A tribute to Heinrich Heine – 150 years later a poetic reflection not from exile, but outside of Germany

By: Hatto Fischer, Athens

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There are several ways of honoring a poet but one being often overlooked is simply letting the impact of his written words be felt. No one stands in the way if you wish to read poetry, would be the obvious answer, but who will listen? Poetry is more than ever squeezed in-between fast moving images flickering across urban screens so that people no longer can make a distinction between advertisement, official messages and artistic expressions, and a way the literary business of publishers, book fairs and disputes mark the successful. As if branding literary works and culture has become a part of industrial like salesmanship while receptivity seems no longer of any importance.

When the “Literary Quartett” organized by critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki discussed Heinrich Heine with Hellmuth Karasek and Iris Radisch, it was not poetry, its content which received attention but the so-called biographical determination of what art works stand for: a great lover, a romantic fool, a poet in exile, etc. And if this categories do not suffice, then more qualitative statements are added to sense the taste for things then compared to today. For example, Hellmut Karasek thinks Heinrich Heine found Italy ‘boring’, but then the correction would mean boring are travel descriptions, but not the secret dialogue with travel descriptions of the kind Goethe wrote when on his way to Palermo.

Still, in the style of modern casualness, Iris Radisch had to include the assertion that Heinrich Heine had nothing to say to women. Then, so Marcel Reich-Ranicki, it would be good to keep in mind that poets must not speak all the time even though someone like Heinrich Heine could be as provocative as in his poems. Therefore, attention would turn with the interlude by Monika Maron to Heinrich Heine being a player with masks as if poetry was suddenly a test case for someone being without ideology and yet in the romantic mood a part of another kind of ideology. Such remarks make then possible a hint at his Jewishness even though Heinrich Heine, after studies in Berlin, including by Hegel, he converted to Protestantism in the hope of landing a job as civil servant, but which of course he never did.

So while the so called literary world steam rolls across pages of history without caring what is flattened in the process, it should be said that Heinrich Heine belongs to more than just poetic inscriptions of life around the time of Napolean. He was not so much at home in Germany, but he did have a solid position in the political movement which became thanks to his presence curious in what the poetic word had to say. Once Engels had visited Heinrich Heine when already sick in Paris, his poems became a mandatory for every follower of Marx and Engels in an attempt to link political concepts with what culture means amidst all political turmoil. To confront the world of poetry written outside the bounds of the state as Hegel had envisioned meant also to uplift poetry to a level equal with sense perception and therefore with what Michel Foucault would later describe as the sanity of man. Hegel had banned poetry from any philosophical consideration of truth, but Heinrich Heine did not confirm. This means in a way to understand his poetry as a way to show love where it is often amiss:

Always writing from exile is a forlorn business,

Or as you put it once heroes leave the world stage,

Then only clowns, spies and word thieves fill the spectacle

That seems to amuse till it gets first loud, then bloody

And afterwards, when too late, the stillness of the cemetery reigns

Not above the clouds but within the depth of German cities

Who never behold the importance of a poet not gone mad.

Grief it may be or even despair when words written in exile

Never make it across inner borders so thick and tall

That no one can see over them into the future.

Your poems have a ring of melancholy to them, yes, it is true

That you life before death can be compared to others

For Freud was killed by cancer near the mouth and

Nietzsche looked back upon life from a chair of deadly decline,

But you differ greatly because even when in that grove of a mattress,

Your appetite for love never ceased and people parted, not you.

In your satire there are those ironic thoughts about yourself

As if it deems for a poet to be close to mockery of the self

Caught in reflections of not pools of blood after the French revolution,

Nor in mirrors of the bourgeoisie once it was again safe to be in Paris,

But in those words of yours that laughed like your eyes

When a young girl would sing to you songs about Alice

You confounded in your nature the publisher standing beside your bed

If only to bend to your will so as to ensure all poetic messages reach home.