Gesammelte Werke

foremost exponents, but are profoundly involved with the progress of subjectification itself. The more art becomes subjectified, that is to say, the more it goes »into itself«, the more subjectivity
reflects
upon itself, and the more it consequently becomes »available« to itself. Concomitantly, poetic technique increases together with this ever-increasing subjective disposal over the subject's own inwardness. Thus, however, the poet learns more and more to manipulate his own human substance. The development of subjectivism is inseparable from a progress of self-reification: the subject becomes the easily accessible, facile content of its own poetry. This reification and availability of inwardness, however, allows the poet to put it on exhibit, as it were, to sell it. Thus, in a certain sense, progress of autonomous art furthers its own deterioration into commercialism. Viewed socially, exhibitionism is the ultimate realization of the fact that inwardness itself has come to be a commodity – a fact of which Nietzsche had an inkling when he said that just the artists who are popularly regarded to be »emotional« really aren't so at all, that increasing artistic sophistication is tantamount to the artist's becoming his own actor. Heine becomes a journalist through the very virtuosity with which he is able to express himself: virtuosity of expression tends towards its ultimate abolition.
    Nowhere does this tendency make itself more strongly felt than where Heine takes the poetical for granted, namely, in his metaphors the conventionality of which has attracted most criticism. He unhesitatingly employs all the congealed formulas of the romantic stock, the rose, the lily, the dove, the sun, and what not, in order to convey through continuous exaggeration of his figures of speech fervent and extreme passion. At the same time, however, all these deteriorated metaphors work as devices for »easy listening« and easy remembering. It is not the least among the paradoxes of Heine's poetry that he falls victim to commodity culture at precisely the point where he clings to the most exalted non-prosaic words. Just his conservation of remnants of lyrical language against everyday speech works as a means of communication through automatized effects, ready for imitation by everybody. If the culture of the last few hundred years has neutralized religion and philosophy and transformed both into »cultural goods« merely to be looked at, Heine has extended this process of neutralization over poetry itself. Through achieving an uninhibited and unrestricted disposal over its objects, poetic language loses its life relationship to the very same objects and surrenders its claim of seriousness to the consumer who demands of intellectual efforts that they spare him any intellectual effort.
    A decisive re-evaluation of Heine could not content itself with »salvaging« certain phases of his work from the wreckage of a poetry that flirts with mass production. This could amount to no more than half-hearted apologetics and historical appreciation. The ultimate aim should be, instead, to save those very aspects of Heine which lay him open to attack and which are identical with the trauma represented by Heine throughout the history of the modern mind. For the indignation about Heine's brilliant cheapness is always tainted by bad conscience. It is as if Heine, through the unabashed configuration of romanticism and journalism, had revealed basic changes in the presuppositions of responsible lyrical poetry itself which are otherwise not recognized and overcompensated by the passionate and stubborn claim to the monumentality and dignity of poetry. While Heine has betrayed poetry to the market, he has expressed, through the essence of his work, that poetry opposed to the market bears its hallmarks just through this opposition. The
malaise
that emanates from his verses, their somewhat shocklike and scandalous effect is that of an art heralding its own impossibility. And it may well be that his greatness consists in his being the first one who registered such historical experiences through the essence of his production. It is just his abandon to the ephemeral which gives him the ring of authenticity. To find the first words for essential historical experiences is more than a merely historical merit: Heine may well claim for himself that he is able to do what his post-humous arch enemy Karl Kraus once postulated: »to listen to the noises of the day as