THE GERMANIC REVIEW

Heine in the Bronx

PAUL REITTER

etween the Griinderzeit wave of Bismarck monuments and the Kriegerdenkmal debates that arose during World War I, there were the Heine monument controversies. Those controversies, that is, the debates over whether Germany should play permanent host to a Heinrich Heine monument, invite inquiry for a number of reasons. Their cultural importance in late Wilhelmine Germany was enormous: luminaries such as Max Liebermann, Alfred Kerr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann, Franz Mehring, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Empress Elisabeth of Austria, to name just a few, participated in them vigorously. More importantly, the controversies prompted profound and, indeed, seminal reflections on the process of public memorialization, both in late Wilhelmine Germany and in general. When, for example, the incendiary anti-Semitic "literary critic" Adolf Bartels claimed that a Heine monument would be acceptable in Germany only if it bore an inscription marking Heine as a Jewish, rather than a German, cultural phenomenon, the Viennese essayist Karl Kraus responded by articulating the connection between the politics of memory and identity politics with scatalogical force, and in ways that anticipated contemporary discussions of Holocaust memorials. The Heine monument controversies led to further instances of theoretical prescience as well, or so I will argue. Yet they have remained hidden in the shadow cast by the massive historical frame that surrounds them: again, the Bismarck monuments that immediately predate them and the Kriegerdenkmal debates that followed them. I. Heine monument controversies are not particular to the late Wilhelmine era. They continued on in Germany, stretching through the postwar era to the protracted, and ultimately successful, campaign in early 1970s to name the University of Diisseldorf "Heinrich Heine Universitat." Here, however, the phrase "the Heine monument controversies" refers exclusively to the bitterly contentious fight over Germany's first Heine monument or, in other words, it refers to the urHeine monument controversies. These controversies began in the late 1880s and concluded with the unveiling of the Frankfurt Heine monument in 1913.
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If Frankfurt, the site of the first Heine monument in Germany, is where the controversies found their final resolution, Dusseldorf is their point of departure. In 1887, with the centenary of Heine's birth looming on the horizon, several prominent denizens of Heine's home city came together to form a "committee for the erection of a Heine monument." The committee promptly encountered both success and resistance. Empress Elisabeth of Austria signed on as a member almost immediately and offered to donate 50,000 marks, provided the commission for the memorial go to Ernst Herter, a well-known public works sculptor. On the other hand, an array of fulminating nationalist and anti-Semitic demagogues wasted no time in challenging the committee's designs. Writing in the prestigious journal Die Kunstwart in early 1888, Franz Sandvoss excoriated Heine as an unpatriotic Jew who, far from deserving a monument, deserved to be regarded with contempt. Conrad Alberti countered with a measured defense of Heine's "Denkmalwiirdigkeit." And thus the Heine monument controversies were born. Interestingly, Die Kunstwarfs readiness to publish vulgar invectives against Heine and his prospective monument enraged that great critic of monumentalization, Friedrich Nietzsche. Citing, among other things, the journal's betrayal or "Preisgabe" of Heine, Nietzsche canceled his subscription to Die Kunstwart in spring 1888.' But the most fateful opposition to the Dusseldorf monument came from a thoroughly lowbrow periodical, Georg Schonerer's newspaper Unverfalschte deutsche Worte. The anti-Semitic attacks that Schonerer launched from its pages seemed to land directly in the Hofburg. For soon after he began to mobilize his verbal violence against the monument, Elisabeth pulled out of the Dusseldorf project, with her 50,000 marks and invaluable legitimating effect in tow. She left behind only a vague reference to Heine's caustic treatment of the Wittlesbachs and Hohenzollerns to justify her move. Elisabeth's abrupt abdication threw the Dusseldorf committee for the erection of a Heine monument into a terminal disarray. However, Sissy, as the empress was called, did manage to guide to completion what might well be regarded as the world's first major Heine monument. After