The German Genius

divided his own time between prose (journalism—Georg Lukács described him as a revolutionary journalist of significance—travel writing, criticism) and poetry. His early verses were collected into the Buch der Lieder ( Book of Songs ), which Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn helped to make famous. In his prose of that early time, particularly Briefe aus Berlin ( Letters from Berlin ) and Die Harzreise ( The Harz Journey )—travel notes of a sort—he showed himself as sensitive to the very different Germanies that then existed, in particular the unchanging life of the countryside as compared with the industrializing, fast-paced, always-different world of the city. After the excesses of the Napoleonic Wars, he anticipated that the great issue of the day would be emancipation, of races as much as of social classes and other oppressed peoples. “Our age is warmed by the idea of human equality…” In his journalism he tried hard to prepare the ideological ground for a German revolution. 18
    Though the fragmentation of Germany, as reinforced by the Treaty of Vienna, did not appeal to him, Heine was by no means a nationalist, one reason being the nationalists’ espousal of a “Christian German” identity, which had no place for Jews, of which he was one. In Die Romantische Schule ( The Romantic School ), written with a French audience in mind, he drew attention to the cosmopolitanism of the great eighteenth-century German writers and explored what had been lost. Romantic poetry, he said frankly, was incompatible with modern life: “The railway engine shakes and jolts our minds, so that we cannot produce a song; coal-smoke is driving away the song-birds…” 19
    The 1840s were a complicated time politically. Food shortages in several European countries during the “hungry forties” stimulated radical activity. In Germany, the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the Prussian throne in 1840 aroused hopes of liberalization after his father’s long (forty-three-year) reactionary reign. There was a flood of political verse, produced mainly by the so-called Tendenzdichter (committed poets) such as Ferdinand Freiligrath (later a political exile in London), and the philologist August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who was dismissed from his professorship on account of his political verse. This verse included “Das Lied der Deutschen” (Song of the Germans), “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” which is not always understood as a liberal work appealing for a German national state with free institutions. 20 Heine thought these “committed” poets were banal; the proper poet-genius, for him, could belong to no party and toe no line:
    Aimless is my song, Yes, aimless,
As is love, as life is aimless
As Creator and creation.
     
    Heine wasn’t apolitical; he despised capitalism and expected more “heroics” from the bourgeoisie than were there, but for him the true poet searches for those deeper and more fundamental forces that go beyond the aims of the radicals. Like Jacob Grimm he thought that folktales—the deeper poetry—contained glimpses of the ancient Germanic religion. 21 Christianity had drawn people away from earthly (and earthy) realities, as revealed in folktales, toward a more ethereal, disembodied spiritual realm. By recovering and reworking the original folktales, he believed he could revive the lost excitement (though he believed “God’s opium” was passing).
    The radical turmoil that existed in “the hungry forties” produced a foretaste of revolution in Germany in 1844, when the Silesian weavers mounted an insurrection. Their traditional cottage industry was simply unable to cope with the industrialized textile manufactures of Britain. Reduced to starvation, they were a pitiful group and their uprising, quickly put down, inspired Heine’s famous bitter proletarian poem, “Die schlesischen Weber” (The Silesian Weavers), which would resonate throughout Germany down the century:
    The shuttle flies, the loom creaks loud,
Night and day we weave your shroud—
Old Germany, at your shroud we sit,
We’re weaving a threefold curse on it,
We’re weaving, we’re weaving! 22
     
    The idea, stemming from Heine’s deep concern about the anachronism that was Germany, was partly based on a song composed amid another uprising, that of the Lyons silk weavers in 1831: “We shall weave the old world’s shroud.”
    Heine was famously ambivalent about his Jewishness.