Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine, b. Dec. 13, 1797, d. Feb. 17, 1856, was one of the greatest and most controversial German writers of the 19th century. That he was born a Jew exacerbated the many conflicts that he precipitated both by his conduct and his polemical prose and verse.

In the eyes of the youthful Heine, the French occupation of the Rhineland under Napoleon meant liberation and equality. Hero worship of the emperor merged later into admiration of French culture and the constitutional monarchy (1830-48) of Louis Philippe. Heine's father failed in business, and Heine was supported by his millionaire uncle, Solomon, in Hamburg, with whose daughters, Amalie and Therese, he claims to have fallen in love. Whether Heine's passion was real or feigned is still disputed, but many of the poems in his Book of Songs (1827; Eng. trans., 1846) seem to be addressed to one or the other of his cousins. While some of these lyrics are genuinely moving, in others there lurks, behind the romantic facade, the ironic cynic Heine later became. Composers thought the lyrics genuine, however. Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Brahms, Wagner, and Hugo Wolf all wrote music for them.

Heine studied law in Bonn, where he preferred the literature lectures of August Wilhelm von Schlegel; in Berlin, where he frequented the salon of Rahel Varnhagen von Ense; and in Gottingen, where, after being expelled for dueling (1825), he received his doctorate and Lutheran baptism. The baptism was professionally necessary, but Heine never did practice law, for his fame as a writer had soared with the publication of the four volumes of Reisebilder (Travel Pictures, 1826-31).

Disappointed in not receiving an expected professorship at Munich, but elated over the July Revolution in France, Heine made Paris his home after 1831. Through his uncle he had entree to Baron Rothschild and the financial elite; as poet he was courted by salons; and because of his reputation as a radical he was welcomed by German political exiles. He formed a liaison with the illiterate Crescentia Mirat ("Mathilde"), whom he married just before having a duel with Solomon Strauss, who had taken umbrage at allegations concerning his wife in Heine's book Uber Ludwig Borne (Concerning Ludwig Borne, 1840).

Heine's Harzreise (Harz Journey, 1826) had ridiculed Gottingen professors, "with their sausage quotations"; Hanoverian aristocrats, "asses who talk about nothing but horses"; and the establishment in general. His "Bader von Lucca" (Baths of Lucca), which had appeared in the third volume of Reisebilder, attacked the poet Count von Platen for his homosexuality. Platen had incited the riposte by his slur on Heine's Jewishness, but the public was shocked nonetheless, and Heine was included in Metternich's ban (1835) on the "Young German" writers. Hamburg disregarded the federal censorship, however, and Heine's publisher there, Campe, was ingenious in smuggling editions across the Prussian and other borders.

By 1840, Heine's deteriorating health led to a sojourn in the Pyrenees, where he composed the mock-epic Atta Troll (1843), which combines moonshine madness, humor, and romance with satire on political poetry. Two visits to Hamburg inspired his second epic, Deutschland: Ein Wintermarchen (Germany: A Winter Tale, 1844), criticizing conditions in Germany.

Caught in the February Revolution (1848), Heine sought refuge in the Louvre, where he collapsed at the feet of the Venus de Milo. He spent his last eight years in a "mattress grave," apparently paralyzed from syphilis. From this "grave," however, arose his greatest poetry--somberly pessimistic but vividly ironic, witty, and prophetic--published in Romanzero (Romances, 1851) and Gedichte 1853 und 1854 (Poems 1853 and 1854).

To secure an annuity from Solomon's heirs, Heine had to destroy most of his memoirs, but what remained was published in 1884. His last year was brightened by the devotion of Elise Krinitz ("La Mouche"), who inspired poignant love lyrics. Some of them were dictated to her when he could no longer hold a pencil. With Heine's last breath came the word schreiben, "write."