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Heine and His Age: Literary Dissidence in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Author(s): Jeffrey L. Sammons
Source: The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 55, No. 4 (April 1981), pp. 165-176
Published by: Yale University, acting through the Yale University Library
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Heine and His Age:
Literary Dissidence in Nineteenth-
Century Germany
By Jeffrey L. Sammons*
gives me great pleasure to make some introductory remarks on

the occasion of the exhibit in the Beinecke Rare Book and Man-
uscript Library to mark the 1 25th anniversary of the death of Hein-
rich Heine. I have first of all three obligations to discharge. First,
to former Beinecke Librarian Stephen Peterson for welcoming the
proposal for the exhibit. Second, to Christa Sammons, Curator of
the German Literature Collection, whose hard work, initiative, and
watchfulness were indispensable; it is as much her exhibit as it is
mine. Third, but by no means least, to a gentleman who died forty-
seven years ago: the distinguished rabbi, Judaist, and educator
George Alexander Kohut, among whose important benefactions
to the Library and to Judaic studies at Yale was the gift of the
Kohut-Rutra Collection of Heineana in the early 1930s. This
collection of first editions, manuscripts, and several hundred an-
cillary books, though it has been supplemented by gift and purchase
over the years, remains the core resource for the scholarly study
of Heine and his age at Yale. Without it my own researches and
writings would have been much more difficult.
In retrospect the Kohut-Rutra Collection looks even more im-
pressive than it may have when it was given. It was assembled at
a time when, for various reasons, Heine's reputation was at a low
ebb in his homeland, and it came to Yale not long before the
darkness of Nazism closed over that reputation altogether. In recent
years the interest in Heine has vastly intensified and we have learned
a great deal more about him than we knew before. It is in the light
of the contemporary constellation of interests that the Kohut ma-
terial appears especially pertinent and its donor uncommonly well
informed. At first the manuscripts and some of the Heine editions
were of primary interest. Much of the important work on them was
accomplished by Yale's great Heine scholar of that time, Hermann
* This talk was given on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition in the Beinecke
Library, 20 February 1981. - Ed.
165
The Yale University Library Gazette
J. Weigand. Today this aspect of scholarship is well under control;

of greater current interest are the books by Heine's contemporaries,
acquaintances, friends, and enemies, and by the friends and enemies
during the tortuous aftermath well into this century. These books
are a great treasure in Yale's German holdings. Many of them are
quite rare, for reasons that I shall explain, and today's intense
interest in the period has caused them to increase substantially in
value. I think it somewhat unfortunate that, at the time, the col-
lection was scattered among the Rare Book Room, the Zeta collec-
tion, "W" storage, and the open stacks. One or two of the items
have been lost. If I might venture a suggestion from the faculty
corner of the University, I think it would be a worthwhile project
to reassemble the collection and protect it in the Rare Book Library.
Now, on the basis of these materials and others in Yale's collec-
tions, it would have been possible to assemble a rather different
kind of exhibit, one more bibliographical and philological, and more
strongly focused on Heine's own biography. For example, of the