abandoning Herter and Diisseldorf, she commissioned the Danish sculptor Louis Hasselriis to portray Heine as kind of Lazarus figure for her palace on Corfu. Hasselriis's sculpture was triumphantly unveiled in 1891, but it remained on Corfu for only a relatively short time. When Wilhelm II bought the Corfu property in 1910 (Elisabeth was assassinated in 1898), he got rid of Hasselriis's Heine quickly and unceremoniously. For years the monument's whereabouts were unknown. Recently, however, it was discovered standing dilapidated and defaced in a remote corner of Toulon, in the south of France. To come back to Dusseldorf, the committee for the erection of a Heine monument had remained sanguine even after Elisabeth's departure, and despite increasingly voluble opposition. It set about raising new funds. And, rejecting the design Herter had developed according to the empress's wishes, the committee called for a monument that would not actually represent Heine. The committee

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was not seeking to avoid graven images of Heine out of respect for the Old Testament prohibition against graven images. The hope here was that the prospect of a Heine-less Heine monument would mollify the opposition. It did not. In January 1893, shortly after it had approved Herter's model for what had now become a "Lorelei Fountain" Heine memorial, the committee was peremptorily forced to abandon its project. A special commission of the mayor's office had decreed that Diisseldorf could not house a Heine monument for reasons of decorum. What really happened was that the city council buckled under the pressure of anti-Semitic agitation. Hinting obliquely at this sad fact in its curiously formulated official explanation, the mayor's commission decreed, "Under the present conditions the effect of a Heine monument would be inappropriate." [Die Erwirkung eines Heine-Denkmals ware nicht angezeigt.) Mainz's mayor Georg Oechsner, a liberal '48er and passionate Heine aficionado, had been waiting in the wings, and when the Diisseldorf campaign collapsed, he stepped in with alacrity, offering Mainz as an adoptive home for Herter's orphaned "Lorelei Fountain." As soon as word of his plan got out, the horn of protest sounded again, even louder than before. Die Kreuzzeitung claimed that a Heine monument in Mainz would be a victory for "Weltjudentum," while extremist organizations threatened the city with violent reprisals should it carry out its plan to memorialize Heine. The pro-monument faction seemed at first to enjoy the upper hand, as Maximilian Harden and other well-known critics came to Heine's defense. But the Heine monument movement again proved unable to recover from the loss of a charismatic leader. For when Oechsner developed a debilitating illness in the spring of 1894, his cause went down with him. This process of capitulation was in fact so rapid that by autumn the Mainz campaign and its promising start were things of the past. On 23 October 1894 the city council voted to turn Herter's Lorelei Fountain away. Meanwhile, the Arion Verein, a German choral group in New York, had been following the controversies in the German American press and playing with the possibility of intervening. The Arion Verein contacted Herter in 1895, informing him that they were prepared to sponsor the completion of the fountain. When Herter enthusiastically accepted their offer, a "New York Heine monument committee" was hastily assembled to deal with New York's Municipal Arts Commission. This task proved difficult. At first the commission rejected the monument committee's plans outright, apparently on both aesthetic and ethnic grounds. The commission thought that the sensuousness of the Lorelei Fountain might incite sailors to prurient behavior; several astute observers, among them William Steinway, scion of the famous family of piano makers, felt that the commission's reservations were also motivated by anti-Semitism. These problems were somehow worked out, and the city agreed to accept the monument. But the haggling did not end. Aiming high, the monument committee wanted the Lorelei Fountain to stand at the entrance to Central Park, on Fifth Avenue. The Arts Commission balked. The committee's next choice was the Municipal Court Plaza in the Bronx. This proposal was also vetoed. Eventually and acrimoniously, committee

