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extent, it sponsored between God and the Devil.") Perhaps the eastern
bloc, I have heard, did not exhibit a perfectly strict implementation of the
beliefs that lay behind its establishment.
There were two beliefS of the Communists that he liked best, notions
that he thought they copied from the followers of Saint-Simon: the idea of
the "exploitation of man by man," a realization Heine felt to "far over–
shadow any declamations on the privileges of birth." The other, deriving
from Hegelian philosophy, was the conviction that history was a process of
evolution. That this must lead to a golden age was a notion of Saint-Simon
to which Heine subscribed wholeheartedly; wi thout this conviction, he
would have brandished the sword of poetry with much less force. "Here
on this earth we will attempt / To build heaven's kingdom," is his response
to the "Lullaby of Heaven," that he made long before the Communists
could. On his deathbed, the poet consoled himself with the thought that
the ruin of the descendants of the 1815 Teutonic nationalists would sure–
ly come at the hands of the Communists. He considered them, like
himself, born cosmopolitans, whose homeland could only be the world
itself, in which his ancestors were so widely dispersed. When he speaks of
the great battle between the unpropertied and the aristocracy, in which
neither nationality nor religion would playa role, but only one fatherland
(the world) and one belief (in worldly happiness), it sounds as if he has read
an advance copy of
The Communist Manifesto.
He was of the opinion that
there were large areas of agreement here with the "fundamental dogma of
Christianity." But his
Internationale
was that of the poet, that "writes not
for moments of passion, but for centuries; not for one country alone, but
for the world; not for one race, but for all humanity." This is why he joined
no party, not even that of the Saint- Simonists. He took it as the highest
compliment when a Saint-Simonist once said of him that he was no "party
man," but "a man of progress."
Long before Marx, Heine had studied the workings of capital domi–
nance; this, together with his reverence for Napoleon, accounts for his
hatred of England. He felt that there more than elsewhere he heard the
"sibilants of egoism," and that the majority of "average Englishmen" had
much of that brutal energy with which the Romans repressed the world
but they combined that "Roman wolf-hunger" with "the serpent-wiliness
of Carthage." But his primary objection was to the "trivial feelings and
superficial thought" he encountered there, the fixation on material daily
concerns and on sheer necessity, leaving no place for art. "On all the docks
in England you encounter no single unifying idea, nothing but steamships
and hunger." His friend Marx used these two elements (among others) as
the basis for a most fertile work. Heine's grasp of the mechanism of capi–
tal dominance was more intuitive: "If you have much, then you will soon /
