Heinrich Heine

This article is about the poet; for the mathematician, see Heinrich Eduard Heine.

Heinrich Heine by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim.

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (December 13, 1797 – February 17, 1856) was a journalist, essayist, and one of the most significant German romantic poets. He is remembered chiefly for selections of his lyric poetry, many of which were set to music in the form of lieder (art songs) by German composers.

Early Life

The Radspielerhaus - Heine's home in Munich from 1827-1828

Heine was born into a family of assimilated German Jews in Düsseldorf, Germany, which was then occupied by France (becoming part of Prussia in 1815). He was called "Harry" as a child, but after his baptism in 1825 he became "Heinrich."

His father was a merchant, and his mother, the daughter of a physician, was a refined and educated woman. When his father's business failed, Heine was sent to Hamburg. His wealthy banker uncle, Salomon, encouraged him to go into commerce, but his ventures in this sphere were not successful. Instead, he took up law, studying at the universities of Göttingen, Bonn and Berlin, where he heard Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history (he later wrote a short satirical poem about Hegel's philosophy, entitled Doctrine). During his student years he participated in the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentumes ("Society for the Culture and Scientific Study of Judaism"). Heine only stayed in the society for three years and left the group before earning a degree in law in 1825. The same year, he opted to convert from Judaism to Protestantism.

Jews were subject to severe restrictions in many of the German states at that time. They were forbidden from entering certain professions, including university lecturing, which was a particular ambition for Heine. As Heine said in self-justification, his conversion was "the ticket of admission into European culture". He wrote, "As Henry IV said, 'Paris is worth a mass'; I say, 'Berlin is worth the sermon.'" For much of the rest of his life Heine wrestled over the incompatible elements of his German and his Jewish identities.

Works

Heine is best known for his lyric poetry, much of which (especially from his earlier works) was set to music by lied composers, most notably by Robert Schumann. Other composers who have set Heine's works to music include Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner; and in the 20th century Hans Werner Henze and Lord Berners.

As a poet, Heine made his debut with Gedichte ("Poems") in 1821. Heine's one-sided infatuation with his cousins Amalie and Therese later inspired him to write some of his loveliest lyrics; Buch der Lieder ("Book of Songs", 1827) was Heine's first comprehensive collection of verse.

For example the poem Allnächtlich im Traume of the Buch der Lieder was set to music by Robert Schumann as well as Felix Mendelssohn. It contains the specific ironical disillusionment which is indeed typical of Heine:

Allnächtlich im Traume seh ich dich,

Und sehe dich freundlich grüßen,

Und lautaufweinend stürz ich mich

Zu deinen süßen Füßen.

Du siehst mich an wehmütiglich,

Und schüttelst das blonde Köpfchen;

Aus deinen Augen schleichen sich

Die Perlentränentröpfchen.

Du sagst mir heimlich ein leises Wort,

Und gibst mir den Strauß von Zypressen.

Ich wache auf, und der Strauß ist fort,

Und das Wort hab ich vergessen.

(non-literally translation in verse by Hal Draper:)

Nightly I see you in dreams - you speak,

With kindlyness sincerest,

I throw myself, weaping aloud and weak

At your sweet feet, my dearest.

You look at me with wistful woe,

And shake your golden curls;

And stealing from your eyes there flow

The teardrops like to pearls.

You breathe in my ear a secret word,

A garland of cypress for token.

I wake; it is gone; the dream is blurred,

And forgotten the word that was spoken.

Heine left Germany for France in 1831. After arriving in Paris, he associated with utopian socialists. These included the followers of Count Saint-Simon, who preached an egalitarian paradise based on meritocracy.

German authorities banned his works and those of others who were considered to be associated with the Young Germany movement in 1835. Heine continued, however, to comment on German politics and society from a distance. He remained in Paris, with the exception of a visit in 1843 to Germany, for the rest of his life. Heine wrote Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. A Winter's Tale), an account of his visit to Germany and the political climate there, in 1844; his friend, Karl Marx, published it in his newspaper Vorwärts ("Forward") in 1844. Heine also satirized the utopian politics of those opponents of the regime still in Germany in Atta Troll: Ein Sommernachtstraum ("Atta Troll: A Midsummer Night's Dream") in 1847. In the preface to Atta Troll he comments on the risk of arrest that he faced during his clandestine return visit to Germany.

Heine wrote movingly of the experience of exile in his poem In der Fremde ("Abroad"):

Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland.

Der Eichenbaum

Wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft.

Es war ein Traum.

Das küßte mich auf deutsch, und sprach auf deutsch

(Man glaubt es kaum,

Wie gut es klang) das Wort: »Ich liebe dich!«

Es war ein Traum.

