Heine: a dreamer and a Romantic
This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“Me reading Heine, you somewhere in China”, wrote Ira Gershwin, ever the wit, for his brother George. Even in those days the German writer was a taste acquired by few Anglophones. Now the man known to his family as Harry languishes in the kind of perfumed obscurity which claims most poets.
In a Radio 3 feature, The First Modern European, Michael Goldfarb presented Harry, later Heinrich, not as a songwriter’s curio but as a major Romantic figure, whose example continues to put salt in the porridge of European culture. He succeeded, too. It was an excellent programme.
Poet, essayist, and the kind of cultural maypole around whom others merrily danced, Heine was born in rich Dusseldorf in 1797, and died in Paris in 1856. Between two revolutions, therefore: the French, which overthrew a king in 1789, and the German, which established a unified nation state in 1870. Heine, like many Rhinelanders, had a dog in both fights.
“democracy, openness, and tolerance” were his obsessions, according to the current Mayor of Dusseldorf. Though it’s always useful to recall A.J.P. Taylor’s judgement that when Germans talk about freedom what they really mean is the freedom to be German. That was the key.
A Jew who converted to Lutheranism, Heine initially looked towards Napoleon, and, like every other young German idealist, towards Hegel. Later he became an unofficial German consul in Paris, where he spent the last 25 years of his life burdened by homesickness less for a flesh-and-blood nation than for an ideal of enlightened nationhood.
When his native lands were finally united, under the heel of Bismarck, one might argue that Germans had been brought together by the wrong people: the blood-and-iron militarists, not dreamers like Heine, who in his Parisian reveries dreamt of Germany in the night. What would the gentle soul whose verse inspired Schubert and Schumann make of Wilhelmine Germany?
the romantics lived in a realm of their own imagination. Many still do. David Hockney has said many times he lives not in a real place but “in Bohemia”. Heine’s emotional state was of the Weltschmerz (world sorrow) which followed the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Not for him or for other heroic outsiders the trap of “foolish national distinctions”.
Théophile Gautier, who visited Heine throughout the wasting illness that eventually did for him, thought his fellow poet was “romantic and classic”. He recognised a social gadfly, most comfortable in the company of Balzac, Chopin and George Sand. Here was the comradely spirit acknowledged in this country by George Eliot and Matthew Arnold. Idealists, all.
Yet nations are propelled by actions as well as ideals. The Germany which emerged from nineteenth- century revolutionary thought turned out to be less benign than Heine and his allies had wished into being. Caspar David Friedrich’s dreamers, shrouded in mist or peering from a lonely shore towards a distant horizon, left an uneven bequest, and Europe has paid a heavy price.
ah yes, the “e” word. heine, harry or Heinrich, was a genuine man of Europe. He was not, as the programme seemed to suggest, a citizen of the European Union avant la lettre. We should never conflate the two, though many do.
A Ukrainian poet awarded the annual Heine Prize by the city of Düsseldorf referred to “today’s European idea”. Yet, as every generation learns, pan-European notions cannot erase centuries of development rooted in those “foolish distinctions” Heine urged his followers to overcome.
So this was ultimately a programme that prompted questions it could not completely answer. National characteristics will always count for something, which is why Heine’s story remains so very German.
One needn’t wonder whether Emma Barnett has read Heine. Poetry requires reflection, and the only reflection that busy lady sees is the one that gazes back at her each morning, asking: “Am I not wonderful? Let me count the ways.”
her first shift on radio 4’s today programme was a minor masterpiece of solipsism. She was delighted to be with us, proclaimed the Norma Desmond of Prestwich. It was such an honour. The only phrase missing was “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille.”
After three treacly hours the producers permitted her to offer listeners her very own playlist, a treat mysteriously withheld from Jack de Manio. How tempting it must have been to include “The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze”, which Gilbert and Sullivan might have written with her in mind: “Ah pray, make no mistake, we are not shy …”
Still, they put out a touching shot of Barnett embracing Amol Rajan at the end of the show. Small beer! Brian Redhead and Sue MacGregor bumped fists at 9am every morning, after putting another show to bed, and if Rajan imagines he is the first presenter to call a politician “a cool dude” he may be upset to learn John Timpson habitually referred to Harold Wilson in those terms.
Mike Chaney, Today’s former producer, died recently. “Narcissists” was one of the words he used to describe the presenters who came after his beat. What might he say now?
