Last year, Tino Chrupalla, leader of the AfD, Germany’s largest “far-right” party, was interviewed by a young student for a TV program. The topic was education, educational policy—and Chrupalla talked about the decreasing level of literary education in Germany, particularly regarding in-depth knowledge of German poets—something I, for the record, also think is an important topic. The student, listening intently, then asked Chrupalla a question: “Who is your favourite German poet?”—and Chrupalla, a trained house painter without higher education, blanked: he could not come up with a name. The leader of the party that vowed to “protect and restore” German culture could not come up with the name of a single German poet, in a country that calls itself “the land of the poets and thinkers” (“Land der Dichter und Denker”, a phrase every child knows, a central element of our shared culture), a country in which every town has a copious amount of streets named after our greatest minds and word-smiths, a country in which children are made to learn poems by heart every single year in school—9th grade, the 23 stanzas of Schiller’s The Cranes of Ibycus. A country also in which even the most incompetent politicians (and we are cursed with many of them) can be entrusted to say “a few reasonable words”, to speak with Goethe, on their favourite poet when asked in public—as Peter Altmeier, from the CDU, the great rival of the AfD, was recently able to demonstrate. Of course the media echo on Chrupalla’s blunder was damning, gloating, mocking—I myself, in recounting the story here, further add to it. A few voices mentioned the “class aspect” of it: Chrupalla, a working class man, clearly had not received the education he himself campaigns for others to receive, in some way proving his point—but that is another topic. A few days later, when confronted again with the question, Chrupalla was able to conjure up the name of Heinrich Heine (1799-1856)—a good choice on the face of it, a safe choice (but “safe choices” are good choices when we deal with the greats); Heine is widely-recognized as one of our greatest poets, one whose poetry is perhaps second only to Goethe and Schiller in terms of popular recognizability. “On the face of it”: The favourite poet of the leader of a “far-right” party is the liberal, satirical, critical, and Jewish-born Heine, an exile with a conflicted relationship to Germany, the favourite poet of Karl Marx? “If I think of Germany in the night, / I am jolted from my sleep”, two of Heine’s most famous lines. A strange choice for Chrupalla; conservative or “right-wing” “forces” in Germany have historically disliked Heine—mostly for these “political” reasons.
I myself, and this is the actual topic of this little article, have long had a conflicted relationship with Heine, and when I grant him the title of “one of our greatest poets” I do so with some hesitance, and perhaps against my own long-held opinion, “for the sake of critical objectivity”. He is great, his lyrics are among the most perfect in any language, but I could still never like him much. Part of that is of course a certain infantile contrarianism—Heine is very popular, a “school poet”, one you see quoted by everyone from the local baker up to the chancellor, one you are forced to learn poems by in school—but these things are also true for Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, etc, and I never had any issue loving them. It was Heine’s popularity in conjunction with the relative obscurity of another poet I love deeply, August von Platen (1796-1835). Platen, the aristocratic humanist, the classicist, the man who experimented with Arabic and Persian metres, the formalist—he was a poetic and in some sense also political rival of Heine, of Heine the romantic, the bourgeois, the critic, the anti-formalist. Their somewhat public argument about Platen’s “orientalism” ended quite ugly: Heine publically denounced Platen as “gay” (true), and Platen denounced Heine as a Jew (true)—but Jew beats gay and so Platen fell into obscurity, only appreciated by a few writers “in the know”; Benn, who loved Platen, later said that “only me and Thomas Mann read him”, echoing Hebbel’s remark on Hamann: “A writer only read by Goethe and Hegel must be interesting”. I loved Platen—and so I was a partisan against Heine. Foolish—foolish also was to assume that Heine had always been unquestionably and uncritically popular, an assumption that requires rectification, as Heine in reality is a rather exceptional figure, by which I mean: he is a figure whose “place in the world” of German letters is very interesting and elucidating.
