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Chapter Three  Mediated Situatedness in the Reception of Heinrich Heine The relation of medium to space, and the location of the performing body within that matrix, has profound poetic and political implications, structuring Heine’s perception of his writing and of its place in the world. Heine’s writing is always already to a striking degree preoccupied with the question of how it will be read, by whom and where. The issue for Heine is not primarily time (Will he be read in the future? Will his words allow him to make his mark on posterity?) but rather space (Where is he read? And what are the implications of this location and contextualization?). As his experimentation with prose and his writing on artistic media show, Heine was continually investigating the pragmatics of writing and examining the implications of transmitting his words through the world, away from a shared space of copresence and across geopolitical borders. Hence the great importance of the issue of reception within the field of Heine studies, which goes beyond the manifest fact that as a Jew writing in German he was not easily incorporated in the canon.1 Many of those who reacted strongly to his writing over the centuries—whether that reaction was positive or negative—found in Heine a powerful vehicle through which to meditate precisely on their own situatedness, their own ability to transmit their words into the public sphere and to produce world-space through writing. This is evidenced in the fact that the nexus of space and medium is fundamental to the history of Heine reception. This history moves between partially overlapping contexts that illuminate, complicate, and clarify one another: German and Jewish, Hebrew and German-Jewish, Zionist and non-Zionist, pre-state and Israeli. In all of these contexts, Heine is at once both a mediating figure, connecting romanticism with modernism, German and Jewish writing, German and Hebrew, prose and poetry, and a figure that must be mediated, rewritten, translated, composed, memorialized, illustrated, and recontextualized . The history of Heine reception can and should in fact be told as a series of medial transformations, of remediations, a fact that escapes from 48 Chapter Three view when scholars neglect to view these media—such as music, art and architecture, literature, and political commentary—as one larger picture, as I propose to do here. All of these circles of remediation bridge text and context. With each new act of medial translation, new contexts are created , and they in turn lead to further remediations and further texts. Heine’s work, for example, is by far the body of texts in Western literature (excluding the Bible) most widely used as the basis for musical compositions , a fact that has only recently become a subject of scrutiny in its own right.2 Estimates of the number of songs composed to Heine’s words run between eight and ten thousand, and they include some of the great cycles in the history of the lied (art song), such as Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, or the six songs each that were composed by Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. Indeed, composers consistently turn to a relatively narrow corpus of eminently “singable” texts from Heine’s oeuvre. About a dozen poems—all from the Book of Songs—exist in more than one hundred compositions each. The most popular text with composers is “Du bist wie eine Blume” (“You are like a flower”), for which Peter Shea lists almost 450 versions (of course, many other of Heine’s poems remain, for a variety of reasons, untouched by composers). But if during his lifetime and shortly after his death Heine’s poetry was a vehicle for musical innovation , by the time the nineteenth century had ended, musical compositions using the very same poems were overwhelmingly sentimental and seemed to labor at maintaining intact a world of social mores that Heine had been set on unmasking.3 Heine’s great popularity with lied composers offers us an image of his work as entirely focused on the voice of a performer, highlighting the gesturing, copresent speaker and his listener and hiding from view the author who wrote prose to explode the space of performance. If poetry is often staged in contrast to prose as a performed mode that highlights copresence, then the art song can be seen as a medium that harnesses music and performance to confirm this staging.4 As Roland Barthes puts it in his essay on the romantic song, “For the most...

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