[ The liveliness and invention of Heinrich Heine’s writing
changed 19th century German literature for the better. Poet, writer,
literary critic, satirist and ironist, but banned in his homeland and
expatriated to Paris, he was well appreciated by Marx]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HEINE’S HEARTMOBILE  
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Michael Hofmann
July 22, 2021
New York Review of Books
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_ The liveliness and invention of Heinrich Heine’s writing changed
19th century German literature for the better. Poet, writer, literary
critic, satirist and ironist, but banned in his homeland and
expatriated to Paris, he was well appreciated by Marx _

Heinrich Heine; portrait by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1831, Wikimedia
Commons

 

If I had to nominate an ideal poet, a Platonic poet, a conservator and
repository of poet DNA, a poet to take after and on and from, a
forsake-all-others-save-only-X poet, it wouldn’t be Byron, though it
would be close. It wouldn’t be MacNeice, though ditto. It wouldn’t
be Mandelstam or Akhmatova or Cavafy or Apollinaire or Ovid or Brecht
or Li Bai or Bishop or Baudelaire or Les Murray or T.E. Hulme. It
would be Heine. Harry or Heinrich or Henri Heine, to taste. Oscar
Wilde’s older Parisian cemetery-mate Heine (1797 (?)–1856). Of
those named he has perhaps the least presence in English, though
it’s a strange thing to say of someone who has furnished three
thousand composers with the lyrics for ten thousand lieder, who in his
younger years was a bit of a scapegrace, and who for a time after his
death was one of the unlikeliest and most hideously travestied of
Victorian bards (more even than Shelley—isn’t it all birds and
flowers?!), pirated translations of whom were made in the US, of all
places.

Here’s why. A life brief, but not exquisitely so; rich in drama, but
not stupidly so. Exile, first accidentally—he happened to be in
Paris at the end of the Europe-wide round of disturbances in
1830—then permanently: he didn’t want to leave. As happy there as
a fish in water. So happy, he said, that he wanted a happy fish to
say, “As happy as Heine in Paris.” Heine makes one think that
maybe Gertrude Stein—fellow Parisian, fellow fish—was wrong with
her remark about remarks not being literature. Maybe that’s exactly
what remarks are or literature is—certainly Heine’s, who described
the Bible as _ein portatives Vaterland_ (a portable Fatherland) to
the Jews, and whose most famous utterance is to do with the burning of
books being a prelude to the burning of people. Something as important
as a book—or the Book—can live again as a phrase or in a phrase.
He is an irresistibly quotable writer, the godfather of the soundbite.
And also—because that would just be tedious—he’s the opposite: a
relaxed and expansive improviser, who even in his rhymed lyrics sounds
as natural as though he’s talking to you.

Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution
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By George Prochnik

Yale University Press; 312 pages

November 24, 2020

Hardback:  $26.00

ISBN: 9780300236545

Yale University Press
Then trouble. Ten duels trouble. Trouble given and trouble taken.
Nothing in his life that gave him ease and pleasure wasn’t also a
source of anguish: family, friendship, career, fame, body. His
millionaire uncle, the banker and philanthropist Salomon Heine, ended
his stipend; his publisher, Julius Campe, wouldn’t answer his
letters for three years; throughout most of the three dozen statelets
of pre-unified Germany most of his books were banned for most of his
life. And then the long matter of his dying. Syphilis, possibly, or
spinal meningitis, at any rate a mysterious, protracted, and agonizing
condition kept him confined to bed for seven years (Heine referred to
his _Matratzengruft_,_ _or “mattress-grave”). Among his symptoms
were blindness, paralysis, a weight of just seventy pounds,
excruciating spinal pain—made endurable only by opium taken three
ways, including poured into wounds kept open for the purpose. Opium
and the late poems, “Mad revels of a spectral play—/Often the
poet’s lifeless hand/Will try to write them down next day,” once
frowned on because they were so close to the unmentionable—the body,
morbidity—now revered for the same reason.

