HEIDI URBAHN DE JAUREGUI
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regime.
It
will be a frightful duel. Communism, though seldom mentioned
today, is nonetheless the dark enemy to whom has been allotted a great, if
passing, role in this modern tragedy, awaiting its cue to enter."
The world dominance presaged by Heine has not entirely come to
pass, there being surely a qualitative difference between regional and total
dominance. Yet one might still compare the scenario that bothered Heine
with the east-bloc regime that remains fresh in our memories. Heine's
anxieties call to mind those of my own childhood. Children of a West
German bourgeois family, we used to lie in lookout in a safe and distant
hideaway for a man people had told us was a Communist.
It
gave us a sen–
sation of danger: of course he looked intimidating, and any day he might
have discovered us. When I grew older and visited East Germany, I
observed many such fearsome men up close and was disappointed to real–
ize that they were no different from you and me. They seemed completely
to have abandoned any early taste for radical action they might once have
had. All I saw was large groups drinking coffee, offering me cakes when–
ever I approached.
Heine was particularly horrified by the prospect of "general equality
of cuisine-where the giant gets the same portion enjoyed by brother
dwarf." This si tuation, so thoroughly enjoyable for the dwarves, is quite the
opposite for the giants. But how he would have been surprised at the por–
tions given to a few poets in that eastern land, though some of them might
not have been exactly giants, as if Marx had truly been heeded in his tol–
erance for poets. As for the "hard-won achievements of so many
centuries," and all the " hodgepodge," so beloved to Heine, that he per–
ceived to be endangered by the new rulers, I would say that Goethe and
Heine received the highest honors in that country, together with all the
hodgepodge, and once, strolling along Unter den Linden, I encountered
Old Fritz riding toward me. But as for his royal castle, Heine would have
had as much trouble finding it as he would the Tuileries Castle in Paris,
whose Renaissance walls had to yield to the new urgency of the bourgeois
republic. Newcomers start by tearing down what they later rebuild with
great effort, and badly. But as for the poet's worries about the black soup,
Spartan in flavor, that was so unpleasing to his palate, he found it tolerable
until the day of a much-needed redistribution of wealth, but it was quite
another matter to wai t until the new order achieved an equally needed
growth of this wealth. We can easily see both phases from a distance, but
the two cannot be brought together. Was this close to what Heine meant
by "horribly raw, common Communism?" Some may feel that the poet's
fear of too-strictly enforced consequences of Hegelian teachings is over–
stated. (In contrast, he praised the Catholic church for its "clever system of
mediation, its wise concessions to life, and the concordat that, to some
