Toward a Reappraisal of Heine

The position of Heine's lyrical poetry in the history of the German mind has fluctuated between extremes. During the nineteenth century Heine's poetry stood at the height of popularity. There was hardly any German lyrist whose work was as widely read as his. It has been stated with good reason that the Buch der Lieder was the last manifestation of the German lyrical spirit which proved to be of European significance and interest – comparable, in this respect, only to Baudelaire's considerably later Fleurs du Mal which by themselves, were much more esoteric. The range of Heine's influence was equally strong among artists and intellectuals, on one hand, and middle-class consumers on the other. Equally important is his impact upon music. The history of the German Kunstlied is unthinkable without Heine. Those compositions for Heine's verses which Schubert wrote shortly before he died, rank among the boldest and most advanced musical ventures of the period, anticipating with the violence of an explosion the extreme and unchecked expressiveness of later romanticism. Neither the polished intérieur songs of Mendelssohn nor the self-forgotten melancholy of those of Schumann would have been possible, were it not for Heine's texts. Even Richard Wagner, the nationalist and rabid anti-Semite, borrowed the scenario of his Flying Dutchman from the Jewish refugee in Paris, and Wagner's friend and foe Nietzsche not only expressed his adoration for Heine but shows the latter's influence in the nervous flexibility of his style and the climate of irony as a medium of subjective expression which permeates his whole work. In addition to his success with the elite, however, Heine maintained a tremendous hold over the bulk of the educated and semi-educated. His verses were the last ones which belonged to the sphere of serious artistic production while enjoying mass consumption and stimulating widespread imitation by laymen. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there was no German business man with cultural ambitions who would not, when he felt compelled to write a birthday poem for his wife or his mother, imitate some established model of Heine's. The results were atrocious and led straight away to advertizing poetry. But they give evidence of an impact going beyond passive reception. Heine affected the last remnants of expressive urges surviving in the area of German commercialism and Tüchtigkeit to the coldness of which his unbriddled sentimentality afforded a complement if the imitator only was too insensitive to hear the ironical overtones. This need for Heine seems to have been so indestructible that not even the Nazis dared to omit the Lorelei from their text-books, contenting themselves with the note »author unknown«.

It was this cheap popularity and its roots in certain aspects of Heine's work itself which led, since 1900, to a rebellion among those intellectuals who were becoming conscious of the crisis in German culture and saw in Heine a representative of that very juste milieu the momentum of which moved rapidly towards barbarism. This rebellion did not stop at any political creed. It reached from Karl Kraus, the radical Viennese critic of cultural liberalism, to the conservative George circle. Yet the very hatred of the George school, whose followers opposed the affable melody of Heine with their artful and detached verses reflects what is avoided, just as modern painting reflects the photographic realism which it excludes.

It is hard to escape the impression that the violent change between attraction and repulsion with regard to Heine and the affect-laden atmosphere in which this change took place, are not merely due to historical trends, such as the increasing allergy to romantic sentimentalism, but to a deep ambivalence toward the intrinsic nature of Heine's poetry itself. Some kind of uneasiness seems to prevail wherever Heine's spirit manifests itself, comparable to the malaise that sometimes arises in the presence of people who are resented as aggressive, overly self-conscious and tactless – just because these very qualities strike a chord in the souls of those who react against them. In other words, something disquieting and unsolved remains in the phenomenon Heine, and his supposed obsolescence as a poet is at least partly a means to repress this discomfort rather than to cope with it consciously.

Those qualities of Heine's which account superficially for this uneasiness are generally explained by his Jewishness. But this procedure seems to be dubious. For reference to these qualities suggests all too strongly a number of anti-Semitic stereotypes, which as modern social psychology has established beyond doubt, are due to projective mechanisms on the part of the indignant. Granted that Heine actually possesses some of those qualities, it would be more pertinent to understand what they mean than merely to point them out. This can be done only by an attempt to derive the characteristics of Heine's poetry from those historical dynamics in which he was involved, not by being satisfied with the private and accidental quality of his descent. The role of the latter was probably confined to enabling him to give voice to universal experiences of his epoch, without the restrictions brought to bear upon those more completely identified with German tradition than he was. Moreover, while there is no doubt about the existence of Jewish traits not only in Heine's psychological make-up but also in his poetic imagery, his medium, the German language makes it almost impossible to disentangle them from non-Jewish elements. If one is not satisfied with simply referring to Jewish subject matters like those of the Hebräische Melodien, one would have to enter into an interminable process of linguistic analysis in which very frequently what appears to be Jewish may actually be due to that self-alienation of poetic language as such which took place in the era of early industrialism. It would be fallacious to attribute to Heine the Jew what actually characterizes his work as one of the early manifestations of the invasion of poetry by journalistic mass communication.