Knew, it sometimes seems, the whole of the nineteenth century: was
taught at university by Schlegel and Hegel; in Paris befriended on the
one hand the banker James Rothschild and on the other the yet
unbearded Karl Marx; the composers Berlioz and Liszt and Rossini and
Meyerbeer; and a whole galère_ _of French writers, of whom he
thought little or nothing, among them Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Sand,
Nerval, and Musset. For an exile, he was perhaps without rival in the
degree of his integration into the local establishment. Faced, as so
often, two ways. The great German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki
once observed, “His true element was ambivalence, albeit not of a
sort that resembled conciliatoriness or dither. It was a militant and
aggressive ambivalence. He was a genius of love-hate.” A remittance
man and one of the first professional freelance writers. Qualified
lawyer and once aspiring academic and utterly unemployable. City
dweller and enthusiastic sea-swimmer. Devoted son and brother and
black sheep of the family. And so on. “And in the wars of gods,”
he proclaimed, “I now take the side of the defeated gods,” which
might be Jehovah, Jupiter, or Napoleon Bonaparte. Or none of the
above.

Jewish German Protestant Royalist Revolutionary Frenchman,
buried—without benefit of clergy—in the Catholic part of the
cemetery, so that his much younger and devoutly Catholic wife could
join him in her own time. (She did, in 1883.) In a lovely late poem
called “Gedächtnisfeier,” or “Memorial Service,” he imagines
her dolefully visiting his grave (sighing, “Pauvre homme!”), and,
knowing her, and considering her pleasure, urges her to take a cab
back and the weight off her feet: “Süsses, dickes Kind, du
darfst/Nicht zu Fuss nach Hause gehen;/An dem Barrieregitter/Siehst du
die Fiaker stehen.” (Sweet fat child, you mustn’t walk
home;/You’ll see the cabs standing at the gate.)

Explained Germany to the French, and France to the Germans.
Productive. In poetry _and_ prose. Often published together between
one set of covers, it being the case that books over 320 pages were
not automatically packed off to the censor (touching: the German faith
in the purifying quality of drudgery). Heine espoused a kind of
swerving prose that unpredictably changed subjects; a master both of
contraction and expansion, spinning entire scenes of fictitious
dialogue. He was arraigned by the inveterate scold Karl Kraus for
having made possible the feuilleton and “so loosened the corset on
the German language that today every salesclerk can finger her
breasts”; he pioneered travel writing that had little to do with
travel; collected work under the title “Salon” (derived from the
Salon d’Automne, the annual exhibition of painting in Paris), which
could be anything at all; made a polemic on the deceased revolutionary
Ludwig Börne, one of whose five sections was about the North Sea. He
collected poems under the title “Ollea”—the Spanish _olla
podrida_, a casserole or, literally, rotten pot. An all-sorts.

Poems, then, both amorous and polemical, or polyamorous and amical.
The teasing sequence “Sundry Women” names their—made-up—names:
“Seraphine,” “Hortense,” “Yolante and Marie,”
“Clarisse.” Balladry and intimacy. Politically committed and
sagaciously detached. (I don’t know what he would have thought of
“writing the revolution,” the subtitle of George Prochnik’s new
biography, as a sole ascription; presumably, he would have reversed
it, “revolting writer”; thereafter scoffed.) At different times, a
democrat and a royalist. As Reich-Ranicki said: ambivalent. It was
important not to be bound, ergo he levitated, an ability beyond all
but a very few German writers, who were accordingly reviled or at
least distrusted—Brecht, I think, Enzensberger, and certainly Joseph
Roth, who strikes me now as nothing more or less than
Heine _redivivus_, a recurrence a hundred years later: Jew,
cosmopolitan, charismatic exile, politically engaged, a great hater,
Paris, money worries, a long malady, imperturbable, crystalline
stylist, until one thinks: Is there anything in Roth
that _wasn’t _Heine?

Heine: a liveliness and invention in the writing that can make one
suddenly bark with laughter at a rhyme or formulation, now, the better
part of two centuries later. An anagram he made of his name and
birthplace, “Harry Heine. Duesseldorff,” and by which he signed
some juvenile poems, is beyond price: “Sy. Freudhold Riesenharf.”
Translated into Pynchonese, it might be something like Simeon Joyluck
Harpoon, emanating both anti-Jewish and anti-German ridicule and a
tremendous if unspecified erotic threat. _Scintillations—_not a
word of a lie—_from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine_: the title of
a volume first published in 1873. “He possessed that divine malice
without which I cannot imagine perfection,” Nietzsche wrote
in _Ecce Homo_, while Pound’s idol Théophile Gautier called him
“a mixture of Apollo and Mephisto.”

