in 1970. 76 Heine scholarship, which increased its momentum decade by decade, has naturally an international character and in any case comes more and more to be restricted to academic consumption. While such things are difficult to measure, I believe that today there is no significant general reception of Heine in the United States outside the academic community. A contemporary enthusiast who has rediscovered him was moved to say: "Heine's very spirit is roaming among us," but I think this is an optical illusion caused by the mass of scholarly publication. 77 People generally associate nothing with his name except perhaps a memory of a musical setting. What little does appear in the public domain is often amateurish and trivial. 78 Even within the 74

77 78

Heine to Immanuel Wohlwill, April 1, 1823; to Ferdinand Lassalle, February 11, 1846, Heinrich Heine Säkularausgabe, 20, 112; 22, 194. Ludwig Marcuse, Heine: A Life Between Love and Hate (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933). Antonina Vallentin [?pseud. for Julien Luchaire], Poet in Exile: The Life of Heinrich Heine (New York: Viking, 1934); Francois Fejtö, Heine: A Biography (London: Wingate, 1946), both republished: Port Washington, NY, and London: Kennikat Press, 1970. Heinz R. Kuehn, "Rediscovering Heinrich Heine," Sewanee Review , 97 (1989), 124. Examples are Kuehn's essay, cited above; Philip Kossoff, Valiant Heart: A Biography of Heinrich Heine (New York and London: Cornwall Books, 1983), for which the verdict "worthless" would not be excessive, or Henry Regensteiner, "Heine in Retrospect,"

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academy I have found that non-specialists know little about him. Most current American Heine scholarship, with some exceptions, is derivative of German models and exhibits no particularly American note. There are no Heine texts edited for American students currently in print; my own effort twenty years ago to produce such a textbook was, I believe, the last, and the fiasco attending its publication appears in retrospect as a sign that the time for such things was past. 79 In general this situation is a symptom of the total lack of interest that has befallen the German literary tradition of the past in our culture. That Heine was an exception to that tradition and in some ways a pugnacious dissident from it can have no effect as long as the entire context with which he contended remains unapprehended. This may change in the future, but there are no signs that it will happen soon. A malevolent observer might look upon this outcome as a fair recompense for Heine's contemptuous lack of interest in America, "that Freedom Stable where / All the boors live equally." 80 Nevertheless, he was gratified by what he heard of his American reputation, and he might have continued to be by much if not all of it for something like a century after his death.

79

Midstream , 33, No. 11 (November, 1987), 43-46. Of doubtful utility is Alfred Kazin's essay "One of us?" New York Review of Books , 28, No. 17 (November 5, 1981), 24-25. It was unwisely employed as a foreword to Heine, Poetry and Prose, (Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub, Eds.), (The German Library, Vol. 32; New York: Continuum, 1982), vii-xiii. Jeffrey L. Sammons (Ed.), Heine-Selections (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970). Prentice Hall vigorously solicited this text, but, when it had been edited to everyone's satisfaction, sat on it for some three years. I believe the purpose was to make me angry enough to withdraw it. Soon after publication it was remaindered. It was republished by Preston in New York in 1976 on the strength of colleagues' recommendations. But they must have been supplied out of pure collegiality, for none of the colleagues ever used the book, leaving me in a somewhat embarrassed situation with the publisher. Lines from the poem "Jetzt wohin?" ("Now, Where To") from Romanzero, in Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, (Klaus Briegleb et al., Eds.), (Munich: Hanser, 1968-1976), 6/1, 101; English by Draper, The Complete Poems, 633.

Appendix Alain Suied

Mo'ise, Heine, Celan

Nous autres, Juifs, nous vivons moins dans une Civilisation que dans les CONTRADICTIONS d'une Civilisation. Freud a synth6tis£ le "malaise" dans la "Kultur" dans une lettre de 1913 ä l'une de ses patientes Sionistes: "Nous sommes et nous restons Juifs. Les autres ne feront que nous utiliser sans jamais nous comprendre ni nous respecter." L'Ethique Juive, fruit de l'histoire errante de ce peuple et de la predominance oedipienne de sa vision-du-monde axde sur Γ image et la religion du Pfere, ne peut qu'apparaitre contradictoire et dörangeante pour les mentalitis narcissiques incarndes par les autres religions monothdistes, ax6es sur Γ image du Fils et du Prophfcte, messagers du Paradis ou de Γ Illusion du ventre maternel. De plus, la pensöe Juive, qui propose l'organisation de la vie sociale et les principes de la Loi comme base et but de toute reflexion, avant la venue lointaine du Messie, ne peut que häter le malentendu, ne peut que heurter les espoirs et les conventions de soci6t6s et d'iddologies avant tout soucieuses de bonheur 'Stemel" et de Resurrection miraculeuse. A la Renaissance, l'Universitd Fran9aise, rejetant les orientations de Frangois 1er, choisit de privilögier la pensöe et le formalisme grecs et latins et d'oublier, de refouler la pensie Juive, source essentielle, originelle, fondatrice de la pensie Chritienne. Les consdquences de ce choix (narcissique) ne cessent de hanter la culture occidentale et le destin des Juifs europöens, des Ghettos ä la Shoah, du M£pris(e) ä l'Horreur. Le refus de considdrer les aspects agressifs, ndgatifs de l'homme, la Sublimation, l'illusion iddalisante qui alimentent l'idfologie chrötienne ne pouvaient que mener au sursaut des forces obscures et des 61ans palens brid£s en Europe sous couvert d'organisation religieuse ou de pr6f£rence culturelle. Heine, hier, Celan, aujourd'hui, ne pouvaient - en tant que poötes, en tant que Juifs - que se trouver pi£g6s dans cet ensemble de contradictions: pour chacun d'eux, l'identitd Juive devint un sujet de tourment et de questionnement. Pour chacun d'eux, le retour ä cette identity fut la r£ponse ad6quate ä la Situation d'exclusion qui leur fut faite.

