4. THE NORTH SEA

Jews on Ships Or,

How Heine’s Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegel’s Philosophy of World History

4.1  Emil Hundrieser, plaster model of Weltverkehr (1880).

DESIGNED IN 1880 by Emil Hundrieser and cast in zinc shortly thereafter by Friedrich Peters, a sculptural group known as Der Weltverkehr (World transportation) crowned the entrance hall to the newly reopened Anhalter Bahnhof. The sculpture was composed of an angelic female figure flanked by two youths, one of whom guided a locomotive with his arms. Installed at the highest point of the station, the sculpture stood for the dream of an interconnected world of mobility. The station represented its material instantiation, the dream made real. Even while the Anhalter Bahnhof epitomized the triumph of secular progress, it still needed a guardian angel at its apex to acknowledge a debt to the theological. Hence Der Weltverkehr celebrated material progress in both secular and theological dimensions: Speed was connected with transcendence.

In the nineteenth century railway construction was consistently likened to theology: Heine considered the opening of new railway lines to be “providential events” and Benjamin would later describe the religious zeal of Saint-Simon side by side with the secular deification of progress.¹ With spatial progress linking cities and peoples together, railways were wed to a concept of infinite historical development; progress itself was deified, both in its material form and as an abstract ideal for societal evolution.² Religion and railways became ways of binding or, essentially, covenants to progress. In his material history of nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin quotes the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier on the relationship between religion and the building of railway lines: “One can compare the zeal and the ardor displayed by the civilized nations of today in their establishment of railroads with that which, several centuries ago, went into the building of cathedrals.”³ Building railways was essentially the religion of modernity. In One-Way Street, Benjamin even mentions a specific church that achieved precisely this union between technology and religion in the space of its interior architecture: the Marseilles Cathedral transformed itself into the “Marseilles religion station” at the end of the nineteenth century. When the refurbished church building was completed in 1893, it was the apotheosis of a “gigantic railway station … [complete with e]xtracts from the railway traffic regulations in the form of pastoral letters [hanging] on the walls, tariffs for the discount on special trips in Satan’s luxury train … [with] sleeping cars to eternity [departing] from here at Mass times.”⁴ Religious dreams condensed into the reality of progress such that the modernity of the railways could rapidly transcend any distance, worldly or otherworldly. In Germany the name Anhalter became legendary along precisely these theological lines, as both an allegory for and the material proof of the belief in progress.

This deification of progress and its secular triumph was not, of course, without its dialectical counterpoint: The angel of “world transportation” adorning the Anhalter station might also be seen as the other side of Benjamin’s famed angel of history. While the railway ushered in a newly interconnected world of mass mobility and material exchange, it also ushered in the conditions of possibility for this world’s self-destruction. Railway tracks, after all, are bidirectional, and railway cars were not always in the service of the salvific. Benjamin imagines the “angel of history” propelled backward into the future, while the “storm” of progress “keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” at his feet.⁵ In Klee’s original rendition of the Angelus Novus the angel is a gaunt, terrified figure, with a head that is vastly disproportionate to his feeble body. In Benjamin’s words: “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.”⁶ He has limited agency and is unable to “make whole what has been smashed.”⁷

The angel of “world transportation,” however, is a voluptuous figure of determination: Her right breast is exposed; she has a purposeful look in her face; her wings are spread; and she carries a staff in her hand. The two youth who turn their sinewy bodies to face her are emblems of virility. It is not coincidental that the German word for “transportation,” Verkehr, also connotes sexual intercourse. The profound sexuality of this scene is something that is completely absent in Benjamin’s angel. And while the angel of history stares with his open mouth at the catastrophe called progress, the angel of world transportation has her back to progress: The trains departing the Anhalter Bahnhof left from behind her and sped southward, out of Berlin. She only looked forward, with her wings spread open, and saw no wreckage. Even after the station was bombed during World War II, the angel of world transportation remained ensconced high above the ruins. We might consider the angels to be kindred spirits, poised back-to-back, at a standstill, looking upon the same railway tracks and, hence, upon the same dialectic of modernity.

“The great tragedy of the Jewish people is no Greek tragedy.”⁸

At first sight it would make sense to situate Heinrich Heine’s Reisebilder within the well-defined generic tradition of travel literature as self-discovery and Bildung.⁹ After all, not only are the Reisebilder full of references to Goethe’s travel writings, particularly his Italienische Reise and paradigmatic novel of education, Wilhelm Meister; Heine planned the first of his journeys through the Harz Mountains in 1824 to include a meeting with the aged luminary in Weimar and later even retraces many of Goethe’s footsteps through northern Italy. Both men were working in the already established generic form of the travel narrative, combining elements of a rich historical tradition of discovery with their subjective experiences of mobility on foot and by ship. And accounts of journeys to Italy were often produced by affluent men and women of letters, including Adam Smith, David Hume, J. J. Winckelmann, Laurence Sterne, and Karl Philipp Moritz, in the eighteenth century, and Germaine de Staël, Stendhal, and Chateaubriand in the first third of the nineteenth, when both Goethe and Heine penned their accounts of Italy.

Given this tradition, it is striking that Heine abruptly declares midway through the second book of his journey to Italy, The Baths of Lucca, how absurd it is to read and write travel literature about Italy:

There is nothing more boring on the face of the earth as reading a description of travels to Italy—unless it is to write one—and the only way in which its author can make it in any degree tolerable is to say as little in it as possible about Italy. Although I have made use of this trick of the trade, I cannot promise you, dear reader, anything very captivating in the next chapter. If you become bored by the stupid stuff in it, console yourself by thinking of what a dreary time I must have had writing it! I would recommend that once in a while you skip several pages—for in that way, you will arrive much sooner at the end. Oh! How I wish I could do the same thing.                (Sämtliche Schriften 2:426)

Unlike Goethe, with his methodical observations and patient accumulation of detail, Heine interrupts his account and urges his readers to skip ahead to finish the story sooner. The task of reading and writing about a trip to Italy is anything but the opportunity for self-discovery and Bildung. Yet, to claim that the genre of travel writing is basically useless, Heine places himself in the paradoxical position of composing a book of travels in order to reject the legitimacy of the very genre.

Whereas for Goethe the specific journey to Italy is important as a voyage—Italy represents his connection to antiquity, the sea voyage to and back from Sicily completes his personal growth, the encounter with foreignness shores up his German subjectivity—for Heine the journey is background for another task, namely, the idea of writing a critical history of his present. He uses the form of the travel narrative not in order to convey the “history of his trip to Italy” or to map out the pathway leading to a strong, nationally grounded subject, but rather to question the presuppositions behind any such claims and critique the attendant ideas of national legitimacy and historical inevitability. His target is not so much Goethe as Hegel and the early practitioners of the so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism). As I will argue, Heine mocks the genre of the great travel narrative and the genre of the great historical narrative, mimicking them with a Jewish difference to ultimately expose their built-in claims about historicity and national belonging.¹⁰ The Reisebilder deconstruct the so-called progress of Spirit and the eschatology of world history by taking the very ghosts that Hegel supposedly exorcised or consigned to oblivion and pressing them back into history. He does this not by creating a “countersystem” to Hegel’s world history but rather by creating a mobile space for particularity—especially Jewish particularity—in the form of the travel narrative.

Heine personally knew Hegel and attended his lectures during part of the four semesters the poet spent studying in Berlin. Although Hegel lectured on a range of subjects, including metaphysics, logic, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of right, and the philosophy of world history, it is only known for certain that Heine attended the lectures on the philosophy of world history, delivered by Hegel during the winter semester of 1822–23.¹¹ About the same time, Heine became an active member in the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for Culture and Science of the Jews), first conceived by its founders, Leopold Zunz and Eduard Gans, in 1819 and formed into a society in November of 1821.¹² Heine joined the Verein on August 4, 1822, and began regularly attending meetings upon returning from Poland on September 29 of that year. Although its early philosophy and justification were imagined by Zunz in a manifesto that first appeared in Berlin in May 1818, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” Gans quickly became the leader of the Verein and delivered three important lectures on its role in propagating the idea of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Gans, certainly the most committed Hegelian in the group, believed that Jewish particularity could be overcome by the Verein such that Jews could be productively reintegrated into the totality of European history.¹³ The young Heine encountered Hegel’s philosophy of history directly in the lectures that the philosopher himself delivered and from Hegel’s most ardent Jewish disciple, Gans.

