Georg Prochnik: Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution

“Doctrine,” Heinrich Heine’s call to arms, was meant not only to remind his friends, admirers, and fellowwriters of how important it was to continue fighting for a better world but also to insist that while doing so one should not forget to embrace and celebrate life. In the third and final stanza, the poet also refers to Hegel as the philosopher-guide who had shown him how to combine theory and practice. About ten years before the publication of “Doctrine,”Heine’s critical reflections On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany had given Marx some crucial leads as to how Hegel’s ideas could be put to practical use. Traces of that encounter can be detected in one of Marx’s best-known essays,Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Whether Marx ever got the signals from Heine entirely right, and—perhaps equally important, because it relates to the question of radical subjectivity—whether Marx was ever able to appreciate the more enjoyable aspects of life while still denouncing the societal injustices produced by capitalism, is still very much debated. As has been pointed out, Marx could have drawnmore sympathetic conclusions from his encounter with, and reading of, Heine. This applies especially to the Jewish question and how to react to the hostile environment that nineteenth-century conditions created for Jews, especially those who held that enlightenment and democratic ideas should go hand in hand. Heine, Prochnik suggests, reacted less by way of fiery insults than did Marx. Instead, he pursued his struggle against prejudice and persecution in more ironic, creative, and, in the final analysis, thought-provoking ways. In terms of positioning themselves vis-à-vis the Jewish question, Heine and Marx obviously differed. Marx was prone to deride former comrades in arms, who often had turned into political rivals, in a fashion that makes it hard for the contemporary observer to deny the existence of anti-Semitic tropes. Heine appeared no less passionate and combative, but in contrast toMarx, he tended to be—if we exclude for amoment the spat with fellow German Jewish journalist Ludwig Börne, and the clash he had with his Hamburg uncle, a banker and financier on whom he depended in more turbulent periods of his life—more ironic and playful. Add to that the occasional sad or melancholic selfreflections and, at other times, Heine’s twisted turns of phrase or choice of words, especially when attempting to rally support for his cause against the powers that be. As Adorno famously pointed out on the centennial of the poet’s death, Heinrich Heine’s life and his critical yet often humorous and provocative poetry and prose have remained an open wound. That open wound consists of the frequent neglect if not purposeful omission of the author’s name, including the obliteration of his Jewish background. At the same time, his poetry continues to be celebrated and his name unacknowledged, in schoolbooks and popular anthologies. Obviously, Heine’s ability to display critical and sometimes fanciful ideas in pleasurable and esthetic form made it impossible entirely to ignore his writings. Still, for prolonged periods, recognition and respect have been lacking. In the

"Doctrine," Heinrich Heine's call to arms, was meant not only to remind his friends, admirers, and fellow writers of how important it was to continue fighting for a better world but also to insist that while doing so one should not forget to embrace and celebrate life. In the third and final stanza, the poet also refers to Hegel as the philosopher-guide who had shown him how to combine theory and practice. About ten years before the publication of "Doctrine," Heine's critical reflections On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany had given Marx some crucial leads as to how Hegel's ideas could be put to practical use. 1 Traces of that encounter can be detected in one of Marx's best-known essays, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. 2 Whether Marx ever got the signals from Heine entirely right, and-perhaps equally important, because it relates to the question of radical subjectivity-whether Marx was ever able to appreciate the more enjoyable aspects of life while still denouncing the societal injustices produced by capitalism, is still very much debated. 3 As has been pointed out, Marx could have drawn more sympathetic conclusions from his encounter with, and reading of, Heine. This applies especially to the Jewish question and how to react to the hostile environment that nineteenth-century conditions created for Jews, especially those who held that enlightenment and democratic ideas should go hand in hand. Heine, Prochnik suggests, reacted less by way of fiery insults than did Marx. Instead, he pursued his struggle against prejudice and persecution in more ironic, creative, and, in the final analysis, thought-provoking ways.
In terms of positioning themselves vis-à-vis the Jewish question, Heine and Marx obviously differed. Marx was prone to deride former comrades in arms, who often had turned into political rivals, in a fashion that makes it hard for the contemporary observer to deny the existence of anti-Semitic tropes. Heine appeared no less passionate and combative, but in contrast to Marx, he tended to be-if we exclude for a moment the spat with fellow German Jewish journalist Ludwig Börne, and the clash he had with his Hamburg uncle, a banker and financier on whom he depended in more turbulent periods of his life-more ironic and playful. Add to that the occasional sad or melancholic selfreflections and, at other times, Heine's twisted turns of phrase or choice of words, especially when attempting to rally support for his cause against the powers that be.
