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A Heine for All Seasons
Stuart Schoffman
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BORN IN D�SSELDORF IN 1797 to a Jewish merchant family, Harry (Chaim ben Shimshon) Heine evolved into the best-loved German poet of all time, largely thanks to the musical settings of his lyric poems by Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn and other composers. Among these is �In the Rhine, the Holy River,� from Heine�s immensely popular �Buch der Lieder� (�Book of Songs,� 1827), included in Schumann�s song cycle �Dichterliebe� (�A Poet�s Love�): In the �mighty� Cologne cathedral, wrote Heine, �there hangs a picture/ Painted on golden leather� of the Virgin Mary: �Into the wil-derness of my life/ It has shed its friendly beams.� Now consider the liner notes to a Columbia Masterworks 78 RPM recording of �Dichterliebe� from the 1930s: �In contemporary German editions of Schumann�s songs, Heine�s name is left out, or pasted over with a strip of paper.�
It didn�t matter a whit to the Nazis that in 1825 Harry Heine, to enter the legal profession (which he despised and rapidly abandoned) was baptized a Lutheran and given the name Christian Johann Heinrich. His works were prominent among the 25,000 books by �non-German� authors burned by students in a titanic bonfire on May 10, 1933, in the huge plaza in the heart of Berlin between Humboldt University and the German State Opera. Today, an installation by Israeli artist Micha Ullman marks the spot: a small white underground cell, visible through a window in the pavement, with empty bookshelves along its walls. And beside it, a plaque with the most familiar of Heine�s uncannily accurate political prophecies: �Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned as well.� Many have quoted that chilling line, but few are aware of its source: A verse play called �Almansor� that Heine wrote when he was 23, about the persecution of Muslims by the Spanish Inquisition.
Most scholars agree that the young poet�s choice of material was thin camouflage for his main concern: anti-Semitism. Captivated by Jewish Spain and the doubleness of the Marrano persona, Heine was a merciless satirist, inveterate ironist, and master of literary and rhetorical disguise, and thus what the experts agree upon less is the extent to which Heine (who famously claimed in 1850 that he had not �returned� to Judaism because he had never left it) actually identified and expressed himself as a Jew.
The American scholar Jeffrey L. Sammons, author of the classic books �Heine: The Elusive Poet� (1969) and �Heine: A Modern Biography� (1979), wrote of Heine�s �poisoned bias toward the Jewish faith,� and snippily dismissed the �long tradition of adapting Heine to whatever Jewish position happens to be held by the commentator in question.� In 1983, Oxford professor S.S. Prawer published �Heine�s Jewish Comedy,� an 841-page academic tome that marshals encyclopedic knowledge of Heine�s immense output of poetry, journalism, essays, and letters to provide a nuanced, dispassionate account of the writer�s intricate ambivalences.
Curiously enough, �Heine� (1988), by Cambridge scholar Ritchie Robertson, a volume in the respected �Jewish Thinkers� series edited by Arthur Hertzberg, devotes 75 of its 117 pages to Heine�s critique of the July Monarchy in France (he exiled himself to Paris in 1831 and remained there until his death in 1856), his relationship to idealist philosophy (he studied under Hegel at the University of Berlin) and trenchant critique of German Romanticism and nationalism, his embrace of Saint-Simonian utopian socialism and friendship with Karl Marx (who made famous use of Heine�s description of Christianity as �spiritual opium�), his advocacy of �Sensualism� over �Spiritualism,� and other central aspects of Heine�s thought, all of which are also covered in Yigal Lossin�s fascinating new study. Only in a final chapter entitled �Between Religions� does Robertson finally get around to the revolutionary poet�s Jewishness, and that principally in the context of Heine�s withering assault on religion in general.
EACH, IN OTHER words, to his own Jewish Heine. Now comes Lossin, whose �Heine: A Dual Life� gives us the tart-tongued poet as an Israeli culture hero, indeed a forerunner of secular Zionism whose entire biography and oeuvre are laced with Jewish import and intention. �His ideas,� writes Lossin, �were nothing less than the beginning of a new synthesis of Judaism.� Lossin, a well-known Israeli television documentarian whose acclaimed 19-part series �Pillar of Fire� (1981) traced the history of Zionism, tried for many years to persuade the Poo-Bahs at Israel Television to produce a documentary about Heine, but to no avail. Lossin�s brief account of the affair in the introduction to his book suggests that this was primarily because of Heine�s apostasy. So Lossin turned instead to prose, still holding out hope that his book will someday become a film. In the meanwhile, he has created a thoroughly enjoyable and gracefully written book, rich in anecdote and narrative, with a filmmaker�s eye for the telling moment. Drawing heavily on Sammons, Prawer and other secondary sources, Lossin has also delved deeply into Heine�s writings � relying chiefly on Hebrew translations � to produce, for all its hagiography, parochialism and tendentiousness, a worthy addition to the massive literature about Heine. (Some 200 scholarly articles, reports Lossin, are published every year.)
An active member, in his student days, of the Berlin-based Verein f�r Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews), Heine deplored the defeatist and assimilationist leanings of its leaders, who, as Lossin puts it, were �performing an autopsy� on Judaism as they contemplated its imminent disappearance. (This was no less true for Leopold Zunz, today considered the father of modern Jewish studies, than for the Verein�s founder, Eduard Gans, who converted to Christianity and became an eminent law professor.) Heine, Lossin argues repeatedly, was contemptuous of attempts to dilute or �Protestantize� Judaism. He referred to Reform Jews as �corn-cutters� who �have tried to cure the body of Judaism from its disagreeable skin growth� and were thereby bleeding it to death, and mocked those who �make a tallis out of the lamb of God.� For Heine � as for Lossin and so many secular Israelis � the Orthodox Jew is vastly more honorable and authentic.