Hence, a different procedure is suggested. First, some of the major reasons for Heine's tremendous popularity and effectiveness should be pointed out in terms of the relation of the lyrical poet to the particular historical situation from which Heine arose. Secondly, those aspects of Heine which – inseparable from those of his success – made for the violent counter-reaction, should be discussed. Finally, the problem of a re-evaluation of Heine in our own situation should be brought up, quite independent from a mere »appreciation« of his historical merits or their opposite.

Heine was the first German poet who faced squarely the problem: how is lyrical poetry possible at all in the sober, cold, disillusioned world of early industrialism? He became conscious of the crisis of romanticism and gave account of this consciousness in his prose writings. He realized that the tradition of romanticism in which he grew up and of which he himself was in some respects the climax had begun to become hollow and rigid. He felt that this tradition was no longer adequate to the substance of experience, that it deteriorated into the crude cult of the Middle Ages, of Knights and Castles which found its last, ludicrous monuments in the »neo-Gothic« architecture of the second part of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he reacted against the ever-increasing alliance of German romanticism with the forces of political reaction during the Vormärz-era between 1815 and 1848.

Incompatibility of the industrial era with romanticism has not to be understood in too naive a sense. It would be fallacious to assume that reality in Germany was quaint, »romantic« during earlier romanticism, and that the intrusion of factories and railways destroyed a Germany which looked and was like the Nuremberg later glorified in the stage settings of the Mastersinger. In fact, even earlier romanticism was a protest against the disappearance of a supposedly »organic« world which was to be conjured up by imagery rather than it manifested itself straight-forwardly. The works of the greatest German romanticists, such as Hölderlin and Novalis, denounce as strongly what would be called today business culture, as it ever was resented during a much later phase of economic development. What happened in the time span between them and Heine was not so much that romanticism had become no longer adequate to reality (which it never was), but rather that its substance had ceased to be a protest against reality and had become, as it were, apologetic. The imagery of earlier romanticism had been symbolic of philosophical motives, such as longing which transcends the world as it is, the infinite, the emancipation of subjectivity from alienated, congealed conventions. Of these motives only the caput mortuum remained. They degenerated into mere embellishments of the drabness of life. Heine's position may be characterized as being faithful to the primary impulses of romanticism – represented in his lyrical work by the desire for boundless, exuberant, unbridled love – while he sensed that the old symbols of romanticism did no longer carry those motives, and that just those who did not want to yield to the existent had to recognize its over-whelming impact if the manifestations of romanticism were not to become a piece of furniture in the Biedermeier household.

Thus Heine's artistic situation was from the very beginning antagonistic in itself, that of a romantic poet set against romanticism. He expressed, through the material of his art, what the great social theorists of his era formulated on a discursive level: that only those take the Utopian dream seriously who try to make it become real and enter into a dialectical process with reality, while those who maintain the dream world in its aloofness are liable to surrender to the very reality from which they try to get away. All the more conspicuous traits of Heine's work, everything that is, as Louis Untermeyer put it, »paradoxial« in him, reflects this historical antagonism. To be sure, the antagonism itself, and its poetic objectification, are by no means novel. It may be said that there always was just as much romanticism as the awareness of its incompatibility with the world, and the great romantic poets have dwelt on this incompatibility rather than contenting themselves with the pattern of the blessed olden times. Here one has to think primarily of Byron, by whom Heine probably was influenced more strongly than by anybody else and to whom he owes the decisive poetic idea of Weltschmerz, the »sorrow of the world«. But the atmosphere of Weltschmerz has been reduced, in Heine, from the monumental, from the broad historical sweep of the tragic to much more intimate dimensions of the private individual of his own time, shunning everything grandiose and decorative as extraneous to the concrete world of poetic experience. Heine is, at least in German literature, the first poet who speaks essentially as a city dweller, and even his landscapes, the famous Nordsee, can be properly understood only through the contrast of the vastness of the sea to that of the big town. In this respect like in many others he resembles Charles Baudelaire with whom he shares some amazingly specific motives, such as the glorification of lie, the phenomenon of the »crowd« (summoned also by Poe), the »phantom double« – motives which belong essentially to modern urbanism.