Despite Heine’s sustained and intense encounters with contemporary notions of the philosophy of history, his ideas about historicity and his reception of Hegel have been almost completely ignored in his early writings such as the Reisebilder. In the wake of Georg Lukács’s seminal attempt to position Heine definitively as an intermediary between Hegel and Marx, the scholarship on Heine’s relation to Hegelian philosophy has tended to follow Lukács’s periodization and focus almost exclusively on works produced after Heine went into exile in France.¹⁴ The tendency has been to elucidate Heine’s relation to Hegelianism by examining the more obviously philosophical-historical texts written after 1831, particularly his extended essays “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany” (1834–35) and “The Romantic School” (1833), as well as the various on-again/off-again remarks and reflections Heine made about Hegel in his correspondences and confessions.¹⁵ In “The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” certainly Heine’s most important attempt to write a kind of revolutionary history of Geistesgeschichte, he begins with the Christianization of Germany, moves quickly from Luther to Mendelssohn and Lessing, dispenses with Kant and Fichte, and ends up with Hegel, who, he argues, concluded the German philosophical revolution. The idea, as Harold Mah points out, was to “[continue] Hegel’s project of aligning Germany with France” by showing how revolutions in German intellectual history corresponded with the revolutions in French political history, thereby bringing Germany into the European ranks of “modernity.”¹⁶

In a book-length study of the Heine-Hegel relationship, Eduard Krüger structures his argument by dividing Heine’s work into a pre- and post-1831 Hegelianism, giving comparatively scant attention to the Reisebilder (save a few pages on Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand); instead, he focuses his attention on the later works that he believes illuminate Heine’s Hegelian conception of Geschichtsphilosophie.¹⁷ In so doing, he does not fundamentally reject Lukács’s argument in explaining “Heine’s ideological position between Hegel and Marx” but rather seeks to articulate the exact nature of the Heine-Marx collaboration during the critical years of 1843–44, when Marx wrote and published his “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” and “National Economy and Philosophy.”¹⁸ Although I have no reason to question Krüger’s argument, I do not think that the relationship between Hegel’s philosophy of world history and Heine’s ideas about historicity can be adequately confined to his later “Hegelian” collaboration with Marx in Paris.¹⁹

Only recently has the scholarship on Heine and Hegel begun to rethink this periodization, particularly Klaus Briegleb, who has tried to articulate Heine’s Jewish conception of history.²⁰ Briegleb has argued, with respect to the constellations of Heine’s “Jewish historical consciousness,” that, for Heine, “poetry is the true writing of history” and that his “entire work … is saturated with a structure of historical recollection.”²¹ Briegleb moves elegantly between some of the earliest poems and the lyrical cycles in The North Sea (Reisebilder II) to the later “Romanzero” (1851) in order to demonstrate how “Heine’s Jewish consciousness of history gains its genuine philosophical quality from a de-ideologization of Hegel’s positive dialectic and from the power of irony.”²² Here Briegleb’s intervention is clearly recognizable: Heine’s “consciousness of history,” far from restricted to his essays on German intellectual history and his influence on Marx’s critique of Hegel, can be seen throughout his “literary” writings, particularly his poetry, as a persistently “Jewish” alternative to the triumph of Hegel’s “Christian” World Spirit.

In consonance with Briegleb’s argument, I want to argue that Heine’s Reisebilder, conceived, written, and published between 1824 and 1831, incisively critique Hegel’s all-consuming philosophy of world history and that in these caustic, ironic, nonsystematic, and contradictory “pictures of travel” Heine’s decidedly Jewish conception of historicity emerges. My argument has two main parts. First, through an analysis of the lectures on the philosophy of world history given by Hegel in 1822–23, I propose that Hegel’s conception of the movement of Spirit (Geist) from East to West, from ancient times to the German nineteenth century, is a travel narrative, a nautical voyage of discovery. To make this claim, I will focus on how Hegel conceives of the movement and direction of Spirit as well as on how he relies on the specificity of a particular mode of transportation—ship travel—to characterize the uniqueness of world-historical peoples and the importance of mobility for colonialism and, hence, for the strength of the European nation. Travel by sea—something Jews supposedly do not engage in—turns out to be the prerequisite of nationality and the birth of Christian civil society. The second part of my argument will focus on the emergence of a Jewish conception of historicity in Heine’s Reisebilder. I read Heine’s travel narratives as a philosophy of history, and it is precisely here, in this shared space between Hegel and Heine—between a philosophy of history and a travel narrative, between a travel narrative and a philosophy of history—that my argument operates. Heine draws out a world of particularity—that other history, which Hegel’s Spirit domesticated and consumed along the way to the universal—by reworking the Greek trope of seafaring and allowing Jewish “spirits” to haunt his conception of historicity.

THE TRAVELS OF WORLD SPIRIT

The lectures that Heine heard Hegel deliver in 1822–23 were the first systematic presentation of the philosopher’s conception of world history.²³ The quadripartite structure and basic philosophical idea were articulated several years earlier, in 1819–20, at the end of his lectures on the philosophy of right.²⁴ For this reason it makes sense to look briefly at the Philosophy of Right. Here, Hegel introduces the idea that “world history” is a kind of court of judgment. Because world history is teleological and its end represents Spirit’s last stage of development into the universal of absolute knowledge, this court represents a final place of adjudication. As Hegel says in the lectures on the philosophy of right, “World history is precisely the court [Gericht] of the universal Spirit, under which the particular [is subsumed].”²⁵ Although he does not develop this notion any further in these lectures, it reappears in a slightly, but significantly, altered form at the conclusion to the Philosophy of Right: “Weltgeschichte, als […] Weltgerichte”²⁶ The famous formulation is difficult to translate because Weltgericht not only means the “court of the world” but also the “judgment of the world,” particularly in the theological dimensions of the Last Judgment. In other words, world history is the place where the trial (“the court of the world”) as well as the sentencing occurs (“the judgment of the world”). Neither this trial nor this judgment can be appealed because “world history is the Last Judgment.” Hegel’s juridical formulation of the progress of world history is thus eschatological: The end is always predetermined, and the process betrays a doctrine of Christian judgment.

What is important in Hegel’s view of world history is that the specific end—a final determination of judgment—is also contained in and the basis of every prior stage of history. I suggested earlier that Hegel’s philosophy of world history can be read as a travel narrative, and I now want to back up this claim by looking at the precise forms of historical movement that Hegel attributes to the development of Weltgeist and the specific kinds of metaphors that structure his account of mobility. What we will see is that they fall into two types: first, the dialectical movement of Geist, which is actually described by an appeal to a natural cycle, and, second, the concrete, historical fact of ship travel, particularly voyages of discovery, which facilitate the outward spread of the universal from its home port of Europe. Together, both describe the movement of world history.

The movement of Geist is not a simple repetition, as one finds in natural cycles, such as the orbits of the planets or the succession of seasons, but rather a progressive, dialectical stepping forth (fortschreiten; Rechts 198). This dialectical process also informs his lectures on world history, where he differentiates Spirit’s progressive development from a mere cyclical motion: “Every successive stage [of Spirit] presupposes the others, is produced as a new, higher principle, through the elevation [das Aufheben], the reworking, and the destruction of the previous stages” (Weltgeschichte 39). This kind of movement contrasts with “the repetition of the same … in nature, wherein nothing new comes forth [and] everything just goes in circles” (Weltgeschichte 38). Corresponding to this dialectical process of universal sublation is a world historical process in which “the different stages through which World Spirit goes are characterized by different peoples and states. Every people expresses a specific moment of spiritual development” (Rechts 198–99). Thus each historical stage is a unique level of development that remains telos directed by the forces of historical necessity and moves forward through a dialectical process of elevation, reworking, and destruction.

World history is divided into four stages based on geography: the “Oriental world,” the “Greek world,” the “Roman world,” and the “Germanic world.” The last corresponds to the highest development of the family, civil society, and the state, having emerged, in successively progressive stages, from abstract rights and mere law-based morality (Rechts 202–6). This quadripartite formulation also provides the geographical basis of the direction and movement of Weltgeist in the lectures on the philosophy of world history. The movement, in accord with these stages of development, is in a singular direction, toward a specific, predetermined goal: World Spirit proceeds “from east to west, from southeast to northwest, from sunrise to sunset” until universal knowledge is attained (Weltgeschichte 106). And later, in discussing the transitions from the “Oriental world” to Europe, Hegel explains that world history follows a decidedly natural course: “The sun follows a course from east to west, and so we go from Asia to Europe, to the West” (Weltgeschichte 317). This mobility is rendered even more explicit in the standard edition of the lectures: “In the geographic overview the course of the world’s history has been marked out in its general features. The sun—the light—rises in the East…. The history of the world goes from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning” (Werke 12:133–34). World history has begun to emerge as a travel narrative.

