Heine's Devilish Heroism

...their spirit is as searing as anything in Das Kapital...

...Heine's works, by contrast, match the skepticism and ambivalence of our age...

...Mathilde had no interests in common with her husband and hardly understood his fame...

...No matter how elementary one's German may be, it pays to look closely at the original stanzas to catch some of the music and incomparable rhythmic subtleties which carry yet another level of meaning...

...But The Poet Dying is not confined to politics...

...He recognizes the comedy inherent in lust, and the moments of jealousy, frustration and boredom in even the most rapturous love...

...Inspired by the pattern on her seal ring, he nicknamed her Mouche?fly" in French, but with almost untranslatable variations of meaning, such as "little speck" and "beauty mark...

...A lesser biographer than Ernst Pawel could easily make such a complicated man sound unpleasant, neurotic or merely inscrutable...

...But his works radiate fondness and continuing appreciation for her ways...

...Raised by a millionaire uncle, who used money alternately as a carrot and a stick to prod his willful nephew into conventional behavior, young Heinrich rebelled against the business world he was being urged to enter...

...Above all, he reminds us that if we don't like the present state of government, society or our lives, they will certainly change soon, almost surely for the worse...

...True, he reacted to the economic and social injustices inflicted upon the working classes no less keenly than did his friend Marx...

...In his posthumously published biography, The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine s Last Years in Paris (Farrar Straus Giroux, 277 pp., $23.00), Ernst Pawel argues that his subject's uncannily contemporary sensibility gives him an "enduring power to disturb...

...He designated her the sole heir of his money and literary properties, and praised her as "my beloved and faithful companion in the vicissitudes of exile...

...For when books are burned, they end up burning people.'" Heine, the biographer notes, was a "rebel rather than a revolutionary...

...He further punned on it by calling her une fine mouche, "a sly puss," and referring to her notes to him aspattes des mouche, the equivalent of our idiom "chicken scratchings...

...An unmistakable foreigner, the poet nevertheless felt welcome in France, where he did not experience any of the covert snubs or barely suppressed hostility that dogged him at home...

...She avoided fully revealing her intelligence, since he was known to dislike brilliant women...

...he was a 37-year-old intellectual with a reputation for affairs with uneducated young women of the lower classes...

...He resembles many of us in his faults, but his virtues are rare...

...The difference between the poet and the Communists was that they offered a cure, and he doubted conditions would improve in the future...

...Nowhere is this more obvious than in his choice of love objects...

...The Poet Dying shows that in eschewing his century's overblown style of heroism, Heine became the most authentic kind of hero...

...She was not aware, either, that he was Jewish...

...The dying man fell in love with her at once, making her the muse of his final poems...

...they felt his sickness was made more hellish by her neglect and her resentful rages against his doctors...

...In the years of her widowhood, however, Mathilde confounded the intelligentsia by proving she was neither the helpless child of Heine's imagination, nor the frivolous trollop his circle believed her to be...

...The illness left him imprisoned on what he called his "mattress tomb," partially blind and unable to so much as feed himself...

...In one respect, though, some of the gap between Heine and Goethe, the big hitter of German letters and his occasional rival in the years their lives overlapped, has closed...

...One of the most fascinating deals with the writer's relationships...

...The obvious assumption would be that the poet was sexually obsessed, but after his lusts strayed to others he remained devoted to her...

...How many, among the millions watching these pyres on the town squares," Pawel wonders, "recalled the prophetic lines from Heine's 'Almansor': "Twas but a prelude...

...However] he drew his inspiration—whether he knew it or not—from the skepticism of generations of his ancestors, thus becoming the emblematic figure of an emancipation that went wrong from the beginning—the outsider who is neither Jew nor German...

...The Nazis went further, ordering public autos-da-fe of his writings...

...EQUALLY MYSTERIOUS, albeit for different reasons, was another female who appeared in 1855 when Heine was close to death, ostensibly to deliver a composer's setting of some of his lieder...

...State and religious pietism provoke his derision for the injustices they conceal...

...She left a moving, accurate account of the poet's last year, and she captured Heine's charisma and contradictions in describing him as having "the head of Christ, with the face animated by the smile of a Mephistopheles...

...He mystified everybody when he chose to marry Cres-cence Eugenie Mirat, whom he renamed Mathilde for unknown reasons...

...His satiric eye finds the fly in every jar of ointment...

...The warmth he inspired in his circle testifies to the immense power of his charm...