Just since Heine's affinity to the Baudelairian romanticism of disillusionment is so striking, the difference between the two, which does not merely consist in Baudelaire's being spiritually »later«, enables us better to understand the problem of Heine. Baudelaire, too, faced a sober and »unpoetic« world which he did not want to escape but rather transfigure into what might be called a negative imagery. The way he chose to achieve this was a heroic one and it is not accidental that the poet styles himself throughout his work as a hero. While surrendering himself unreservedly to the experiences and shocks of the merciless big city, he tries at the same time to absorb those shocks by an extreme emphasis on poetic form and on the distance between poetry and every day life. This is what Paul Claudel described in his statement that Baudelaire represents a mixture between the journalist style of his time and the classicism of Racine.

Heine's resolution of the same situation went to exactly the opposite direction. To be sure, there is no lack of the journalist element in his poetry. As a matter of fact, he introduced this element into German verse. But there is no Racine to counter-balance it, partly because no tradition of equal authenticity was available in Germany, partly because the only literary figure in Germany who truly and substantially represented the idea of a »high style«, Goethe, was the very same against whose authority Heine's school, the writers of the »Young Germany«, were in violent rebellion. Instead of enhancing the distance between poetry and the empirical world, between lyrical language and the ordinary spoken word, Heine tried to cut down this distance radically. If the »great style« had lost its substance, Heine tried to salvage this substance by giving up the great style. As an artistic principle he consciously introduced triteness, banality, the hackneyed and the conventionalized. He attempted to translate the subtlest and most moving experiences into the vernacular of drawing room conversation. His work exploits incessantly the contrast between romantic content, namely boundless sublime love, and sobering, sometimes slovenly, yet often striking and concise expression.

It is this particular configuration which defines Heine's novelty and made for his tremendous effectiveness. By cutting down the distance between poetic and empirical language, he also cut down the distance between the poet and his audience. In doing so he utilized two formal models supplied by German tradition. One of them is Goethe's idea of Gelegenheitsdichtung, poetry written for an occasion, which was originally conceived in order to emphasize the spontaneity of subjective experience against the dry pedantry of German Rococo. He followed up this idea to an extreme, delivering himself, as it were, to the senseless contingency of the life of a »man of the crowd« without even attempting to present this life as meaningful but rather expressing its meaninglessness, reflecting the break between the poetic subject and the objective world. Love is conceived as the only bridge between the two: »Und wäre nicht das bißchen Liebe, man hätte nirgends einen Halt«, but even this »hold« is precarious, for the substance of love itself is in jeopardy, it is only »that bit of love«, which does not take itself quite seriously in the midst of universal alienation.

The second pattern by which Heine attempted to cut down the distance was the folksong. He was close to it both through primary contact in his Rhenish home province, and through the romantic school which had made a cult of the folksong. But he changed the meaning of this pattern. Whereas it was supposed in earlier romanticism to raise poetry beyond the level of the private by constituting a link to what the reactionary romantic philosophers and historians of law called Volksgeist, folk spirit, Heine made use of the looseness and flexibility of rhythm and tone of the folk song so as to make it befit highly individualized, differentiated psychological impulses. What was once a device of creating the »semblance of the well-known«, of social objectivity, was put by him into the service of radical subjectivism.

