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Jewish Thinkers
Heine
The life and work of one of Germany's greatest writers of verse and prose.
- GenresBiography
117 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
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January 3, 2021
Few Americans outside of our rarified class of literary minded people will know much about Heinrich Heine, one of Germany's most heralded writers. And even those who do will likely know more about his biography than they will about his corpus of poetry and prose works.
I first read and learned about Heine during a German poetry class at university. Two books of his poetry, both acquired second hand, enjoy a pride of place on my bookshelves, but neither the Selected Poems (in German) edited by Barker Fairley nor Louis Untermeyer's English translations have received the share of my attention they surely merit.
More frequent have been my indirect encounters with Heine over the years, largely in occasional pieces published in outlets such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Criterion, or Commentary Magazine. It's this secondary reading that leads me to believe the dim light of Heine that we recognize from English shores even today has to do with his status as a German, a Jew, a Protestant convert, and a 19th century Parisian, as much as it does with his actual writing.
Ritchie Robertson's short offering, Heine, may be read as something of a corrective to the outsized focus on Heine's biography that is the subject of the lion's share of contemporary English language commentary. Robertson begins with a rather magnanimous introduction, focusing on Heine's brilliant wit and agile mind, and on the great pleasure it is to actually read his work. Unfortunately, with the appetite thusly whet, he largely fails to substantiate such claims with convincing evidence in the four chapters that follow.
Robertson's gaze throughout the book is primarily directed on Heine's satirical works of prose. All of this work--including that chained bear in flight to the Spanish border--was new to me. There's also some focus on Heine's travel writing, which also contains a healthy measure of satire. To Robertson's credit, he does a good job situating the various social and political issues that Heine was responding to, even if this means giving up a more chronological ordering of his commentary.
But the body of Heine's work that emerges a hundred pages later, I have to sadly admit, feels like something of a disappointment. For all the points of his biography that make him a figure of interest, he comes across in Robertson's telling as largely a political hack writing in an unheroic age where politics were not conducive to free expression. His satire and even his travel writing were a rather ineffectual attempt to sidestep that reality. For readers of the time, surely, there was interest. It seems much harder to justify the staying power of such work in our own time.
What I appreciated most about Robertson's book was the contextualization of the reactionary politics of Heine's day, those set in motion by Metternich and the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, and which largely held through mid-century. For that reason, I judge the third chapter, 'Between Revolutions', to be the best. I found it interesting to have Heine associated with the Young Germany writers; I wasn't aware of that. I would have liked to know more, then, about any criticism he may have leveled at the more quietist Biedermeier writers and painters.
The most disappointing chapter, on the other hand, is the fourth, Between Religions. Given the fact that the book is a part of the Jewish Thinkers series edited by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, one would have thought the last chapter would have held the most interest. But Heine was an uncommitted Jew and an even less committed Christian. His religion, according to Robertson, was a vaguely secular one, whether that be in his commitment to the Saint Simonian movement or in his Romantic attachments to a sensual materialism grounded in pantheistic naturalism.
It's also worth noting that Robertson's book, published in 1988, is something of an artifact of its own time. There is quite a bit of text given over to Heine's relationship to Marx and his writings. From a comment in the introduction, it seems that Heine's legacy was still a point of contention in the 1980s on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the East Germans stressing his embrace of Marx, the West Germans stressing Marx's indebtedness to Heine. It's not a reason to read the book, but likely an anachronistic curiosity for those readers born after 1980.
Ironically, what I will likely remember from this book has more to do with a biographical point of fact from Heine's life, that despite the very light treatment of his biography. Heine was a very skilled political thinker, one who was able to all too clearly see the logical, and often unsavory, ends of the various political positions that appealed to his sense of right. Asked to characterize him, I would say he was a liberal (in the classical sense of the term), but one who saw clearly some of liberalism's absurdities, most notably its alliance with an illiberal 19th century German nationalism or the idea that a fully emancipated laboring class was fit to govern itself. Yet even so Heine never seems to have given up on politics as the cord necessary to unfurl the curtain that would allow for a secular messiah to make his grand entrance onto the stage of the world. In that sense he was a political optimist for most of his life.
The loss of affinity I feel with Heine after reading Robertson's book is not universal. Where I feel a greater sense of brotherhood is with his belief in the importance of the arts and on his natural feeling that there is value in pomp and hierarchy. He seems to have cultivated the kind of aristocratic soul over the course of a life spent observing the world that many artists surely do, and which causes those same artists to often look with frustration on those who have failed to cultivate the same despite having all the same opportunities in education and culture to do so.
