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  • "Ich bin krank wie ein Hund, arbeite wie ein Pferd, und bin arm wie eine Kirchenmaus." Heinrich Heines sprichwörtliche Sprache
  • Jeffrey L. Sammons
"Ich bin krank wie ein Hund, arbeite wie ein Pferd, und bin arm wie eine Kirchenmaus." Heinrich Heines sprichwörtliche Sprache. Von Andreas Nolte. Hildesheim: Olms, 2006. 364 Seiten. €38,00.

The specialty with which this study identifies itself is die Parömiologie. I was abashed that I did not know this term; it is not in my lexica of literary terms, German or English, nor did I find its equivalent in my unabridged dictionary, but it is in the OED under "parœmia," "adage or proverb," thus "parœmiology"; and in Duden, where Parömiologie is defined as "Lehre von den Sprichwörtern." The derivation is from Greek paroimía, "proverb, adage"; in the Gospel of John, "parable." It would have been helpful for the less informed if the author of this comprehensive compilation of adages and common turns of phrase in Heine's works and letters had defined it somewhere. Andreas Nolte has scoured Heine for occurrences of phrases found in Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander, Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon (1867–1880) and Lutz Röhrich, Das große Lexikon der sprichwörtlichen Redensarten (1991–1992). It will surprise no one to learn that Heine made extensive use of these communal language materials, but Nolte's 5,166 occurrences may still be impressive in their magnitude. Nolte introduces and analyzes the materials systematically. He describes their various functions, [End Page 577] the critical perspectives they imply, their employment for support of authority and as leitmotif, their reversals through wordplay, their repetition, extension, escalation, and indirect allusions to them. However, Nolte's main point, which he stresses from the beginning, is that Heine employs these phrases in the interest of clarity, ease of understanding, and the accessibility of his writing to the common reader.

This interpretation suggests a rather conventional view of the author as a democratic writer of and for the people, and there are moments indicating that Nolte lacks a critical perspective on Heine. Nowhere does he ask whether the points and assertions Heine makes with his adages are just or accurate; he is taken at his word on all matters. It was rather shocking to read that he wanted to distance himself from "den seichten Liebesliedern" (56), though Nolte goes on to suppose that Heine may never have abandoned love songs for political polemic. In one place Nolte is actually unjust to Heine, where he remarks that the English in the letters to the London theater manager Benjamin Lumley concerning the ballet scenarios "weitgehend mit dem Wörterbuch aus dem Deutschen übersetzt zu sein schein[t]" (102). Heine wrote to Lumley in French; the letters were translated in Lumley's office. I doubt that Heine was capable of composing a letter in English. There are some other slips. For example, Heine did not find Heinrich Laube "einen der wenigen, durch die Jahre hinweg unvermindert treuen Weggefährten" (60), and Nolte identifies Adolphe Thiers as elected president of France in 1840, thirty-one years too early (32). On the same page, the first reference to the Säkularausgabe I looked up had the wrong volume number, perhaps unfairly undermining confidence in the hundreds of others.

Two-thirds of the book is filled with a register of the adages and phrases, alphabetized by keyword. There is no practical way to estimate its exhaustiveness, but I was puzzled in a couple of places. Of Barbarossa's do-nothing aphorisms in the Wintermärchen, the first, "Man baute nicht Rom in einem Tag," is listed, but not the other four, leaving out "chi va piano va sano," even though the narrator specifically says of it: "so heißt / Das Sprüchwort im römischen Reiche." Under "Schlehmihl" there are two citations, one an allusion to Chamisso, but nothing is said of the genealogy of the schlemihls in Jehuda ben Halevy. Such anomalies may be owing to the dependence on the compilations of Wander and Röhrich, though Nolte does not restrict himself to them.

The utility of what Nolte himself calls a "Fleißarbeit" (7...

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