The question could be raised why Heine, determined to cut down the distance between poetry and the prosaic, insisted on writing poetry at all. The answer seems to be that the maintenance of poetic form as such was the only means by which he felt able to keep faith to what might be vulgarly called the »ideal«. Yet the ultimate consequence, the virtual impossibility of poetry itself, entered his poetic horizon, and each verse of his is tinged by this impossibility. This is the objective, non-psychological explanation of the role irony plays in Heine's work. Irony is another element which he took over from earlier romanticism, while changing completely its function. »Romantic irony« meant the triumph of absolute, infinite subjectivity over the element of limitation and reification implied in any artistic form. With Heine, it loses this metaphysical dignity and becomes the medium through which the dawning realization of the impossibility of poetry itself is brought to the fore. While still writing poetry, he puts it under irony, thus indicating that it does no longer take itself quite seriously, that it has resigned to the spirit of a world which continuously humiliates the last traces of the dream. Through irony, the impossibility of poetry becomes its own subject matter. But if Heine ever proved to be a genius, it was in this respect. He did not content himself with the abstract negativism of revoking poetry by poetry itself but forged this revocation into a means of expression. When he ends, as he frequently does, a poem with a joke, a pun or a grimace, he does so not merely in order to suggest that he does not really believe in the poetic anymore but reveals the underlying antagonism of the poetic subject itself. Heine's irony is more than mere sabotage of his own poetry. Rather, this sabotage obtains the meaning of overcoming a problematic state of the mind by giving voice to it. For the poet is not simply set against a world in which all relations are distorted under the impact of a commodity culture: he himself is part and parcel of this world, and yet torn asunder by a romantic longing for transcending it. Heine is the first »modern« German poet in as much as he is the first one expressive of conflict not only with the outer world but also within himself, the first who does not merely bespeak such conflict but gives evidence of it through every nuance of his form.

It is this modernity, and the element of irony in particular which set in motion the tremendous process of identification which is at the hub of Heine's popularity. But it is also this element that accounts for the more negative aspects of his work: the touch of the meretricious, his affinity to the market, his coquettishness and gossip, in brief, his traits of commercial journalism. It should be noted that these traits are to be found in his artistic substance as such rather than in his practical behavior: as a matter of fact, he was a poor businessman, continuously exploited by his Teutonic publisher Campe. But it was his good and bad luck that he, when simply expressing himself, did at the same time not express himself, but somehow catered for the tastes and desires of an audience which wants to get »its money's worth« out of poetry: entertainment. He fell victim to a pre-established harmony with alienated society. He may be compared, in this respect, to a hit composer who has not to calculate his effect upon the audience in order to be successful but who simply has, as the phrase goes, to be »sincere« in order to meet them on the line of the least resistance, of sham. It should not be forgotten that the needs and wants of collective identification within a middle class that had lost its hold in religion and philosophy were as alive at Heine's times as they are today when they are the basis of manipulative mass culture, but that media such as the films and radio were not available and that Heine, at least partly, fulfilled their function. We may well spot in Heine some of the standard motives of modern mass culture such as that of the self-conscious and weak male infatuated with the unapproachable glamour girl. He has set the pattern for a »respectable«, conventionalized manifestation of masochism and exhibitionism.

While these features imply an externalization of poetry which begins to »sell out«, it should be stressed that they are not a mere defection from that process of subjectification of which Heine the lyrist is one of the foremost exponents, but are profoundly involved with the progress of subjectification itself. The more art becomes subjectified, that is to say, the more it goes »into itself«, the more subjectivity reflects upon itself, and the more it consequently becomes »available« to itself. Concomitantly, poetic technique increases together with this ever-increasing subjective disposal over the subject's own inwardness. Thus, however, the poet learns more and more to manipulate his own human substance. The development of subjectivism is inseparable from a progress of self-reification: the subject becomes the easily accessible, facile content of its own poetry. This reification and availability of inwardness, however, allows the poet to put it on exhibit, as it were, to sell it. Thus, in a certain sense, progress of autonomous art furthers its own deterioration into commercialism. Viewed socially, exhibitionism is the ultimate realization of the fact that inwardness itself has come to be a commodity – a fact of which Nietzsche had an inkling when he said that just the artists who are popularly regarded to be »emotional« really aren't so at all, that increasing artistic sophistication is tantamount to the artist's becoming his own actor. Heine becomes a journalist through the very virtuosity with which he is able to express himself: virtuosity of expression tends towards its ultimate abolition.

Nowhere does this tendency make itself more strongly felt than where Heine takes the poetical for granted, namely, in his metaphors the conventionality of which has attracted most criticism. He unhesitatingly employs all the congealed formulas of the romantic stock, the rose, the lily, the dove, the sun, and what not, in order to convey through continuous exaggeration of his figures of speech fervent and extreme passion. At the same time, however, all these deteriorated metaphors work as devices for »easy listening« and easy remembering. It is not the least among the paradoxes of Heine's poetry that he falls victim to commodity culture at precisely the point where he clings to the most exalted non-prosaic words. Just his conservation of remnants of lyrical language against everyday speech works as a means of communication through automatized effects, ready for imitation by everybody. If the culture of the last few hundred years has neutralized religion and philosophy and transformed both into »cultural goods« merely to be looked at, Heine has extended this process of neutralization over poetry itself. Through achieving an uninhibited and unrestricted disposal over its objects, poetic language loses its life relationship to the very same objects and surrenders its claim of seriousness to the consumer who demands of intellectual efforts that they spare him any intellectual effort.