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and commission settled on a less-prominent Bronx home for the monument: Franz Sigel park, now Joyce Kilmer park, at 161st Street and Grand Concourse. The monument committee had to modify its time frame as well. It had planned to unveil the monument in 1897, to commemorate the centenary of Heine's birth. But Hcrtcr wasn't able to finish the Lorelei Fountain in time. Finally, on 8 July 1899, Heine in the Bronx was unveiled. New York turned out to be no safe harbor for the Lorelei Fountain. The Christian Temperance Union railed against it, condemning the figure of Lorelei as a pornographic spectacle. And in 1900 it was vandalized; someone decapitated the "Personification of Poetry" that adorned the fountain's base, perpetrating just the kind of iconoclastic act that Heine had so often lamented. The city responded by assigning an around-the-clock police guard to the monument. Such extravagant protection, of course, could not last. By 1975, to make a rather large chronological leap forward, the fountain's state of disrepair had become so acute that All Around the Town called it "a pathetic sight" and claimed that "no monument in the city is in worse condition." Happily, the monument's situation is no longer quite so dire. For several years now, it has been scrubbed clean of graffiti every summer by Hermann Klaas, a dentist from Diisseldorf who vacations in the Hamptons. And large-scale renovaationsmay be in the offing. The year 1899, then, marked the end of the first major Heine monument controversy. Let me now try to adumbrate the contours of the subsequent Frankfurt am Main controversy (1910-1913). Debate had continued after the Mainz debacle, even without a concrete site to be contested. In fact, as I will argue in more detail later, the expulsion of Herter's Lorelei Fountain prompted some of the most interesting contributions to the controversy, such as Alexander Moszkowski's unpublished satirical drama Die Enthiillung des Heine-Denkmals (1902). Moreover, 1906, the fiftieth anniversary of Heine's death, was, unsurprisingly, a year of particularly intense discussion. The liberal cultural critic Alfred Kerr admonished Germany to erect some kind of memorial; Adolf Bartels inveighed against the very idea of such a project in his rancorous and tellingly entitled book Heinrich Heine, auch ein Denkmal. And displaying his characteristic egalitarianism, Karl Kraus condemned both the pro- and anti-monument factions in his essay "Um Heine." Yet, formally speaking, a new controversy did not begin until 1910, when "Die freie literarische Gesellschaft Frankfurts" formed a new "committee for the erection of a Heine monument." The Frankfurt controversy was marked by eminence and vehemence. Max Klinger, Max Liebermann, Harden, Kerr, Erich Haeckel, Gerhard Hauptmann, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal lent their prestige to the monument cause. Bartels and Ferdinand Werner, leader of "Der Bund Frankfurter Antisemiten" pulled out all the rhetorical stops in organizing an anti-monument movement. Bartels's vitriol notwithstanding, the surging anti-Semitism of the 1890s abated significantly in the years before World War I, and the success of the Frankfurt campaign never really seemed to be in doubt. It was well run from the start by

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Paul Fulda, head of Die freie literarische Gesellschaft Frankfurts, and supported resolutely and with impressive equanimity by Frankfurt's mayor Georg Voigt. In fact, under these relatively propitious circumstances the debate turned inward. How to depict Heine became a pressing and hotly contested issue among the monument's supporters, much more so than had been the case in Diisseldorf and Mainz. Should Heine be represented as a political activist or as a singer of beautiful songs? Should the romantic Heine, the "popular" Heine, the Heine of Buch der Lieder be memorialized, or rather, should Frankfurt commemorate the political and controversial Heine as the Heine? This was the crucial question. Georg Kolbe's Tanzendes Paar was chosen as something of a compromise solution. And, indeed, with a few voluble exceptions, Tanzendes Paar was generally applauded by friends of the monument project when it was unveiled in the Friedburger Anlage on 12 December 1913. Kolbe hiffeelf seemed more interested in a monument to his own avantgardiste sensibilities than in memorializing a particular side of Heine. For the monument he created deviates significantly from the plan that won the competition, veering off rather sharply in the direction of high modernism. Hence, perhaps, its success: with its rough-hewn, ethereal pair of dancers, Kolbe's sculpture is abstract enough to allow almost any Heine fan to find "their Heine" in