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  • Heinrich Heine und die Diaspora. Der Zeitschriftsteller im kulturellen Raum der jüdischen Minderheit von Lydia Fritzlar
  • Jeffrey L. Sammons
Heinrich Heine und die Diaspora. Der Zeitschriftsteller im kulturellen Raum der jüdischen Minderheit. Von Lydia Fritzlar. Berlin und Boston: de Gruyter, 2013. 308 Seiten. €99, 95

Many efforts have been made to find a formula that would explain and perhaps unify Heine’s elusive and shifting relationship to his Jewishness. Lydia Fritzlar makes an ambitious attempt to find a constant in Heine’s awareness of his location in the Diaspora, now no longer a punishment ordained by God to be endured in isolation and ritualized introversion until the Messiah comes and the Jews are returned to Zion, but a secular, socio-politically explicable condition of the oppression of a minority by a majority society. The Diaspora comes to be seen historically, not religiously. Heine is a participant in and a particularly acute observer of the epochal turn from a religious [End Page 724] to a secular mentality. Marginality generates consciousness on the threshold of modernity. Fritzlar goes at length into the traditional memory of the Diaspora, beginning with the biblical account. The Babylonian exile defines the consciousness of Diaspora. Despite the introversion through ritual and Torah study and sense of otherness in alien surroundings, the Jews perpetually interacted with the environment, beginning with the Hellenistic Greeks and continuing, sometimes with violence, through the Middle Ages. But in the eighteenth century the status of the Torah was weakened by the Jewish enlightenment. The problem, as is well known, was how to give up separateness without dissolving Jewishness. In Fritzlar’s account Heine documents this dissociation into a disparate, self-alienated existence.

She begins with Der Rabbi von Bacherach, which gives up on the optimism of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. The poles are the tradition of the Rabbi and the cynicism of the renegade Abarbanel. Jewish separation is not theologically grounded but the result of persecution, and it leads to degeneration, fear, and boorishness. Heine’s poem about the longing of the fir tree in the north for the palm in the south indicates the isolation of the acculturated Jew. The account of the Passover Seder does not include God’s blessings, implying that the Jews made the Exodus themselves and must rely on themselves for further progress. Fritzlar then turns to the rehabilitation of Shylock in Shakspeares Mädchen und Frauen, where Heine derives antisemitism from the deprivations of the common people and explains Jewish finance as a protection against it. Shylock is associated with repressive Nazarenism. The critique of Jessica is an attack on assimilation, and Heine humanizes Shylock by adding a line not in Shakespeare: “Jessica, mein Kind!” The signs of insanity Heine claims to have found in the Yom Kippur ceremony in Venice are ascribed to Börne as well, the result of pursuing Jewish instead of universal human emancipation, leading to the degeneration of the Jew in exile. Fritzlar finds an increasing sense of futility about Heine’s situation as a writer in the Diaspora: “[D]ie Überlegenheit des Kosmopoliten ist im Verlauf der Denkschrift mit Blick auf die Zukunft des Dichtertums in Resignation umgeschlagen” (255), illustrated by the fate of Jehuda ben Halevy and the original Schlemihl, in whom Jew and poet are equated. Thus the dichotomy of Jew and poet, asserted by the dominant majority, is overcome, and Jewish literature replaces religious tradition.

As usual, a complex and detailed argument has been selectively abridged here. It is very attentive to textual details, often eloquent, and in places ingenious. The interpretations of Almansor, Börne, and Jehuda ben Halevy are subtle. Fritzlar indicates a deeper and more continuous preoccupation with Jewishness than others have seen. However, there are problems here, some of which seem to me fundamental. One of them is the now persistent inflation of Heine as an incomparable socio-cultural and literary-historical innovator, superior to all others in insight and prophecy, and immune from criticism. Heine certainly experienced antisemitism, but its magnitude is exaggerated. The teasing of his schoolmates that he reports does not indicate an unrelievedly hostile environment; some of the friendships he made...

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