A figure with so much specific gravity that people wrote Heine
knock-off poems to try to insinuate themselves into his oeuvre; that
his family tried to buy his silence; that long after his death, some
of his papers were offered for sale to the son of the Austrian
arch-conservative Prince Metternich (the driving force behind the
Vienna Congress of 1815, the post-Napoleonic settlement of the
continent, and hence the man who more than any other forced Heine into
exile and kept him there); sale, presumably, for catch-and-kill
purposes; that the mostly whimsical, then mostly grave outlines of his
life were able to accommodate such apocrypha as that he was born into
the nascent nineteenth century, not the waning eighteenth; that his
dying words were “Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier” (sadly,
it was neither Heine nor Voltaire who said that, though both, in the
hereafter, are presumably still pretty cut up about it—there is
esprit d’escalier and envy even in heaven); that Flaubert was moved,
twenty years after the fact, to write, “And I think with bitterness
that Heine’s funeral was attended by nine persons! O reading public!
O bourgeoisie! Miserable knaves!” when in fact the attendance seems
to have been a perfectly respectable hundred or so.

You never go very far in Heine without something concrete, some
quiddity. Often it’s done to ironic purpose, a reminder, a bringing
down to earth. “The world is stupid and insipid and unpleasant and
smells of dried violets” is a characteristic and brilliant instance.
It brings genius to jiltedness. During a deadly cholera epidemic in
Paris, having discussed what fantastical steps others were taking to
stay safe, Heine wrote, “I believe in flannel.” The opening
sentence of his first major prose publication, _The Harz Journey_,
his 1824 travelogue on walking in the Harz Mountains, begins and ends
with _stuff_:

The town of Göttingen, famous for its sausages and university,
belongs to the King of Hanover, and contains 999 hearths, sundry
churches, a lying-in hospital, an observatory, a lock-up, a library,
and a beer-cellar, where the beer is very good.

(The translation is Ritchie Robertson’s, and comes from the Penguin
volume _The Harz Journey and Selected Prose._) This thinginess, this
materiality, is part of what makes Heine so modern, such that the
critic E.M. Butler called him “the first lyrical realist,” and
Thomas Mann’s Francophile older brother Heinrich “the anticipation
of modern man.” We tend to think it’s only in the twentieth
century that we get Brecht with his poster declaring “truth is
concrete,” and Pound talking about images, and Eliot playing games
in the mud with garlic and sapphires. In fact, it’s all there in
Heine.

When his father apprenticed him as an ornery teenager to a grocery
shop and then a bank in Frankfurt, his account of the experience goes:
“This was when I learned how to write out a banker’s draft and
identify a nutmeg.” There is something—as Heine very well
knows—inherently comic in the droll conflation of his duties. His
use of balance and pairings is, as often, destabilizing. We see the
bankers counting out their nutmegs, the grocers drawing strings of
zeroes on brown paper. Later, when his father died—Heine referred to
him as “the person whom I loved more than anyone else on this
earth”—he wrote to a friend:

Yes, yes, they talk about seeing him again in transfigured form. What
use is that to me? I know him in his old brown frock-coat, and
that’s how I want to see him again. That’s how he sat at the
table, salt-cellar and pepper-pot in front of him, one on the right
and the other on the left, and if the pepper-pot happened to be on the
right and the salt-cellar on the left, he turned them round again. I
know him in his brown frock-coat, and that’s how I want to see him
again.

We think perhaps Williams or Lowell (with his “old white china
doorknobs, sad,/slight, useless things to calm the mad”) brought
this level of humble detail into poetry, and Cheever or Salinger (via
Balzac and Flaubert) into prose, but it’s all in Heine. When he
wouldn’t call his wife Crescence Mirat by her given name, it
wasn’t for any reason of Shavian reinvention (_Pygmalion_) or
sinister masculinist domination; it was because the guttural _r_’s
roughed up his throat to say them. He called her Mathilde instead. A
materialist.

It’s no different in poetry. It makes no odds whether it’s the
romantic frippery of the _Buch der Lieder_ or the more substantive
dissatisfactions of the later poems:

_Dearest friend, you are in love,_

Though you never have confessed.

Why, I see your heart on fire

Burning a hole right through your vest!

This pokes fun at the tired literary trope—call it the
“Corazon”—much as John Berryman would a hundred and something
years later: “trapped in my rib-cage something throes and aches.”
The poem “Zur Beruhigung” (“Consolation”) tips its quartets
with bathos as it relays Heine’s reliable disappointment with German
politics. Here are two of its stanzas, again in Hal Draper’s heroic
if diminished 1982 _Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine_ (eccentrically
published in Boston by the German firm of Suhrkamp, and probably more
easily come upon these days in Germany, but which I still had the
devil of a job finding):

_No Romans are we; we drink our beer._

Each people to its own taste, it’s clear.