it. Also noteworthy here is Paul Schmidt's response to the monument. Schmidt, an early art historian, offered a kind of expert approbation, publicly praising Kolbe's work in the technical terms of modern art historical discourse. This was not an unprecedented move. Franz Wickoff and Alois Riegl had invoked their special authority as experts in 1900, during the Klimt university painting debates. When Klimt's painting Philosophic was condemned as ugly by the philosophy faculty at the University of Vienna, Wickoff and Riegl came to his defense, claiming that visual representations of philosophy fell under the purview of art historians, not philosophers, and that they, as art historians, were best qualified to judge Klimt's work. Still, Schmidt's gesture is one of the earliest of its kind in Germany, and as art historians have since become central players in monument projects, it invests the Frankfurt controversy with a distinctively modern character. The monument that Schmidt championed remains intact. Tanzendes Paar was toppled in 1933 by the Nazis, as Kolbe went to work for the party and began to create some of the most interesting art produced under the Nazi regime. But the body of Tanzendes Paar survived the war, as did Kolbe. And so in 1947 Kolbe himself was able to provide the monument with a new portrait-relief of Heine. The monument has remained on its pedestal ever since, although it was quite literally defaced in 1964 when someone poured plaster over the portrait-relief. The monument also lost its original inscription: "dem Dichter Heine." Whether the plaque which carried the inscription simply broke off and wasn't replaced or was removed for symbolic reasonsnamely, to show that postwar Germany wanted to memorialize not just "the poet Heine" but rather the political activist and essayist as wellremains an open question. Accounts of the monument's second unveiling in Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung do not provide us with an answer.

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II. I stated above that the Heine monument controversies invite inquiry. Nietzsche's response, the empress's compensatory monument and its expulsion from Corfu, the rude reception of the Lorelei Fountain in New York, the debate over which Heine should be memorialized, Kolbe's modernist agenda as well as his strange postwar, post-Nazi resurrection of Heine, and Schmidt's proto-modern involvement open up many potentially rewarding avenues of analysis. And yet again, the little scholarship that exists on the controversies hardly reilects this plenitude of interpretive possibility. For the Heine monument controversies between 1888 and 1913 have been read almost exclusively as poignant examples of anti-Semitism's massive incursion into the public sphere in late Wilhelmine Germany. This approach is, of course, legitimate, as it seeks to understand the controversies in terms of a factor that shaped them: anti-Semitism. At the same time, narrowly focusing on the issue of anti-Semitism has had certain problematic concomitants. Not only have many areas gone unexplored, but a faulty, or at the very least questionable, narrative of the controversies has emerged as the standard account. The standard account views the effect of the Dusseldorf-Mainz controversies as follows: precisely the failure of the first attempts to erect a Heine monument in Germany drove the Frankfurt campaign to its victorious conclusion. Only after 1894, only in response to the ignominy of an exiled monument, did the pro-monument cultural elite shake off their torpor and hit the streets. This reading is Dietrich Schubert's. Schubert, it should be noted, has done more than anyone else to bring attention to the Heine monument controversies. My project has in fact profited enormously from his research. But again, Schubert fails effectively to sift through the rich material he has mined. His premise is that the causal connection between the Diisseldorf-Mainz controversies and the Frankfurt monument controversy is straightforward; the Dusseldorf and Mainz debacles contributed to the Frankfurt triumph and did not do much else, certainly nothing worth examining thoroughly. But is that really the case? Did the exiled Lorelei Fountain function simply as an emblem of German anti-Semitism that could and should be redressed through the erection of a Heine monument in Frankfurt? Was the effect, the significance, of the Lorelei Fountain among Heine supporters really so univocal? Did this "Heine in the Bronx" do more than motivate them to fight for the Frankfurt monument?
