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  • A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine
  • Robert Combs
Roger F. Cook, ed., A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. xiv + 373 pp.

This engrossing, wide-ranging collection of essays by distinguished scholars might best be appreciated by reading the last contribution first. In that essay, George F. Peters discusses the vexing question of why Heine has never emerged as a galvanizing force in German political thought. For Peters, the Weimar Republic, following the 1918–19 revolution, should have been the perfect occasion for such a cultural moment. Why did not "the assumption of power by a coalition of social democrats and liberals who set out to fulfill the lost promise of the 1948 revolution" (351) lead German writers directly to Heine as a voice of "enlightened, non-Prussian humanitarianism" (350)? Yet only Heinrich Mann embraced Heine as the prototype of the "European German." A number of complex issues militated against Heine's retrieval from the old, persistent prejudices: "Heine the Jew, the Francophile, the mannered, frivolous poet, or the talented but superficial journalist" (352). Perhaps 20/20 hindsight reveals Heine as the lucky one, the Weimar Republic having led to the Third Reich. As Peters notes, after [End Page 241] 1945 Heine began to be appreciated profoundly, though not as a political voice exactly.

The many complex issues that have relegated Heine to a "state of limbo on the threshold to modernity" (1) are explored in the essays of Roger F. Cook's excellent companion to Heine. Though Heine continually represented the central theme of his work as "the struggle for emancipation" (4), he also saw himself as embodying in his own being the contradictions of his time, as if he suffered them in his own body after his physical collapse in 1848. Cook discusses the five authorial personae of Heine in his introductory essay, which in turn become the five chapters of this collection.

"The Romantic Poet" remains the Heine known best to the general reader, though the essays in this section find "world dissonance" (52) in Buch der Lieder not totally in keeping with this book's fate as a favorite engagement gift. Michael Perraudin eloquently captures both the themes and counter-themes of the work. As he says, Heine characteristically invokes "an ideal domain that loses credibility in collision with material reality—social, psychological, emotional"—[with] an implication of regret at the loss" (38). Yet Heine also implies, according to Perraudin, that it may not be the ideals that are at fault, but the materialism and rationality of modern man. In other words, Heine cannot adequately be described as Romantic or anti-Romantic, an ambiguity that continues throughout Heine's career. George F. Peters explores Heine's eroticism, describing, in the longest essay in this collection, a rich array of conflicts beneath all that "doesn't happen" between men and women. Peters quotes Queen Victoria ("Mother was not a person," 38) as an introduction to exploring all the ways that the female subject, the love object, societal convention, feminine sensuality, and the "lost continent of the body" (86) impact the unsuspecting male's "libidinous journey...to the sheer alterity of woman" (98). A great deal of literary theory regarding gender issues has been distilled for this reader-friendly essay.

Some of these same concerns carry over into Cook's second chapter, "Philosophy, History, Mythology," as Willi Goetschel discusses Heine's uneasy relationship with Hegelianism in terms of the poet's "anti-idealist reinstatement of the flesh" (141). Although Heine admired Hegel, the poet in him challenged the limits of reason and intuition (148), felt affinities for pantheism and Spinoza, and toyed with both evolutionary and cyclical views of history, a point explored further in Gerhard Höhn's discussion of Heine's conception of history after 1848. For Höhn, "faith in the ongoing struggle for emancipation" remains a constant throughout Heine's life, even in the way he anticipated his own death. Paul Reitter contributes to the important though little discussed question of Jakob Grimm's influence on Heine, asserting that Grimm "transformed not only Heine's understanding of German mythology, but also his understanding of...

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