Buch der Lieder, Heine's first major volume of poetry and the most
widely read book of German poetry in the world, the Library has
the first edition of 1827, the second of 1837, the third of 1839, and
the fourth of 184 1, along with numerous later ones. Of his second
volume of poetry, Neue Gedichte, we might have shown the first
edition of 1844, the second, six weeks later, in two states, and the
expanded and revised third edition of 1852. And so forth. There
is also more manuscript material than we have elected to display.
The exhibit has been formed as it has for primarily two reasons.
In the first place, it is not always remembered today that for
most of the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany, there
was a vigorous, implicitly revolutionary intellectual and literary
opposition that worried the Central European governments very
much. In modern times we have developed a tendency to read
German history backwards from the catastrophe of Nazism. We
seek for the political and intellectual failings of the Germans, their
habits of conformity and authoritarianism, their nationalism and,
in the course of time, racism and class oppression. But it should
not be forgotten that, in the period covered by this exhibit, there
was a widespread, energetic, sometimes courageous, and always
dangerous effort to turn the course of German history. It failed,
and there is an inclination to blame the failure on the liberals and
166
Heine and His Age
radicals themselves. This is especially the case with the now fairly
dominant Marxist interpretation of the period, for Marx and Engels
held most of their bourgeois liberal and radical contemporaries in
contempt. Such a judgment is not wholly unjustified, but the sit-
uation needs to be seen to some extent through the eyes of these
writers in their own context, which was depressing and confusing
in the extreme. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that one
of the consequences of the events of the time was to drive some of
the most committed and rebellious minds to emigration, some, like
Heine, to France, but many to the United States, where their
contribution to American politics tells us something of what
they might have accomplished had they been able to stay in their
homeland. For example, without the pressure from the German-
Americans, it is at least possible that Lincoln not only might have
had even more difficulty in prosecuting the Civil War, but also
might not have emancipated the slaves. As an example of how an
outstanding American could emerge from the German struggles of
this period, I have included in the exhibit an episode of the life of
Carl Schurz.
Secondly, the literary and intellectual experience of that time
strongly resembles things that go on in our contemporary world.
The oppression of writers and thinkers in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe vividly recalls, down to some of the motives, details,
and strategies, the policies of the Metternichian system. I have
come to underline this resemblance by referring to the oppositional
writers of Heine's age as "dissidents." Of course, their situation
was much less severe; the nineteenth-century police state was still
technologically inefficient, and the concentration camp had not been
invented. But there are striking parallels all the same, and there are
lessons in them that touch on our own commitment to freedom of
expression as well as on the utterly archaic and reactionary style
of government in most of the Communist countries. I have a third
reason for shaping the exhibit as I have, which I shall mention at
the end.
The period covered by the exhibit is segmented by six crucial

