HEIDI URBAHN DE JAUREGUI
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a dangerous combination. Heine, who established his poetic career at
eighteen with a hymn to Germany completely free from irony ("I now
sing Germany's fame"), was now singing in a somewhat different key, but
he never abandoned his astonishingly deep feelings of love and honor for
Germany. When, in "Winter Tale," he says that his "eyes well with tears"
as he steps anew onto German soil, his words are to be taken at face
value.
It
indicates no disdain on Heine's part for the Fatherland that he
envisioned the "clumsy little ogre" as the one who would someday real–
ize the unprecedented revolution that would put an end to all previous
French revolutions. Still, he considered the black, red, and gold congre–
gation at St. Paul's a collection of political asses and descendants of the
"Deutschtum
rabble" from whom he would have himself and his
Germany spared.
Nonetheless, our attention is drawn by the fact that he, ally of the
Jacobins, has difficulty finding good words for the Revolution of 1848 in
France. Perhaps his ever-worsening health lay behind his reticence here. In
February, on his way to the sanatorium, he encounters fighting in the
street. His coach becomes material for the barricades. He writes his moth–
er that the "spectacle" has destroyed him "physically and morally." The
battles in July of the same year, the first with the substantial participation
of the Paris proletariat in which Heine foresaw such a great future, were
for
him
no more than "three horrible days," "universal anarchy, a motley
crowd, divine madness made visible." Yet we may ultimately assume that
the primary reason for this harsh condemnation was neither his illness nor
the fact that this political change put an end to his state pension, granted
by Louis Philippe to all emigrants who, as Heine puts it, "compromised
themselves among their countrymen to some degree for the Revolution's
sake." In their evaluation of the world, great poets are less influenced by
their personal feelings than at other times. Heine writes to Campe, the
publisher: "I have never altered my attitudes, and hence have nothing to
change in my books in light of the February Revolution." He knew well
what he was saying. All forms of wishy-washiness were alien to his nature,
tantamount in his eyes to betrayal; this was sensed by many of his friends .
Even in "Lutetia," one of his last publications, this is apparent: "All dis–
loyalty is hateful to my eyes." What is highest in art was what is highest
elsewhere: "the self-conscious freedom of the mind." So whence comes
this apparent backtracking from the Revolution of '48? I do not see this
as a step back; when he wrote his friend Meissner in April 1848 that he
had never been a republican, this was nothing new. Borne and others often
reproached him for this, stamping him as a monarchist. During the
February Revolution, he writes, "the wisdom of the brightest fell to
pieces" and "inanity's chosen" were elevated onto a pedestal.
