Heine

Excerpt from Poems of Heinrich Heine: Three Hundred and Twenty-Five Poems, Selected and Translated

But it needs something more than a list of antitheses to understand this restless genius, a confusing figure who has been paired with such names as Catullus, Aristophanes, Burns, Rabelais, Cervantes, Voltaire, Swift, Villon - in fact to every writer who is known as a master of either simplicity or irony. It needs a close and interpretive reading of his Book of Songs it needs a general knowledge of the politically experimental and altogether chaotic times of which he was so fiery a product; and it needs, first and last, the constant reminder that Heine was a sensitive Jew, born in a savagely anti-semitic country that taught him, even as a child, that Jew and pariah were synonymous terms. The traditions and tyrannies that weighed down on all the German people of his day were slight compared to the oppressions imposed upon the Jews. The demands upon them, the petty persecu tions, the rigorous orders and taboos would form an incredible list. Let these few facts suffice: In Frank fort, when Heine was a boy, no Jew might enter a park or pleasure resort; no Jew might leave his ghetto after four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon; and only twenty four Jews were allowed to marry in one year. In such an atmosphere Heine received his heritage of hate and his baptism of fire.

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