Gesammelte Werke

area of German commercialism and
Tüchtigkeit
to the coldness of which his unbriddled sentimentality afforded a complement if the imitator only was too insensitive to hear the ironical overtones. This need for Heine seems to have been so indestructible that not even the Nazis dared to omit the
Lorelei
from their text-books, contenting themselves with the note »author unknown«.
    It was this cheap popularity and its roots in certain aspects of Heine's work itself which led, since 1900, to a rebellion among those intellectuals who were becoming conscious of the crisis in German culture and saw in Heine a representative of that very
juste milieu
the momentum of which moved rapidly towards barbarism. This rebellion did not stop at any political creed. It reached from Karl Kraus, the radical Viennese critic of cultural liberalism, to the conservative George circle. Yet the very hatred of the George school, whose followers opposed the affable melody of Heine with their artful and detached verses reflects what is avoided, just as modern painting reflects the photographic realism which it excludes.
    It is hard to escape the impression that the violent change between attraction and repulsion with regard to Heine and the affect-laden atmosphere in which this change took place, are not merely due to historical trends, such as the increasing allergy to romantic sentimentalism, but to a deep ambivalence toward the intrinsic nature of Heine's poetry itself. Some kind of uneasiness seems to prevail wherever Heine's spirit manifests itself, comparable to the
malaise
that sometimes arises in the presence of people who are resented as aggressive, overly self-conscious and tactless – just because these very qualities strike a chord in the souls of those who react against them. In other words, something disquieting and unsolved remains in the phenomenon Heine, and his supposed obsolescence as a poet is at least partly a means to repress this discomfort rather than to cope with it consciously.
    Those qualities of Heine's which account superficially for this uneasiness are generally explained by his Jewishness. But this procedure seems to be dubious. For reference to these qualities suggests all too strongly a number of anti-Semitic stereotypes, which as modern social psychology has established beyond doubt, are due to projective mechanisms on the part of the indignant. Granted that Heine actually possesses some of those qualities, it would be more pertinent to understand what they mean than merely to point them out. This can be done only by an attempt to derive the characteristics of Heine's poetry from those historical dynamics in which he was involved, not by being satisfied with the private and accidental quality of his descent. The role of the latter was probably confined to enabling him to give voice to universal experiences of his epoch, without the restrictions brought to bear upon those more completely identified with German tradition than he was. Moreover, while there is no doubt about the existence of Jewish traits not only in Heine's psychological make-up but also in his poetic imagery, his medium, the German language makes it almost impossible to disentangle them from non-Jewish elements. If one is not satisfied with simply referring to Jewish subject matters like those of the
Hebräische Melodien,
one would have to enter into an interminable process of linguistic analysis in which very frequently what appears to be Jewish may actually be due to that self-alienation of poetic language as such which took place in the era of early industrialism. It would be fallacious to attribute to Heine the Jew what actually characterizes his work as one of the early manifestations of the invasion of poetry by journalistic mass communication.
    Hence, a different procedure is suggested. First, some of the major reasons for Heine's tremendous popularity and effectiveness should be pointed out in terms of the relation of the lyrical poet to the particular historical situation from which Heine arose. Secondly, those aspects of Heine which – inseparable from those of his success – made for the violent counter-reaction, should be discussed. Finally, the problem of a re-evaluation of Heine in our own situation should be brought up, quite independent from a mere »appreciation« of his historical merits or their opposite.
    Heine was the first German poet who faced squarely the problem: how is lyrical poetry possible at all in the sober, cold,