dates: 1815, 1819, 1830, 1835, 1840, and 1848. By 1815 Napoleon
had been driven from Germany and finally defeated. This was an
ambiguous situation that the ruling classes promptly proceeded to
clarify. Napoleon was a tyrant, and in important ways a burden-
167
some one, but he carried with him into Germany some of the élan
of the French Revolution, and Napoleonic administration achieved
a certain amount of political modernization and emancipation. The
rebellion against Napoleon released powerful national and liberal
middle-class energies and enthusiasms, which contributed much to
the military victory and to hopes that the momentum of victory
would carry forward to the creation of a modern nation on more
liberated principles. At the Congress of Vienna it was seen to it
that these hopes were frustrated. Germany was reorganized into
thirty-five principalities and four "free" cities, most of which re-
stored the trappings of feudal absolutism and erased Napoleonic
achievements, such as the emancipation of the Jews. A Federal Diet
was established in Frankfurt, whose function it was to rubber-stamp
the policies of Prussia and Austria, and the whole system was
guided by the shrewd and cynical Austrian chancellor, Prince
Metternich. New ideas of freedom and democracy were to be made
to disappear. King Frederick William HI seemed to promise Prussia
a constitution in 1 8 1 5 , but forgot about it for the remaining twenty-
five years of his reign. The Metternichian system operated from
a single principle: nothing must ever change.
In retrospect one can see that the system had a certain ingenuity
and political savvy. Since it did not want to do anything but restore
and conserve, it was not aggressive in its oppression, but instead
reacted to challenges that permitted it to tighten its grip. One such
event occurred in 18 19. Karl Sand, a student fired with the typical
revolutionary enthusiasm of the time, assassinated August von
Kotzebue, a popular playwright and Russian agent. Sand's prompt
trial and execution generated just the sort of public debate and
discussion that the Metternichian system deplored, and the con-
sequence was the so-called Carlsbad Decrees of 18 19. One of the
regulations abolished the student fraternities, breeding grounds for
personalities like Sand. Fraternity membership was threatened with
six years of fortress imprisonment, and leadership with death. But
more far-reaching was the establishment of a pre-censorship for all
publications under twenty signatures, or 320 pages. The idea was
that pamphlets and short works were dangerous, while the "people"
would not read long books. The effect on book design can be seen
in several of the items of the exhibit, as Heine and his contempo-
raries struggled to bring their works over the 320-page limit: plenty
168
Heine and His Age
of blank pages, wide margins, generous spacing, big type, twenty
lines to a page. A steadily growing bureaucracy was established in
all the German states to enforce the censorship regulations, which
became increasingly stringent as the years went by. Throughout
the period works of any size were subject to post-publication cen-
sorship and confiscation. The censorship is the single most universal
and enduring issue in the literary life of the time.
During the gloomy 1 820s there emerged with remarkable rapidity
the careers of the two personalities who were to be the commanding
figures among the dissidents. The first was a young man out of the
Frankfurt ghetto named Lob Baruch, who, upon his conversion to
Christianity, took the name of Ludwig Börne. Fired with liberal
and republican ideas, and becoming increasingly radical over the
years, Börne was a powerfully gifted writer of polemic and satire.
He had a large following, and his pungency revitalized the style
of public discourse in the German opposition; one of his stylistic
pupils was to be the young Friedrich Engels. The other was an
unhappy law student, also Jewish, from Düsseldorf, named Harry
Heine, who, upon his conversion to Christianity - under duress and
much resented by him - took the name Christian Johann Heinrich
Heine. He first came to public attention as a poet, and indeed his
poetry is still the foundation of his worldwide fame, in part owing
to the fashion of the German Lied that began to take shape some
years later. It is said that no other poet excepting the Biblical
Psalmist has been set to music more often than Heine. But even
his poetry is rebellious, in its wit and its impudence, its conver-
sational, social tones and breaches of stylistic decorum; and by the
end of his student days he, too, had opened a career of oppositional
writing of inimitable dexterity. Börne was a political man, focused
on liberty and equality and the hope of popular revolution; Heine
was a poet with a rather aristocratic allegiance to aesthetic excellence
and what he regarded as a higher revolutionary vision of sensual
and material emancipation from religious and political oppression.
The two temperaments, unfortunately, came to clash bitterly.
One other important personality emerging at this time must be
mentioned: Julius Campe, sole proprietor of the Hamburg book