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Nul n'dchappe ä sa structure psycho-sexuelle inconsciente; le poöte, souvent narcissique, cherchera ä fuir le labyrinthe formd par les contradictions de l'äme humaine: tour-ä-tour trop centrde sur elle-meme, tour-ä-tour trop dloignde du Rdel incontournable .... II est ainsi le mieux placd pour vivre et signaler les contradictions qui animent aussi les socidtds, les groupes humains, les cultures partagds entre le besoin de sdcuritd et l'effroi devant l'inconnaissable aventure de l'existence. Ce röle, n'dtait-ce pas ddjä celui de Moi'se, enfant d'une culture et d'une dducation dominantes, bientot designd pour une mission de Verbe? "Parole, tu me manques", s'exclame le Mo'ise de l'opdra inachevd de Schönberg (qui lui aussi brisa les "tables" d'une Loi: la Musique tonale....) soulignant Γ aspect symbolique de son personnage - celui qui parlait difficilement devait reprdsenter sur terre la Parole divine, celui qui n'atteindrait pas la "terre promise" (l'objet de la Parole, le Rdel ddsignd par le langage?) devait lutter pour en ensemencer l'espoir au coeur du peuple dcrasd et abusd .... De meme, le podte ressent - au-delä ou au travers des "grilles" ou des "codes" de la langue et de l'iddologie de son temps - l'appel d'une parole perdue. Croit-il la retrouver (dans les dtapes de sa lutte contre les "iddes regues" ou de son retour ä des valeurs ddsaffectdes?), il la perd ou la trahit. Croit-il la perdre, il sait alors en montrer ä d'autres le chemin. Cet appel - cette perte - je crois qu'ils furent au coeur des pofetes Juifs livrds aux tourments de la socidtd et de la pensde dominantes occidentales. J'imagine Heine tour-ä-tour tentd par la conversion, par le retour ä la Foi de son pfcre, tour-ä-tour pofcte des "lieder" et de l'äme Romantique et pofcte des "Mdlodies Hdbraiques", de la nostalgie de la Mdmoire survivante. J'imagine Heine ä Paris comme d'autres plus tard recherchdrent Jerusalem. J'imagine Heine fidfele jusqu'ä la trahison mime. J'imagine les ddchirements d'un coeur partagd entre la societd de ses enemis et la compagnie de sa culture profonde. Entre le narcissisme Allemand et l'Oedipe Juif. Au coeur des contradictions d'un etre et d'un groupe social. Des contradictions du Juif interrogateur face aux autres nations acquises aux rdponses rassurantes. Du Juif bouc-dmissaire face aux accusateurs loup-pour-l'homme. Du Juif Symbole arbitraire de 1'Argent (du Rdel?) face aux veritables puissants (manipulateurs du Symbolique?) D'autres que moi l'imaginent seulement dans le con texte Romantique Allemand: ainsi, la seule ddition fran?aise de "L'Intermezzo" (Editions Aubier) ne comporte pas les "Mdlodies Hdbrai'ques", considdrdes, dans la prdface comme mineures et ratdes! Quelle dconomie! D'emblde, le responsable de cette ddition a compris qu'il fallait dvacuer la mdmoire du pofcte, son

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interrogation vivante. Evacuer le Reel au profit du my the, du melodieux, du non-contradictoire. Pourtant meme Byron 6crivit des "Mdlodies Hdbrai'ques" .... Mais non, le regard de 1'universitäre frangais plonge dans une Tradition vieille de plusieurs sfecles: si c'est "hdbreu", ce ne peut etre moderne .... Un sifccle aprfcs, le po£te Allemand le plus Frangais voit toujours son identiti Juive diminuee, ηΐέβ. Un siöcle aprfcs, le pofete qui voulut peut-etre passer du Romantisme au souci du Rdel rest un ... "converti" littdraire. Son identic se borne aux limites de la Culture Allemande. Son retour au Judaisme ne lui autorise pas une reconnaissance de la prdsence de la culture Juive dans sa po£sie - dans son etre. Face au Chäteau Kafkaien de la "Kultur" dominante, l'arpenteur Heine est rejeti sauf s'il adopte la langue, les codes, la soumission, les usages du Maitre. Le Juif Heine n'a pas les memes droits (de citd) que le converti Heine. Meme dans le domaine de sa podsie. Moise "retrouve" ses origines et lib^re son peuple. Au IXX6 s., l'origine Juive, la döfense de la Mdmoire, de l'Identitd, de l'Ethique Juives amfcnent les innocents au bord du gouffre de la Shoah. L'Industrie en "rdvolution" retourne ä l'Archaisme, ä la haine ancestrale, ä la peur de l'autre, au pr6jug6 aveugle. Moise n'atteint pas la Terre promise. Au XX~e s., Paul Celan visitera, un an avant sa disparition, Israel, ou il rencontrera son dernier amour. Mais la vie du po£te se brisera un an plus tard - ä Paris. Une vie d6jä nife, ddjä dispersde dans l'lnfini, par le "soleil noir" de la Shoah, trente ans plus tot, quand meurent ses parents, quand meurt son enfance ä Czemowitz, au coeur de l'exil Roumain, au coeur de la langue Allemande. Une vie que son long sdjour parisien ne permettra jamais de consoler, pidgde par l'lndifference, par l'esprit de "clans", par le deni de la Mimoire. Moise, Heine, Celan: mystiques ou pofetes, aventuriers du Verbe, ces Juifs d'6poques, de mentalitds diffirentes ont du affronter la parole de l'autre mais aussi l'incomprdhension des leurs. La "reception" juive de ces voix meurtries, de ces hommes en quete d'identitd et d'Humanit6 n'est parfois pas vraiment meilleure que celle des non-Juifs. Ces derniers voient mieux peut-etre que les doutes, les interrogations de ces "pontes de leur vie" constituent justement l'aspect le plus profonddment hdbrai'que de leur ddmarche... Tandis que les Juifs, soucieux de prdserver rites et traditions, sont parfois tenths de pröferer la lettre ä l'esprit, la juste rigidity de la Loi ä l'aventureuse interrogation de la parole poitique. Heine, absurdement attaquera les Juifs de Paris "dont le dieu est l'or et la religion l'industrie", caricaturant la vision denaturde des antisimites, la "projection" facile. Mais il sait aussi difendre les Juifs pers£cut6s de Damas et voir en eux les "boucs-dmissaires" de l'lnjustice, les symboles de toute Victime. II appellera en vain la conscience de son Temps ä la rescousse: en