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I argue that it indeed did. To be sure, the very idea that New York had a Heine monument before Germany engendered much indignation among the pro-monument faction in Germany, as well as among enemies of anti-Semitism looking for a cause to seize on. And this indignation, no doubt, facilitated the Frankfurt success. Yet when we look closely at responses to and representations of the Diisseldorf-Mainz controversies and the Lorelei Fountain between 1895 to 1910, we see that far from being straightforward, they are in fact quite multivalent. We see that Heine in the Bronx may well have pulled some Heine supporters away from the Frankfurt campaign, even as it supplied the project with an all-important

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point of argument. We see that the uncanny affinities between Herter's exiled monument and the exiled poet it was to memorialize lent the ensuing Heine monument controversy a kind of farcical aspect for a number of intellectuals sympathetic to Heine. And, indeed, the exiled Heine monument was, as noted earlier, widely satirized. The satire here is not mean-spirited; in most cases it did not express the "Schadenfreude" of anti-Semites. For those doing the satirizing tended to be sympathetic to Heine. But neither, in many cases, does this satire bring out the monument's absurd fate, the strange abjection it was made to suffer in order to fire up the pro-monument troops. If anything, satirists of the monument controversies trenchantly poke fun at the whole process of monumentalization, at times delivering incisive caveats as to its dangers. For example, two cartoons from the late 1890s confront us with a crude sketch of the Lorelei Fountain, encircled and being pulled from its pedestal by a carefully drawn catalogue of Heine-haters: nationalists, anti-Semites, and other unsavories, while tuxedo-wearing, Semitic-looking supporters try in vain to defend their cultural icon. What the monument is supposed to represent has been effectively eclipsed by the controversy around it, as in both cases the monument itself is schematically drawn and blurred to the point of being barely recognizable, whereas the tumult is mapped out for us in sharp detail. Here, then, the process of memorialization has paradoxically effaced its referent. Also striking is the image of the Lorelei Fountain surrounded by Heine's enemies. For the sense of concentrated animosity it evokes gets at the strategic advantages Heine's critics derived from such attempts to block monumentalization. The monument functions as a localized, stationary target that can be smeared much more readily than can a large and complex oeuvre. Karl Kraus expressed this idea with scatological pithiness when he ridiculed "the Germanic endurance with which Bartels relieves himself at Heine's grave." The localization that attends monumentalization fosters frontal assaults on an author's memory. It allows for a dismembering. And that is just what is happening in the other image in question. Severed from its pedestal, the Lorelei Fountain is about to crash to and presumably shatter on the ground. Responding to "Heine in the Bronx," the cartoons arrive at an awareness of the potential for violence, violence to memory, that is intrinsic to processes of public memorialization. The melancholy appropriateness of a missing monument as a memorial for an exiled author elicited critical reflection on the tenability of memorializing by constructing fixed representations on fixed sites from Heine supporters working in other discourses as well. Indeed, we might even say that something like the thinking behind Jochen Gerz's Holocaust "counter-monument" in Hamburg, a monument that managed to stage its own disappearance to memorialize a missing people, begins to emerge, as the familiar Nietzschean criticism that Wilhelmine monuments ossify memory is pushed forward, toward a new level of sophistication.'' "Urn Heine," Karl Kraus's most extensive response to the early Heine monument controversies exemplifies this phenomenon. Kraus thematized the dangers monuments pose to memory even beyond ossification and misrepre4 6