dealership of Hoffmann und Campe, who became the major pub-
lisher of the German dissidents. He was intermittently Börne's
publisher, and beginning in 1826 he brought out every one of
169
Heine's important works. An exceedingly tough, courageous, and
inventive man with an unparalleled knowledge of the book business,
he doggedly fought the German governments to a standstill for
decades. He played cat-and-mouse with the censorship, he smug-
gled books, he put bogus printers and places of publication on title
pages. He was shut down; he was interrogated; he hovered on the
edge of ruin more than once; and he stuck with Heine through
thirty years of what may have been the most acrimonious pub-
lisher-author relationship in the history of literature. Of course it
was a business for him, but current tendencies to regard him as in
the first instance a "capitalist publisher" absurdly miss the point.
Then came the Revolution of July 1830 in France. Within the
well-carpentered Metternichian system it caused barely a few rip-
ples, but its effect on the dissidents was electrifying: history was
on the move again. Börne moved to Paris, where he spent most of
the rest of his life as an acknowledged leader of the tens of thousands
of German exiles in that city, mostly artisans and workingmen.
Heine, for various reasons, was not as prompt, but in 183 1 he too
went to Paris, there to remain, first in voluntary, then in involuntary
exile for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The July Mon-
archy greatly expanded the consciousness of Heine and his con-
temporaries. The incessant political turbulence and the relative
liberty, especially of the press, contrasted vividly with the torpor
and repression of Germany; at the same time they were able to
assess the new phenomenon of a ruling capitalist order with its
consequent stresses and sufferings.
This atmosphere brought forth in the 1830s a number of younger
writers known collectively as "Young Germany." They were not,
as the German governments liked to pretend, a conspiracy or even
a very coherent group, but they all attempted to find some means
of expression for what they conceived of as urgent modern ideas.
They owed a considerable debt to the examples of Börne and Heine.
Some remarks on the writings and fates of the most important of
them, Ludolf Wienbarg, Theodor Mundt, Heinrich Laube, and
Karl Gutzkow, will be found in the commentary to the exhibit.
Some modern observers find it difficult to take Young Germany
seriously. It is true that the writers' purposes were not explicitly
political and none of them could easily be dignified with the term
"revolutionary." They were much more concerned with freedom
170
Heine and His Age
of expression, criticizing religion, reforming the relations between
the sexes, and, not incidentally, fighting for the right to establish
their own literary and intellectual careers. Typically their writings
are confused, high strung, sometimes abstruse, and always self-
oriented. But Metternich and the German states understood them
better than today's supercilious critics, for they were very afraid
of them and mobilized the whole machinery of government to com-
bat them. As usual, the authorities waited for an appropriate op-
portunity that would not be overtly political. It was provided in
1835 by Karl Gutzkow's outlandish novel Wally, the Skeptic, which,
with studied adolescent cynicism, parodies the convention of love
and marriage, debunks the Christian religion, and, to the utter
consternation of the public and the censors, contains a nude scene.
Gutzkow was arrested and spent a couple of months in jail, but
that was a sideshow. The main event was a Federal Decree of
December 10, 1835, that banned all works, past, present, and fu-
ture, of Heine, Wienbarg, Mundt, Laube, and Gutzkow, and de-
livered an explicit warning to the publishing house of Hoffmann
und Campe.
Again there is a modern tendency, conditioned, I think, by the
much grimmer atrocities of our own century, to underestimate the
seriousness of this event. It is true that the ban was so Draconic
as to be unenforceable, and it was moderated to a special censorship
for the five writers, from which two of them, Laube and Mundt,
freed themselves with a loyalty oath several years later. Julius
Campe was protected to an extent by the somewhat more liberal
policy of the city-state of Hamburg. The writers kept publishing,
more or less. But the intended disruption was considerable. The
ban set off unseemly squabbling among the writers, all of whom
denied that there was any such thing as Young Germany or that
they had any admiration for the others. Gutzkow went to jail for
a while; Laube was nearly driven mad by eight months of solitary
confinement, without light or companionship, in a Berlin jail;
Wienbarg and Mundt were dismissed from their university teaching
positions. Their books and periodicals were banned consistently.
Heine in desperation tried to write harmless potboilers, for which
he was completely unsuited.
Sometimes it is pointed out, as though it were an ameliorating
virtue of the age, that none of the writers was killed. There were
Ï71
