A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine (review)

The editor of this volume, Roger Cook, has brought together some very fine Heine scholars from North America and Europe in order to produce a collection of essays that might address those aspects of Heine which do not fit neatly into any unified image of his career. In his introduction, Cook expresses the rationale of the volume as an attempt to open the main features of Heine's work to contemporary critical approaches that share some of its underlying assumptions. Thus, the essays regularly employ the tools and rhetoric of critical theory and modern cultural studies, without abandoning literary critical, literary historical, and even more traditional philological methodologies. Also, perspectives and insights from the latest developments in German-Jewish studies have been brought to bear on Jewish-related issues concerning Heine. Consequently, the volume should be of interest to a wide range of readers.

In order to make the work broadly accessible to the English-language readership, two of the essays were translated into English, but the quotations from Heine's work are given throughout in the original German (or, on occasion, in French). This practice is a bit perplexing. The implied readers of the volume would be an audience familiar with Heine in the original, and they would have to know German to appreciate the essays fully. I think it might have been better in this case to provide English translations of these passages in order to enlarge the readership possibilities, since the volume has much to offer, and Heine's German is not easily comprehensible for those with a rudimentary command of the language or even for those with intermediate-level competence. Likewise, the abbreviated chronology of Heine's life and the list of his major works, presented after the table of contents, can only provide very limited help for the uninitiated. A more informative chronology would make the volume more useful for a wider audience. However, Cook's introductory explanations concerning Heine's different personae and regarding the different editions of Heine's works are informative and should prove to be quite valuable for those less familiar with Heine scholarship.

Whereas Cook justifies the fact that the volume is weighted toward the later period of Heine's life—that is, his situation and writings after 1848—it is the essays which focus on the earlier period and on his poetic language through the 1840s that seem to me to be the most compelling. Michael Perraudin's essay on the "Buch der Lieder" presents an incisive analysis of the work that established Heine's international reputation. He argues that this collection of poetry is a testament of generational disillusion, straddling the gap between the world of Romantic imagination and skeptical social and psychological realism. Perraudin reads the work convincingly as one holding poetic impotence in productive tension with poetic power in a world where humans have lost the capacity to experience ideality. In perhaps the most illuminating and brilliant essay in the volume, Paul Peters elucidates Heine's erotic imagination, which blossomed after he arrived in Paris. In close readings of the double entendres and ironies characteristic of much of Heine's poetic language, Peters successfully demonstrates how irreverent and lascivious Heine's verbal playfulness really is. Cook's own essay on Heine's Romantic poetry and historical progress raises the very difficult question of the place of Hegel in Heine's aesthetic development. The issue of Hegel comes up numerous times and in various contexts throughout the collection, as in Gerhard Höhn's essay on Heine's conception of history. Cook speculates, perhaps a bit too irresponsibly, that Heine's nearly obsessive fascination with unrequited love in his poetry "may reflect the frustrations of a German Jew trying to attain the status of a Romantic poet at this time in Germany" and "may resist a tendency to deny that a Jew could ever truly be a German poet." Maybe, but then, maybe...