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1860, vingt ans aprfcs son appel, ce seront les chrötiens que Damas massacrera! Enfant des "Lumiüres", Heine est "universaliste" mais veut pourtant s'inscrire "hic et nunc", dans son pays, dans son sifccle. En un sens, il perd ä la fois par rapport ä son id£al et par rapport ä sa communauti d'origine. Mais n'est-ce pas le destin du pofcte de n'appartenir ä Personne, d'appartenir comme la Rose de Celan - ä Personne..? N'est-ce pas le destin du po£te de nous rappeler la Transcendance - je ne parle pas en termes d'Ideologie religieuse - de nous inviter ä chercher plus haut que Γ Homme social, une Ethique qui ferait de l'horreur du destin natural la source d'un renouveau, d'une £tevation de l'Homme 6cras6 par le Temps et l'Espace, de l'homme mortel et infiniment Futur? Μέπιε si parfois le langage qu'il choisit ä cette fin est celui de la ddrision, de la cruautf, de la distance prise, du refus des compromissions et des 6vidences temporaires; meme si parfois les siens ne s'y retrouvent pas dpreuve oü le narcissisme social blesse affronte la pure rdvolte oedipienne du pofete. Destin cruel: s'opposer ä l'Industrialisation sans morale, sans parole, sans autre enjeu que le profit - et laisser l'impression de participer au Systeme luimeme! Face au Veau d'or, le poete de la Transcendance de l'espoir au bout de la cruaute de vivre, au coeur d'un Projet inconnu dont nous ne sommes qu'une dtape, qu'un rebondissement, ne peut que porter et retirer les masques du moment - mais pour garder au fond de soi - au fond de l'äme - la v6rit6 nue, la νέπίέ fiddle d'un 61an vers le Haut. Moi'se, Spinoza, Heine, Celan: destins de Juifs errants metes avec l'autre socteti - et qui dέpassent la CONTRADICTION pour re-trouver ltelan perdu, le message d6chir6, l'enigme infiniment recompos6e et toujours impronongable. Pour nous rappeler le destin de notre contradiction: etre - au milieu des pulsions, des intrigues, des illusions des Societes - au milieu de leurs contradictions - l'interlocuteur intime, l'ombre oedipienne du passd, le briseur d'idoles et de miroirs. ("L'intermezzo" du Rdel entre Mythe et Miracle...) Pofete: Juif - nulle difference entre ces deux vocables. Marina Tsvötadva et Paul Celan nous l'ont appris. Une non-juive et un juif dont le dieu dtait Personne nous ont rappelte, au XXfes. qui industrialise la Mort, que le "jeu" de Heine avec son identiti Juive ntetait pas une "trahison" (ä travers la conversion) mais un vital ressourcement (ä travers le retour ultdrieur ä l'image et ä la parole du P£re, autrement-meme.)

Alain Suied - English Translation by Jay Shir

Moses, Heine, Celan

As Jews we dwell not so much within a civilization as among the contradictions of a civilization. Freud epitomized the discontents of Kultur in a letter of 1913 to one of his Zionist patients: "We are Jews and we will remain Jews. Other people will merely make use of us, without ever understanding or respecting us." The Jewish ethic, developed out of a people's historic wanderings and the predominantly Oedipal quality of its world view, is based upon the figure and the religion of the Father. It can only seem contradictory and disturbing to the narcissistic mind-sets of the other monotheistic religions, based on the figure of the Son and the Prophet as messengers of heaven or of the Illusion of the maternal womb. Moreover, Jewish thought places the social order and the principles of the Law at the beginning of all reflection and makes them the purpose of all reflection, in this age long before the coming of the Messiah. Jewish thought can only compound the misunderstanding, as it clashes with the hopes and the conventions of societies and ideologies, which are above all else concerned with "eternal" happiness and a miraculous Resurrection. Rejecting Francis I's intellectual orientation, the French universities of the Renaissance gave pride of place to Greek and Latin thought and formalism. They forgot, indeed suppressed, Jewish thought, which is the essential ground and source of Christian thought. The consequences of this narcissistic choice have never ceased to haunt Western culture and the destiny of European Jews, whether in the ghetto or the Holocaust. A refusal to come to terms with man's negative, aggressive side, an idealizing illusion, a sublimation which feeds Christian ideology, must necessarily augment the power of dark forces and a pagan spirit in Europe, which are typically held in check beneath the cloak of religious institutions or cultural preferences. Heine in his day and Celan in ours, as poets and as Jews, found themselves trapped in this nexus of contradictions. For both, Jewish identity became the focus of anguish and questioning. For both, the return to Jewish identity was a sufficient response to their condition as outcasts. No one can escape his subconscious psychosexual makeup. The poet, often a narcissistic

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type, seeks to flee the labyrinth of contradictions that constitute the human spirit, which is in turn centered too obsessively on itself and too far distanced from unchanging Reality. Thus, it is the poet who is in the best position to live out and to give voice to these contradictions, which also bring into being societies, human groupings, cultures, torn between a need for security and the terror arising in the face of the unfathomable adventure of existence. Was this role not shared by Moses as well? Moses, the scion of a dominant culture and upbringing, soon to be selected to accomplish a mission of the Word! "I lack you, word," cries Moses in the unfinished opera of Schoenberg, who himself broke the tables of the "Law" of tonal music. He underscores the symbolic aspect of his person: he who speaks with difficulty must represent the divine Word on earth; and he who never reaches the Promised Land ~ the object of the Word, the Reality designated by language? - must struggle to plant a seed of hope in the hearts of an oppressed people .... At the same time, the poet feels within or through the "iron grids" or the "codes" of language and the ideology of this time the name of a lost speech. Does he believe he can find it (in the stages of its struggle against "conceived ideas" or of his coming back to "unaffected values")? He forgets it or betrays it. Believing to lose it, knows thus to show others the way. This name, this loss: I believe that they were in the heart of Jewish poets delivered up to the torments of society and to the dominant Western thought. I imagine Heine in turn, experienced by his conversion, by his return to the belief of his fathers, in turn a poet of "Lieder" and of the romantic soul and a poet of "Hebrew Melodies," of the nostalgia of surviving memory. I imagine Heine in Paris, like others later searching for Jerusalem. I imagine Heine loyal to the point of treason itself. I imagine the pieces of a heart divided between the society of its enemies and the company of its profound culture. Between German narcissism and the Jewish Oedipus. At the heart of contradictions, of a being and of a social group. Contradictions of an interrrogating Jew facing other nations which are disturbed by reassuring responses of the scape-goat Jew, facing the accusing wolf-mail, of the Jew, an arbitrary symbol of money, of the Real facing true powers, manipulators of the symbolic. Others imagine him only in the German Romantic context; thus, the only French edition of "L'intermezzo" (Aubier edition) does not include the "Hebrew Melodies," which are considered in the preface to be minor and spoiled! What economy! At once, those responsible for this edition understood that they should rid the memory of the poet, his living interrogation, questioning. To evaluate the Real for the profit of the myth, of the melodic, of the non-contradictory. However, even Byron wrote "Hebrew melodies"