This justification for the movement of World Spirit is striking for its dubious reasoning. First of all, it is a false analogy: why should the rising and setting of the sun correspond to anything historical? Second, in terms of astronomy, it is patently false: the sun does not move from East to West. Finally, it contradicts Hegel’s earlier point about the particular movement of history: if Geist moves dialectically, why should Hegel make recourse to a natural cycle characterized by a repetition of the same? But I do not want to harp on these issues. The second type of movement—travel by ship—is more significant for our inquiry because it is here that Hegel provides the justification for the movement of world history by appealing to a specific material history of transportation.

Hegel’s most important geographic observation about the production of world-historical people concerns their relation to the sea. World-historical people, Hegel argues, have a connection to seafaring and ship travel, whereas nonhistorical people are basically landlocked and condemned to wander on the ground. In his discussion of the history of the Greek and Roman worlds of antiquity, Hegel shows how the Mediterranean Sea played a critical role in the spiritual development of these civilizations by facilitating the emergence of a national identity and civil society and, more expansively, by spreading the universal outward. In his words, “The middle point of the ancient world is the Mediterranean Sea…. If the middle of the ancient world were not the sea, world history would be impotent…. Just as Rome and Athens would be unimaginable without forums and streets, the ancient world would be nothing without the sea” (Weltgeschichte 106). As the first stage in the development of Spirit, the Oriental world—where Hegel places the Jews—is overcome because “the sea has no meaning for Asia; quite the opposite: the Asian peoples have closed themselves off from the sea.” By contrast, “the relation to the sea in Europe is important … [because] only through a connection to the sea can a European state become great” (Weltgeschichte 111).

Although the sea ostensibly separates nations from one another, Hegel argues that through seafaring and voyages of discovery “people became bound [verbindet] to one another” (Weltgeschichte 111). In other words, the geographic and material prerequisites of colonialism and imperialism—closeness to the sea and ships—are crucial for the direction of world history and the universal expansion of Geist. In fact, nations only become powerful and, hence, world-historical by their relation to the sea. Africa, for instance, dispensed by Hegel in a couple of pages, is not even a part of the history of the world because it does not have a colonial relation to the sea.²⁷ In the standard edition of the lectures on world history, Hegel explains that Africa has “remained impenetrable,” “enveloped in the dark color of night,” and filled with “the most thoughtless inhumanity and disgusting barbarism” (Werke 12:120–21). Not only do Africans not undertake voyages of discovery but the Europeans “have scarcely [been able to penetrate] into the interior of Africa and Asia because travel by land is much more difficult than travel by water” (Werke 12:118). The African people, Hegel concludes, are “no historical part of the World” and, hence, are not a part of the narrative procession of world history (Werke 12:129).

World-historical nations, in contrast, are characterized by their power to master the expansiveness of the sea and by their ability to undertake voyages of conquest. As Hegel writes, “The sea is not only a means for satisfying one’s needs; it also puts property and life at risk … something brave and noble…. Bravery is at the core of a sea journey [and] the ship, this swan, so graceful in its movement, is an instrument that brings the boldness of reason to the highest level” (Weltgeschichte 112). Hegel places colonial expeditions and “voyages of discovery” (Entdeckungsreisen) in a lineage of pivotal historical moments, including the invention of book printing and gunpowder. Europe emerges as the telos of world history because it is here that World Spirit has reached the highest level of outward development (Weltgeschichte 487–89). The Germanic world—by which Hegel seems to mean “Western Europe,” including England²⁸—is thus the culmination of world history, the product of all the dialectical movements of Spirit from East to West, and itself the fount of an outwardly realized, civilizing, colonial mission (Werke 12:490–91).

Through a process of ever increasing glorification and purification, the crumbling of the Oriental world gave rise to the possibility of the Greek world; the destruction of the Greek world gave rise to the Roman world; the ruination of the Roman world, around the middle of the fifteenth century, set in motion the worldwide spread of Christianity and the advent of the Germanic world. However, the rise of the Germanic world is “entirely different from that sustained by the Greeks and Romans. For the Christian world is the world of completion [die Welt der Vollendung]; the grand principle of being is realized, consequently, the end of days is fully come” (Werke 12:414). In other words, the Germanic world will not go to ruin because it represents “the world of completion,” one without temporal extension or historicity. It is essentially nondialecticizable. Unlike the other worlds, the three periods of the Germanic world do not correspond to the narrative categories of beginning, middle, and end or birth, rise, and decline; instead, they correspond, in his terminology, to the “Kingdoms of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit” (Werke 12:417). In effect, Hegel’s progressive narrative of world history ends in overcoming narrativity itself by the eschatological logic of Christianity. Here we also notice a decided tension in Hegel’s story: on the one hand, the “modernity” of the narrative underscores the progress of history and the acceleration of time through the dialectical procession of Spirit; on the other hand, the narrative is fundamentally eschatological insofar as it announces the arrival of the end time, the Germanic world of the nineteenth century as the telos of history. What we are left with at the end of Hegel’s narrative of modernity is pure space—a Germanic empire that extends outward in all directions, something that also explains the primacy Hegel gave to geography in his conceptualization of the advancement of World Spirit.

Hegel considers the “Germanic world” to exhibit the highest level of development in world history not only because Geist radiates outward from Europe to “bind” distant people to the universal but also because the state is founded on the Christian concept of love and freedom. In this world all particular wills and contingencies have been overcome in the name of the universal, ethical state. With “this urging of Spirit outward” (dieses Hinaus des Geistes)—through “the maritime heroes of Portugal and Spain who found a new way to the East Indies and discovered America,” through the spread of Christianity to the New World, and through the discovery of a passage to India by the Cape—the Germanic stage emerges as the universal (Werke 12:490). World history thus has a direction and finality, culminating in the universality and absoluteness of the imperial European state.

Hegel’s philosophy of history is a colonial travel narrative, in which past civilizations are dialectically overcome until we arrive at the end, the modern European state, at which point the truth of the European state radiates back outward. The ruins of past empires merely confirm the progress of Spirit and propel its march forward in a seascape that moves from overcoming the temporality of destruction and ruin to the permanent spatiality of a Christian empire spread the world over. As a part of a grand narrative that unfolds geographically, the non-European is simply accorded a place outside world history (as in the case of Africa) or else treated as a colonial space reachable by ship and thus to be subsumed into the progress of civilization and the expansion of empire. After all, as Hegel indicated in his earlier discussion of the English in India, “it is the necessary fate of Asiatic empires to be subjugated by the Europeans” (Werke 12:179). In its essential form The Philosophy of World History is a geographic narrative of the imperial imaginary and the subjugation of the non-European other.

As Hegel sums up the project of the philosophy of world history at the end of his lectures: “The point was this: to show that the entire course [of world history] follows the logic of Spirit and that all history is nothing more than the realization of Spirit, which the states carry out, and that the state is the same as this worldly realization” (Weltgeschichte 521). Spirit thus proceeds from the African threshold, making its way from the first world-historical peoples in the East toward the West, from where voyages of discovery and colonial expansion facilitate the spread of the European idea of the Christian state to the rest of the world. In this dialectical movement of Spirit, the particular and the contingent are domesticated and overcome in the wake of the universal. World history has a direction and finality, which, at its telos, is also the last judgment of the world. For Hegel the end of history is the truth of the European, Christian state.

