The German Genius

Like many German Jews before and since, he was first and above all else, a German . In 1824 he described himself to a friend as “one of the most German beasts in existence…my breast is an archive of German feeling.” 23 At the same time, one of the features of his unfinished Jewish novel Rabbi von Bacharach is his loving description of kosher food.
    This did not stop Heine from converting to Protestantism in 1825. It was a curious business, secret at the time, famous afterward. It was not a case of “instant bleaching,” the term applied to Jewish converts who were given a baptismal gift of ten ducats by the Prussian state if they named the king as their godfather. Heine had always been uncomfortable with his Jewishness and used to describe himself only as “of Jewish ancestry.” Crescence-Eugénie Mirat (“Mathilde”), who met Heine in 1834, began living with him two years later, and married him in 1840, had no idea he was Jewish. He always anticipated that German Jews would achieve full civil equality, explaining the anti-Semitism of his day as economic, not religious. 24 He thought of his own time as tolerant. 25
    In 1848, the year of revolution, Heine’s health dramatically deteriorated and for the last eight years of his life he was bedridden, forced to lie on mattresses laid on the floor, which, he complained, formed his “mattress grave.” 26 His speech could be labored but his mind was still agile and illness brought him back to God. He observed mordantly that the healthy and the sick need different religions and that Christianity “was an excellent religion for the sick.” 27 Ritchie Robinson has described the late sick-bed poems as unlike anything else in the canon save, perhaps, the late poems of Yeats, savage and playful. In one memorable verse Heine bequeaths his ailments one-by-one to his enemies. In another he challenges God head-on:
    Drop those holy parables and
Pietist hypotheses:
Answer us these damning questions—
No evasions, if you please.
     
    From his mattress grave he tells us that poetry can be no help in this desolate world—he agreed with Hegel that the world “had entered the age of prose.” 28
    M ODERNITY AND M URDER
     
    Many people—especially in Germany—believe that, had he lived a normal lifespan, Georg Büchner (1813–37) would have become the equal of Goethe or Schiller. His best known work, Woyzeck , is certainly an arresting masterpiece. Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, Büchner was the son of a doctor and the brother of the philosopher Ludwig Büchner. He studied medicine at Strasbourg, published his dissertation, on aspects of the nervous system, and moved to Giessen, the up-and-coming center for scientific research. But Büchner had always been interested in politics and, appalled by the conditions in Hesse, helped to form a secret society dedicated to revolution. He longed for the poor to attain self-consciousness, realizing that, in his day, the proletarians were not yet a “class.” In a letter written from Giessen, he observed: “The political conditions could drive me crazy.” He was forced into exile when one of his pamphlets was judged too incendiary, first in Strasbourg, then Zurich. He became professor of anatomy at the University of Zurich but died almost immediately of typhus at the age of twenty-three.
    Büchner produced his first play— Dantons Tod ( Danton’s Death ), about the French Revolution—in 1835, followed by Lenz , a novella based on the life of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, a poet of the Sturm und Drang period. His second play, Leonce und Lena , was about the nobility but then came Woyzeck , unfinished, published posthumously and the first literary work in German whose main characters came not from the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie, but from the working class. (The title of the play was chosen by subsequent editors.) Büchner left four drafts, which among them allow for a proper reconstruction. The drafts were probably begun in 1836, but a performance was not arranged until 1913. The work is perhaps best known through Alban Berg’s opera, Woyzeck , which premiered in 1925.
    Woyzeck , based on true events, tells the story of a common soldier driven mad—and to suicide—by unyielding military discipline and strict hierarchical societies where, as he says at one point, “Man’s an abyss; you get dizzy when you look down.” Büchner had followed a lengthy debate in a medical journal regarding a convicted murderer, J. C.