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.... But no, the view of the French scholar plunging into an old tradition of several centuries: if this is "Hebrew," it cannot be modern. A century after, the most French of German poets always sees his Jewish identity diminished, denied. A century after, the poet who wished perhaps to pass from Romanticism to the anxiety of the Real remains a literary "convert." His identity is bound by the limits of German culture. His return to Judaism does not authorize him with a recognition of Jewish culture present in his poetry, in his being. Facing the Kafkaesque castle of the dominant Kultur, the land-surveyor, Heine, is rejected - unless he adopts the language, the codes, the submissiveness, the usages of the profession. Heine, the Jew, did not have the same rights (of the city) as the converted Heine. Even in the domains of his poetry. Moses retrieves his origins and sets his people free. In the 19th century, the Jewish origin, the defence of memory of identity, of Jewish ethics, invites the innocents to the verge of the abyss of the Shoah. Industry in "revolution" returns to archaism, to ancestral hatred, to the fear of the other, to a blind prejudice. Moses does not reach the promised land. In the 20th century, Paul Celan will visit before his disappearance, Israel, where he will meet his last love. But the poet's life will end a year later in Paris. A life already denied, already dispersed in infinity, by the "black sun" of the Shoah, thirty years later, after his parents die, after his childhood dies in Czernowitz, in the heart of the exiled Rumanian, in the heart of the German language. A life which his long Parisian visit will never permit to console, trapped by indifference, by the spirit of the "clique," by the denial of memory. Moses, Heine, Celan: mystics or poets, adventurers of the Verb, those Jews of epochs, of different mentalities have to confront the word of the other — but also its miscomprehension. The Jewish "reception" of these martyred voices, of these people in a quest of identity and humanity, sometimes is not really better than the one of the non-Jews. The latter may see better the doubts; the interrogations of these poets of their life justly constitute the most profound Hebraic aspect of their bearing. While Jews, anxious to preserve rights and traditions, are sometimes inclined to prefer the letter, the spirit, the rigid justice of the law to the adventurous interrogation of poetic speech. Heine, in an absurd manner, will attack the Jews of Paris "in which God is gold and religion industry," making a caricature of the unnatural vision of the anti-Semites, the facile "projection." Yet, he also knows how to defend the persecuted Jews of Damascus and to see in them "scape goats" of injustice, the symbols of each victim. In vain he will call upon the conscience

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Alain Suied - English Translation by Jay Shir

of his time for rescue; in 1860, twenty years after his call, it will be the Christians whom Damascus will massacre! Child of "lights," Heine is universalist, but still wants to be remembered as here and now in his country, in his century. In some sense he sometimes loses his origin, regarding his ideal and his community. But is it not the poet's destiny not to take part in no one, to take part as Celan's rose in "Niemandsrose." Is it not the poet's destiny to remind us of Transcendence? I am not speaking in terms of religious ideology. Does he not invite us to a search higher than social man, for an ethic which could transform the horror of natural destiny into the source of renewal, which could work for the elevation of Man, torn by time and space, of mortal man and infinite future. Even if sometimes the language which he choses for this end were the one of derision, of cruelty, of captured distance, of refusal to compromise, and of temporary evidence; even if sometimes these are not found there — proof where social narcissism confronts the pure oedipal revolt of the poet. Cruel destiny: opposing industrialization without morals, without speech, without anything at stake which profits from it — and to make the impression of participating in the system itself. Facing the golden calf, the poet of the transcendence, of hope at the beginning of the cruelty of living, in the heart of an unknown project, in which we are but a stage, but a rebounding, and cannot but wear and take off the masks of the moment — but for guarding the depth of himself — in the depth of the soul ~ the naked truth, the loyal truth of an elevation towards the "Above." Moses, Spinoza, Heine, Celan: destinies of wandering Jews mingled with the other society — and which pass over the contradiction in order to find anew the lost spirit, the torn message, the enigma infinitely recomposed and always "impronongable." To remind us of the destiny of our contradiction: to be ~ in the middle of the impulses, of intrigues, of societies' illusions — in the middle of their contradictions - the intimate speaker, the oedipal shade of the past, the breaker of idols and mirrors. ("Intermezzo" of the Real between Myth and Miracle...) A Poet, Jew — no difference between these two terms. Marina Tsvitadva and Paul Celan brought him to us. A non-Jewess and a Jew whose God was no one. We have recalled them in the 20th century. Who industrializes death, which was never the "game" of Heine, who never "betrayed" his Jewish identity (on account of the conversion) but a vital resourcefulness (according to the ultimate return to the image and the word of the Father, otherwise himself).

Contributors

Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Department of Hebrew Language and Literature, BenGurion University, Beersheva 84105, ISRAEL Mark H. Gelber, Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University, Beersheva 84105, ISRAEL Sander L. Gilman, German Department, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Donald D. Hook, Department of Modern Languages and Literature, Trinity College, Hartford, 06106 Connecticut, USA Wulf Koepke, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Texas A & Μ University, College Station, Texas 77843-4238, USA Joseph A. Kruse, Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Bilkerstr. 14, 4000 Düsseldorf 1, GERMANY Leo A. Lensing, German Department, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 06457, USA Sol Liptzin, 21 Washington Street, Jerusalem 94187, ISRAEL Margarita Pazi, 21 Sharett Street, Tel Aviv, 62092 ISRAEL Jeffrey L. Sammons, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Box 18-A, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06512, USA Renate Schlesier, Cosimaplatz 1, 1000 Berlin 41, GERMANY Julius H. Schoeps, Steinheim Institut für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, Universität Duisburg, Geibelstr. 41, 4100 Duisburg 1, GERMANY