Although Hegel spends little space detailing the significance of the Jews in world history, his terse remarks are nevertheless telling and are in complete accordance with his anti-Semitic description of Judaism in “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” (1798–1800). In the philosophy of world history Jews are quietly placed in the “Oriental world,” where the sun supposedly rises, as an insignificant part of the first stage in the movement of World Spirit. Jews do not exhibit any freedom and are, instead, rigidly bound to laws but without the productivity of a state: “The [Jewish] subject never realizes freedom for himself … [and] the state is not consonant with Jewish principles and is alien to the legislation of Moses” (Werke 12:243)²⁹ Jewish ideas are affiliated with “particularity” (Weltgeschichte 500) and “locality,” not in the sense of being bound to a place but in contrast to the universality of Christianity (Weltgeschichte 268). As Hegel makes clear in “The Spirit of Christianity,” the first Jewish act was a “severance” [Trennung], in which Abraham, the progenitor of a nation, “completely tore himself from his family … severing the bonds of community and love” (Werke 1:277). Unlike Kierkegaard who praises Abraham as a knight of faith who transcended the universal laws of the ethical, Hegel sees Abraham as a selfish stranger who refused to enter into familial ties and, instead, tore himself away from the rootedness of place. In Hegel’s words, “Abraham wandered here and there over a boundless territory, without bringing any parts of it nearer to him by cultivating or improving them…. He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and men alike” (Werke 1:278). Even though the notion was not conceived until the fifteenth century, Hegel anachronistically suggests that Abraham was always already the first wandering Jew.

According to Hegel, because Abraham, as the leader of the Israelites, refused to enter into any kind of familial, property, or national ties, Jews are condemned to “their original fate,” namely, to remain forever at the first stage of world history, “in the mean, abject, wretched circumstances in which they still are today” (Werke 1:292). Here, Hegel considers Abraham’s “original” severance (as an Israelite) to be a transgenerational, Jewish trait that explains the state of Jews in Hegel’s Europe. The Jew is a perpetually negative moment in the progress of world history because the “Jewish spirit” is characterized by a “severance,” which contradicts the formation of a civil society, polis, community of reason, or political subjectivity. By contrast, “Christian spirit” is characterized by a “union” of familial love and freedom wherein the slavish laws of Jewish morality have been “sublated … by something higher than obedience to law,” the love of Jesus and the ethical community (Werke K324).³⁰ This manifestation of Sittlichkeit (ethics) is the culmination of a movement that began with the Greek polis, moved to the Roman ideal of citizenship, and ended in Europe with the development of civil society, from where the Christian ideal of the universal radiated outward. The few words that Hegel accords to Judaism are telling precisely because the Jew represents an undeveloped particularity, which was to be overcome in the first stages of world history. The telos of world history is a grand, dialectical synthesis, wherein the untruth of the Jewish particular has been sublated and, finally, forgotten by the totality of the Christian universal.

This is the version of the philosophy of world history that Heine encountered at Hegel’s lectures in 1822–23 and in the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. In the lectures Jews were considered barely world historical people because of their self-severance from any form of incipient nationality or communal belonging; in the Verein the particularity of Judaism could be productively overcome when Jews were absorbed into European world history. In both world history was a European domain, and Jews, because they had neither a homeland nor a nation, were to be either overcome by or assimilated into the progress of history. In no case, however, could Jews continue to subsist in their difference as Jews.

Among the members of the Verein, Gans was the most articulate and passionate advocate of the necessity of Jewish reintegration. Because he, often in parodic connection with Hegel, shows up with such frequency in Heine’s Reisebilder and letters, it is important to briefly explicate the nature of his Jewish-Hegelian conception of history and the role he envisioned for the Verein in realizing it. Although Gans’s radical “Hegelianism” may not have been representative of all his colleagues in the Verein, he was arguably the most outspoken and influential member of the Verein, playing a critical, public role in the wider dissemination of the organization’s ideas. Gans not only gave the organization its name but also assumed its presidency in 1821 and, in his series of semiannual reports, publicly delivered the clearest statements of the Verein’s political goals. Wissenschaft des Judentums not only meant that the “scientific study” was to be undertaken by Jews but that Jews were also to be the objects of such study precisely in order to achieve a “synthesis” into the totality of European history and culture.³¹

As evidenced by the first speech that he gave at the Verein on October 28, 1821, Gans’s outlook on history was clearly Hegelian: “Just as the individual rises up into the genus in nature until it is lost in the all, the task of human civilization is for the particular to be ever raised up into the universal, in which the hoped for perfectibility of humanity would be the end point and final stage.”³² Just like Hegel, Gans considers world history to start in the “childlike particularity … [of] the East” and to move westward, like the sun.³³ Gans does not want Jews to “stand in the way … of the development of nature and history” but rather to assume their rightful place in history, as “citizens” (Bürger) who both participate in the “education establishment” (Bildung-sanstaltung) and celebrate their love of the “fatherland” (Vaterland).³⁴

Unlike Hegel, however, Gans still believed that Jews could be “world-historical” people, participating in the totality of European history once they overcame their strange particularity. The goal of the Verein was to expedite this process. In his second speech to the Verein, delivered on April 28, 1822, Gans appeals to the Hegelian quadripartite organization of history, not in order to place Jews in the Oriental first stage, but to argue that Jews, as inhabitants of Europe, have a claim to be world-historical people in “today’s Europe.”³⁵ For this to happen, however, Jewish particularity cannot continue to subsist “parallel to world history”—Jews must become “completely assimilated” (ganz einverleiben) into Europe.³⁶ Gans describes the nature of this process of assimilation: “to absorb” (aufgehen) is not the same as “to destroy” (untergehen). He continues: “The consoling teaching of history correctly understood is that everything passes by without passing away, and that everything remains, even when it is considered long past. Therefore, Jews cannot be destroyed, nor can Judaism dissolve away; but in the great movement of the whole it will appear to be destroyed and nevertheless live on, as a current lives on in the ocean.”³⁷ In this extraordinary passage, highlighted by a sea metaphor, Gans desires a Judaism that is no longer Jewish in its particularity; he wants a people who have been assimilated into the “ocean” of Europe and are as historically indistinguishable from other people as one “current” is from another. In other words, the specificity of Judaism and Jewish history is to be absorbed into the totality of European world history to survive not as Jewish but as European.

As Gans argues in his less philosophical and more pragmatic third speech, delivered on May 4, 1823, the “scientific” study of Judaism within Europe undertaken by members of the Verein will help accelerate “Jewish Bildung” and this process of reintegration. He tells the Verein that they are continuing to realize the production of a “better culture” and universal history: “The bad mixture [Mischung] of a half-Oriental, half-medieval life has been broken apart. In place of a completely alien culture [Bildung] came the dawn of a better upbringing [Erziehung] that moved toward the universal…. On this ground our Verein was formed.”³⁸ Under the leadership of Gans, the Verein thus sought to overcome Jewish particularity for the sake of Judaism’s absorption into the universal current of Europe.³⁹

GERMAN/JEWISH GHOST STORIES

I now turn to what I earlier called Heine’s “Jewish conception of historicity” and will show how Heine’s Reisebilder, when read as a philosophy of history, offer a different take on Hegel’s concept of world history and on this process of Jewish absorption into the totality of Europe. I will begin by showing how Heine mocked and rejected Hegel’s systematic philosophy of history and its Jewish reception in the Verein.⁴⁰ Instead of chronologically going through Heine’s Reisebilder to demonstrate these claims, however, I will focus on “places” where we can best see the emergence of Heine’s conception of history and his deconstruction of Hegel’s system: namely, in his reworking of Hegel’s systematic voyage of Weltgeist into a ghostly, nautical, Jewish travel narrative.

As S. S. Prawer has shown in a meticulous study of the representation of Jewish characters in Heine’s oeuvre, caricatures of Eduard Gans and his Hegelian commitments first appeared in Briefe aus Berlin (1822) and became frequent in the four volumes comprising the Reisebilder.⁴¹ Heine ridicules Gans’s Judaism, his baptism (which took place several months after Heine’s), his pedantic scholarship, his profession (Gans was a law professor at the University of Berlin), and, most of all, his decidedly political commitment to a Hegelian philosophy of world history.⁴² This mockery of Gans and Hegel receives one of its most critical formulations in the two cycles of North Sea poems (Sämtliche Schriften 2:167–205) originally published as parts of Reisebilder I and Reisebilder II. The immediate inspirations for the poems were Heine’s vacations to the North Sea in 1825 and three sea voyages to the island of Norderney in 1826.⁴³ I will briefly summarize the cycles and then show how Heine uses the topos of seafaring and ship travel to rework Goethe’s journey to Italy as well as Hegel’s and Gans’s reliance on the history of seafaring for the spread of the universal World Spirit. In both cases Heine takes up the “Greek” paradigm of seafaring to critically deconstruct the ways in which mobility contributes to a restrictive concept of nationality and world history.

