HEINE: SWORD AND FLAME

...Havelock Ellis envisaged the poet as a new Moses, gazing from the vulgar Pisgah of his day into a promised land that he would never enter...

...Perhaps the most devastating comment on Heine's inability to serve a political cause without reservation and without flagging has come from Boerne, who once wanted the younger and more famous man as his ally in the struggle against German reaction: "Heine, with his sybaritic nature, is so effeminate that the fall of a roseleaf disturbs his sleep...

...Heine went beyond the demand that every human being should live under decent conditions...

...The poet's admiration for the Emperor is expressed in his great ballad, The Two Grenadiers, and in his reminiscences, where he describes Napoleon riding through the palace gardens of Dusseldorf ("What it was to me when I saw him, I myself, with thrice blessed eyes, his very self...

...It is impossible to cast Heine as a political leader, for he did not have the clear, unalterable concepts expected of one, and his witticisms are of little help as political guidance...

...after a while, Napoleon appears as "the representative of colossal will, but at the same time a warning example of the ephemeral effect of unbounded will...

...What irony of fate that I, who am so fain to sleep on the pillow of . . . silent contemplation, should be marked out to whip my fellow-Germans out of their torpor...

...But he did not speculate how this "beatific state" might be achieved...

...I am the son of the Revolution and I again take up the charmed weapons upon which my mother breathed her magic words of blessing . . . Give me my lyre that I may sing a battle-song...

...He did not fall for the legend of the "noble proletarian...

...Heine, the poet who hated the rigidity of all systems and organized philosophy, was incapable of appreciating the ardent German patriot and unflinching liberal...

...Like all other Jews of the Rhineland, the precocious lad admired Napoleon, who had brought the Jews emancipation from medieval restrictions...

...The first way to read Heine is the easier one...

...a hedonist, but his own special kind...

...Heine studied this form of socialism and associated with some of the socialist leaders, especially with those ardent young men, Marx and Lassalle...

...Anyone—even Communists or German nationalists—can quote Heine to his own ends...

...The admiration becomes mixed with misgivings...

...If we must circumscribe Heine with a single term, he was...

...Heine's biographer, Max Brod, once defined the poet's formula: "All for justice and all for the proletariat, but not by the proletariat...

...True too that, compared to Boerne, with his one-track mind and sure-fire solutions, Heine seems inconsistent in his political views to the point of irresponsibility—and yet is it not also true that he is to be credited for admitting mistakes...

...The great journalist Boerne who, despite his wit, often lacked a sense of humor, was incapable of viewing other than as a natural enemy the poet who arrayed himself against all systems, whose fatherland was not Germany but the world...

...In 1830 the French Saint-Simonists issued a manifesto demanding the abolition of individual inheritance rights, communal control of the means of production, and the enfranchisement of women...

...Paris is the new Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which separates the holy land of liberty from the country of the Philistines...

...Truly, my position never favored my development into a singer of soft love ballads...

...in fact, he was cordially received by the intelligentsia as a distinguished foreigner, and, whatever curbs on freedom were invoked after 1830, France was a paradise of liberty compared to Germany...

...Marx was a poverty-stricken exile in London, and Lassalle still a long way from founding the General Union of German Workers...

...In fact, he was aware of a certain prejudice on his part: "Most dangerous to me is that brutal, aristocratic pride that is rooted in my heart . . . which whispers to me so much contempt against industry and could mislead me into the most distinguished wickedness...

...let him whom her rhymeless prose cannot please, turn to poetry...

...we are searching still, and among those who have helped us in our search for the right path was that "irresponsible hedonist," Heinrich Heine...

...Fearing what he called "the great herd of mankind," he was not the man of the people Walt Whitman was...

...What he wanted he made quite clear when, in writing to his former countrymen from Paris, he denned his sort of patriotism: "Calm yourselves, I will honor and esteem your colors when they are no longer an idle and a servile mummery...

...George Eliot was aware of his dream when she hailed him as "a lover of freedom, who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men...

...II Originally, Heine wanted to be a poet, and nothing but a poet...

...That the Communists are not absolutely sure Heine was their man is proven by the latest popular Heine edition, published in Leipzig, which has no fewer than four introductions —one by a German, another by a Russian, the third by a Hungarian Communist, and the fourth Heine's 1855 preface to the French edition of Lutetia, a collection of political prose...

...It is important to remember that Heine's life began at the time one Napoleon rose to power, and that another Napoleon was firmly entrenched in power at the time of Heine's death...

...He was afraid of what he saw coming—and honest enough to admit that this new force was likely to stay...

...Because of this love I have passed thirteen years of my life in exile . . ." Nor would Heine have approved of Bolshevism, with its regime of terror, its drab and depressing uniformity, and standardization of cultural expression...

...mitting, with a sigh, that Heme, though a friend of Marx, "did not succeed in becoming a real Marxist...

...What he actually desired was not a "Greater Germany," but a victory of the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, »nd Hegel...