224

Itta Shedletzky, The Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Advanced Studies Building, GivatRam, Jerusalem 91904, ISRAEL Miijana Stan&d, Barcev trg 15/YIII, 41020 Zagreb, CROATIA Alain Suied, 6, rue Saint Severin, 75005, Paris, FRANCE

Index

Adams, Hazard 139 Adorno, Theodor W. 5, 16 Albala, Paulina 160 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d' 79 Alexander III 69 Alexis-Häring, Willibald 45, 46, 49, 166 Alkabetz, Shlomo Ben Moshe Halevi 146 Alkvist, J. 83 Altenberg, Peter 103, 106 Altenhofer, Norbert 85 Andree, Richard 81 Arendt, Hannah 126, 150, 185 Arnold, Heinz L. 168 Arnold, Matthew 201 Auerbach, Berthold 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 205, 212 Auerbach, Jakob 56

Babeuf, Fran$ois Noel 22 Bachner, Rudolf 193 Bader, Gershom 128 Bar-Yosef, Hamutal 2, 127, 223 Bartels, Adolf 14, 87, 95, 100 Baudelaire, Charles 87, 138 Bauer, Bruno 23, 25, 40 Bauer, Ernest 158, 159, 160 Bauer, Julius 99 Bauschinger, Sigrid 113, 115, 116, 117, 120

Becker, Godfrid 199 Becker, Hansjakov 100 Becker, Hermann 43 Becker, Karl Wolfgang 19 Beer, Michael 53, 55, 58, 62, 183 Bein, Alex 140, 185 Beller, Steven 79 Beraud, Armand-Louis-Joseph 82 Berdychevski, Micha Yosef 137, 138 Berg, Leo 54, 64 Bergmann, George F. J. 189 Berkley, George E. 79 Bernfeld, Shimon 128, 131 Bernstein, Aron 1, 45-52 Berthold, Werner 189 Bialik, Haim Nakhman 73, 129, 131, 137, 138 Bickel, Shlomo 111 Bieber, Hugo 211 Bienenstock, M. 157, 158 Birnbaum, Nathan 141, 142, 148 Bischoff, Ewald 3 Bismarck, Otto von 62, 148 Bitell, Jethro 114 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste 22 Blaze de Bury, Henri 202 Blidstein, Ya'akov 3 Blok, Alexander 134, 135, 136 Bloom, Harold 99 Blumauer, Johannes Aloys 178 Blumenfeld, Kurt 149, 150 Bodine, Jay 15

226

Börne, Ludwig 8, 16, 18, 22, 40, 49, 55, 56, 57, 61, 63, 103, 131, 155, 159, 170, 199, 202, 205, 209 Bornes, Mechthild 15, 95, 97, 110 Böschenstein, Renate 77 Botz, Gerhard 79 Boucke, Ewald 15 Bovshover, Joseph 68 Braakenburg, Johannes 98 Brahm, Otto 64 Brainin, Reuven 128, 131 Brask, Peter 88 Braun, Eduard 48 Brenner, Joseph Haim 137, 138 Briegleb, Klaus 6, 7, 22, 190, 214 Brod, Max 1, 151, 163, 173-184, 185, 206, 213 Browne, Lewis 208 Brunold, F. 51 Buber, Martin 119, 122, 123, 142, 144 Buddha 116 Bulwer, E. L. 47 Bürkner, Robert 46 Bury, (Countess de) 202 By nam, William F. 78 Byron, (Lord) George Gordon 157, 158, 159, 176

Campe, Julius 147 Carr, Gilbert 97, 105 Casanova 60 Cazden, Robert E. 198 Celan, Paul 215-221 Chalupetzky, J. 161 Chamisso, Adalbert von 46, 47, 50, 52 Chincholle, Charles 141 Chone, Hana 3 Churchill, Winston 189

Ciraki, Franjo 155 Clauren, Heinrich 60 Cohn, M. C. 161 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 47 Cring, Elliott 88

D'Annunzio, Gabriele 87 Damasmora, J. M. R. 93 Dante Alighieri 21 Daumer, Georg Friedrich 25, 83 David, (King) 120, 125 da Vinci, Leonardo 87 Demetz, Peter 204 Denkler, Horst 45, 77, 78, 96, 119 Dineson, Jacob 67 Disraeli, Benjamin 190 Dmitrejew, Alexander Sergej ewitsch 19 Döblin, Alfred 168 Donath, Adolph 156 Dostoievski, Fjodor M. 135 Douglas, Frederick 199 Draper, Hai 179, 182, 204, 205, 209 Dreiser, Theodore 194

Eacoft, S. E. 93 Eckart, Dietrich 158 Eckert, Britta 189 Edelstadt, David 67, 69 Ederer, Hannelore 15 Einig, Bernhard 100 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 212 Eisner, Kurt 122 Elata, Gerda 3 Elata, Haim 3 Elial, Michel 3 Elio, Paul 141 Eliot, George 201

227

Elisabeth, (Empress) 148, 197 Elster, Ernst 15, 158 Embden, Charlotte 148 Embden, Ludwig 201 Emden, Moritz 176 Engels, Friedrich 8, 23 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 37 Epicurus 32 Estermann, Alfred 16, 18 Eulenberg, Herbert 193, 194 Eusebius 83 Ewers, Hanns Heinz 193, 194

Federn, Ernst 104 Feiwel, Berthold 141, 142 Fejtö, Francois 213 Ferdinand I 41 Ferrand, E. 51 Fet, Afanasy 133 Feuchtwanger, Lion 1, 163-172 Feuchtwanger, Marta 170 Feuerbach, Ludwig 25, 159 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 158 Fichte, Hubert 18 Finke, Franz 167 Finkelstein, Haim 3 Fishberg, Maurice 81 Foner, Philip S. 202 Fourier, Charles 22 Francis 1215, 219 Francke, Kuno 200, 201 Frankel, Jonas 15 Franzos, Karl Emil 51, 52 Frederick the Great 57 ν Freiberger, Salom 154 Freud, Anna 77 Freud, Sigmund 1, 77-94, 104, 106, 107, 108, 170, 215, 219 Friedländer, David 177 Friesen, Gerhard 200

