foudebassan (foudebassan) wrote in gedichte, @ 2008-04-20 23:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | heine |
Heinrich Heine
(1797-1856) was born in Düsseldorf to a modest Jewish family. He attended high school, but left before graduation to apprentice as a merchant with his very wealthy uncle. He lacked both the talent and the desire to make money and therefore spend most of his time writing instead. His uncle was a bit disappointed but was fond of him and took to subsidising his literary efforts until his death. Heine however managed to fall in love with his cousin, which prompted his uncle to pay for his going to university far, far away from his daughter. Heine got a PhD in law from the university of Berlin, wrote a lot, and was eventually promised a professorship in Bavaria. At this point, however, his got into what is politely called a dispute with a man from a much higher social status. It got very ugly and very personal as he bore the brunt of lots of antisemitic attempts, despite his having converted to Protestantism, hence his Christian name - the first name he got at birth was actually Harry (!). Heine got back at him by outing his homosexuality, which prompted the other man's going into exile in Italy, but the Bavarian king changed his mind about giving Heine the professorship in the business, so he moved to France instead.
There he married an illiterate, Catholic shoe-shop attendant, to whom he taught to read and write, but who never spoke a single word of German. When asked what she thought of her husband's activities, she answered that he wrote a lot of poems, but surely they couldn't be any good - he never seemed to be satisfied with them. It is very odd to think she probably never realised she'd married one of the sharpest minds of her time. But he seemed happy enough with the situation and only ever left France twice after that, both times to visit his ageing mother. Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen was written after one of these trips.
He was friends with Marx and Engels and was one of the very first intellectuals to include the notions of poverty and class action into poetry - the poem Die Schlesischen Weber comes to mind. He also incorporated everyday language into poetry (as obvious in today's poem), as opposed to the more pompous, heavily educated verse of his fellow-Romantics. Heine was, however, at no point overtly revolutionary. In 1848 he even sneered at the mob (which did include people like George Sand or Lamartine...), saying it was nothing but anarchy. In fact he defined himself as being independant from politics and interested only in his writing. In this sense he is very much the ancestor of contemporary journalism, that tries (or pretends it tries) to be objective.
From 1844 onwards his situation deteriorated. His uncle died and with him his main source of income disappeared. He also became very ill, to the point where he wasn't able to leave his bed after 1849. Neither that nor partial paralysy nor blindness stopped him from writing (or rather, dictating things). We don't know what the illness actually was. Heine thought it was syphillis and he was probably right, but there are theories saying it might've been tuberculosis or even lead poisoning.
He was very much controversed in his lifetime, and that didn't stop with his death. People mostly disliked him because he was Jewish, and refused to take insults with replying to them (usually in far more effective and talented a manner than the original slur), which eventually led to his works being burned in 1933. There is a curious legend according to which the Nazis banned him from schoolbooks, but that some of his poems (including today's Lorelei) were just too beautiful to get the chop, so that they got published with the mention "unknown author". It is probably untrue, but it's a nice legend. He never really came back into fashion in the Federal Republic, but the Democratic Republic capitalised on his friendship with Marx and contributed to his being read again. Even though he is now recognised as one of Germany's most important poets in Germany itself, he is more famous abroad. Probably because he never was all that complimentary about his homeland.
The Lorelei can be found here, avec traduction française en bonus.
There is of course a lot of morbid fascination about verse 8 (one single word making almost an entire verse? you really have to be German to do that and make it sound nice). He is by no means the first to have written about the Lorelei, she's an old legend from the Rhine valley, but his is the prettiest version. Her song probably represents the poem itself, to the irony would be that if you let yourself be taken in by its sly versified charm, you're probably neglecting something a lot more important from real life. So, stop reading! Go back to work!
For more liberal a dose of sarcasm, look at Bei des Nachtwächters Ankunft in Paris (#6, scroll downwards a bit). A nightwatchman comes back to France after a trip to Germany. "How are things going back home?" he's asked, and he answers that all is for the best: freedom is best shown in the dark recesses of one's heart and isn't made to be exhibited around, and anyway all publications are soon to be forbidden, so censorship will die from itself! Hurray! Or there's Teutoburger Wald - wherein he celebrates at length the victory of the heroic, Germanic Hermann (Harmonius) over the evil Romans who would otherwise have corrupted the country. The poem ends on a Germanised Latin word.
Am still unsure about whom it'll be tomorrow. There's Holz (whom I don't know all that well), George (whom I don't like all that much), Hofmannstahl (whom I've never understood) or Rilke, for whom I have an irrational but no less virulent hatred, but who's nonetheless One Of These People you can't just skip. Choices, choices. Any preferences on your side?