Sweetness and Bite

...Sweetness and Bite Heinrich Heine: Selected Works Translated and edited by Helen M Mustard Random House 446 pp $12 50 Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author of documentary films, "Germany Today" and "Berlin Powder keg', translator, critic HEINRICH HEINE once jested that, as with Homer, seven cities would probably contend for the honor of being his birthplace after he was gone Schilda, Krahwinkel, Polkwitz, Bockum, Gottingen, and Schoppen-stedt But none of these whistle-stops came forward to claim him when he died in 1856, nor did the sizable city where he was actually born, Dusseldorf, show any eagerness to acknowledge him In fact, more than a century passed before the metropolis got around to granting him a memorial (The first monument erected to him anywhere went up not in Germany at all but in the Bronx, m New York City ) Heine was a poet, rebel, wit, satirist, and Jew, any one ot which would have been sufficient to make him unpopular in the Germany ot his time and afterward Taken together, his qualities added up to a personality of undoubted genius So he was hated and despised in his native land, his writings were banned there, and he was forced to seek permanent exile in Pans, where he spent his most productive years It is a rich irony, and one he would have relished, that today both sides of his divided country are fulfilling his Homeric prophecy to an extent he could hardly have imagined Something like a Heine industry has developed in Dusseldorl, and there was even a movement not long ago to name the local university after him (it failed) In East Germany, wheie he would certainly be suppressed if he were alive, massive editions of his works are being prepared by leading scholars Marxist critics engage their bourgeois counterparts in a running duel of Heine quotations, each side seeking to support its claim on him by citing his own words The joke, of course, is that he belongs to neither side and never did Yet the current tug-of-war over him in Germany is welcome evidence of his continuing vitality and appeal On a lesser scale, the same is true of this new American book by and about him He was, indeed, "a good soldier in the wars of human liberation," as he himself said, and, since those wars continue unabated in our own day, how he waged his battles remains endlessly interesting and relevant Heine was a dazzling journalist of breathtaking range With equal flair and facility, he could do a piece on politics or poetry, revolution or literature, philosophy or religion, history or folklore In between he wrote poetry of both melting loveliness and satiric bite He produced no novel, no major play, no really extended work of any kind But within the forms he chose —the topical essay, the ballad, the lyric, the pamphlet, the biographical sketch, what today is called the profile and the column—he was incomparable Whatever he did was lifted above journalism by the cutting edge of his prose and by arabesques of insight and imagination that were peculiarly his own And by wit He was one of the great wits ot the world A sampling of all this is available in the selected works presented here by Helen M Mustard, an emeritus professor of German at Columbia University She offers a surprisingly pedestrian sketch of Heine's career as an introduction, and she demeans her text by a gnatswarm of painfully pedantic and often silly footnotes (Does anybody literate enough to be reading a book about Heinrich Heine need to be told who Leda was, or that Bedlam was an insane asylum, or that mercury was once used to treat syphilis' Does anyone on earth care that August Hermann Francke, 1663-1727, was the founder of "the well-known ['] home for orphans in Halle7") Ms Mustard's translation of the prose, however, turns out to be supple and readable, if now and then needlessly arch She starts off with "The Harz Journey," which made Heine famous and still reads agreeably enough, but is a lightweight ramble that could well have been passed over in favor of something more solid Fortunately, the bulk ot the book contains more substantial material, including "The Romantic School" and "Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany " The titles sound dreary enough to put the uninitiated reader ofi Heme permanently The pieces make absorbing reading, though, and aie full of flashing observation and acute comment They are part of Heine's avowed project of interpreting the Germans to the French, and vice versa They can be read with profit by people who are neither French nor German, and they frequently cast glints of illumination on the background of events in our own time The contemporary French, for instance, might have profited by a more careful reading of the warning Heme gave them back in 1835 "If some day we [the Germans] take a notion to pick a quarrel with you, we won't lack for reasons In any case, I advise you to be on your guard Whatever happens in Germany keep yourselves armed Stay quietly at your posts, your guns in your hands " The whole world, in fact, would have been better off had it heeded another passage in the same essay " if some day you hear a crash such as has never been heard before in world history, you will know the German thunder has finally reached its mark Eagles will drop dead from the skies, and the lions in the farthest desert of Africa will put their tails between their legs and hide A play will be performed in Germany compared with which the French Revolution will seem merely an innocent idyll In still another ominously accurate prophecy he foresaw a future that would ' smell of Russian leather, blood, godlessness, and many whippings I should advise our grandchildren to be born with very thick skins on their backs " Heine's poetry reveals him in a somewhat more optimistic mood, and a short selection of his verse is offered here, translated by Max Knight The lyrics are notoriously difficult to transfer from one language to another without damaging the enchanting simplicities and shadings that make them worth translating to begin with But Knight performs the feat about as well as possible, and enough of the original gets through to show that if Heine sensed the horrors that were coming long in advance, he also savored the sweetness of life as he was living it...