Gesammelte Werke

question could be raised why Heine, determined to cut down the distance between poetry and the prosaic, insisted on writing poetry at all. The answer seems to be that the maintenance of poetic form as such was the only means by which he felt able to keep faith to what might be vulgarly called the »ideal«. Yet the ultimate consequence, the virtual impossibility of poetry itself, entered his poetic horizon, and each verse of his is tinged by this impossibility. This is the objective, non-psychological explanation of the role irony plays in Heine's work. Irony is another element which he took over from earlier romanticism, while changing completely its function. »Romantic irony« meant the triumph of absolute, infinite subjectivity over the element of limitation and reification implied in any artistic form. With Heine, it loses this metaphysical dignity and becomes the medium through which the dawning realization of the impossibility of poetry itself is brought to the fore. While still writing poetry, he puts it under irony, thus indicating that it does no longer take itself quite seriously, that it has resigned to the spirit of a world which continuously humiliates the last traces of the dream. Through irony, the impossibility of poetry becomes its own subject matter. But if Heine ever proved to be a genius, it was in this respect. He did not content himself with the abstract negativism of revoking poetry by poetry itself but forged this revocation into a means of expression. When he ends, as he frequently does, a poem with a joke, a pun or a grimace, he does so not merely in order to suggest that he does not really believe in the poetic anymore but reveals the underlying antagonism of the poetic subject itself. Heine's irony is more than mere sabotage of his own poetry. Rather, this sabotage obtains the meaning of overcoming a problematic state of the mind by giving voice to it. For the poet is not simply set against a world in which all relations are distorted under the impact of a commodity culture: he himself is part and parcel of this world, and yet torn asunder by a romantic longing for transcending it. Heine is the first »modern« German poet in as much as he is the first one expressive of conflict not only with the outer world but also within himself, the first who does not merely bespeak such conflict but gives evidence of it through every nuance of his form.
    It is this modernity, and the element of irony in particular which set in motion the tremendous process of identification which is at the hub of Heine's popularity. But it is also this element that accounts for the more negative aspects of his work: the touch of the meretricious, his affinity to the market, his coquettishness and gossip, in brief, his traits of commercial journalism. It should be noted that these traits are to be found in his artistic substance as such rather than in his practical behavior: as a matter of fact, he was a poor businessman, continuously exploited by his Teutonic publisher Campe. But it was his good and bad luck that he, when simply expressing himself, did at the same time
not
express himself, but somehow catered for the tastes and desires of an audience which wants to get »its money's worth« out of poetry: entertainment. He fell victim to a pre-established harmony with alienated society. He may be compared, in this respect, to a hit composer who has not to calculate his effect upon the audience in order to be successful but who simply has, as the phrase goes, to be »sincere« in order to meet them on the line of the least resistance, of sham. It should not be forgotten that the needs and wants of collective identification within a middle class that had lost its hold in religion and philosophy were as alive at Heine's times as they are today when they are the basis of manipulative mass culture, but that media such as the films and radio were not available and that Heine, at least partly, fulfilled their function. We may well spot in Heine some of the standard motives of modern mass culture such as that of the self-conscious and weak male infatuated with the unapproachable glamour girl. He has set the pattern for a »respectable«, conventionalized manifestation of masochism and exhibitionism.
    While these features imply an externalization of poetry which begins to »sell out«, it should be stressed that they are not a mere defection from that process of subjectification of which Heine the lyrist is one of the