some close calls, however, some of which are illustrated in the
exhibit. The Low German dialect writer Fritz Reuter was sentenced
to death for alleged fraternity activities; the sentence was commuted
to thirty years of fortress imprisonment, after seven of which - and
considerable agitation - he was pardoned. The now forgotten poet-
professor Gottfried Kinkel also received a death sentence, com-
muted to a long term in Spandau Prison, from which he was freed
in a jailbreak organized by his student and friend Carl Schurz.
Georg Büchner spent half of the two years of his creative life as a
fugitive in hiding from the police, and the co-author of his agitative
pamphlet on the condition of the Hessian peasantry, the clergyman
Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, was imprisoned without trial and so
badly treated that he committed suicide. In 1834 the Prussian gov-
ernment commissioned a pamphlet arguing that Heine should be
imprisoned or executed. Heine was, of course, out of reach in Paris.
Later the Prussians put pressure on the French government to have
him expelled, and might have succeeded, as they did succeed with
Karl Marx, if it had not been that Heine had a legal right of residence
in France owing to the circumstance that he had been born under
French occupation in Düsseldorf. The point is that just enough
terror and threat were dosed out to keep the situation under control
and the opposition in disarray, and the governments tried to attack
on fronts, such as blasphemy or pornography, that would split the
middle-class public. The similarity to the practices of Communist
governments in these matters strikes one forcibly. The policy was
successful. By 1838 the Young German movement was destroyed.
Thus matters stood when in 1840 the Prussian King Frederick
William III died and was succeeded by his son Frederick William
IV. Some people had hoped that the Crown Prince would be more
liberal than his father and that there would be a thaw upon his
accession. There was, but it was brief, and the hopes placed in the
new king were to be cruelly disappointed before long. But it is no
doubt connected with this more imaginary than real atmospheric
change that the strategy of the dissidents shifted from the difficult,
abstruse prose of Young Germany to simpler, more easily com-
municated forms of verse, and a number of new political poets
appeared on the scene. The most prominent of them are discussed
in the commentary to the exhibition. Their straightforward forms,
plain if strongly expressed sentiments, stirring rhetoric, and re-
172
Heine and His Age
functioned religious imagery reached the horizon of understanding
of the middle-class public; for comparison one might think of Julia
Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" some twenty years
later. None of these poets was outstanding - Heine laughed at them
all - though some were more talented than others. It is an irony of
history that the homeliest of them is the longest remembered:
August Heinrich Hoffmann, who called himself "von Fallersleben"
after his home town. When his verse caused him to be dismissed
from his professorship at the University of Breslau, he began to
wander about with his guitar and his songs. He is most charitably
remembered for a number of charming children's songs learned by
generations of German kindergarteners to the present day, and
doubtless most notorious for a simple and somewhat stupid poem
composed on the island of Helgoland in 1841, entitled "The Song
of the Germans," with the recurrent first line "Deutschland,
Deutschland über alles." But it was a subversive and revolutionary
work in its day. Julius Campe happened to be vacationing on Hel-
goland at the time; he snapped up the poem, had it set to the Haydn
melody from the Emperor Quartet that served as the Austrian national
anthem, and distributed it as a single sheet all over Germany. It
was banned everywhere, but it was immensely popular and it be-
came the German national anthem in 1922. Today the first two
stanzas are not permitted to be sung in West Germany, though for
different reasons. We are exceptionally fortunate to be able to in-
clude in the exhibit a rare copy of this historic first edition.
Meanwhile Heine, who took a dim view of all these goings on,
geared himself up to drive his competitors from the field. He, too,
wrote a number of especially biting and satirical political poems,
several of which were published by Karl Marx in his journal
Vorwärts! ', including what is doubtless the most effective of all the
shorter political poems of the period, "The Silesian Weavers."
Then, cheered by his friendship with Marx, he produced the most
famous and probably the greatest satirical-political poem in the
German language, the 2,000-line Germany: A Winter's Tale.
To what extent these writings, especially Heine's, helped to pre-
pare the ground for the Revolution of 1848 is a disputed and, in
my opinion, insoluble question. It is not disputed that the Revo-
lution was ultimately a failure in Germany. If there is any place
where much of the oppositional middle class might be charged with
173
political blundering and ideological half-heartedness, it is here,

