Anyone who wants to make a serious contribution to remembering Heine on the centennial of his death and not merely deliver a formal speech will have to speak about a wound; about what in Heine and his relationship to the German tradition causes us pain and what has been repressed, especially in Germany since the Second World War. Heine’s name is an irritant, and only someone who addresses that without whitewashing it can hope to be of aid.
The National Socialists were not the first to defame Heine. In fact, they almost honored him when they put the now famous words “Author Unknown” under his poem “Die Loreley,” thus unexpectedly sanctioning as a folksong the secretly scintillating verses that remind one of Parisian Rhine nymphs from a long-lost Offenbach opera. Heine’s Book of Songs had a stupendous influence, extending far beyond literary circles. In its train lyric poetry was ultimately drawn down into the language of commerce and the press. This is why Heine came to have such a bad name among those responsible for culture around 1900. The George Circle’s verdict may be ascribed to nationalism, but that of Karl Kraus cannot be erased. Since that time Heine’s aura has been painful and guilt-laden, as though it were bleeding. His own guilt became an alibi for those of his enemies whose hatred for the Jewish middleman ultimately paved the way for the unspeakable horror.
One who confines himself to Heine as a prose writer avoids the annoyance; Heine’s stature as a prose writer in the utterly dismal level of the era between Goethe and Nietzsche is immediately evident. This prose is not limited to Heine’s capacity for conscious pointed linguistic formulation, a polemical power extremely rare in Germany and in no way inhibited by servility. August von Platen had the opportunity to experience it when he made an anti-Semitic attack on Heine and was disposed of in a way that would probably be called existential nowadays—if the concept of the existential were not so carefully preserved from contamination by the real existence of human beings. But in its substance Heine’s prose goes far beyond such bravura pieces. After Leibniz gave Spinoza the cold shoulder, the whole German Enlightenment failed, at least in that it lost its social sting and confined itself to subservient affirmation; of all the famous names in German literature, Heine alone, for all his affinities with Romanticism, retains an undiluted concept of enlightenment. The discomfort he arouses despite his conciliatory stance comes from that harsh climate. With polite irony he refuses to smuggle right back in through the back door—or the basement door to the depths—what he has just demolished. It is questionable whether he had such a strong influence on the young Marx as many young sociologists would like to think. Politically, Heine was not a traveling companion one could count on: even of socialism. But in contrast to socialism he held fast to the idea of uncurtailed happiness in the image of a just society, an idea quickly enough disposed of in favor of slogans like “Anyone who doesn’t work won’t eat.” His aversion to revolutionary purity and stringency is indicative of Heine’s distrust of mustiness and asceticism, elements whose traces are already evident in many early socialist documents and which, much later, worked in favor of disastrous developmental tendencies. Heine the individualist—and he was so much an individualist that even in Hegel he heard only individualism—did not bow to the individualistic concept of inwardness. His idea of sensuous fulfillment encompasses fulfillment in external things, a society without coercion and deprivation.
The wound, however, is Heine’s lyric poetry. At one time its immediacy was enchanting. It interpreted Goethe’s dictum on the occasional poem to mean that every occasion found its poem and everyone considered the opportunity to write to be something favorable. But at the same time, this immediacy was thoroughly mediated. Heine’s poems were ready mediators between art and an everyday life bereft of meaning. For them as for the feuilletonist, the experiences they processed secretly became raw materials that one could write about. The nuances and tonal values which they discovered, they made interchangeable, delivered them into the power of a prepared, ready-made language. For them the life to which they matter-of-factly bore witness was venal; their spontaneity was one with reification. In Heine commodity and exchange seized control of sound and tone, whose very nature had previously consisted in the negation of the hustle and bustle of daily life. So great had the power of a mature capitalist society become at that time that lyric poetry could no longer ignore it without descending into provincial folksiness. In this respect, Heine, like Baudelaire, looms large in the modernism of the nineteenth century. But Baudelaire, the younger of the two, heroically wrests dream and image from modernity itself, from the experience of implacable destruction and dissolution, which by then was further advanced; indeed he transfigures the loss of all images, transforming that loss itself into an image. The forces of this kind of resistance increased along with those of capitalism. In Heine, whose poems were still set to music by Schubert, they had not reached such a high level of intensity. He surrendered more willingly to the flow of things; he took a poetic technique of reproduction, as it were, that corresponded to the industrial age and applied it to the conventional romantic archetypes, but he did not find archetypes of modernity.
It is just this that later generations find embarrassing. For since the existence of a bourgeois art in which artists have to earn their livelihoods without patrons, they have secretly acknowledged the law of the marketplace alongside the autonomy of their laws of form, and have produced for consumers. It was only that this dependency was not visible behind the anonymity of the marketplace. It allowed the artist to appear pure and autonomous in the eyes of himself and others, and this illusion itself was accepted at face value. Heine the advocate of enlightenment unmasked Heine the Romantic, who had been living off the good fortune of autonomy, and brought the commodity character of his art, previously latent, to the fore. He has not been forgiven for that. The ingratiating quality of his poems, which is over-acted and hence becomes self-critical, makes it plain that the emancipation of the spirit was not the emancipation of human beings and hence was also not that of the spirit.
