Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was
one of the greatest German writers of the nineteenth century. Heine is
considered the last poet of romanticism and, at the same time as the one who
overcame it. More specifically, Heine is famous for having not only managed
to raise everyday language to the rank of poetic language, but also for
having done something similar to cultural writings and travelogues, raising
them to the level of art form. Importantly, Heine is generally regarded as
having played a major part in conferring on German literature a kind of
elegant lightness unknown until then. Heine was a poet and critic, author of
the Book of Songs (1927), whose verses, both lyrical and satirical, have
proven to have a universal appeal. Heine was close to both Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, without sharing their political philosophy.
Heine was officially born on December 13, 1797 in Dusseldorf, in the Duchy
of Berg, under the name of Harry Heine. If Heine’s birthplace has never
raised the slightest doubt, the exact date of his birth, however is today
still uncertain. All documents that could provide information on this
subject have been lost over the last two centuries. Heine himself claimed,
jokingly, to being “the first man of the century” because there was some
evidence also that he might have been born on the first day of the new year
of 1800. From time to time, Heine also mentioned 1799 as the year of birth.
Heine specialists now consider the date of December 23rd, 1797 as the most
likely. Following the French Revolution, his childhood and youth were spent
in a time of great upheaval. Heine was still a teenager when he wrote his
first love poems. Heine fell in love with one of his cousins, Amalie, the
daughter of his uncle Salomon, who will be his patron for most of Heine’s
life.
Few other works of German poets have been so often translated and set to
music than that of Heine. As a critical journalist, politically engaged,
essayist, satirist and polemicist, Heine was equally admired as he was
feared. Heine’s Jewish background together with his political stance brought
him hostility and ostracism. This role as a kind of marginal figure marked
all, his life, his writings together with the turbulent history around the
reception of his work.
A face and a beard like that of Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine who is famous
for having said he had “neither God nor Master” remains one of the greatest
poets of the nineteenth century German Romantics era. Son of modest bankers,
Heine himself worked for a time in a bank in Frankfurt while dreaming only
of poetry and freedom. Rebelled against all authority, Heine went on to
study law. Heine’s first writings were nostalgic, compiled in 1821 in the
book Gedichte (“Poems”), and lured sailors by their fatal sound. As a poet
Heine marked German culture strongly by the combination of legends and
fantasy, which often were his leitmotiv. Guided by his heart, Heine
published Die Nordsee. Erste Abteilung (“North Sea I” in 1826. Heine
eventually completed his doctorate in law, but not for his social ambitions
as much as in order to no longer be financially dependent.
Of Jewish origin, Heine struggled to find a place in German officialdom
where anti-Semitism was common practice. Heine published his memories of
trips under the title Buch der Lieder in 1827 which continues to occupy an
important place in German literature. Wandering between Florence, Venice and
Berlin, Heine settled in Paris in 1831 where he worked as a newspaper
correspondent for the German newspaper Morgenblatt. It is there in the
capital of freedom that Heine was able to focus on his poetry and satire
while leading a dissolute life filled with women and wine. One of the ways
to put it is to say that Heinrich Heine was a German writer of Jewish origin
and of French passion. Heine embodied many of the contradictions of his era.
Heine was split by his own membership in two complementary worlds in their
antagonism: the Germanic and the Latin. According to his friend, the French
writer Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), “Never was nature composed of elements
more diverse than that of Heine: he was both gay and sad, skeptic and
believer, tender and cruel, mocking and sentimental, classic and romantic,
German and French, delicate and cynical, enthusiastic and full of composure.
Everything but boring, he really was Euphorion, child of Faust and of the
beautiful Helen.” Indeed, from the pen of this sagittarius sprang sarcastic
whistling arrows which never missed their aim. Heine was also the great poet
whose words Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms and many others put in
countless music Lieder (type of German song from the Romantic period).
Heine only had one real contemporary equal: the French poet and critic
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Both are champions of modern poetry. Both
admired and wrote about the painters of their time, and especially
Delacroix. Both were immersed in bitterness and need, and both equally hated
the bourgeoisie. Neither of them indulged in illusions about love. Both
cursed men in general but loved humanity with passion. Both died in exile.
Heine was banned in Germany, while Baudelaire had to flee France for
Belgium. Their poems were truly understood until well after their death, and
it is partly through them that trouble became manifest in both the
bourgeoisie and the nationalists. The poisonous beauty of their poetry never
ceases to haunt us. Heine eventually published Shakespearean-sounding books
such as Germany: A Winter’s Tale (in the original German: “Deutschland:
Ein Wintermärchen” and Atta Troll: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in the
original German: Atta Troll: Ein Sommernachtstraum).
In February 1848, when the revolution broke out in Paris, Heine had a
serious seizure. Almost totally paralyzed, Heine will spend his last eight
years in bed in what he himself called his “mattress-grave”. Since 1845,
Heine had a gnawing neurological disease, which worsened dramatically by
successive seizures. In 1846, Heine was even declared dead. Several stays in
health resorts in France in the mountainous region of the Pyrenees in 1846,
or in the countryside near Montmorency in 1847, for example, unfortunately
brought him no apparent relief. We must add to it all the inconveniences
caused by the succession of disputes that Heine had for years with his
cousin in Hamburg, Carl Heine.
February 17, 1856, Heinrich Heine took his last breath, perhaps riddled with
syphilis as well, although there is no consensus on the matter. Three days
later, he was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre in Paris, France. After
his death, inflammatory rhetoric against Heine continued to grow and
persisted for more than a century.
As part of the thousands of book that were burnt in Berlin in 1933 by the
Nazis were Heine’s works. As a commemoration, the famous lines from the 1821
play Almansor written by Heine were engraved at the site: “That was but a
prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.”