\Vhere are those days when 'Young Germany' in its 'beautiful sublime' was theoretically liberating the Fatherland, and in the spheres of Pure Reason and Art was finishing with the world of tradition and prejudiceJ Heine disliked the brightly lit, frosty height upon which Goethe majestically slumbered in his old age, dreaming the clever but not quite coherent dreams of the second part of Faust; but even Heine never let himself sink below the level of the bookshop; it was all still the aula of the university.
the litclass="underline" 'rary circles, the journalistic parochial gatherings with their tittle-tattle and squabbles, with their bookish Shylocks, with thPir Giittingen high priests of philology and bishops of jurisprudence at Halle or Bonn. Neith<'r Heine nor his circle knew the people, and the people did not know them. Neither the sorrow nor the joy of the lowly fields rose up to those heights; to understand the moan of humanity in the quaking-bogs of to-day they had to transpose it into Latin manners and customs and to
� Correspondance inrditr dr Hrnri Heinr, 2 ,·ols. ( Paris, 1 866-67) , containing the corr<>spondenu• of Heine, not preYiously published, for the years 1 82 1 -42. (A.S.)
The Later Years
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arrive a t their thought through the Gracchi and the proletariat of Rome.
The graduates of a sublimated world, they sometimes emerged into life, beginning like Faust with the beer-shop and always, like him, with a spirit of scholastic denial, which with its reflections prevented them as it did Faust from simply looking and seeing. That is why they immediately hastened back from living sources to the sources of history; there they felt more at horne.
Their pursuits were not only not work but were not science
-
either, but rather erudition-and, above all, literature.
Heine at times revolted against the atmosphere of archives and of analytical enjoyment, for he wanted something different, but his letters are completely German letters of that German period, on the first page of which stands Bettina the child and on the last Rahel the Jewess.3 vVe breathe more freely when we meet in his letters passionate outbursts of Judaism, for then Heine is genuinely carried away; but he quickly lost his warmth and turned cold towards Judaism, and was angry with it for his own by no means disinterested faithlessness.
The revolution of 1 830 and Heine's moving afterwards to Paris did much for his progress. 'Der Pan ist gestorben!' he says with enthusiasm, and hastens to the city to which I once hastened with so morbid a passion-to Paris; he wanted to see the 'great people' and 'grey-headed Lafayette' riding about on his grey horse. But literature soon gets the upper hand ; his letters are filled, inside and on the envelope, with literary gossip and personalities alternating with complaining against fate about his health, his nerves, his low humour, through which there shines an immense, shocking vanity. And then Heine takes on a false note. His coldly inflated, rhetorical Bonapartism becomes as repulsive as the squeamish horror of the well-washed Hamburg Jew before the tribunes of the people when he meets them not in books but in real life. He could not stomach the fact that the workmen's meetings were not staged in the prim setting of the study and salon of Varnhagen, 'the fine-china' Varnhagen von Ense, as he himself called him.
His feeling of his own dignity, however, did not go beyond 3 Bettina von Arnim, the author of a book well known in its time: Gaethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde; Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, the author of Galerie von Bildnissen aus Rahels Umgang und Briefwechsel. Heine was a frequent visitor at the literary salon of Rahel, who took the young poet under her wing. (A.S.) See Hannah Arendt's book, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess ( London, 1 95 7 ) . (D.M. )
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
598
having clean hands and being free from the smell of tobacco. It is hard to blame him for this. This feeling is not a German nor a Jewish one, and unhappily not a Russian one either.
Heine coquettes with the Prussian government, curries favour
\vith it through the ambassador and through Varnhagen, and then abuses it.4 He coquPttPs with the King of Bavaria and showers sarcasms on him ; he more than coquettes with the 'high'
German Diet, and tries to redeem his abject behaviour to it with biting taunts.
Does not all this explain why the scholastic and revolutionary flare-up in Germany so quickly came to grief in 1 848? It, too, was merely a literary effort, and it vanished like a rocket let off in Krollgarden: it had its professor-leaders and its generals from the Faculty of Philology; it had its rank and file in Jack-boots and berets, students who betrayed the revolutionary cause as soon as it passed from metaphysical valour and literary daring into the market-place.
Apart from a fe\v working men who looked in for a moment, or were captivated, the people did not follow these pale Fuhrer, but just held aloof from them.
'HO\v can you put up with all Bismarck's insults?' I asked a year before the war of a dPputy of the Left from Berlin at the very time v1-·hen the count was getting his hand in, in order to knock out the teeth of Grabow and Co. more violently.
'We have done everything we could, inncrhalb the Constitution.'
'Well, then, you should follow the example of the government and try ausscrhalb.'
'How do you mean? Make an appeal to the people? Stop paying taxes? . . . That's a dream . . . . Not a single man would follow us or make a move to support us . . . . And we should provide a fresh triumph for Bismarck by ourselves giving evidence of our weakness.'
'Wf'll, then, I shall say as your president does at each slap in the face: "Shout three times Es lcbc dcr Konig and go home peaceably ! " '
4 Did not the kept genius o� the Prussian King do the same? His twofold hypostasis drew down upon him a caustic remark. After 1 8+8 the K ing of Ha nover, an ultra-Consen·ative and Feudalist. arrived at Potsdam. On the palacP staircase lH' was met hy various courtiers. and among them Humboldt in a l ivery dress-coat. The malicious king stopped and said to him
"·i th a smilP: 'lmmer dPrs,•lbr. immrr Republikaner und immer im Vor::.immer drs Palostrs' (Always the same-always republican and always in the antichamber of the palace).
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L I V I i\" G F L 0 \V E H S-T H E L :\. S T
0 F T H E M 0 H I C :\. N S Q U :\. \Y S
'LET us Go to the Bal de !'Opera; nO\v is just the right time, halfpast one,' I said, getting up from the table in a little room of the Cafe Anglais, to a Russian artist who was always coughing and never quite sober. I wanted some open air and noise ; and besides I was rather afraid of a long tete-a-tJte \vith my Claude Lorrain from the Neva.
'Let us go,' he said, and poured himself out another glass of brandy.
This was at the beginning of 1 849, at the moment of delusive convalescence between two bouts of sickness when one still wanted, or thought that one wanted, to play the fool sometimes and be merry.