though it should be remembered that the situation was quite dif-
ficult and also that the Revolution really did not turn out much
better in France, where it eventuated in the dictatorship of that
ninny Louis Napoleon. For a time there was a ray of light. One
of the first consequences of the Revolution - a matter of days, in
fact - was the collapse of the censorship regulations in one German
state after another, an event that galvanized the frustrated publisher
Campe into action. But the respite did not last; by 1850 the cause
was lost and the censorship was reinstated. Again a miasma of
gloom settled over Germany, a backward and poor land that had
become a laughingstock even to some of its own most alert and
observant citizens, until, beginning in the 1860s, Germany began
to get its bearings along a different path that ultimately was to bring
misfortune to much of the rest of the world.
It is a poignant symbolic coincidence that the definitive collapse
of Heine's health occurred almost simultaneously with the Revo-
lution of 1848. After May ofthat year he was never to walk again,
and he remained confined to his "mattress-grave," suffering ago-
nizing spinal cramps and fuddled with morphine, for eight long
years. In some ways his spirit moved with the mood of the times:
he became bitter, pessimistic, and resigned, like many other of the
defeated dissidents, though he refused to yield, as some other Ger-
man intellectuals did, to any compromise with the ruling order. He
underwent his famous "return" to a personal religion of his own
devising, in order that he might argue more directly and vocifer-
ously with God about the unjust governance of the world. But he
was by now the outstanding living writer in the German language;
indeed, Matthew Arnold was to say that he was the most important
European writer in the quarter century following upon the death
of Goethe. His mind remained alive, sharp, and, despite the drugs,
rational as ever; considering his condition he accomplished a great
deal in the "mattress-grave." He composed the searing visions and
introspections of his third and what many now consider his finest
volume of poetry, Romanzerò, in 1851, along with a body of very
late poetry that I believe he would have brought together in a fourth
volume had he lived somewhat longer. In 1854 he published his
largest and, to date, least researched work, Lutezia, & revised com-
pendium of his reportage from France in the 1840s. Almost to his
!74
Heine and His Age
dying day he supervised the French edition of his works; in the
world at large Heine has been read in French almost as much as
in German. He was released at last 125 years ago, on February 17,
1856, and buried in a simple ceremony in Montmartre Cemetery.
Our exhibit is in some ways discouraging to contemplate. It is
a record of frustrated purposes and wrecked lives, of apparent vic-
tories of lumpish power over youthful energies, of the dead hand
of an interminably dying past over visions of a better future. Like
East Germany today, the Metternichian system crushed, expelled,
or corrupted many of its most conscientious and progressive minds,
and furthermore the record shows how relatively easy it is to do,
how fragile even the most elementary liberties are and how difficult
of achievement. The result, then as now, was a helpless conformity
born of despair, relieved only by an occasional flicker of excep-
tionally courageous rebellion. But of course this is not the only way
to look at it. No age, however bleak, that put Heinrich Heine and
Ludwig Börne into the annals of mankind can be counted a total
loss. But all the dissident writers, the brilliant along with the con-
fused, the gifted poets along with the lumbering versifiers, the
relatively sane along with the distinctly neurotic, in the midst of
the desperation of their lives and their constant quarreling with one
another, left behind a record of groping resistance, in their ugly
books, printed hastily, fearfully, and sometimes clandestinely. With
few exceptions, most of the books in this exhibit were banned.
Some were on the market for no more than twenty-four or forty-
eight hours before they were confiscated and destroyed. That sort
of thing naturally tends to make books rare, and in fact it must be
owing to the interest they aroused in their time that we have them
at all, for we know from the censorship records that the police
sometimes had difficulty finding any copies to confiscate, so quickly
did they sell out. Now they are safe in a Library performing one
of its important functions, and they are here because George Alex-
ander Kohut and other donors had the wisdom to pick out from
the mountains of old books littering the world those that demand
preservation. Metternich frustrated the German dissidents, but the
Library frustrates Metternich. I like to believe that in the long run
the libraries will defeat the Metternichs.
And this brings me to the third of my reasons for organizing the
exhibit as I have. Those of us in the literary disciplines are having
175
a rather uproarious time of it these days. An international crisis of

purpose and perception has generated a clamor of competing meth-
odologies, though, as usual in such episodes, it is not clear that
there are as many people listening as there are talking. In some
quarters the pressure of ever increasing ingenuity has driven literary
study deep into epistemological paradoxes that sever texts from
authors, that sever both texts and authors from history, that sever
texts from meaning and intelligible purpose. Like all intellectual
ferment, these developments should undoubtedly be welcomed or
at least tolerated with as much good will as one can muster. But
I think it is also necessary from time to time to come up for air
onto the surface of common experience and real history, and to
recognize that one important function of literature can be to con-
tribute, through the force and vagaries of the imagination, to the
slow and painful progress of mankind to enlightenment and
emancipation.
176

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Yale University Library

Heine and His Age: Literary Dissidence in Nineteenth-Century Germany

gives me great pleasure to make some introductory remarks on

J. Weigand. Today this aspect of scholarship is well under control;

The period covered by the exhibit is segmented by six crucial

political blundering and ideological half-heartedness, it is here,

a rather uproarious time of it these days. An international crisis of

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