Heine in der Romania (review)

With this study, Gerhart Hoffmeister joins a long succession of literary critics who have investigated the impact of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish writer on the literature of the Romance languages. Hoffmeister carefully balances summarizing the interpretations of his predecessors with his own clearly enunciated perception of Heine's poetry as pivotal to the development of poetry from Romanticism to Symbolism. He attributes Heine's influence to two sources: Nerval's "rhythmically lyrical" translations of excerpts from Heine's Buch der Lieder (Le Livre des chants), Lyrisches Intermezzo, Die Nordsee (La Mer du nord), and Atta Troll and the role of the Revue des Deux Mondes in making Heine's poetry, as well as articles by and about him, accessible to speakers of Romance languages.

Hoffmeister devotes nearly half of his study to Heine's fluctuating career and fortune in Paris. Heine emigrated to Paris in 1831 to escape Prussian censorship of his political writings. Warmly welcomed into Parisian literary circles because of his wit and charm, he soon became acquainted with Hugo, Dumas-père, Musset, Marie d'Argoult, Caroline Jaubert, George Sand, Nodier, Vigny, and most importantly, Nerval and Gautier. He also conceived several contradictory goals: first to study Saint-Simonism, then to become part of the contemporary life of Paris, to achieve financial stability by selling his work in the Parisian literary marketplace, and to correct the false image of Germany as a land of mystic enchantment propagated twenty years earlier by Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne. Hoffmeister delineates how all these projects failed. A quarrel with Victor Cousin led to isolation from the political-philosophical scene. Heine's inability to write French as fluently and wittily as he spoke it restricted his ability to earn a living by writing in Paris. And the French remained obstinately devoted to Madame de Staël's image of Germany. Despite the publication of eight sections in Victor Bohain's newly launched L'Europe littéraire, his De l'Allemagne received little attention and garnered few sales. Heine's self-characterization as "ce pauvre rossignol allemand qui a fait son nid dans la perruque de M. de Voltaire" in a letter to Sainte René Taillandier a year before his death demonstrates the poet's acute awareness of his inability to gain recognition for his philosophical and political ideas.

Hoffmeister convincingly traces the far greater success of Heine's poetry in challenging the traditional French romantic image of Germany as the land of poetic dreamers and in influencing the development of French poetry. The partial translation of Reisebilder as Tableaux de Voyage by Renduel in 1832 won Heine praise for its satirical-ironic tone. It became Heine's most popular book in France. Nerval's lyrical translations of excerpts from Heine's poetry in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1844 and his rhythmic prose poem translations of sixteen poems from Heine's masterpiece, Buch der Lieder (Le Livre des chants), in the 15 September 1848 issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes introduced the French to Heine's peculiar combination of musical lyricism with witty sarcasm. The publication of his Œuvres complètes by Michel Lévy-frères in 1855, followed by a second edition in 1857, sealed Heine's reputation in France as the poet who could masterfully interplay lyrical songs about unrequited love with mocking irony. According to critics cited by Hoffmeister, in particular, Boeck (1972), Höhn (1994), Weinberg (1954), and Werner (1978, 1991), Heine's coupling of romantic longing and mystery with wit and irony inspired numerous imitations by both Romantic and post-Romantic French poets ranging from Nerval and Gautier to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Banville, and Laforgue and extending to the twentieth-century writers Apollinaire and Gide. Hoffmeister concludes with a section on André Suarès's image of Heine as a fellow exile and victim of anti-Semitism.

In the second half of his...