As Adorno famously pointed out on the centennial of the poet's death, Heinrich Heine's life and his critical yet often humorous and provocative poetry and prose have remained an open wound. That open wound consists of the frequent neglect if not purposeful omission of the author's name, including the obliteration of his Jewish background. At the same time, his poetry continues to be celebrated and his name unacknowledged, in schoolbooks and popular anthologies. 4 Obviously, Heine's ability to display critical and sometimes fanciful ideas in pleasurable and esthetic form made it impossible entirely to ignore his writings. Still, for prolonged periods, recognition and respect have been lacking. In the German context for much of the nineteenth century and during the Third Reich, the author was mainly evoked and remembered in and from exile. 5 After 1945, Heine's reception took on an almost schizophrenic homecoming: first, with the GDR's claim to his inheritance-cleansed of its hedonistic dimensions, Heine's work became surprisingly that of a virtuous Prussian Rhinelander-and second, with the Federal Republic's reluctant if not to say subdued reception (for many in the West, Heine remained an uncontrollable force, too left and too subversive to be properly domesticated). 6 Thirty years after Adorno's praise, or to be more precise on the retrospective celebration of the "Young Germany" and the 1835 Vormärz movement and its (limited) formative influences on German politics and society, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas took on the baton from Adorno and offered another interpretation related to the "open wound" by placing Heine in the context of discussion on the role and task of intellectuals in Germany. 7 While Habermas conceded that the word "intellectual" was of course of much later making-it emerged only with the Dreyfus affair and Emile Zola's J'accuse, the latter being directed against the anti-Semitic sentiments at France's fin de siècle-Heine seemed to have developed and demonstrated an early sense (half a century before Zola's famous appeal) of the courage that was required to qualify as a true man of letters and a good citizen in the republic of knowledge.
As Habermas points out, for Heine, the role of a man of letters could not yet have entailed a collective call to arms in the manner advocated by Zola. And yet, as he also stresses, Heine showed early signs of intellectual courage by protesting vehemently against two extreme measures, exile and censorship-the tools of early anti-democratic state repression to which fellow men of letters and early freedom-loving radical democrats were subjected.
Yet, Habermas also stresses that Heine's critical voice against the brutal measures of early nineteenth-century Prussian state autocracy remained rather an exception than the rule. The poet never became a popular political voice or a symbolic figure representing some larger democratic sentiment. In Germany, despite the Vormärz and the efforts of 1848, no successful movement emerged that managed to establish lasting democratic institutions.
For Habermas, Heine represented both a wound and a sting. The poet personified a wound insofar as the repeated anti-Semitic slur served as a kind of spiritual ammunition against the early radical-democratic critique that Heine tried to articulate. Such prejudice developed into a tradition that would, in the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century, become an essential part of the "politics of cultural despair" (Fritz Stern), which in turn proved crucial in paving the way for National Socialism.
The attribution to Heine of a sting points in a slightly different argumentative direction. It served, and continues to serve, as a vestige of a more sophisticated sort of engagement and writing. It refers particularly to Heine's whimsical and vivid embrace of Enlightenment ideas, and to the fact that in his writing these were often interwoven with romantic passion and sentiment. This was in sharp contrast to the reactionary, apolitical romanticism of so many writers at the time.
Habermas's argument culminates in defending Heine's vision of a more "hedonistic democracy." The poet's understanding of how passions and politics are related served as a weapon directed against Puritan notions on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, and to thinkers and political movements alike. But Habermas argues that Heine's legacy reaches out even beyond that: the poet became also the first voice to defend art and esthetics against their instrumental use through and by politics. Maintaining a delicate balancebeing intellectually engaging without turning art into propaganda-was a tightrope to walk. In fact, striving for an artful combination of esthetics and politics is a challenge to this day. This is one of the reasons why Heine's "Doctrine" and its vision of radical subjectivity still speaks to us. ---.
Enter Georg Prochnik and his new biography of Heinrich Heine. Prochnik undertakes the complicated task, by careful "lumping" and "splitting" of the facts and influences, of distinguishing between what pertains to Heine the revolutionary and what pertains to the poet's Jewish background. Prochnik takes a closer look at Heine's ever-shifting self-identification as a Jew and as an emerging revolutionary bard. He suggests in the end, more implicitly than explicitly in the judgment of this reviewer, that Heine and his work should perhaps be understood as a complex amalgam of both. However, this sense of synthesis is an impression that only emerges once one has finished the book.
Heine was born and spent his childhood and early adolescence in Düsseldorf, a city that had become part of the more Catholic western Prussian provinces after Napoleon's defeat. He was the child of a well-to-do Jewish household that strived for assimilation without ever fully achieving it. The arrival of the French Revolution in the Rhineland provinces came in the person of Napoleon, that "world spirit on a horse" (Hegel). The new type of emperor symbolized and promised hope, especially for Jewish emancipation: the newly introduced Napoleonic Code would remove significant barriers that had hitherto precluded Jews from achieving middle-class professions. Such progressive measures did not last long. With the Prussian and allied victory against Napoleon and the Vienna Congress, political reaction returned, although it has to be said not in a totally stagnant form. For Heine, these developments meant constant personal "adjustments," yet without ever becoming an achiever in the sense of securing a regular income from a "respectable," i.e., bourgeois, position.