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sentation. In "Um Heine," Kraus's ironic formulation of this point reads: "the bad reputation of a poet cannot be damaged as easily as a sculpture." Furthermore, Kraus raised important questions about the limits of monuments debates. When do they cease to be salutary instances of a public coming together to mediate its memory and its aesthetic values? Can monumentalization be legitimate where the debate "um Heine" is characterized by deformed communication? Significantly enough, Kraus begins his piece by alluding to that other Heine monument in exile, Haaselriis's Heine-Lazarus in Corfu. Kraus is reacting here to the writer and critic Oskar Blumenthal, who had apparently made a pilgrimage to the monument and had spoken of "dreaming" before it in "contemplative seclusion." Thoroughly repulsed by this "vapid sentimentalism," Kraus writes that "one can bring forth enthusiasm for Heine only after one has overcome the image of Blumenthal on Corfu." At the same time, according to Kraus, one can raise objections against Heine only after one has insulted the "Urteutons" who would deny that he is worthy of a monument. Kraus himself, then, thought that Heine deserved a monument, at least in principle. Here we see and should note that in 1906 Kraus was still a long way from the annihilatingly anti-Heine stance he would assume in 1910, in Heine und die Folgen [Heine and the Consequences]. Again, the Urteutons are wrong. Heine is worthy of a monument. And yet, Kraus came down squarely against monumentalizing Heine in Germany. Kraus's central claim, in fact, is that Germany is not worthy of a Heine monument, "nicht denkmalswiirdig." Polarized to the point of fatuousness, the debate "um Heine" has proved inimical to any honest reckoning with Heine's memory. Here memorialization has turned in on itself and should be disbanded. Kraus asked: If monumentalization implies official recognition, is it legitimate or honest to force through monumentalization where official recognition is patently missing? Since Heine's great strength is a "Jewish cynicism" toward which German culture harbors deep-seated antipathies, to do so, for Kraus, would be to broadcast a disingenuous message about both Germany's relation to Jewish cynicism and about Heine's cynicism itself. A culturally acceptable Heine could only be a whitewashed Heine, a Heine made into a vehicle for official recognition of the idealized German-Jewish symbiosis that Heine's assimilationist supporters had really been championing all along. According to Kraus, Heine the "Jewish cynic" would have been quick to lampoon such parvenu behavior. And, in fact, the assimilationist Heine supplicants who travel from Vienna to Heine's tomb in Paris to lay down wreaths are greeted, in Kraus's essay, by three handfuls of dirt that come flying from the grave. The German-Jewish intellectuals who identify closely with Heine turn out to be not so different from Bartels. For they molest Heine where he is most vulnerableat a fixed site designated for commemorationeven if they do so with fragrant flowers rather than bodily fluids. Moreover, these German-Jewish Heine sympathizers are, again like Bartels, no friends of German-Jewish culture. They are willing to slice away Heine's Jewish cynicism to make him palatable to German culture. On such terms, at the price of evisceration, integration into a hostile culture can only be a painfully hollow integration.
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And so when we stand in front of an exiled Heine monument, we should not do as Blumenthal does; we shouldn't dream of erecting a Heine monument in Germany. Rather, we should ask ourselves, Is Germany, a nation that exiles Heine monuments, worthy of a Heine monument? Questioning the kind of recognition Wilhelmine monuments confer, Kraus turned the monument debate on its head. III. Kraus's argument is of course problematic. His claim about Heine's "Jewish cynicism" is crude and essentialist, even if it valorizes Jewish cynicism as a literary virtue. In fact, I certainly do not mean to imply that I subscribe to the views I have extracted from "Urn Heine." My contention, rather, is that notwithstanding their problems, the insights forged by Kraus and a few other critics (e.g., Franz Mehring) in response to the Dtisseldorf and Mainz controversies added seminal nuances to the well-known Nietzschean criticisms of Wilhelmine monuments and monumental culture. To recapitulate, Kraus's incisive discussion of the dangers that attend public memorialization, beyond a simple ossification of memory, as well as his critical remarks on the limits of monument debates and their troubling embeddedness in the politics of cultural recognition, lent new depth and bite to blanket indictments of monuments. For, again, in his analysis of the way in which the push for a Heine monument functioned as a strategy of assimilation and legitimation, Kraus identified and examined the links between identity politics and the politics of memorialization at a time when they were seldom subjected to critical reflection. And, indeed, Kraus's admonition to let the exiled "Heine in the Bronx" monument stand as the absent, and therefore most appropriate, permanent memorial to an exiled author and to a futile debate over how that author should be memorialized resonates powerfully with cutting-edge responses to the