...Yet despite his genius for friendship, Heine fled real intimacy...

...Whatever the case, she neither kept house nor nursed him in his illness...

...Mathilde's loyalty also was fulsomely acknowledged in Heine's will...

...His best writing possesses a breadth, beauty and candor difficult to rival...

...Readers who like authors they can identify with, and who are unfamiliar with the emotional and intellectual currents of the Continental Romanticism that imbue Goethe's writings, often find him too foreign...

...she spent her days shopping for luxuries or playing with her parrot...

...Writers & Writing HEINE'S DEVILISH HEROISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL HENRICH HEINE (1795-1856) does not quite qualify for the peak of Parnassus, where Western literature's all-stars —the likes of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Pushkin—assemble...

...The originals are indispensable, since Heine is so allusive that the ablest English rendition misses secondary references, not to mention the song-like flow characteristic of this master of lyric...

...When they first met, in 1834, she was a 19-year-old shop girl...

...As his subtitle makes clear, Pawel's focus is Heine's last eight years, when the expatriate poet suffered a progressive paralysis doctors today hypothesize to have been some kind of muscular dystrophy or sclerosis...

...Heine was fond of saying he could hold a multiplicity of stances at once, and Pawel accordingly examines his subject on several levels...

...And Pawel reminds readers that the poet "dealt with his dying in a way that far transcended mere courage and gave it a meaning few men have been able to wrest from it...

...This brilliant work brings Heine to life so vividly that when he finally succumbs in the last pages, we mourn his passing almost as deeply as the vast company of his admirers...

...Pawel concedes that our ignorance of her true nature stems from the fact that those who left written records did not bother to get to know this woman whose class and culture predisposed them to pigeonhole and ignore her...

...Still, some of his victims remained loyal, and friends found him generous to a fault...

...For a long time, though, Uncle Salomon remained both generous and surprisingly forbearing, especially considering the shabby treatment he received in return for his support...

...The large German audience that read them both accorded Goethe respectful devotion, while treating Heine as a kind of court jester and upstart...

...The Slave Ship," and even more forcefully "The Silesian Weavers," are poems that portray the exploitation of human beings as maledictions which will blight society...

...Let those quick to condemn his all too human weaknesses match the grandeur of that end...

...Seeing himself as David battling Philistines, he used his satirical pen mercilessly, allowing a note of Teutonic overkill to mar many cultural and political essays Pawel feels have not worn well...

...She gave her legal name, Elise Krinitz, though she told others she was called Margot and later published as Camille Selden...

...No one could figure out why he found this particular mistress so captivating, or why, after living with her for five years, he suddenly chose to marry her...

...Like Kafka, to whom Pawel compares him, Heine was clear-eyed and honest enough to anticipate the state-sponsored horrors that would accompany a reliance upon ideology to solve problems—the concentration camps and gulags where men and women would be sacrificed in the name of what the biographer calls "Order, Organization, and Obedience...

...Although her extravagances forced him to keep working right up until he died, he clearly enjoyed protecting her...

...On the contrary, she emerged as a canny manager who drove shrewd bargains in the sale of his manuscripts...

...Perhaps a clue is to be found in his addressing her in some lyrics as Susses, dickes kind, "sweet, fat child...

...The pattern was repeated with publishers and patrons throughout Heine's life...

...Pawel limns a full portrait of a complex man in half the number of pages most biographies now run to, and completes it with German texts of 28 poems plus facing translations by Hal Draper...

...In any event, her presence brightened his final days, spurring a last spate of poignantly erotic poetry...

...Fifteen years after his death in 1856, following hostilities that erupted between his native and adopted country, Bismarck's Reich attacked his memory with anti-Semitic slurs and branded him a traitor to the fatherland...

...For Pawel, Heine, before and after his malady, exemplifies the artist alienated from his society not by his own convictions, but by his culture's refusal to accept him: "His image of himself as a German poet was an illusion, understandable enough at a time when Jews began to believe they could be Germans...

...She probably hoped Heine would advance her literary career, but Pawel thinks her compassion for the sick man was genuine...

...There he could hobnob with fellow emigres like Karl Marx, or sophisticated French intellectuals like Hector Berlioz, Honore de Balzac and Gerard de Nerval, the mystic who translated many of his pieces...

...Marx recorded that she decamped as soon as her husband died—several hours before the funeral—and did not reappear for several months...

...No wonder he left in 1831 for cosmopolitan Paris...

...His friends hated her...