...The first half of the Nineteenth Century saw the development of nationalism and socialism, the strife for a parliamentary democracy, and the emancipation of the Jew...

...Heine did love the beautiful—but not merely for himself...

...a free spirit who knew he was not free of prejudices and who endeavored to be honest with himself...

...Words like 'Fatherland,' 'Germany,' 'faith of our ancestors' will always galvanize the masses more than such words as 'humanity,' 'citizen of the world,' 'spirit of youth,' 'truth.' I mean to say by this that the representatives of the nationalist idea have their roots more deeply sunk in German soil than the representatives of cosmopolitanism, and that we shall always be beaten by them unless we swiftly forestall them—with the help of the guillotine...

...His fear of brutality, of violence, his abhorrence of insipid mediocrity become ruler, were things he could not help...

...The Communism to which he refers in his writings was not of the Leninist-Stalinist variety which was to shake the world seven decades after the poet's death...

...True, he was dominated by emotion rather than by reason, and he lacked Marx' theoretical insight into the workings of society...

...Heine was perhaps too sensitive, too soft-hearted for a world in which it seemed changes could be made only by force and with the shedding of much blood...

...It was his conviction that the emancipation of mankind could not be achieved before each individual was made free to enjoy the beauty of life...

...All he [Heine] loves in truth is the beautiful," Boerne complained...

...In the aforementioned 1855 preface to the French version of Lutetia, he sums up all his fears...

...The role Marx—who was twenty-one years younger than the poet—piayed in Heine's life is often vastly exaggerated in Communist literature...

...But by no stretch of the term can Heine be called a Socialist...

...His Preface, jubilantly used by the extreme Left as the one document "proving" that Heine had seen the light, proves nothing beyond the fact that the invalid of Avenue Matignon, about to die and disgusted with both the reactionary France of Napoleon III and the aggressive Prussia of Fredrich Wilhelm IV, recognized the growing importance of the proletariat as a political power...

...The Emperor...

...His fellow-emigres in Paris complained that Heine was not above selling out liberty, but they failed to understand him...

...Heine was willy-nilly drawn into the whirlpool...

...Hosannah...

...Where is there any beauty without a fault...

...And later, vacationing on the island of Heligoland, he wrote bitterly: "I am weary of political bickering, and long for peace, at least for a condition of affairs in which I can give myself freely to my own natural inclination, to my dreamy way of living, to my imagination and brooding thoughts...

...a poet and thinker who strove to understand the events of his time without prescribing for problems that seemed to him insoluble, and without championing any particular doctrine...

...He was more complex than the fiery Boerne, who knew precisely what he wanted and what he was against, and who was utterly immune to seduction by beauty in any form...

...Yes, here on earth.I would establish by means of the blessings of free political and industrial institutions that beatific state which according to the opinions of the pious will be realized only on the Day of Judgment—and in Heaven...

...After all, Heine did write: "All of Europe, the whole world, will become German...

...Nature is seldom a poet and never rhymes...

...The Great Soviet Encyclopedia hails him as the one German poet who came close to understanding the mission of the working class...

...Where is there any good thing without its ridiculous side...

...Heine was only one of thousands of German liberals who decided that life was unbearable in the Fatherland, and that France was the only place their ideas and ideals would be appreciated and they could work for the destruction of the evil forces in Central Europe...

...Heine certainly never wished to become one...

...That was written in June, 1830...

...Heine realized that he could never tolerate the German brand of nationalism which makes the German's heart "shrink like leather in the cold, until he loathes all that is foreign, until he abandons all claim to be a citizen of the world or even a European, and desires only to be a German, narrow and limited...

...For the same Heine who had ridiculed monarchs and aristocrats and praised the ideal of democracy would declare, when it came to a showdown, that he favored a republic governed by monarchists, or a monarchy governed by republicans...

...After seeing his demi-god, Napoleon, dethroned and exiled, he embraced German nationalism...

...He wanted, not a drab mass civilization, not a proletarian society, but a world full of comfort and beauty for everyone...

...Plant the black-red-and-gold banner upon the heights of German thought...

...He was a boy of seven when Bonaparte took the crown from the hands of the Pope and set it on his own head...

...True, there are countless passages in his poetry and prose which prove that Heine strongly sympathized with the underdog, and that he considered the existing social order as far from satisfactory: "I believe in progress...

...he had strongly pronounced sympathies and antipathies...

...Unfortunately Paris failed to become the New Jerusalem the exile had expected...

...You can focus on those passages that seem to support your own philosophy, or you can take Heine as he was in reality: a man born at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, who matured in the Romantic Age, and was fated to die on the threshold of a new era which was to see mankind divided in a hopeless struggle between Left and Right...

...he wished to see wars abolished...

...Make it the standard of free humanity and I will give my best heart's blood for it...

...He is a puzzle to all simple souls...

...he was capable of great enthusiasm for great characters and for great historic forces...