Frishman, David 71, 72, 73, 128, 131, 138 Frug, Simeon Samuel 67, 69, 70, 72, 130 Futterknecht, Franz 8

Galley, Eberhard 9, 16 Ganot, Suzi 3 Gans, Eduard 179, 183 Gassendi, Pierre 32 Gay, Peter 88 Gehlhoff-Claes, Astrid 123 Gelber, Jody 4 Gelber, Mark H. 2, 4, 43, 139, 223 Geldern, Simon van 175, 186, 191, 192 George, Stefan 165 Gerba, Antonija 158 Gilman, Sander L. 1, 2, 77, 102, 104, 223 Ginat, Joachim 149 Ginsberg, Ernst 117 Gischdeu, Sergej Pawlowitsch 19 Glanz-Leyeles, Aaron 75 Glatstein, Jacob 75 Giesinger, Lavoslav 161 Gnessin, Uri Nissam 129, 137, 138 Goedeke, Karl 64 Goeppert, Sebastian 8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10, 14, 17, 21, 47, 4 9 , 5 0 , 63, 67, 69, 77, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 126, 128, 155, 198, 204 Goldfaden, Abraham 67 Goldschmidt, Hans Eberhard 100 Goldschmidt, Leon 110 Goldschneider, Paul 119 Goldstein, Moritz 96 Goodnight, Scott Holland 204

228

Gordon, Yehuda Leib (Yalag) 128, 129, 130 Gottlieb, Hinko 155, 156, 160, 161 Graetz, Zvi 128 Greenberg, Eliezer 76 Greenberg, Martin 211 Greenberg, Uri Zvi 75 Grigoriev, Apolon 132 Grillparzer, Franz 180 Gross, Naftali 73 Gruby, David 161 Gubitz, Friedrich Wilhelm 45, 46, 48 Gunther, John 189 Gutzkow, Karl 57, 58 Guy, Irene 8

Ha-am, Ahad 129, 138, 142 Habermas, Jürgen 16 Hadas, Moses 211 Hädecke, Wolfgang 5 Halevi, Yehuda 146, 147, 158, 180, 181 Hall, Murray G. 99 Halliday, John 95 Halpern, Moshe Leib 73, 111 Hansen, Volkmar 202 Harden, Maximilian 103, 110 Harlan, Veit 168 Hartmann, Eduard von 137 Hauptmann, Gerhart 64, 116 Haven, George Wallis 204 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 23, 33, 37, 39, 46, 47, 170, 177 Heine, Betty 175 Heine, Mathilde 158, 184 Heine, Maximilian 191 Heine, Samson 175 Heine, Solomon 86

Heinzen, Karl 200 Heller, Hugo 106, 107 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm 26 Herder, Johann Gottfried 157 Hermand, Jost 214 Herodotus 84 Herrmann, Helene 15, 206 Hertzberg, Arthur 212 Herzen, Alexander I. 135 Herzl, Theodor 99, 139-152 Hess, Moses 24, 128 Hessing, Jakob 119, 122 Heymann, Fritz 1, 185-196 Heymans, G. 89 Hirsch, Helmut 187, 188, 189, 195 Hirschfeld, Ludwig 148 Hirth, Friedrich 185 Hitler, Adolf 125 Hofacker, Erich P. 198 Hoffmann, Ε. Τ. A. 51 Hofmann, Sime 156 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 106, 164 Höhn, Gerhard 5, 78, 86 Hölderlin, Friedrich 10 Holdheim, Samuel 83 Holtei, Karl von 46 Holub, Robert C. 93, 103, 214 Holzhausen, Paul 15 Homer 35 Hook, Donald D. 1, 3, 53, 223 Horch, Hans Otto 3, 45, 77, 78, 96, 119, 206 Hörth, Otto 200 Horwitz, Ya'akov 151 Hotz, Karl 14 Houben, Heinrich Hubert 15, 158, 211 Howard, William Guild 201 Howells, William Dean 203 Hugo, Victor 165

229

Hurvitz, Henry 150 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 131 Hyndman, Henry Mayers 37

Ibsen, Henrik 64, 135, 138 Iceland, Reuben 73 Iglic, Edo 155 Imber, Naftali Herz 75 Imber, Shmaryahu 75 Imber, Shmuel Jacob 75 Immermann, Karl 49, 50, 52, 55 Immerwahr, Raymond 200 Iser, Wolfgang 139, 140

Jacobs, Joseph 208 Jacoby, Johann 63 Jaffe, Robert 148 Jäger, W. 51 Jammer, W. 83 Jauss, Hans Robert 139 Jean Paul 51 Jenner, F. Α. 93 Jesus 116 Jungmann, Max 148

Kabonovski, David 128 Kafka, Franz 180 Kahn, Lothar 1, 3, 53, 163, 165 Kalbeck, Max 97 Kaltner, Jonathan 43 Kämmerling, Bernd 15, 95 Kant, Immanuel 25, 33 Kanzer, Mark 91 Karczewska, Irma 105 Karpeles, Gustav 15, 143, 175, 185, 191, 206 Kassner, Rudolf 164 Kaufmann, David 185, 193 Kaufmann, M. 158

Kazin, Alfred 214 Keil, Ernst 46 Keil, Jürgen 3 Keilson, Hans 187 Kellner, Leon 145 Kerr, Alfred 14 Kesten, Hermann 163, 185, 186, 188 Khaikin, Moshe 129 Kiba, Hiroshi 10 Kircher, Hartmut 167 Klauzner, Yosef 128, 138 Kleinknecht, Karl Theodor 14, 45 Kleist, Heinrich von 64 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 38 Knilli, Friedrich 168 Kobler, Franz 186, 188 Kochba, Bar 146 Koenigsberg, David 75 Koepke, Wulf 1, 163, 223 Kohn, Em. 83 Kohut, George Alexander 209 Kolmos 128, 130 Kopelew, Lew 185 Kopp, W. Lamar 204, 209 Kossarsky, L. 51 Kossoff, Philip 55, 213 Kraus, Karl 1, 13, 15, 78, 95-112, 116, 117, 122 Kraus, Oto 156 Kredel, Fritz 207 Kristeva, Julia 8 Krivitsky, Walter G. 189 Krolop, Kurt 97 Kruse, Joseph Α. 1, 18, 185, 223 Kuehn, Heinz R. 7, 213 Kugler, Franz 46 Kuh, Moses Ephraim 56 Kulback, Moshe 75 Kupper, Margarete 115 Kuschel, Karl-Josef 7