So—where does he belong? In some sense he “ruled” the 19th century, rarely ever has a German poet achieved such a broad and direct influence in his own day—lest we forget that while Goethe was revered like no other, his greatness made imitation practically impossible, and so his direct influence was quite limited; he had no “students”. But Heine did: at least three or four generations of German poets lived with Heine, were taught by reading Heine, imitated Heine. Half a century of Heineian sentiments—but during this whole time the “official” critical line was polemic and negative. Indeed, Heine was marked as a “defiler of the fatherland” by the most bone-headed Prussian censors; a good deal of the lexicon of German antisemitic phrases comes from the bureaucratic-critical struggle against this influential poet—but even those “conservative forces” could not withstand the quotability and veracity of Heine’s satire, the beauty and musicality of his lyrics; Heine: condemned and secretely loved, censored and admired, at least in the times of the Kaiserreich (1871-1918). It would be a falsification of history to claim that Heine’s ubiquity was brought to an end by the Nazis, as some public-facing critics like to do. Already after the first world war the cultural focus shifted, the 19th century, the century of Heine—was gone, irrecoverably so, and with it the “romantic” conception of the German lyric poem, of the Lied (few poets have been set to music as often as Heine). Heine did not fall out of fashion and favour for political reasons—but because poetry, the way poetry was conceived, changed. The generations that hailed Heine’s verse as the epitome of the poetical, could only do so by disregarding Platen, Brentano, Mörike, even Goethe to an extent—but most of all Hölderlin. To be infatuated with Heine’s “Book of Songs” meant ignoring the “true stock of German verse”—a new canon formed. It is hard to quickly explain this shift—the break that only started to form around 1900. Liliencron (1844-1909), a poet now little-read (but to quote Benn: “back then Liliencron was my god”), was among the first to engender this break; it was he that “killed” the last vestiges of Heineism in the early Rilke; it was him who instigated what one could say was a return to the free-rhythms of the early Goethe, and, unbeknownst to him at the time, also to the late Hölderlin—the irony: that Liliencron’s move forward was also a move backward, re-volution, the condition of all modernism. Liliencron’s work brought Droste, Storm, and Keller—overlooked in the “age of Heine”—to the critical eye. And so Germany “relearned” poetry, what poetry was and could be—more than “mere love lyrics” and “political jokes”—and most of all: nothing that needed to be “useful”, “quotable”, “witty”, no salon poetry, no cruiseships on the Rhine with people singing Heine songs for “entertainment”. The rediscovery of Hölderlin through the George-student Hellingrath showed that the highest poetic aspiration was not to be the (folk-)song but the sermon, not music but speech—oration; the rise of Nietzsche’s popularity coincides with this. George's and Wolfskehl’s famous anthology “The Century of Goethe” exemplifies the results of this entire development: of Eichendorff not the popular songs but the highly formalist sonnets were included, and of Heine—basically nothing. The rise of Hölderlin was seen as a purification of language, and also as something that required a philosophical treatment of poetry, more so than a broader philological or literary-historical treatment. The “age of interpretation”: that Rilke’s verse—so musical, so playful—would become a concern for philosophers, and, through a few steps of deracination, a matter of “self-help”-books, lies also in this development. Heine’s work did not lend itself to the philosophical interests of the age the way Hölderlin, Goethe, Rilke—or Platen—did, and so he was “lost”, temporarily forgotten. After the second world war, there were attempts to repopularize Heine by way of his political sentiments, the liberal cosmopolitan, etc; but these attempts initially failed, concerns were different. It was only, I think, through the growing popularity of more “light-hearted” and lyrical poets like Erich Kästner—in some sense a true successor of Heine—that he regained popularity, and that at the same time as Schiller’s reascent (Schiller had been badly abused as a phrasebook by the bourgeoisie of the 19th-century and fell out of fashion towards the end of the age, despite the attempts of people like Mehring; Nietzsche’s scathing and frankly unfair polemics against him rest on this false reception). There are, perhaps we can say that, two “lineages” or rather “types” in German poetry—we may call them “high” and “low”, not as judgements of quality but to indicate their orientation, their poetological goal: the lineage of “high poetry”: Hölderlin, Platen, George, Benn, as examples—poetry only for itself, a heightened conception, the sacrality of language, classicity; the lineage of “low poetry”—Heine, Herwegh, Fontane, Brecht, Kästner—poetry with a “social goal”, “common language”, the popular sentiment, poetry as a civic