Hinrich Heine, in full Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, original name (until 1825) Harry Heine (born Dec. 13, 1797, Düsseldorf, Prussia [Germany]—died Feb. 17, 1856, Paris, France), German poet whose international literary reputation and influence were established by the Buch der Lieder (1827; The Book of Songs), frequently set to music, though the more sombre poems of his last years are also highly regarded.
Heine was born of Jewish parents. His father was a handsome and kindly but somewhat ineffectual merchant; his mother was fairly well educated for her time and sharply ambitious for her son. Much of Heine’s early life, however, was influenced by the financial power of his uncle Salomon Heine, a millionaire Hamburg banker who endeavoured to trade generosity for obedience and with whom Heine remained on an awkward and shifting footing for many years. After he had been educated in the Düsseldorf Lyceum, an unsuccessful attempt was undertaken to make a businessman of him, first in banking, then in retailing. Eventually, his uncle was prevailed upon to finance a university education, and Heine attended the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, Berlin, and Göttingen again, where he finally took a degree in law with absolutely minimal achievement in 1825. In that same year, in order to open up the possibility of a civil service career, closed to Jews at that time, he converted to Protestantism with little enthusiasm and some resentment. He never practiced law, however, nor held a position in government service; and his student years had been primarily devoted not to the studies for which his uncle had been paying but to poetry, literature, and history.
Heine’s pre-university years are rather obscure, but during this period he apparently conceived an infatuation for one, and possibly both, of his uncle’s daughters, neither of whom had the slightest notion of mortgaging her future to a dreamy and incompetent cousin. Out of the emotional desolation of this experience arose, over a period of years, the poems eventually collected in The Book of Songs. The sound of Romantic poetry was firmly lodged in Heine’s ear; but the Romantic faith, the hope for a poeticization of life and the world to overcome the revolution, alienation, and anxiety of the times, was not in his heart. Thus, he became the major representative of the post-Romantic crisis in Germany, a time overshadowed by the stunning achievements of Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics but increasingly aware of the inadequacy of this tradition to the new stresses and upheavals of a later age. The most consistent characteristic of Heine’s thought and writing throughout his career is a taut and ambiguous tension between “poesy,” as he called the artistic sensibility, and reality. His love poems, though they employ Romantic materials, are at the same time suspicious of them and of the feelings they purportedly represent. They are bittersweet and self-ironic, displaying at the same time poetic virtuosity and a skepticism about poetic truth; their music is now liquid, now discordant, and the collection as a whole moves in the direction of desentimentalization and a new integration of the poet’s self-regard in the awareness of his artistic genius.
The steady growth of Heine’s fame in the 1820s was accelerated by a series of experiments in prose. In the fall of 1824, in order to relax from his hated studies in Göttingen, he took a walking tour through the Harz Mountains and wrote a little book about it, fictionalizing his modest adventure and weaving into it elements both of his poetic imagination and of sharp-eyed social comment. “Die Harzreise” (“The Harz Journey”) became the first piece of what were to be four volumes of Reisebilder (1826–31; Pictures of Travel); the whimsical amalgam of its fact and fiction, autobiography, social criticism, and literary polemic was widely imitated by other writers in subsequent years. Some of the pieces were drawn from a journey to England Heine made in 1827 and a trip to Italy in 1828, but the finest of them, “Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand” (1827; “Ideas. The Book Le Grand”), is a journey into the self, a wittily woven fabric of childhood memory, enthusiasm for Napoleon, ironic sorrow at unhappy love, and political allusion.
When the July Revolution of 1830 occurred in France, Heine did not, like many of his liberal and radical contemporaries, race to Paris at once but continued his more or less serious efforts to find some sort of paying position in Germany. In the spring of 1831 he finally went to Paris, where he was to live for the rest of his life. He had originally been attracted by the new Saint-Simonian religion (a socialistic ideology according to which the state should own all property and the worker should be entitled to share according to the quality and amount of his work); it inspired in him hopes for a modern doctrine that would overcome the repressive ideologies of the past and put what he variously called spiritualism and sensualism, or Nazarenism (adherence to Judeo-Christian ideals) and Hellenism (adherence to ancient Greek ideals), into a new balance for a happier human society. His critical concern with political and social matters deepened as he watched the development of limited democracy and a capitalist order in the France of the citizen-king, Louis-Philippe. He wrote a series of penetrating newspaper articles about the new order in France, which he collected in book form as Französische Zustände (1832; “French Affairs”) and followed with two studies of German culture, Die Romantische Schule (1833–35; The Romantic School) and “Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland” (1834–35; “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany”), in which he mounted a criticism of Germany’s present and recent past and argued the long-range revolutionary potential of the German heritage of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modern critical philosophy. The books were conceived with a French audience in mind and were originally published in French. In 1840–43 he wrote another series of newspaper articles about French life, culture, and politics, which he reedited and published as Lutezia, the ancient Roman name for Paris, in 1854.