230 Labisch, Alfons 83 Labuhn, Wolfgang 18 Lachover, Shmuel 127 Landau, Zisha 73 Landauer, Gustav 122, 174 Landucci, Giovanni 82 Lasker-Schüler, Else 1, 103, 113126 Lassalle, Ferdinand 213 Laube, Heinrich 45, 57 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 54 Lazarus, Emma 206, 207, 213 Lefevere, Andre 210 Leland, Charles Godfrey 204 Lensing, Leo Α. 1, 95, 148, 223 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 54 Levine, Michael G. 77 L£vy, Michel 205 Lewald, Elisabeth 50 Lewald, Otto 50 Lewald-Stahr, Fanny 54, 62, 64, 65, 179 Licht, Aleksander 157 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 91, 107 Liebenfels, Lanz von 111 Lilien, Ephraim Moshe 142 Lilienblum, Moshe 128, 130, 131 Liliencron, Detlev von 15 Lilliput 73 Lincoln, Abraham 199 Lind, Jakov 91, 92 Lipps, Theodor 89, 90 Liptzin, Sol 2, 3, 67, 210, 223 Littmann, Franz G. 189 Loeb-Larocque, Louis 191, 192 Loewenthal, Erich 182, 185, 206 Longfellow, Η. W. 203 Louis-Philippe 55 Lowell, James Russell 203 Löwen thai, Marvin 178, 184 Lublinski, Samuel 142

Lukäcs, Georg 11, 164 Luther, Martin 24, 25 Luxemburg, Rosa 122 Lyser, Johann Peter 45

M'Lintock, R. 205 Maccabaeus, Judas 146 Mai 133 Maier, Shlomo 3 Maikov, Α. N. 133 Mallek, Hans-Jurek 185 Manger, Itzik 75 Mani-Leib 73 Mantegazza, Paolo 82, 83 Marcus, Ludwig 34, 179 Marcuse, Ludwig 163, 185, 205, 213 Marggraff, Hermann 61 Markish, Peretz 75 Marx, Eleanor 37 Marx, Hirschel 39 Marx, Karl 1, 6, 8, 21-44, 76, 170 Mato?, Antun Gustav 156 Mauclair, C. 158 Mayer, Hans 18, 49 Mayser, Erich 102 Mazuranic, Ban 153 McCagg, William O. 79 McGrath, C. 185 Meissner, Alfred 56 Mende, Fritz 9, 13 Mendelssohn, Lilli 150 Mendelssohn, Moses 53, 54, 56, 58, 166, 213 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 213 Mendes, Lothar 168 Menzel, Wolfgang 14, 40, 47, 57, 61 Merezhkovski, Dmitri S. 136 Meulenberg, Leo F. J. 7

231

Meyer, Andri 120 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 18 Michaelis, Johann David 83 Mikhailov, Mikhail 132, 135 Miler, Ferdo Z. 155 Miller, Marion Mills 202 Milton, John 77 Minkoff, Ν. B. 75 Minski, Nikolai Maximovich 136 Mintz, Arie Leib 128, 132 Miron, Dan 129 Mitscherlich, Alexander 107 Moser, Moses 131, 144, 179, 180, 182, 183, 207 Moses 110, 120, 151, 215-221 Müller, Wilhelm 98 Muncker, Franz 165, 167 Mündt, Theodor 57

Nadir, Moshe 74 Napoleon 63, 115, 125, 126 Nebuchadnezzar 26 Nemcic, Antun 159 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 64, 116, 136, 137, 164, 165, 170 Nordau, Max 104, 139-152 Novalis 180 Nunberg, Herman 104

Ochs, Günter 187 Ochs, Walter 187 Oehler, Dolf 6 Ölender, Mauricen 80 Oppel, Hans 187 Oppenheim, Moritz David 208 Origen 83 Oxaal, Ivar 79

Palota, Aron 153

Pater, Walter 73 Pauls, Georg 18 Pazi, Margarita 1, 173, 223 Peretz, Y. L. 71, 72, 111 Perraudin, Michael 98 Petuchowski, Elizabeth 208 Pfemfert, Franz 95 Pfizer, Gustav 59, 60 Philippson, Ludwig 96 Philo of Alexandria 83 Pinski, David 73 Pinto, Avram 158 Platen, August von 18, 54, 55, 92, 93, 103, 107, 108, 109, 183, 184, 199, 202 Plavsic, DuSan 156 Pochmann, Henry A. 203, 204 Pollak, Michael 79 Pound, Ezra 204 Präger, Max 98 Prawer, Siegbert S. 167, 185 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 22 Pulzer, Peter 79

Raabe, Wilhelm 17 Rahmer, Siegmund 158, 161 Rattermann, Η. A. 199 Ratti-Menton, (Count) 31 Ravitch, Melech 75 Rebenstein, A. (see Bernstein, Aron) Reese, Walter 13 Regensteiner, Henry 213 Reimann, Hans 193 Reinick, Robert 46 Reisen, Abraham 72, 73 Reitzel, Robert, 200 Richards, Angela 107 Richarz, Monika 79 Riesser, Gabriel 53, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 205

232

Rippmann, Inge 18 Ritz, Hermann 132 Robert, Ludwig 53, 55, 182, 183 Roberts, Steven Henry 189 Röder, Werner 187 Rolnick, Joseph 73 Roneil, Avital 77 Rosenberger, Erwin 99 Rosenrauch, Gabriel 111 Rosenthal, Ludwig 167, 186, 190, 191, 192, 193 Rosenzweig, Franz 180 Rossin, Shmuel 76 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques 32 Rudolf, (Crown Prince) 148 Rüge, Arnold 23 Rutra, Arthur Ernst 209

Sabina, Karl 174, 175 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 78 Sachs, Η. B. 203, 204, 207 Sachs, Hanns 91 Sagarra, Eda 106 Saint-Simon, C. H. de 22 Sambursky, Miriam 149 Samlaic, Elisa 160, 161 Sammons, Jeffrey L. 1, 2, 5, 65, 95, 101, 121, 148, 167, 197, 223 Sand, George 62 Saphir, Moritz Gottlieb 54, 55 Schaub, Uta 15 Scheichl, Sigurd Paul 97 Scheid, Mark 73 Schern, Alexander J. 199 Schiff, Hermann 53 Schiller, Friedrich 17, 64, 113, 115, 128, 155, 198 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 101, 103 Schlesier, Renate 1, 21, 223