The first cycle begins with a voyager gazing out into the unbounded ocean as he prepares to sever personal ties and leave behind his family and homeland. Having embarked on his journey, he encounters the spirits of Odysseus and Poseidon, the latter of whom tells him not to fear the tumult of the sea. The voyager survives a terrible storm, but, after the waves have calmed down, he has to be saved by the captain from falling off the side of the vessel while beguiled by a “sea phantom” deep beneath the waters (Sämtliche Schriften 2:182–84). The cycle concludes with a poem entitled “Peace,” which ends with a tribute to the voyager’s ultimate savior, Jesus Christ (Sämtliche Schriften 2:185–87).⁴⁴ The second cycle of poems begins with the voyager leaving the island and setting sail, as we later find out, back to “my German fatherland” (Sämtliche Schriften 2:202). Once again, the sailor braves a storm and a shipwreck, but he begins to question the worth of the journey in its mythological, historical, and personal valences. He yearns for “the German coastline” but can only discern water. The voyager then makes a wish for his homeland, Germany: “May, for all time, your lovely ground be covered / With madness, hussars, and wretched verses / … And may they tally votes every day / On whether cheese maggots belong to the cheese; / And deliberate for long periods of time / How one can ennoble Egyptian sheep / By improving their wool / … Oh Germany! / I still long for thee, / For at least you are still solid ground” (“Seaksickness,” Sämtliche Schriften 2:202). In the penultimate poem, “In Port,” the voyager has arrived in Germany and finds himself in a rathskeller in Bremen, reflecting on the direction and movement of world history. The cycle concludes with a short poem, “Epilogue,” on artistic production.

As Jeffrey Sammons has pointed out, the North Sea cycles are not only original in Heine’s oeuvre but also in German poetry: Heine was “the first German to write a body of major poetry about the sea.”⁴⁵ Thematically speaking, German literature about seafaring goes back to the end of the fifteenth century with Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools), the first German work, according to Fritz Strich, “to have reached the status of world literature” (since it was translated into multiple languages).⁴⁶ But what makes Heine’s cycles particularly original and relevant here is that the poet critically replicates the antique journey of seafaring and return, as it was inherited and used by Goethe and Hegel, but with a Jewish difference: Heine has consciously taken up the most canonical and recognizably Greek of themes—the sea voyage—and made it into a satirical, semiautobiographical travel narrative of a baptized German-Jew, torn between land and sea. After all, not only is the grand sea voyage to the island of Norderney anything but grand (on a clear day the island is visible from the German coast across shallow mud flats), but onboard the great ship Heine’s voyager desires the safety and solid ground of the German nation yet scorns the Germans’ petty discussions about the improvement of the Jews: the “Egyptian sheep.” In other words, Jews are no longer condemned to wander on land; they also set sail, like Heine, like Germans, like Goethe and Hegel, if only to cross a tame strait. In effect, if Jews engage in seafaring, they have a claim to be both nationally grounded subjects (the round-trip by sea shores up subjectivity and nationality, as Goethe suggested) and world-historical (the journey by sea is the condition of possibility for the spread of the universal World Spirit). This is Heine’s first deconstructive claim.

To better understand how Heine achieves this deconstruction in the poem “Im Hafen” (In port), we should pay particular attention to his reformulation of Hegelian world history (Sämtliche Schriften 2:203–4)⁴⁷ The poem is roughly based on Heine’s return from his travels to the North Sea during the fall of 1826, when he made a short stay in the port city of Bremen. It begins with a man who has returned to port after having weathered storms on the open sea. He thinks about the dialectical history of the world and the movement of “World Spirit,” which he sees reflected in his glass of wine:

Wie doch die Welt so traulich und lieblich

Im Römerglas sich widerspiegelt,

Und wie der wogende Mikrokosmus

Sonnnig hinabfließt ins durstige Herz!

Alles erblick ich im Glas,

Alte und neue Völkergeschichte,

Türken und Griechen, Hegel und Gans,

Zitronwälder und Wachtparaden,

Berlin und Schilda und Tunis und Hamburg,

…

Hallelujah! Wie lieblich umwehn mich

Die Palmen von Beth El!

Wie duften die Myrrhen von Hebron!

Wie rauscht der Jordan und taumelt vor Freude,

Auch meine unsterbliche Seele taumelt

Und ich taumle mit ihr und taumelnd

Bringt mich die Treppe hinauf, ans Tagslicht,

Der brave Ratskellermeister von Bremen.

Du braver Ratskellermeister von Bremen!

Siehst du, auf den Dächern der Häuser sitzen

Die Engel und sind betrunken und singen;

Die glühende Sonne droben am Himmel

Ist nur die rote betrunkene Nase,

Die der Weltgeist hinaussteckt,

Und um die rote Weltgeistnase

Dreht sich die ganze betrunkene Welt.

[Oh, how the world, so intimately and sweetly, / is reflected in the wine glass / and how the surging microcosmos / sunnily flows through the thirsty heart! / I see everything in the glass, / the history of ancient and modern peoples, / Turks and Greeks, Hegel and Gans, / Citron forests and parading guards, / Berlin and Gotham and Tunis and Hamburg […] Hallelujah! How sweetly around me wave / The palm trees of Bethel! / How the myrrh from Hebron breathes! / How the Jordan ripples and tumbles with glee, / Just as my immortal soul tumbles, / And I tumble with it and, tumbling, / Am brought up the stairs, into daylight, / By the good rathskeller owner from Bremen. / You, good rathskeller owner from Bremen! / Do you see, sitting on the roofs of the houses, / angels, drunk and singing; / The radiant sun there above in the sky / Is only the red drunken nose, / which the World Spirit sticks out; / And around the red-nosed World Spirit / Revolves the whole, drunken world.]

Heine is unequivocally mocking the central concept of Hegelian history, the Weltgeist, which no longer deliberately and reasonably guides the development of history through successively higher stages but instead pulls the world in a drunken orbit according to the direction of its red nose. This is not the progressive movement of Geist articulated by Hegel in his philosophy of world history. But, more than that, Heine’s voyager imagines the totality of history coming together not in the Germanic world but in a magical glass of wine after a sea voyage.⁴⁸ Here he perceives an array of apparently antithetical pairs—ancient and modern history, Turks and Greeks, Hegel and Gans, and so forth—which we might seek to sublate into a higher term if they are, in fact, opposing. But Heine does not do this. Instead, he critically juxtaposes them, as if dialectically at a standstill. Indeed, the only way that Hegel could be seen to be the antithesis of Gans would be by virtue of Hegel’s Christianity and Gans’s Judaism, which by 1826 Gans had given up through baptism. What emerges from these critical constellations is a new image, one that, because of its inherent tensions, bursts forth like a flash. The result, as Benjamin would later articulate, is the production of a revolutionary effect upon consciousness and historical practice. In this regard, Heine’s Reisebilder—in their critical juxtapositions of images—can be seen to be the methodological antecedents to Benjamin’s theory of the dialektische Bild (dialectical image). Both Heine and Benjamin rework Hegel’s systematic philosophy of history, with its concept of strict development, teleology, and continuity, by attempting to salvage the very particularity that was lost in the triumphal spread of Weltgeist.

The particularity of Judaism is thus the critical subtext in Heine’s poem and, as I already suggested, in the cycle as a whole: before being pulled outside by the owner, the voyager mistakes the stairs of the rathskeller for the steps of Jacob’s ladder. Bethel, where Jacob dreamed of the ladder to heaven, is replaced by Bremen. In effect, Bremen, a port city leading to and away from Germany, leads, on some other journey, to a Jewish topography: to Bethel, Hebron, and the Jordan River. In these unresolved juxtapositions, from Hegel and Gans to Bremen and Bethel, and in his co-opting of the seafaring topos, Heine creates not only a new poetic space but also a new transhistorical and transnational space, which might be productively called Jewgreek or German/Jewish. In blending these seeming oppositions and holding them together in a moment saturated with tension, a new German-Greco-Jewish space emerges.

In the conclusion to an essay on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida asks what can “account for the historical coupling of Judaism and Hellenism? And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists [James Joyce]: ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet’?”⁴⁹ Although he does not propose to answer this question, the relationship between Greek and Jewish, like German and Jewish, cannot be reduced to a simple binary opposition. Instead, Hegel and Gans, Bremen and Bethel, and, for that matter, Hegel and Heine must be seen in a dialectical tension, as a kind of German/Jewish constellation that allows us to assess the very modernity from which these thinkers, images, and figures emerged.