I once had a beautiful fatherland.

The oak

Grew there so high, the violets gently nodded.

It was a dream.

It kissed me in German, it spoke in German

(One can hardly believe it,

It sounded so good) the phrase: "I love you!"

It was a dream.

Death

Heine suffered from ailments that kept him bedridden for the last eight years of his life (some have suggested he suffered from multiple sclerosis or syphilis). He died in Paris and is interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre. The Walhalla temple in Bavaria plans to add Heine's bust to its collection in 2009.

Among the thousands of books burned on Berlin's Opernplatz in 1933, following the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, were works by Heinrich Heine. To commemorate the terrible event, one of the most famous lines of Heine's 1821 play Almansor was engraved in the ground at the site: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." ("Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.") In the original text, Heine had been referring to the burning of the Quran during the Spanish Inquisition.

Controversial legacy

In the 1890s, amidst a flowering of affection for Heine leading up to the centennial of his birth, a plan was enacted in Düsseldorf to honor Heine with a memorial statue. While at first the plan met with enthusiasm, the concept was gradually bogged down in anti-Semitic, nationalist, and religious criticism; by the time the memorial was finished, there was no place to put it. Through the intervention of German American activists, the memorial was ultimately transplanted into The Bronx. Known in English as the Lorelei Fountain, Germans refer to it as the Heinrich Heine Memorial.

The Heine memorial resides today in the Bronx, New York. The activism of some German Americans, including Carl Schurz, aided in its relocation across the Atlantic.

In Israel, the attitude to Heine has long been the subject of debate between secularists, who number him among the most prominent figures of Jewish history, and the religious who consider his conversion to Christianity to be an unforgivable act of betrayal. Due to such debates, the city of Tel-Aviv was very late in naming a street for Heine, and the street finally chosen to bear his name is located in a rather desolate industrial zone rather than in the vicinity of Tel-Aviv University, suggested by some public figures as the appropriate location.

Ha'ir (a left-leaning Tel-Aviv magazine) sarcastically suggested that "The Exiling of Heine Street" symbolically re-enacted the course of Heine's own life. Since then, a street in the Yemin Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem and a community center in Haifa have been named after Heine. A Heine Appreciation Society is active in Israel, led by prominent political figures from both the left and right camps. His quote about burning books is prominently displayed in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

Selected works

• Auf Flügeln des Gesanges
• Gedichte, 1821
• Tragödien, nebst einem lyrischen Intermezzo, 1823
• Reisebilder, 1826-31
• Die Harzreise, 1826
• Ideen, das Buch le Grand, 1827
• Englische Fragmente, 1827
• Buch der Lieder, 1827
• Französische Zustände, 1833
• Zur Geschichte der neueren schönen Literatur in Deutschland, 1833
• Die romantische Schule, 1836
• Der Salon, 1836-40
• Ludwig Börne: Eine Denkschrift, 1840
• Neue Gedichte (Big Rudy), 1844 - New Poems
• Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, 1844 - Germany
• Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum, 1847
• Romanzero, 1851
• Der Doktor Faust, 1851
• Les Dieux en Exil, 1853
• Die Harzreise, 1853
• Lutezia, 1854
• Vermischte Schriften, 1854
• Letzte Gedichte und Gedanken, 1869
• Sämtliche Werke, 1887-90 (7 Vols.)
• Sämtliche Werke, 1910-20
• Sämtliche Werke, 1925-30
• Werke und Briefe, 1961-64
• Sämtliche Schriften, 1968

Editions in English

• The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine. A Modern English Version by Hal Draper, Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers Boston, 1982. ISBN 3-518-03048-5

See also

• Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf
• Heinrich Heine Prize

External links

• Works by Heinrich Heine at Project Gutenberg

In English

• Works by/about Heinrich Heine at Internet Archive
• Selected English translations online
• Deutsche Welle's review of Heinrich Heine in 2006, 150 years after his death
• "Ihr Lieder! Ihr meine guten Lieder!" - a guide to musical settings for one or two voices of Heine's poetry by Peter W. Shea
• Art of the States: The Resounding Lyre - musical setting of Heine's poem "Halleluja"
• Heinrich Heine's holy hits - Georg Klein's top ten Heine quotes on religion

In German

• German Heinrich Heine society
• Heinrich Heine institute
• Heinrich Heine portal - annotated, scholarly digital edition of Heine's complete works and letters with more than 12.000 digital images of original manuscripts, first editions, etc.
• Complete works of Heine online
• Heine multimedial - Heine events, multimedial biography, interpretation of works, rankings, quiz, manga, etc.

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