duty, poetry also as cultural critique, etc. That is obviously very broad and schematic, to the point of inaccuracy: Heine and Brecht wrote wonderfully “transcendent” poems, and Benn was not above political remarks and jokes. But as a heuristic we can let it stand. If you wonder where I would place Goethe and Schilller—they both wrote poems that fit either. My sympathy, however, has usually always been with the former; the “true nature” of poetry in the “heightened conception”—but as I grow older I can see the merits—and more importantly: the necessity—of the simple lyrics of Heine, or the war-songs and elegies of Brecht, the little love stories and tragedies of Kästner—they are as much a legitimate part of poetry as Hölderlin’s hymns on the absence of the gods, George’s invocations of the poetic law, and Benn’s “drunken floods” of mankind. In Goethe’s divan, simple almost limerick-ish poems on being drunk and jovial can be followed by deep neo-platonist meditations and theological subjects, there is no contradiction—if only you contain multitudes. The turn-of-the-century discussions on the “true nature” of poetry, which sought to purify poetry and excised Heine—did they not make the same mistake as the Heineists preceding them? If loving Heine means forgetting Hölderlin—then it would be a mistake in turn to have “loving Hölderlin” mean “forgetting Heine”, to be one-sided, to be what Jünger would call a “half-man”. These dualisms (the irony of me constructing one above not withstanding)—let us also recall Kommerell’s infamous “a youth without Goethe is a youth with Hölderlin”—only serve to limit our appreciation; and this I do not think, as a critic of this view may mention, is akin to the “dull liberal sentiment that thinks all things tolerable” that Goethe mentions. In any case—the whole of poetry or nothing, that is my view.
As these discussions on the “true nature” of poetry, so common in the first half of the 20th century, faded, the critical “stigma” fell off Heine, and as the attempts to politicise him in favour of the new “republic” faded, the political stigma fell off him—and he returned to the broad popularity he had enjoyed in the 19th century, though of course without the influence or the weight behind that position. I was born into the age of Heine’s renewed popularity—and as I said: I thought this had always been so. I hope the previous excursion showed that his place is complicated, the story of his reception varied and worth studying—and that my initial schoolboyish assumption was wrong. Upon reading his “Book of Songs” again recently, and browsing through some of his other collections as well as his prose (most of which is very excellent), I found also that the way he is popularly seen is reductive and unfair to his actual merits as a poet—which, of course, is a common thing with major poets: that everyone thinks they know them by way of cultural osmosis and ubiquity, but in-depth knowledge is rare—here Chrupalla, the AfD-man from the beginning of the text, is, as I indicated already, broadly right. How many people in England or the US can say something intelligent about Shakespeare, something that is not platitude?—To do so requires a certain level of engagement that is increasingly rare. The whole of poetry—as I mentioned—also means: to go see with your own eyes, to go hear with your own ears, to let go of popular conception and infantile prejudice, to actually read the great “names”, to make them productive for you. Disdain, rejection, ignorance are not productive, something Ezra Pound, though a discriminatory critic, teaches, I think. It is curious but not surprising then that Pound, despite his general ignorance of German literature, saw the merit of Heine and translated some of his lyrics. Pound himself had a complicated relationship to one of the greats of his own language—Whitman, a poet also often, to this day, rejected for his “democratism”, his perceived politics—but Pound came around to Whitman’s greatness, writing a poem called “A Pact” to make a symbolic truce. I would find it fitting to alter that poem to make a statement on my relation to Heine, whom in recent years I’ve come to appreciate more and more:
I make truce with you, Harry Heine— I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root— Let there be commerce between us.
Let there be commerce between us: even someone who in his own writing has no interest in the “lyrical” of Heineian conception—can try to learn from him, seize from him what is brilliant (and there is much), carve it, make it his own. We shall learn from the whole of poetry, the whole of our tradition—or not learn at all.
To close, a lyric from Heine’s “Book of Songs”—in what I find is a pretty agreeable translation; a poem that for the sake of this article one should read by way of Schiller’s “Maiden from Strange Parts” (one of my favourite poems), in which the “maiden”, the “lady” is poetry, or the muse, itself:
The years they come and go, The races drop in the grave, Yet never the love doth so Which here in my heart I have. Could I see thee but once, one day, And sink down so on my knee, And die in thy sight while I say, "Lady, I love but thee!"