Heinrich Heine (1797 - 1856)

It was 150 years ago today when Heinrich Heine died in Paris. Today he is generally regarded as probably the most important German poet of the 19th century. But during his lifetime the relationship between the poet and his country was difficult.

Heinrich (sometimes called Harry) Heine was born in the city of Düsseldorf in 1797. As a 14-year-old boy he was enthusiastic about Napoleon and his army who had concoured the German territories. Napoleon representated the modern world, the spirit of the revolution, the ideals of freedom, equality and human rights. Heine never liked the government of the old aristocracy or that of the Prussians who took over power in the Rhine-lands after Napoleon was defeated. The French law had given Heine as a jew the full emancipation as a citizen. But the restauration, according to the unholy alliance of the monarchies of Prussia, Russia and Austria took these rights again and reestablished the old social and political conditions, in combination with a new form of police control and censoreship.

That was the reason why Heine moved to Paris where he met with Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas or Honore de Balzac. In Germany, he missed a revolutionary spirit and saw the intellectuals only occupied with literature and philosophy, but not with politics. In a time when Hegel proclaimed the "end of art", Heine found a new form of artistic expression that was much more subjective with the focus on the individual and his perception of the world around him. He took a sentimental and melancholic approach from the Romantic movement, but at the same time he was ironic and sarcastic enough to go into distance to his own statements. Maybe his irony makes him modern, but also his consciousness that he was writing for a market - and he distinguished well between his French and his German readers.

He criticised the traditional forms of religion (the authority of the church, the neglection of the body and nature), but argumented also against a fanatical atheism that became a religion as well. He was more a pantheist. Also he was a personal friend of Marx and Engels and sympathised with a lot of the socialist ideas he ever stayed in distance to a pure and "naked" communism in which he feared a loss of diversity and freedom. His individualism made it difficult for ideologists from all sides to misuse him. In his last years he was both depressed because of the failed revolution of 1848 and physically ill, but nontheless very productive.

The following regimes in Germany had their problems with Heine. In his writings you can find frightening passages where he prophesies a dark German future that became reality a hundred years later with the Nazis (it will start with the burning of books ...). The Prussian Kaiserreich that was made by Bismarck did not want to build him a monument, and the Nazis printed his poem about the Loreley as a typical German piece of poetry, but neglected the author by calling him "unknown".
Heine and his relationship to Germany was a "wound", as Therodor W. Adorno took up Heine´s own word, a wound that should heal up late - and "crooked" as dramatist Heiner Müller said: still in the Federeal Republic, there was disagreement whether one should name the university of Düsseldorf after him.

Today, we have the Heinrich-Heine-university in his home-town, and the house of his parents is renovated and opened as a museum.