Heine�s �The Baths of Lucca� (1829) � which contains his famous pronouncement that Judaism �isn�t a religion at all! It�s a calamity!� � is generally read as a scathing satire of German Jews. For Lossin, however, this is where Heine, �four years after his conversion, reveals his inner feelings publicly for the first time. He denounces apostates, ridicules Reform Jews, and reveals an ambivalent, proto-Zionist attitude to the old-ghetto Jew. The story of Moses Lump [an Orthodox ragman from Hamburg], filled with nostalgia for the joy of Shabbat, gives the lie to the claim that his remark �Judaism is a calamity� is an expression of Jewish self-hatred.� Instead, �it expresses empathy, the pain of identification [with] what he called . . . den grossen Judenschmerz, the great Jewish pain.�
Heine�s best-known overtly Jewish work is the novel �The Rabbi of Bacherach,� a tale of medieval Jewish persecution that he began in 1825 and published, in unfinished form, in 1840, in response to the notorious Damascus blood libel. For Lossin, �The Rabbi of Bacherach� is an early call for Jewish self-defense, indeed a �Canaanite manifesto� that anticipates the Jewish nationalism of the Hebrew Zionist writers M.Y. Berdyczewski and Saul Tchernichowsky. �This was a revolutionary breakthrough in Jewish national consciousness,� insists Lossin. �Heine scholars, many of whom were assimilated Jews, could not understand it,� he argues plausibly, �since they were locked into a conception that denies the national essence of Jewishness ... They were not familiar with the ideas of Ahad Ha�am, or the poetry of Bialik ... if they had been, they would have discovered hidden under the wings [of modern Hebrew literature] the key to the riddle of Heinrich Heine.�
LOSSIN�S HEINE IS NO LESS THE cosmopolitan, ceaselessly quotable European iconoclast than the one we meet in other biographies. Married to a Parisian shopgirl who knew no German and could not read his works, he was a friend of Dumas and Balzac, and the best man at Berlioz�s wedding. He preceded Nietzsche with the notion (developed in his 1835 tract �Religion and Philosophy in Germany�) of the �death of God,� and, ironically, furnished the anti-Semite Richard Wagner with verbal ammunition against Felix Mendelssohn, whose ardent embrace of Christianity Heine disdained.
Heine, for Lossin, was �the first modern Jewish journalist,� and also �the first to prophesy the Holocaust.� But most of all, for Lossin, Heine is ehad mishelanu, one of us, a man with whom the enlightened Israeli of today can identify: �Heine the apostate, paradoxically enough, was the great liberator of Jewish feeling, in a period when �kosher� Jews suppressed that feeling lest it interfere with their struggle for civil rights. In many ways he can be seen as a psychological archetype of future Zionist revolutionaries ... [His was] not the voice of an Orthodox Jew nor of a Reform Jew, but a Jew of the third type, in whose view Judaism is not a religious faith, but mainly a historical essence.�
Throughout his life, Heine confined his most candidly Jewish sentiments to letters to family and close Jewish friends, which, as Lossin demonstrates, are filled with such Hebrew and Yiddish words as �Ganef� (thief), �Rachmones� (mercy) and �Gojim und Reschoim� (anti-Semites.) But it was on his deathbed � upon which he lingered for years, the victim of a mysterious paralytic disease � that he produced his most profoundly felt Jewish works, a series of long poems called �Hebrew Melodies,� a title he borrowed from Lord Byron�s collection of 1815.
�In Arabia�s book of fables,� begins the poem �Princess Sabbath,� we see princes transformed by witches into �hairy monsters.� So too has Israel, writes Heine, been turned into a dog. �But on every Friday evening/At the twilight hour, the magic/ Fades abruptly, and the dog/ Once more is a human being.� Now the Jew � a character akin to �Moses Lump� from �The Baths of Lucca� � goes to the synagogue and �Sings out loud in exultation/ Lecho Daudi Likras Kalle!�
The climax of �Princess Sabbath� is an astonishing paean to Jewish food, specifically cholent, that gloriously overcooked Sabbath stew. Sing along, if you will, to the triumphant melody from the fourth movement of Beethoven�s Ninth: �Schalet, shining gleam from Heaven/ Daughter of Elysium! / Schiller�s ode would sound like this if/ He had ever tasted schalet./ Schalet is the food of Heaven,/ And the recipe was given/ By the Lord himself to Moses/ One fine day upon Mount Sinai.�
And now hear the opening lines of the poem �Jehuda ben Halevy,� which Lossin believes �reflect in a wondrous and chilling fashion [Heine�s] physical state�: �Dry with thirst, oh let my tongue cleave/ To my palate � let my right hand / Wither off, if I forget thee/ Ever, O Jerusalem � / Words and melody keep buzzing / In my head today, unceasing . . .� �Heine�s great Zionist poem,� speculates Lossin, was written under the influence of opium, which the dying poet took for his unyielding pain. Certainly some critics, wedded to a Heine of their own persuasion, will regard Lossin�s unabashedly Israeli claim on Heine as a kind of wishful, pseudo-scholarly hallucination, but such an ungenerous view does not begin to do justice to this eloquent and stimulating book.
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