During these years, then, Heine’s attention turned from “poesy” to writing of contemporary relevance. His second volume of poems, Neue Gedichte (1844; New Poems), illustrates the change. The first group, “Neuer Frühling” (“New Spring,” written mostly in 1830/31), is a more mannered reprise of the love poems of Buch der Lieder, and the volume also contains some ballad poetry, a genre in which Heine worked all his life. But the second group, “Verschiedene” (“Varia”), is made up of short cycles of sour poems about inconstant relationships with the blithe girls of Paris; the disillusioning tone of the poems was widely misunderstood and held against him. Another section is called “Zeitgedichte” (“Contemporary Poems”), a group of harsh verses of political satire. Several of these were written for Karl Marx’s newspaper Vorwärts (“Forward”). Heine had become acquainted with the young Marx at the end of 1843, and it was at this time that he produced, after a visit to his family in Germany, a long verse satire, Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen (1844; Germany, a Winter’s Tale), a stinging attack on reactionary conditions in Germany. Though Heine remained on good, if not intimate, terms with Marx in later years, he never was much taken with Communism, which did not fit his ideal of a revolution of joy and sensuality. About the time that he met Marx, he also wrote another long poem, Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum (1843–45; Atta Troll, a Midsummer Night’s Dream), a comic spoof of radical pomposity and the clumsiness of contemporary political verse.
Heine’s early years in Paris were his happiest. From an outcast in the society of his own rich uncle, he was transformed into a leading literary personality, and he became acquainted with many of the prominent people of his time. In 1834 he found in an uneducated shopgirl, Crescence Eugénie Mirat, whom for some reason he called “Mathilde,” a loyal if obstreperous mistress. He married her in 1841. But troubles were soon hard upon him. His critical and satirical writings brought him into grave difficulties with the German censorship, and, at the end of 1835, the Federal German Diet tried to enforce a nationwide ban on all his works. He was surrounded by police spies, and his voluntary exile became an imposed one. In 1840 Heine wrote a witty but ill-advised book on the late Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), the leader of the German radicals in Paris, in which Heine attempted to defend his own more subtle stand against what he thought of as the shallowness of political activism; but the arrogance and ruthlessness of the book alienated all camps.
Though never destitute, Heine was always out of money; and when his uncle died in 1844, all but disinheriting him, he began, under the eyes of all Europe, a violent struggle for the inheritance, which was settled with the grant of a right of censorship over his writings to his uncle’s family; in this way, apparently, the bulk of Heine’s memoirs was lost to posterity. The information, revealed after the French Revolution of 1848, that he had been receiving a secret pension from the French government, further embarrassed him.
The worst of his sufferings, however, were caused by his deteriorating health. An apparently venereal disease began to attack one part of his nervous system after another, and from the spring of 1848 he was confined to his “mattress-grave,” paralyzed, tortured with spinal cramps, and partially blind. Heine returned again to “poesy.” With sardonic evasiveness he abjured his faith in the divinity of man and acknowledged a personal God in order to squabble with him about the unjust governance of the world. His third volume of poems, Romanzero (1851), is full of heartrending laments and bleak glosses on the human condition; many of these poems are now regarded as among his finest. A final collection, Gedichte 1853 und 1854 (Poems 1853 and 1854), is of the same order. After nearly eight years of torment, Heine died and was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.
Heine’s power to annoy was as great as his power to charm and move, and rarely has a great poet been so controversial in his own country. His aggressive satires, radical postures, and insouciance about his methods made him appear to many as an unpatriotic and subversive scoundrel, and the growth of anti-Semitism contributed to the case against him. Efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to erect monuments to him in various German cities touched off riots and shook governments. In view of the popularity of many of his songs, the Nazis were obliged to include them in anthologies but marked them “author unknown.” For many decades his literary reputation was stronger abroad, especially in France, England, and America, where his wit and ambivalence were better appreciated, than at home. In the second half of the 20th century, the evaluation of Heine’s political role and its relationship to Marxism supplied a bone of contention between East German and West German critics before reunification. Deplorable as much of the history of Heine’s reputation has been, it is testimony to the enduring impact of a genuinely European poet and writer.