Each people is great in its own way;

Swabian dumplings are best, they say.

And:

_We always call them our Fathers, and_

We call their country our Fatherland,

This ancestral estate where princes sprout.

We also love sausage and sauerkraut.

It’s not that Heine frowns on such plebeian tastes; it’s that he
mocks his own foolishness as a political philosopher for expecting
more sensational initiatives, something more along the lines of a
regicide, from such a docile, phlegmatic population.

The last line of one of the “mattress-grave” poems, “Mein Tag
War Heiter” (My Day Was Happy), goes, in Robert Lowell’s cartoon
translation in “Heine Dying in Paris” from _Imitations_—but
still responding to something in the original, almost as though the
words had dreamed themselves into English: midsummer—_in
diesem_;_ _frail—_traulich_; green-juice—_süßen_; bird’s
nest—_Erdenneste_.

_midsummer’s frail and green-juice bird’s-nest_

_in diesem traulich süßen Erdenneste_

A literal translation might read, “in this sweetly familiar
earth-nest.” The reason Lowell’s phrasing is so odd is that he so
reflexively goes off into vocabulary. He habitually has an orchestra
to play with. Lowell uses words almost as a fingerprint, an identity
giver; “green-juice” is strictly one-off.

Heine’s vocabulary—though divided, ambivalent, like everything
about him—seems small by comparison. The same words keep recurring.
There is a striking paucity of
adjectives: _fein_, _rein_, _heiter_, _hold_, _schön_, _lieb_, _fröhlich_, _glücklich_, _grob_, _klug_, _arm._ These
words are then reused, especially in the post- or meta-folk style of
the _Buch der Lieder_, where they are deliberately chimed like the
notes of a glockenspiel: “Ihr goldenes Geschmeide blitzet,/Sie
kämmt ihr goldenes Haar_”_ (her golden necklace glitters/she combs
her golden hair) or “der Menschenhäuser und der Menschenherzen”
(of human homes and human hearts) or “Weiß das Gewand und weiß das
Angesicht” (the robe was white and white the face) or “Und saßest
fremd unter fremden Leuten” (and were seated a stranger among
strangers). It’s almost a kind of comfort language, the words you
find embroidered in a sewing primer. Home Sweet Home. Diminutives are
a kind of addiction, almost an obsession, in this often tender speech,
especially in his early work
- _Liebchen_, _Liedchen_, _Kindchen_, _Schätzchen_, _Blümlein_,_ Äuglein_,_ Bächlein_, _Töchterlein_,_ Büchlein_,_ Schifflein—_but
in the late as well (“Der Scheidende,” “The Parting One”):

_Der Vorhang fällt, das Stück ist aus,_

Und gähnend wandelt jetzt nach Haus

Mein liebes deutsches Publikum,

die guten Leutchen sind nicht dumm.

Peter Branscombe’s accurate subscript crib—yet another way
in—from the 1967 Penguin _Heine _has: “The curtain falls, the
play is over, and my dear German public is now going home yawning, the
good folks aren’t stupid.” (This is given, quite grotesquely, by
Lowell as “my dear German public is goosestepping home,” where
it’s not so much the naughty neon solecism of “goosestepping” as
the violation of Heine’s indescribably complex and stable tone; as
with the beer and sausages earlier, there’s almost a note of envy of
such people. “Tragic sense of difference” might perhaps cover it,
a pairing of respect and disrespect, irony and affection—but
certainly no disjunction or separation, and nothing so straightforward
as a sneer.)

Of course, it wouldn’t be Heine if there weren’t also the
opposite—a smattering of strikingly learned, original, improvised
terms, portmanteau words, classical imports,
neologisms: _Prachthotel _(splendidhotel); _Kunstgenuss _(artenjoyment); _Frühlingsschnurrbart _(springmustache); _sonnenvergnügt _(sunenjoyed); _herzbeweglich _(heartmobile);_ Erschiessliches _(shootable); _Weltposaune _(worldtrombone); _Erdpechpflaster _(earthpitchplaster); _Erdenkuddelmuddel _(earthhiggledypiggledyness).
There is a materiality, a sophistication—as well as a good
humor—to these words that makes me think that, had Pound known Heine
better (he uses his distich, “Aus meinen großen Schmerzen/Mach ich
die kleinen Lieder,” “From my great sorrows/I make my little
songs,” as an epigraph for his poem “The Bellaires”), he might
have found a more plausible peg for his elusive quality of logopoiea
than any he did find. _Grosse_ makes _kleine_; _Lieder_, the
substantive at the end of the second line, supplants
the _Schmerzen_ at the end of the first; they are a pair, but so
are _meine_ and _kleine_. But perhaps most of all, _meinen_ gives
way to _mach ich_, “my” to “I make.” (It’s the secret of
how art works.)