That said, I wouldn't recommend this as a starting point for learning more about Heine. Surely there are other commentaries that will be of greater interest to those with little knowledge of an important 19th century German writer. (c) Jeffrey L. Otto, January 2, 2021
I first read and learned about Heine during a German poetry class at university. Two books of his poetry, both acquired second hand, enjoy a pride of place on my bookshelves, but neither the Selected Poems (in German) edited by Barker Fairley nor Louis Untermeyer's English translations have received the share of my attention they surely merit.
More frequent have been my indirect encounters with Heine over the years, largely in occasional pieces published in outlets such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Criterion, or Commentary Magazine. It's this secondary reading that leads me to believe the dim light of Heine that we recognize from English shores even today has to do with his status as a German, a Jew, a Protestant convert, and a 19th century Parisian, as much as it does with his actual writing.
Ritchie Robertson's short offering, Heine, may be read as something of a corrective to the outsized focus on Heine's biography that is the subject of the lion's share of contemporary English language commentary. Robertson begins with a rather magnanimous introduction, focusing on Heine's brilliant wit and agile mind, and on the great pleasure it is to actually read his work. Unfortunately, with the appetite thusly whet, he largely fails to substantiate such claims with convincing evidence in the four chapters that follow.
Robertson's gaze throughout the book is primarily directed on Heine's satirical works of prose. All of this work--including that chained bear in flight to the Spanish border--was new to me. There's also some focus on Heine's travel writing, which also contains a healthy measure of satire. To Robertson's credit, he does a good job situating the various social and political issues that Heine was responding to, even if this means giving up a more chronological ordering of his commentary.
But the body of Heine's work that emerges a hundred pages later, I have to sadly admit, feels like something of a disappointment. For all the points of his biography that make him a figure of interest, he comes across in Robertson's telling as largely a political hack writing in an unheroic age where politics were not conducive to free expression. His satire and even his travel writing were a rather ineffectual attempt to sidestep that reality. For readers of the time, surely, there was interest. It seems much harder to justify the staying power of such work in our own time.
What I appreciated most about Robertson's book was the contextualization of the reactionary politics of Heine's day, those set in motion by Metternich and the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, and which largely held through mid-century. For that reason, I judge the third chapter, 'Between Revolutions', to be the best. I found it interesting to have Heine associated with the Young Germany writers; I wasn't aware of that. I would have liked to know more, then, about any criticism he may have leveled at the more quietist Biedermeier writers and painters.
The most disappointing chapter, on the other hand, is the fourth, Between Religions. Given the fact that the book is a part of the Jewish Thinkers series edited by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, one would have thought the last chapter would have held the most interest. But Heine was an uncommitted Jew and an even less committed Christian. His religion, according to Robertson, was a vaguely secular one, whether that be in his commitment to the Saint Simonian movement or in his Romantic attachments to a sensual materialism grounded in pantheistic naturalism.
It's also worth noting that Robertson's book, published in 1988, is something of an artifact of its own time. There is quite a bit of text given over to Heine's relationship to Marx and his writings. From a comment in the introduction, it seems that Heine's legacy was still a point of contention in the 1980s on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the East Germans stressing his embrace of Marx, the West Germans stressing Marx's indebtedness to Heine. It's not a reason to read the book, but likely an anachronistic curiosity for those readers born after 1980.
Ironically, what I will likely remember from this book has more to do with a biographical point of fact from Heine's life, that despite the very light treatment of his biography. Heine was a very skilled political thinker, one who was able to all too clearly see the logical, and often unsavory, ends of the various political positions that appealed to his sense of right. Asked to characterize him, I would say he was a liberal (in the classical sense of the term), but one who saw clearly some of liberalism's absurdities, most notably its alliance with an illiberal 19th century German nationalism or the idea that a fully emancipated laboring class was fit to govern itself. Yet even so Heine never seems to have given up on politics as the cord necessary to unfurl the curtain that would allow for a secular messiah to make his grand entrance onto the stage of the world. In that sense he was a political optimist for most of his life.
The loss of affinity I feel with Heine after reading Robertson's book is not universal. Where I feel a greater sense of brotherhood is with his belief in the importance of the arts and on his natural feeling that there is value in pomp and hierarchy. He seems to have cultivated the kind of aristocratic soul over the course of a life spent observing the world that many artists surely do, and which causes those same artists to often look with frustration on those who have failed to cultivate the same despite having all the same opportunities in education and culture to do so.
That said, I wouldn't recommend this as a starting point for learning more about Heine. Surely there are other commentaries that will be of greater interest to those with little knowledge of an important 19th century German writer. (c) Jeffrey L. Otto, January 2, 2021
Displaying 1 of 1 review