Schlingensiepen, Ferdinand 7 Schmidt, Adolf 192 Schmidt, Johann M. 7 Schmidtbonn, Wilhelm 113 Schmitz, Siegfried 98 Schneider, Manfred 8 Schmerle, Herbert 12 Schnitzler, Arthur 106 Schoeps, Julius Η. 1, 45, 186, 188, 189, 195, 224 Scholz, Helmut 4 Schönborn, G. F. E. 47 Schopenhauer, Arthur 137, 159 Schreber, Daniel Paul 87, 93 Schreiber, Carl F. 209 Schubert, Karl 98 Schubert, Dietrich 15, 100 Schulman, Elazar 128, 130 Schwab, Gustav 98 Schwab, Michael 202 Schwartz, I. J. 73 Scott, Walter 166 Searle, Leroy 139 Segalowitch, Zysman 76 Seifert, Siegfried 9 Sethe, Christian 176 Shakespeare, William 21, 26, 29, 33, 130 Sharp, William 201 Shazar, Zalman 178 Shedletzky, Itta 1, 2, 95, 96, 113, 223 Shestov, Lev 137 Shir, Jay 219 Sholom Aleichem 71 Shor, Wolf 128 Sicher, Efraim 3 Sik, Lavoslav 157 Simmel, Georg 164 Simon, Ernst 150 Simon, Heinrich 63 Sinclair, Upton 195

233

Slama, Georges 3 Smetana, Bedrich 175 Smith, Gary V. 150 Sokolov, Nahum 129 Solomon, (King) 41 Spackman, Barbara 87 Spanheimer, Mary Edmund 199 Speidel, Ludwig 97 Spencer, Hanna 200 Spencer, Johann 83 Spicer, Mavro 156 Spinoza, Baruch 87, 88, 91, 147, 169, 218, 222 Spitzer, Daniel 97 Spuler, Richard 11 Srebrny, Simon 43 Stahr, Adolph 63 Stalin, Joseph 170, 209 Stancic, Miijana 1, 153, 224 Steakley, James D. 103 Steines, Patricia 100 Steinway, William 197 Sternberger, Dolf 178, 179, 182 Stöcker, Adolf 125 Stolz, Heinz 188 Strachey, A. 77 Strachey, James 77, 107 Straube, Ingrid 18 Strauss, Salomon 22, 61 Strauß, Herbert A. 187 Strelka, Joseph P. 9 Strindberg, August 96, 135 Strodtmann, Adolf 15, 199, 201 Suied, Alain 2, 215, 224 Suppan, Franz 154 Swet, Adon 126 Syrkin, Nachman 73

Tabak, Israel 209 Taine, Hippolyte 142 Tanny, Shlomo 151

Tatum, John Hargrove 203 Tausk, Victor 91 Tchernikhovski, Sha'ul 132, 137 Tengler, Heinz F. 7 Ternbach, Salamon 159 Thalheimer, Siegfried 189 Thiers, Adolphe 55, 202 Ticho, Ernst A. 77, 126 Tieck, Ludwig 51 Timms, Edward 97 Tiutchev, Feodor 133 Tkalac, Imbro 155 Tolstoy, Leo 133 Torczyner, Harry 192 Tramer, Hans 150 Treitschke, Heinrich von 64 Trotsky, Leo 170 Tsvitadva, Marina 218, 222 Twain, Mark 203 Tynianov, Jurij N. 133, 135 Tyson, A. 77

Uhland, Ludwig 50, 64 , 204 Ullrich, Peter-Otto 100 Untermeyer, Louis 209

Valien tin, Antonina 158, 163, 213 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August 46, 48, 183 Varnhagen, Rahel 33, 55, 126, 158, 177 Vehlen, Thorstein 210 Veinberg, P. I. 133 Veit, Philipp F. 206 Venedey, Jakob 205 Verses, Shmuel 129 Virgil 35 Vogel, Dan 206 Vogel, Doris 3 Vogl, Johann Nepomuk 97

234

Volgina, Albina Α. 9 Voltaire 32, 60 Volynski, Akim 136 Vraz, Stanko 159 Vukelic, Lavoslav 155

Wachten, Johannes 140 Wadepuhl, Walter 198 Wagenknecht, Christian 96 Wagner, Richard 64, 135, 144, 165 Wagner, Nike 102 Waiden, Herwarth 114 Walter, Peter 7 Walzel, Oskar 15, 113 Weerth, Georg 23 Weigand, Hermann J. 209 Weihl, Elsa 208 Weik, John 198, 199, 201 Weill, Alexandre 60 Weininger, Otto 96 Weiss, Gerhard 202, 205 Wellek, Ren6 9 Weltsch, Robert 173, 174 Wendel-Krinitz, H. 158 Werfel, Franz 177 Werner, Michael 9, 55 Wertheim, Pavao Jehuda 158 Wetzel, Christoph 12 Whitman, Walt 203 Widmann, Joseph Viktor 109 Wienbarg, Ludolf 45, 57 Wilde, Oscar 78, 103, 164, 168 Wilhelm, Gottfried 9 Wilhelm, Otto 158 Wilhelm II 103, 188 Windfuhr, Manfred 9, 86, 102, 204 Wise, Stephen 208 Wistrich, Robert 77 Witrol, Joseph 175

Wittels, Fritz 104, 106 Wittke, Carl 200 Wohl, Jeanette 22, 61 Wohl will, Immanuel 213 Wolff, Max 15 Worbs, Michael 107 Würffei, Stefan Bodo 5, 12 Wuthenau, Alexander 190

Yehoash 72, 73

Zeller, Birgitta 3 Zhirmunskii, Viktor 132 Zielinski, Siegfried 168 Zmora, Israel 129 Zohn, Harry 105 Zschokke, Heinrich 51 Zucker, Adolf Eduard 200 Zunz, Leopold 182 Zweig, Arnold 169 Zweig, Stefan 142 Zweik, Moshe 127