present controversy over the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Because Kraus's penetrating critique of memorialization and monuments emerged out of the Heine monument controversies, it can and should be read as a significant moment in the history of the controversies. Above all, the recovery of this theoretically rich level of significance has been at stake in my attempt to challenge the standard narrative of the Heine monument controversies. This standard account, as mentioned above, narrowly focuses on activist responses to the Mainz and Diisseldorf failures. In doing so, it loses sight of more subtle and sophisticated ones, like Kraus's, responses, that we might do well to contemplate as we memorialize Heine on the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. "
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NOTES

1. Nietzsche, the sharp critic of monuments, was not the only improbable Heine monument supporter. Oddly enough, the young Adolf Hitler apparently advocated the erection of a Heine monument in Germany. According to Reinhold Hanisch, who knew Hitler during the latter part of Hitler's

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stay in Vienna, Hitler claimed in political discussions that Heine was a great artist, and that Heine's poetic accomplishments should be memorialized with a monument. Cf. Brigitte Hamann, Miller's Vienna: A Dictator's Appenticeship, trans. Thomas Thornton (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 166. 2. Dietrich Schubert, "Der 'Kampt' um das erste Heine-Denkmal: Diisseldorf 1887-1893 - Mainz 1893/94 - New York 1899," Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 51 (1990): 241-272; and Dietrich Schubert, "Fruhlingslied?," Heine-Jahrbuch 34 (1995): 118-145. 3. The information presented here rests, for the most part, on Schubert's findings I have, in effect, recapitulated the narrative of the Heine monument controversies that he provides in his very valuable and scrupulously researched articles. "Der 'Kampf um das erste Heine-Denkmal" addresses the Diisseldorf and Mainz controversies and the unveiling of the New York monument, as well its reception in New York and the reaction to it in Germany. "Fruhlingslied?" focuses on the Frankfurt Heine monument controversy. 1 learned about Hermann Klaas from Jeffrey L. Sammons, whose erudition and encouragement have helped me greatly. 4. These cartoons were published anonymously in the satirical journals Vim and Der wahre Jacob They ate reprinted in Schubert, "Der 'Kampf' um das erste Heine-Denkmal." 5. For a comprehensive discussion of the "counter-monument phenomenon, see James E. Young's pathbreaking study The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) 27^48. 6. Cf. Die Fackel 199 (April 1906): 7 - 2 1 . "Um Heine," again, can be rendered as "Around Heine." What gets lost in translation is the sense of instrumentalization evoked by the German. For the preposition "um," in addition to meaning around, is also used to form "in order to" clauses. Hence Kraus's elliptical title carries the suggestion that Heine has become the object of an "in order to" situation where the verb, the action, is too contradictory to be described by a single word. The idea here is that Heine is not being discussed properly, as the subject of memoriaiization. Rather, he has been reduced to the status of instrumentalized object and is being maneuvered and manipulated to serve various cultural and political agendas. 7. "Urteutons" is Kraus's derisively hyperbolic term (hyperbolic because both "ur" and "teuton" connote primordiality) for nationalistic, anti-Semitic Heine haters of Bartels's ilk. 8. Kraus is inverting the Jewish burial ritual according to which each male adult throws three handfuls of dirt onto the coffin as it is lowered into the grave, a move which not only marks the Heine supporters in question as Jewish but evocatively points to the convolutedness of their relation to Judaism. 9. For example, in a recent op-ed piece in the New York Tunes 28 April 1999, Stephen Greenblatt suggested that the site designated for a Holocaust memorial should be left barren, with the exception of a small plaque. The striking desolation of an untended lot in the middle of a prosperous city district would be the most effective memorial to the historical desolation caused by the Holocaust, and to a failed (but in this case earnest) discussion about how such desolation should be represented. 10. 13 December 1797 is now generally accepted as the date of Heine's birth. However, some evidence suggests that he was born in 1798 or 1799. The problem is that Heine was inconsistent on the delicate topic of his age. See Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979) 11-14.

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