Logopoiea, as I understand it, is manipulating the pressure of
earnestness or irony in a sentence or phrase. The attempt to get a
word to be more than itself, to get above itself or beyond itself, to
put spin on it, or wah, or stretch, or reverb, the word that, as Heine
says, “ist eitel Dunst und Hauch,” nothing but mist and breath.
True. Sometimes. But sometimes it’s more. As in “Die kranke
Seele,/Die gottverleugnende, engelverleugnende,/Unselige Seele,” the
god-denying, angel-denying, sick, unhappy spirit: the _unselige
Seele_. Or here:

_Laura heißt sie! Wie Petrarcha_

Kann ich jetzt platonisch schwelgen

In dem Wohllaut dieses Namens—

Weiter hat ers nie gebracht.

“Like Petrarch,” goes Branscombe’s prose literal, “I can now
bask platonically in the euphony of this name—he never got any
further.” _Wohllaut_ plays—not so platonically—with _Laura_,
while the crashing _gebracht_ (minus one syllable) by suggestion
smashes the little “a” at the end of the still more
euphonious _Petrarcha._ In his paean (not really!) to King Ludwig of
Bavaria, Heine writes, “Das Volk der Bavaren verehrt in ihm/Den
angestammelten König.” Not _angestammt_, hereditary, ancestral,
but _angestammelt_, someone who comes stuttering up. No wonder the
Bavarians had a warrant out for his arrest!

Heine is a rare genius. He changes the nature of German literature and
he changes the nature of the nineteenth century. There’s a joyful
sophistication in him that none of the English versions is anywhere
close to appreciating, much less capturing. Branscombe gives you the
sense, and Draper knocks out the rhymes (as I think one must), but
it’s a lesser product. Ernst Pawel’s fervent and inward
biography, _The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine’s Last Years in
Paris _(1995), somehow passed me by at the time; it is quite
exceptional, and I would recommend it without reservation. Pawel takes
time to dish such translations as have been attempted (the French ones
being better than the English). I wish someone new would have a go,
instead of giving us another Rilke or Trakl or even Celan. Then
there’s a wonderful and exhaustive life of the man in German—also
available in French—by Jan-Christoph Hauschild and Michael Werner,
called _Der Zweck des Lebens Ist das Leben Selbst _(The Purpose of
Life Is Life Itself); it has more pecuniary detail than I have ever
seen in any poet’s biography, but with Heine, it serves a certain
sense. (He was worried sick for his future widow, who was indeed able
to comfortably add to her collection of parrots. He wrote letters to
rich men, begging them to send him railway shares.)

George Prochnik’s new study feels short and has a breezy way with it
(there’s a very good Goethe joke in it), but it is also full of
heavy matter. Its special focus is on the background. It’s clear
that to know enough, one has to know a great deal too much. Prochnik
gets so bogged down in admittedly complicated circumstances that with
fifty pages to go, it’s still only 1831, and Heine isn’t even in
Paris. The ending is unsurprisingly desultory. Its themed chapters
have the effect of pulling Heine apart, making his life seem like a
series of unconnected battlefields, which, God knows, is probably how
it felt. On the model of the Harry Potter titles, it would be _Heine
and the Chosen Antagonist_. There’s Heine and his mother, Heine and
the Varnhagens, Heine and Judaism, Heine and Saint-Simon, Heine and
Marx, Heine and the Feud with Platen, Heine and the Feud with Börne,
and so on and so forth. It’s like being given a handful of spindles
and cogs and springs fresh out of an oil bath in place of one’s
constantly surprising, faithful, reliably ticking wristwatch.

_Book author GEORGE PROCHNIK is the author of Stranger in a Strange
Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem. His previous book,
The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, received
the 2014 National Jewish Book Award for Biography/Memoir._

_Bottom of Form_

_Top of Form_

_Bottom of Form_

_ _

_[Essayist MICHAEL HOFMANN is a poet and translator from the German.
His latest translation is of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael
Kohlhaas, and his latest book of poems, One Lark, One Horse, was
published last year. He teaches at the University of Florida.]_

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