But the rage of the person who sees the secret of his own degradation in the confessed degradation of someone else is directed with sadistic assurance to Heine’s weakest point, the failure of Jewish emancipation. For Heine’s fluency and self-evidence, which is derived from the language of communications, is the opposite of a native sense of being at home in language. Only someone who is not actually inside language can manipulate it like an instrument. If the language were really his own, he would allow the dialectic between his own words and words that are pre-given to take place, and the smooth linguistic structure would disintegrate. But for the person who uses language like a book that is out of print, language itself is alien. Heine’s mother, whom he loved, did not have full command of German. His lack of resistance to words that are in fashion is the excessive mimetic zeal of the person who is excluded. Assimilatory language is the language of unsuccessful identification. There is a well-known anecdote according to which the youthful Heine, when asked by the elderly Goethe what he was working on, replied “a Faust” and was thereupon ungraciously dismissed. Heine explained this incident in terms of his shyness. His impertinence sprang from the impulse of the person who wants for the life of him to be accepted and is thereby doubly irritating to those who are already established, who drown out their own guilt at excluding him by holding the vulnerability of his adaptation up to him. This continues to be the trauma of Heine’s name today, and it can be healed only if it is recognized rather than left to go on leading an obscure, preconscious existence.
The possibility of that, however, is contained, as a potential for rescue, within Heine’s poetry itself. For the power of the one who mocks impotently exceeds his impotence. If all expression is the trace left by suffering, then Heine was able to recast his own inadequacy, the muteness of his language, as an expression of rupture. So great was the virtuosity of this man, who imitated language as if he were playing it on a keyboard, that he raised even the inadequacy of his language to the medium of one to whom it was granted to say what he suffered. Failure, reversing itself, is transformed into success. Heine’s essence is fully revealed not in the music composed to his poems but only in the songs of Gustav Mahler, written forty years after his death, songs in which the brittleness of the banal and the derivative is used to express what is most real, in the form of a wild, unleashed lament. It was not until Mahler’s songs about the soldiers who flew the flag out of homesickness, not until the outbursts of the funeral march in his Fifth Symphony, until the folksongs with their harsh alternation of major and minor, until the convulsive gestures of the Mahlerian orchestra, that the music in Heine’s verses was released. In the mouth of a stranger, what is old and familiar takes on an extravagant and exaggerated quality, and precisely that is the truth. The figures of this truth are the aesthetic breaks; it forgoes the immediacy of rounded, fulfilled language.
The following stanzas appear in the cycle of poems that Heine, the emigrant, called Der Heimkehr [The Return Home]:
Mein Herz mein Herz ist traurig,
Doch lustig leuchtet der Mai;
Ich stehe, gelehnt an der Linde,
Hoch auf der alten Bastei.
Da drunten fliebt der blaue
Stadtgraben in stiller Ruh;
Ein Knabe fährt im Kahne,
Und angelt und pfeift dazu.
Jenseits erheben sich freundlich,
In winziger, bunter Gestalt,
Lusthäuser und Gärten und Menschen,
und Ochsen und Wiesen und Wald.
Die Mägde bleichen Wäsche,
Und springen im Gras herum:
das Mühlrad staubt Diamanten,
Ich höre sein fernes Gesumm.
Am alten grauen Turme
Ein Schilderhäuschen steht;
Ein rotgeröckter Bursche
Dort auf und nieder geht.
Er spielt mit seiner Flinte,
Die funkelt im Sonnenrot,
Er präsentiert und schultert—
Icht wollt, er schösse mich tot.
[My heart, my heart is heavy,
Though joyously shines the May,
As I stand ’neath the lime-tree leaning
High on the ramparts grey.
The moat winds far beneath me;
On its waters calm and blue
A boy in his boat is drifting,
Fishing and whistling too.
Beyond, like a smiling picture,
Little and bright, lie strewed
Villas and gardens and people
Cattle and meadows and wood.
The maidens are bleaching linen—
They skip on the grass and play;
The mill-wheel scatters diamonds,
Its drone sounds, far away.
A sentry-box is standing
The old grey keep below,
And a lad in a coat of scarlet
Paces there to and fro.
He handles and plays with his musket—
It gleams in the sunset red,
He shoulders and presents it—
I would that he shot me dead!
(translation by M. M. B., in Heine’s Prose and Poetry,
[New York: Dutton, 1934], pp. 27–28)
It has taken a hundred years for this intentionally false folksong to become a great poem, a vision of sacrifice. Heine’s stereotypical theme, unrequited love, is an image for homelessness, and the poetry devoted to it is an attempt to draw estrangement itself into the sphere of intimate experience. Now that the destiny which Heine sensed has been fulfilled literally, however, the homelessness has also become everyone’s homelessness; all human beings have been as badly injured in their beings and their language as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for their words: there is no longer any homeland other than a world in which no one would be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely emancipated humanity. The wound that is Heine will heal only in a society that has achieved reconciliation.