...Today, a century after the poet's death, we have not yet entered that promised land...

...In addition, they have at their service all the slogans which are most effective "with an ignorant people...

...He dreamed of a great federation of peoples— "the Holy Alliance of Nations"—and of a time when "we shall no longer need to sustain standing armies of many hundreds of thousands of murderers because of mutual distrust...

...so was Matthew Arnold, to whom Heine was "a brilliant, a most effective soldier in the Liberation War of humanity...

...A lower middle-class Jew, it was his misfortune to have been born into a period in which, as Napoleon said to Goethe, Politics was the Fate...

...Indeed, he shunned any kind of political action...

...At the time of his death (1856), Socialism was far from being a political force...

...Heine had the impressionable character of a true poet, and he approached politics not with the stern single-mindedness of a Ludwig Boerne or a Marx but with the same illogical passion which might be roused in him by the sight of a beautiful woman...

...I believe that mankind is destined for happiness, and I have a better opinion of the deity than those pious souls who imagine that He created man only for suffering...

...But a few weeks later when he learned of the revolution in France that unseated the reactionary Bourbon, Charles X, he was suddenly jubilant: "Gone is my yearning for rest...

...The new France gave only lip-service to democracy...

...He was afraid of the dark iconoclasts who, once they had gained power, might heartlessly smash the marble statues of beauty, destroy the fantastic toys and spangles of art, cut down the grove of laurels, and plant potatoes instead...

...Heine's characterization of the spiritual ancestors of Hitler, Rosenberg, and Streicher is unmatched in brutal accuracy: "Their fanaticism, carried on with all the fervor of a religion, exceeds in energy the enthusiasm which reason alone can command...

...The Revolution had merely replaced a reactionary Bourbon with a "citizen king" who permitted the real power to be seized from the hands of the counts and bishops by the bankers and merchants...

...The news of the July Revolution turned the poet into an ardent Francophile: "Liberty is the new religion . . . the French are the chosen people of that religion, for in their tongue are written its first gospels and its dogmas...

...He was nine when the Emperor's army occupied Dus-seldorf...

...Mark the "almost"—which makes all the difference...

...Life and the world gave him material for his satire, for his vivid descriptive writing and his poetical outpourings...

...Soon, however, Heine found that the fraternities were no less reactionary in spirit than the oppressive rulers, and that the ideals of liberty and equality were often ignored or even disowned for the sake of the only good that seemed to matter— national unity...

...I am all joy and song, all sword and flamel" How can we explain this sudden change of mood...

...Above everything, the dying Heine hated and feared the Teutomaniacs whom he had known and fought with his pen for more than thirty years...

...how, then, shall he rest comfortably on the knotty bed of freedom...

...Of this mission and this universal domination of Europe I often dream when walking under oak trees...

...His articles on modern art have appeared in many American publications, including Commentary, The American Scholar, and The Saturday Review...

...Calm yourselves, I love the Fatherland as much as you do...

...N. Bernikow cannot help adAtFRED WERNER, art critic and author, has been a lifelong student of Heinrich Heine, several of whose works he succeeded in rescuing from the Nazi torch more than a decade ago...

...But one can watch in Heine's writings a slow process of decanonization...

...It is not surprising that Heine felt ill at ease in a Germany where the alternative to a most unenlightened Eighteenth Century absolutism seemed to lie in a philosophy anticipating many features of Twentieth Century National Socialism...

...Joining one of the German Burschen-schaften, the fraternities of university students, he believed he was fighting on the side of progress because the students opposed Metternich's regime and were suffering persecution by the police...

...In a book written three years after Boerne's death, he oversimplified matters as much as his antagonist had done...

...We shall use our swords and horses to plow with, and we shall win peace, prosperity, and freedom...

...III It took Heine many years to decide that he could not belong to any one narrowly circumscribed political party and that his was an eclectic humanism that defied definition and dogma...

...Eventually, Heine sees him as the one who betrayed freedom...

...it states that Heine's Book of Songs was the only German volume that Lenin took into exile...

...Personally, Heine did not suffer from any restrictions in France...

...Heine was no novice in political life...

...Ludolf Wienbarg, one of the leaders of the Jung Deutsch-land movement with which Heine's name was linked, was not unfair to the poet when he said: "If it had depended upon Heine to destroy the established order of society, to change the face of the world and, with one stroke of his pen, establish a regime to all appearances perfect, he would certainly have hesitated...

...but an abyss separated him from the struggling masses and from their leaders in action...

...His position was somewhat like that of many desperate liberals of the 1930's who were willing to side with Moscow simply because any foe of the Nazis had to be considered an ally...

...I know now what I will, what I shall, what I must do...

...Thus he said: "Out of hatred to the champions of Nationalism I could almost turn to loving the Communists...

...They have forced me to take to the sword," he sighed in 1826...

...Had not Heine been a Jew, the Nazis would have found quotations that make him appear a protagonist of Teutonic chauvinism...