Heine thus achieves two things in the poem that are crucial to the way he deconstructs the Hegelian consumption of particularity throughout the Reisebilder: First, he parodies the universal spread of Weltgeist by turning the deliberateness of seafaring into a Jewish voyage such that the ship and the journey by sea no longer represent the progress of World Spirit or the material and geographic preconditions of its (Greek, Christian) triumph. Second, he juxtaposes classification types and mixes genres but without resolving them into a higher form. Heine essentially presents the Mischung—the mixed form—without the Hegelian Aufhebung in order to tarry with the particular rather than subsume, integrate, or overcome it. The terms in the poem (Turks and Greeks, Hegel and Gans, Tunis and Hamburg, and, we might add, Jew and Greek as well as Jew and German) are readable, then, not merely as opposites—especially not if they are waiting to be sublated into something higher, as Hegel and Gans would have it—but as dialectical terms at a critical standstill.

Not surprisingly, this is also the way Heine conceives of the task of writing history. In the “Journey from Munich to Genoa” Heine rejects the historicist notion that the past can be faithfully represented as it was and the classic Aristotelian distinction between history and poetry in favor of a “mixed” form of representation: “[A people] desire their history from the hand of a poet and not from the hand of a historian. They do not desire the faithful reporting of bare facts but rather desire every fact to be dissolved again into the original poetry from which it sprang. The poets know this, and, not without secret gloating, they arbitrarily remodel the memories of a people, perhaps to the mockery of historiographers proud of their dryness and state archivists with their pieces of parchment” (Sämtliche Schriften 2:330). He later writes in a letter praising Jules Michelet’s historical methodology in 1834: “You are a true historian because you are, at the same time, a philosopher and a great artist.”⁵⁰ In this way we can already see the first results of Heine’s conception of history: Not only does he reject the eschatology of the Hegelian journey of Weltgeist, he is also skeptical of the idea that the past can be purely and fully recuperated. Instead, Heine produces a critically poetic and parodic history of his present by mixing traditionally separated genres, such as literature and history, art and philosophy, not into some higher, purer form but into the most volatile, ironic, and bastardized forms he can imagine. The task of the Reisebilder is to present the travel narrative as a politically charged philosophy of history.

To underscore this methodological innovation, it is useful to recall briefly the definition made by Aristotle in chapter 8 of his Poetics: “The poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible … the historian describes the thing that has been and [the poet] a kind of thing that might be.”⁵¹ In short, historians occupy themselves with reality, with what was, and poets are concerned with possibility, what might be. When history became a positivist discipline in the nineteenth century, it was precisely Aristotle’s distinction, translated over and over again as one between fact and fiction, that turned the work of a historian into the work of a scientist. Histories could be tested, proved, and disproved by evidence and archival material such that eventually, over time, with careful and methodical accumulation, the reality of the past could be written, reconstructed, and finally filled in. The historian does “not judge the past” but, to use Ranke’s famous words, merely shows “how it really was [wie es eigentlich gewesen]”⁵² Cold facts and scientific objectivity would lead to the reality of what happened; the past was “out there.”

Heine wants no part in this. Heine’s Reisebilder are not histories in the strict sense of the Aristotelian or Rankean definition, nor are they philosophies of history in the strict sense of a Hegelian system of teleological movement and historical development. Moreover, they are not stories of return as in Goethe’s Italienische Reise, with its self-certain investment in the antique paradigm of nostos. Through his unfettered mobility, Goethe’s narrator boasts a remarkably total spectatorship on the world, and it is the narration of his transnational accumulation of knowledge that contributes to the construction of a stable, nationally grounded subject. The Reisebilder reject both Hegel’s world history as the nautical expansion of the universal and Goethe’s self-discovery of nationality by deconstructing their overlapping investments in the absolutism and teleology of mobility.

To do so, Heine invents a bastard form, which is not quite literature and not quite history, not quite art and not quite philosophy, not quite Jewish and not quite Greek. The Reisebilder occupy a middle space between temporal, spatial, national, and identity registers that all remain “out of joint.”⁵³ He unpredictably mixes the narration of past, present, and future; he confounds the narration of geographic space by mixing near and far, shallow and deep; he plays with identity categories by mixing Jewish, German, Greek, and Christian; he blends reality (what happened) with possibility (what might have happened) and with falsehood (what did not happen), such that none of these distinctions is tenable; and, finally, he combines “dreams” and “ghosts” with waking images of the supposed clarity of the past. In effect, spirits—particularly Jewish ghosts and Hegelian spirits—move through and haunt his world of simultaneous particularity.

As critics have pointed out, Die Harzreise (1824), just like the other narrative journeys, is only vaguely organized as a travelogue, for neither the narration of geography nor temporality conforms to the expectations of national or relational coherence, whether linear or circular.⁵⁴ Die Harzreise begins with the specificity of a place, namely, Göttingen, and ends in a fragment, in an unspecified place, on the first of May. In between this journey from place to time, Heine’s narrator climbs mountains and descends into mineshafts, talks about the past and reimagines the future, dreams of the dead and is haunted by spirits. On many occasions he ridicules the very notion of systematic thought. The narrator does not travel through space or in time to realize a preordained voyage of self-discovery, national identity, or universal history but rather to critically juxtapose volatile images from his present.

Of these images, unsettling dreams and disruptive spirits persistently undermine narrative coherence achieved through cumulative self-discovery and thwart systematic conceptions of the progress of world history. Not only does Heine use dreams and ghost stories as historical sources in the tradition of Herodotus and Artemidorus, the unsystematic narration of these dreams and ghost stories also allows Heine to elude censorship and still stage trenchant political criticism.⁵⁵ This is particularly evident in Die Harzreise, when he is visited, for example, by the “Jewish” ghost of the recently deceased rationalist, Saul Ascher (Sämtliche Schriften 2:126–29), or when he narrates a dream of his law student days in Göttingen:

I stood in the corner of the Hall of Jurisprudence, turning over old dissertations, and lost myself in reading…. The bell of the neighboring church struck twelve, the hall doors slowly opened, and there entered a proud, gigantic woman, reverentially accompanied by the members of the law faculty…. The goddess cried out and rivulets of tears sprang from her eyes; the entire assembly howled as if in the agonies of death; the ceiling of the hall burst asunder, the books tumbled down from their shelves…. I found refuge from this bedlam in the Hall of History, near that gracious spot where the holy images of the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de Medici stand next to one another, and I knelt at the feet of the goddess of beauty…. My eyes drank in with intoxication the symmetry and immortal loveliness of her infinitely blessed corporeal form; Hellenic calm swept through my soul.

(Sämtliche Schriften 2:108–10)

As an ironic “historical source” (Heine supposedly dreamed it while staying at an inn in Osterode), the dream mocks the idea of history as salvation. The weight of the Greek past—as cultural treasures and historical artifacts—offers a temporary respite from the juridical chaos. But Heine—a baptized Jew—can only partake in this glorious salvation and enjoy such perfect forms in a dream. For his waking vision, as he later remarks in the North Sea III, is nothing like that of Goethe’s, who “sees all things with his clear Greek eyes … in the true outlines and true colors in which God clothed them” (Sämtliche Schriften 2:221). Heine is stuck with his “sickly, torn [zerrissene] romantic feelings” (Sämtliche Schriften 2:221). His waking world—that is, the world of a wandering, baptized yet eternal, seafaring Jew—is far from the dreamed forms of Greek perfection, Hegel’s European universal or Goethe’s Greco-German spectatorship.