Having been mainly educated at Catholic schools, he never became a Catholic-nor was he likely to have ever been accepted as one. Having studied law in Bonn, Berlin, and Göttingen, he thought it useful to convert to Protestantism for practical purposes, and perhaps for keeping options open, such as pursuing a legal career. Yet, the pressures of earning a decent living came not only from without: his family, and after his father's death especially his uncle, demanded of him that he forget about traveling, writing poetry, flirting with the other sex, drinking with buddies in wine bars and beer halls, pursuing journalistic ambitions, and showing a passion for radical Hegelian ideas; Heine instead should opt for a "normal" career and life.
It wasn't to be. Heine's irritation at such demands from his family and beyond turned increasingly into a political passion and a determination to fight for liberty and democracy. This was first triggered and then accelerated by direct experience of the limits to free speech, imposed by Prussian censorship. From early on, Heine developed fine antennae for identifying double standards, for preaching water but secretly drinking wine, for promoting public virtues but pursuing private vices, for bourgeois ambitions such as making money, getting married, starting a family but keeping stumm about the ills of political societyand that included also some rather conservative aspects of the Jewish tradition. Compared to that, France looked much more understanding. Sure, the 1830 revolutions had not resulted in a truly democratic government; still, a lot was going on under the radar, especially in Paris and there most notably in the artistic and literary scene. Censorship did exist in France as well, but compared to Prussia, it appeared somehow bearable. (The British lacked joie de vivre so the idea of living in England never occurred to Heine; he had visited England before and was not impressed by what he had seen).
Exile in France remained the only agreeable option. Settling in Paris, however, did not mean the end of Heine's preoccupation with Germany. Heine stayed in contact with, and interested in, German-Prussian affairs. After all, Heine, despite being fluent in French, needed to publish and to make a living as a writer committed to the German language. He also remained preoccupied about his own Jewishness, but such thinking would now explore dimensions of Jewish life in a much lighter and less self-torturing fashion than previously. In Paris, his Jewishness seemed no longer as afflicting as it had when he was in Germany.
All of this is told beautifully by Prochnik, and the book is a fitting addition to Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series. Yet, one might also speculate about the author's other motives for choosing Heine for this biography, not least if one considers the biographer's previous two attempts to discuss the meaning of what it means to identify as Jewish today.
Prochnik has made a name for himself with previous portrayals of two famous Jewish writers: Stefan Zweig and Gershom Scholem. 8 In each book, Prochnik used the experiences of the individual to cast light on Jewish experience by focusing on specific constellations: Zweig's agnosticism, his odyssey and exile, first in the UK, then in the USA, and finally "at the end of the world" in Brazil; in Gershom Scholem's case, the early spiritual attraction to Jerusalem and the disillusionment with political Zionism in the later period of his life. In both cases, Prochnik used the material at hand to reflect upon and clarify his own position as an aspiring writer and intellectual of Jewish descent in dealing and coping with this modern, ever-changing world and its demands.
Here is the crux of the matter: Was it just anti-Semitism that turned Heine into the Heine we know? Perhaps not only. Heine was exiled primarily for his radical views (his being Jewish obviously played some role although none of the official sources related to his exiled status state this explicitly). His poems contain lines that ridicule authorities, and in rhyme, some acid remarks stuck arguably more than any prose would. But Heine did not just aim at authorities-the macro level, so to speak-but also at the wider circumstances, the political, social, cultural, and often religious conditions, the habits and prejudices that kept the powers that be in their powerful position. As pointed out before, the writer acquired fine antennae early on. These helped him not just to grasp the big picture while simultaneously ridiculing those at the top, but to scrutinize what today we would call "micro-level interaction," which could involve anything from mishap and miscommunication with family relations, to disputes with friends and lovers, to poking and making fun of instructors and agents of any kind, especially publishers.
All this, and the attendant dilemmas, are poignantly described in Prochnik's study of the poet. It is a highly recommendable study. If there is something that deserves critical attention, it is the fact that in the epilogue and in the comments to the bibliography, the references to Heine's posthumous reception are sparse and allude almost solely to the revolutionary tradition. That the discussion surrounding Heine and his work is much more multifaceted and goes beyond revolutionary traits can be seen in two recent monographs, both of which make no appearance in Prochnik's book: Rolf Hosenfeld's portrayal of Heine and his intellectual legacy, and the currently most ambitious biography written by Jan-Christoph Hauschild and Michael Werner. 9 Of course, it is good to know that Heine continues to resonate in the English-speaking world. It is though overwhelmingly as a revolutionary bard rather than as an intellectual who still speaks to us in a way that is more complex as both Adorno and Habermas claimed.
Finally, it is also noticeable that the biographer, unlike in his two previous intellectual portraits, has this time resisted using the word "I": Prochnik says nothing about what drew him to Heine. Who knows? Maybe, this time Heine or his work chose him?
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Reviewer: Andreas Hess is professor of sociology at University College Dublin and co-editor in chief of Society.