A decisive re-evaluation of Heine could not content itself with »salvaging« certain phases of his work from the wreckage of a poetry that flirts with mass production. This could amount to no more than half-hearted apologetics and historical appreciation. The ultimate aim should be, instead, to save those very aspects of Heine which lay him open to attack and which are identical with the trauma represented by Heine throughout the history of the modern mind. For the indignation about Heine's brilliant cheapness is always tainted by bad conscience. It is as if Heine, through the unabashed configuration of romanticism and journalism, had revealed basic changes in the presuppositions of responsible lyrical poetry itself which are otherwise not recognized and overcompensated by the passionate and stubborn claim to the monumentality and dignity of poetry. While Heine has betrayed poetry to the market, he has expressed, through the essence of his work, that poetry opposed to the market bears its hallmarks just through this opposition. The malaise that emanates from his verses, their somewhat shocklike and scandalous effect is that of an art heralding its own impossibility. And it may well be that his greatness consists in his being the first one who registered such historical experiences through the essence of his production. It is just his abandon to the ephemeral which gives him the ring of authenticity. To find the first words for essential historical experiences is more than a merely historical merit: Heine may well claim for himself that he is able to do what his post-humous arch enemy Karl Kraus once postulated: »to listen to the noises of the day as though they were the chords of eternity«. Heine was a great poet not in spite of his journalism but through conserving, in snapshots, as it were, the moment when poetry was transformed into journalism. His verses preserve an almost archaic freshness in as much as they summon authentically and for the first time archetypes of the modern world. What might be called the eternal in him may be compared to early daguerreotypes rather than to the great painting of his own time, to Delacroix or Ingres.

One more aspect of his relation to historical dynamics may be stressed. It pertains to the political sphere, his relation to liberalism. He was identified with it as the genuine child of Jewish emancipation. But he was one of the first enlighteners at least in Germany who did not naively accept the notion of progress and all the values of the French revolution but was aware of the mechanical, de-humanizing impact of progress, of the drabness and boredom of the middleclass world, particularly as he saw it in England. He has therefore often been blamed for political ambiguity and actually was involved in fights with some of the radicals of the liberal school, the »Young Germany«, such as Börne and Gutzkow. It has even to be admitted that there was a reactionary and nationalistic German streak in him, in spite of his satirical poetic narrative on Germany. While he was anti-feudalistic, he doubtlessly was, on account of his hedonistic individualism, afraid of the rising proletariat. One generation ago, such facets of his ideology looked simply like compromises with the existent, and Heine certainly was not beyond such temptation. However, his supposed lack of political faith and conviction has revealed in the meantime some different implications. His skepticism against what might be called the ideals of Jacobinism was not merely reactionary but he had sensed in these ideals traces of puritanic coldness and regressive egalitarianism. His self-ironical tenacity with regard to the romantic heritage is at least partly due to the fact that he was unwilling to subscribe completely to a trend of civilization the barbaric consummation of which he foresaw. He describes in a very famous passage the coming German revolution in terms which later read, and were interpreted, as prophecies of Hitler.

In one of his poems he has reached full consciousness of the dialectics of progress. It is to be found in the Nordsee and is called The Gods of Greece, alluding to a poem by Schiller that glorified the lost naivety and unity of Greek antiquity. After stating against Schiller, that he never liked the predatory and domineering Homeric gods, he deplores, in almost Nietzsche-like words, that they were dethroned by Christianism. Then he continues, in Untermeyer's translation, as follows:

For even though, ye ancient deities,

When you joined in the furious combats of mortals,

You always fought on the side of the victor;

Now you will see that man is greater than you.

For I stand here in the combat of gods

And fight on for you, the vanquished.

What survives in Heine seems to be an inherent appeal to continue to fight for the vanquished and to resist the merciless judgment of history.

1949