Although Heine sometimes even followed Goethe’s footsteps through northern Italy, particularly from Verona through the Tyrol, he never experiences or is able to convey the perfection of Goethe’s worldly and historical spectatorship. As Heine says of the Italienische Reise: “Everywhere in it we find the actual comprehension and the calm repose of nature. Goethe holds a mirror up to—or, to speak more accurately, is himself the mirror of—nature. Nature wished to know how she looked, and therefore she created Goethe” (Sämtliche Schriften 2:367). Heine’s “Jewish” perspective on the world appears to preclude such mastery of nature—he might as well say that nature would never ask a Jew how she looked. Telling of his daydream in the amphitheater of Verona, Heine, as a Jew, can only fancy his way into the beauty, grandeur, and safety of Greco-Roman antiquity, unlike Goethe who convincingly sees himself as a direct descendent and surviving spirit of antiquity:

I walked for a long time on the upper benches of the amphitheater, pondering my way back to the past. As all buildings reveal their inner spirit [Geist] most clearly at twilight, so did these walls speak to me…. They spoke of the men of old Rome, and I was there, as if seeing the Romans wander around as white shadows in the darkened circus. I seemed to see the Gracchi with their inspired martyr eyes! “Tiberius Sempronius!” I cried aloud. “I will vote with you for the Agrarian Law.” … Then suddenly the heavy tones of the vesper bell sounded and the horrible drumming of the evening roll call. The proud Roman spirits [Geister] disappeared, and I found myself once more in the Austrian Christian present age.

(Sämtliche Schriften 2:365; my emphasis)

On awaking from his daydream, Heine inevitably returns as a Jew, in the here and now of his untimely Christian present. He can only dream himself into the harmony of this other place, with its glorious power and historical prestige, by temporarily imagining himself among such mythical, antique spirits.⁵⁶ No matter how deeply he believed his German roots to run, Heine was still left wandering—in his present—as an eternal Jew. As he famously wrote to his friend Moses Moser in October 1826 while traveling to the North Sea,“It is very clear to me that I am most longingly forced to say good-bye to the German fatherland. Less the desire to wander and more the torture of my personal circumstances (that is, the Jew that can never be washed away [die nie abzuwaschende Jude]) drives me away…. For how deeply rooted is the myth of the eternal Jew! [der Mythos des ewigen Juden]”⁵⁷ Not even baptism, seafaring, or Hegel can “wash away” the Jew. In this respect, Heine’s Judaism is a personal specter and a spirit to be eternally tarried with.

Neither exorcised nor forgotten, Jewish ghosts unmistakably haunt Heine’s travels through Europe. While a psychobiographical argument about Heine’s “torn” identity is not irrelevant here,⁵⁸ I want to underscore the way in which Heine subtly deconstructs Hegel’s world history, wherein Jews are circumscribed in the first stage of world history and condemned to be overcome, in a negative moment, and never mentioned again. In this way Heine’s poetry reveals the violent consequences of Hegel’s totalizing philosophy of world history.

To do so, Heine carefully reads the Hegelian system—world history as a systematic, geographically driven Greek voyage or travel narrative of Spirit—in order to mimic it with a Jewish difference. Hegel wants to exorcise the Jewish ghost unequivocally in favor of the Christian Geist, but he can only keep the Jewish specter at bay by cutting it out. In effect, Hegel must enact a severance (Trennung) not unlike the one he accuses Abraham of enacting with the Jewish people: Hegel cuts the Jews out of his system, by not only ignoring Jesus’s Judaism but also the contemporary Jews of the “Germanic world,” in order to accelerate the end of history and the universality of Christian spirit. But, in so doing, Hegel, by this logic, performs a Jewish act. For precisely this reason and perhaps also because he cannot do otherwise, Heine lets the Jewish spirits back in. Not only do Jewish ghosts haunt his travelogues, in dreams and on waking, Jewish ghosts also haunt the supposed totality of Europe as a world-historical achievement. Far from Gans’s desires for Jewish absorption into the ocean of Europe, Heine’s Jews haunt his European travels persistently, as ghosts, in dreams, on ships, and in everyday encounters. These range from the stereotypical to the uniquely cultural-historical: Jews are rationalist thinkers, as in the caricature of Saul Ascher, and are also bankers, as in the caricature of Christian Gumpel with a big nose and hungry pocketbook; as cosmopolitan figures, Jews are historically some 5,588 years old and, in this sense, are hardly suspended in the first stage of world history. Heine does not cut the Jews out, nor does he systematize their belonging to a particular place in history; rather he creates a mobile space for their appearance. In short, he writes Jewish ghost stories of a Christian ghost story.⁵⁹

If Heine had simply offered the positive image of the Jew as an antidote to Hegel’s anti-Semitic image of the Jew or proposed the singularity of the Jewish ghost as a counter to the Christian Geist, he would still have been operating in the terms and logic of the Hegelian system. Instead Heine mimics the travelogue with an ironic difference in order to deconstruct its built-in claims about nationality, self-discovery, total spectatorship, and, most of all, historicity. For Heine Jewish particularity cannot be systematized or contained in the absolute logic of a developmental structure because this would inevitably domesticate Jewish difference and endow it with an ontological stability or, worse, a final, historical resting place. The travel narrative as a philosophy of history is always on the move, slipping away into paradoxes and irony, mixing genres and types, playfully contradicting itself, and, sometimes, outright lying. This political Mischung, this nonspace for particularity, is Heine’s “Jewgreek,” German/Jewish conception of historicity.

In this way Heine reclaims Geistesgeschichte (intellectual history) from its Enlightenment-rationalist stronghold: Heine’s “ghosts” disrupt the systematic and national exclusivity of the Greco-German historical-philosophical tradition. On the Harz journey, for example, in the town of Goslar, Heine is visited by the ghost of the recently deceased Dr. Saul Ascher, one of several visits by various Jewish ghosts and religious spirits throughout the Reisebilder. Ascher was the rationalist, Jewish author of an antinationalist book called Germanomanie (1815), which was famously burned by patriotic German youths at the Wartburg Festival of 1817 as they proclaimed, “Woe upon the Jews that cleave to their Judaism and defame our German nationhood [unser Volkstum und Deutschtum]”⁶⁰ Heine relates the otherworldly visit of Ascher’s ghost, who, true to nature, proceeds to espouse the tenets of rationalism and proclaim the mighty principles of reason to ironically prove that he is not a ghost:

At last the door opened, and the late Doctor Saul Ascher slowly entered. A cold fever trickled through my marrow and veins—I trembled like an ivy leaf, and I scarcely dared to gaze upon the ghost [Gespenst]. He appeared as usual, with the same transcendental gray coat, the same abstract legs, and the same mathematical face; only it was a little yellower than usual, and the mouth, which used to form two angles of 22.5 degrees, was pinched together…. “Don’t be scared, nor believe that I am a ghost. It is a deception of your imagination, if you believe I am a ghost. What is a ghost? Give me a definition. Deduce for me the conditions of possibility of a ghost. In what reasonable connection does such an apparition coincide with reason itself? Reason, I say, reason!” And now the ghost proceeded to analyze reason, cited from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, part 2, section 1 of the second book, chapter 3, the distinction between phenomena and noumena, then constructed a hypothetical problematic for the belief in ghosts, placed one syllogism on another, and concluded with the logical proof that there are absolutely no ghosts.                (Sämtliche Schriften 2:128)

Ascher’s ghost appeals to the most systematic, law-based principles of reason in order to prove the nonexistence of ghosts. Satirizing enlightened rationalism, Jewish ghosts both exist and do not exist; they haunt the integrity of a philosophical system and, at the same time, use the system ironically to rationalize themselves away.

But, most significantly, throughout all the Reisebilder, there is the Hegelian ghost of universal history. The Hegelian ghost is nothing but the progressive movement of Christian Geist in which Jews are circumscribed in the first stage of world history and condemned to be overcome through the progress of world history. It is here that Heine’s Reisebilder betray the violent consequences of the Hegelian project and offer a deconstruction of its totalizing view of history: Jewish ghosts, rather than exorcised and forgotten, haunt his travel narratives to make space for another conception of historicity, namely, the promise or futurity of Jewish difference.

Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, often considered the most successful work of his pre-Paris period, is arguably the best place to see the results of this volatile, political Mischung. The travelogue, structured as a contradictory, monologic conversation with an unidentified woman, enacts this generic blurring by moving between historical references and autobiographical reflections, social commentaries and allegorical reflections, history and literature, past and present, Jewish and Christian, German and Jewish, factual and counterfactual, the said and the unsaid:

Please do not complain of my digressions. In every foregoing chapter, there is not a single line that does not belong to the business at hand. I am coerced to write; I avoid all superfluity; I often pass over what is necessary; for example, I have not once quoted with any regularity—I do not mean spirits [Geister], but, on the contrary, I mean writers…. In case of an emergency, I can get a loan of quotations from my learned friends. My friend G. [Gans] in Berlin is, so to speak, a little Rothschild in quotations and will gladly lend me a few million, and if he does not have them, he can easily find some cosmopolitan spiritual bankers [kosmopolitische Geistesbankier] who do…. Everywhere I discover opportunities to display my pedantry. If I happen to mention eating, I at once remark in a note that the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews also ate—I quote all the costly dishes…. Soup is my favorite dish. Madame, I have thought of going to London next year, but if it is really true, that no soup is to be had there, a deep longing will soon drive me back to the soup flesh-pots of the fatherland…. I might also allege the refined manner in which many Berlin intellectuals have expressed themselves relative to Jewish eating, which would lead me to the other excellences and preeminences of the Jews, to whom we are all indebted, for inventions such as bills of exchange and Christianity.

(Sämtliche Schriften 2:284–85)

The seemingly maniacal, uninhibited play of free associations is, however, anything but apolitical. This ludic mixture of genres, identities, and types not only mocks the idea of a systematic and necessary organization of experience into a dialectical history of the progression of Weltgeist, but it is also a strategy of defiance that enables Heine to avoid suppression by the German censors. The reader need only recall that the previous chapter as well as the chapter just quoted are both written as if partially censored. Save four words, the former is simply represented by empty dashes: “Die deutschen Zensoren—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-… Dummköpfe—-—-—-—-…” (Sämtliche Schriften 2:283). We can apply Seeba’s argument in his study of Heine’s Briefe aus Berlin to Heine’s political criticism and history writing: Heine avoids a systematic method in order to produce an uncensored nonspace for the emergence of particularity.⁶¹ He says one thing, then immediately contradicts himself; he reveals his identity, then suppresses it; he blends historical fact with fiction, and both are blended again with the counterfactual, that is, what might have or could have happened. There is no resolution, absorption, purification, or sublation: Heine’s history not only differs from Hegel’s in its refusal of systematics but also defers the absolute eschatology and the insistent finality of the movement of Spirit in Hegel by creating open spaces for the emergence of another history. This mobile space of paradox and irony, contradiction and Mischung, is Heine’s Jewish historicity.⁶²

We can see this even more clearly in Heine’s extension of the earlier dialectical constellations of Turks and Greeks, Hegel and Gans. The poet concludes the chapter from Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand quoted above by listing exiles and ironically imposing a system of thought. The people in the list are “great” because they had to “run away” at a significant time in their lives. They have nothing in common but self-imposed or forced exile: “If we go through history, Madame, we find that all great men have been obliged to run away once in their lives: Lot, Tarquin, Moses, Jupiter, Madame de Staël, Nebuchadnezzar, Benjowsky, Muhammad, the whole Prussian army, Gregory VII, Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel, Rousseau—to which I could add very many other names, as for instance those whose names appear on the ‘Black Board’ of the stock exchange” (Sämtliche Schriften 2:287). The heterogeneous list ranges from Moses’s leading the Jews out of Egypt to Germaine de Staël’s exile in Switzerland to avoid the guillotine, from Muhammad’s hegira to the Prussian army’s retreat from the French after double defeats by Napoleon in 1806, from Isaac ben Judah Abrabanel’s forced exile in 1482 to Castile.⁶³ We might also add Heine’s exile as a “wandering Jew” and the traveling tales of his Jewish narrator to this list. What they all have in common is travel, or, more precisely, fleeing. History turns out to be pictures of travel, exile, and escape.

He concludes the chapter with an ironic embrace of Systematic: “So, Madame, you see that I am not wanting in well-grounded erudition and profundity. Only in systematology am I a little behind…. I shall, therefore, proceed to speak: I. Of ideas. A. Of ideas in general. 1. Of reasonable ideas. 2. Of unreasonable ideas. a. Of ordinary ideas. b. Of ideas covered in green leather” (Sämtliche Schriften 2:287). Once again Heine has targeted the systematic thought of Hegel. The “idea,” a manifold concept in the Hegelian lexicon, refers to the absolute movement of Geist as an already completed historical process anterior to reality. For Heine the Hegelian concept is complicit with violence because the enclosed logic of any system forces some people into exile, if it does not kill them straight out. Heine’s Reisebilder are, therefore, acts of freedom, defiant and decidedly political acts creating cracks for the survival of a little bit of Jewish alterity.

Unlike Hegel’s philosophy of world history, inexorable in its movement and inviolable in its systematization, Heine’s Reisebilder produce a space for the survival of particularity. To use the critical words of Adorno, Hegel’s systematic philosophy consumes every trace of difference in its “paranoid zeal to tolerate nothing else” but a total synthesis of identity and nonidentity.⁶⁴ Universal history, then, becomes nothing but an “insatiable identity principle that perpetuates antagonism by suppressing contradiction” until all particularity is subsumed into the universal.⁶⁵ Glossing Schiller’s famous dictum that concludes Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Adorno points out: “The fact that history has rolled over certain positions will be respected as a verdict on their truth content only by those who agree with Schiller that ‘world history is the world tribunal.’”⁶⁶ In other words, in the Hegelian system, world history, as the final court of judgment, determines the truth or untruth of certain people and positions and thereby either raises them up into the universal or condemns them to oblivion. The “untruth” of the particular or the heteronomous is simply “rolled over” by that process of carrying out verdicts and final judgments: world history.

As that other history, Heine’s Reisebilder are particular, mixed, and utopian both temporally and spatially: In terms of time, they call forth a future, a kind of messianic promise, and, in terms of space, they are ultimately located in no real topographically or nationally delimited place and are, hence, u-topian. This is not the geographic and national determinism of Hegel’s concept of world history. We might even say that Heine has broken the spell of Spirit.⁶⁷

Toward the end of his “Journey from Munich to Genoa,” Heine articulates this “utopian” hope to allow a little bit of Jewish difference and alterity to survive:

It seems … as if world history is no longer a robber legend but rather a ghost story [Geistesgeschichte]. The grand lever that ambitious and avaricious princes are so eager to employ for their own ends, namely, nationality, with all its vanity and hatred, is now musty and used up; day by day foolish national prejudices are disappearing; all harsh peculiarities are disappearing into the universality of European civilization; now there are no longer nations in Europe but parties…. What is this great task of our time? It is emancipation. Not only the emancipation of the Irish, the Greeks, the Frankfurt Jews, the West Indian blacks, and other oppressed people, but the emancipation of the whole world, indeed of Europe, which has attained maturity and is now tearing itself free from the iron shackles of the privileged aristocracy.

(Sämtliche Schriften 2:375–76)

Here Heine considers universal or world history as a “history of spirit” in order to imagine the end of both nationality and race-based prejudices. Although upon a cursory reading this passage may sound Hegelian vis-à-vis the disappearance of racial particularities, Heine’s philosophy of world history is moving in an entirely different space: Rather than prematurely declaring the arrival of the end time, as Hegel does, Heine recognizes its futurity, its emancipatory promise, and keeps open, to quote Benjamin, its “weak Messianic power.”⁶⁸ In effect, Hegel’s definitive messianism is nowhere to be found here because Heine is not rendering any final judgments or resting places for those forgotten, unliberated, or condemned spirits. This is a philosophy of world history that has never arrived and is always conscious of the space for preserving difference.

To conclude, Heine uses poetry to ultimately subvert the absolutism of philosophy by exposing the metaphors on which Hegel’s geographically inflected conception of world history relies. Instead of immobilizing particularity or attempting to relocate it in a preordained system of universality (as Gans does), Heine strives to create a crack, a conception of historicity that in its openness and playfulness is not lethal to the other, does not imprison the heteronomous, and does not domesticate the nonidentical. He cannot create another system antithetical to the Hegelian system because, if he did, the difference Heine seeks to liberate would be locked up again in a new ontological positivity. It is, indeed, a matter of thinking another historicity by creating a space for the narration of other “ghost stories.” The narrative of his travels to the North Sea turns into a philosophy of world history, wherein the Christian movement of Geist is haunted and displaced by the hybrid German/Jewish/Greek ghosts so thoroughly exorcised by Hegel. By way of this work of deconstruction, Hegel and Heine—precisely like the German and Jewish ghosts of the Reisebilder—become locked together in a dialectic, permanently entangled in one another: Hegel cannot be understood without his “Jewish other” and, recursively, Heine cannot be understood without his “German other.” Through Heine’s transformation of the genre of travel literature and the philosophy of history, the narration of Jewish mobility thus becomes the basis of a new freedom by way of an awareness of this other history.