Ludwig Börne: A Memorial, and: Heinrich Heine: Alternative Perspectives 1985–2005 (review)

The two titles by and on Heine, the one edited and the other authored by Jeffrey Sammons, represent cornerstones of a distinguished career of an outstanding scholar. If Sammons is the dean of American Heine studies, his longstanding loyalty as stalwart treasurer of the North American Heine Society indicates more than just commitment beyond the call of duty. It also has symbolic significance as an engagement that goes well beyond the academic customs and conventions of the guild. A treasurer, indeed, Sammons has kept watch over a treasure whose recognition has gained new critical attention during the last four decades coinciding with the period of Sammons’s own critical work. Sammons has assumed a stature central to the present scene of international Heine research. Without him, the current stage of Heine research is difficult to imagine. And yet he has managed to remain an “outsider,” or so he likes to claim, thus true to the critical but also liberating ethos of Heine’s own approach.

With the first complete English translation of Heine’s controversial Börne book Sammons makes a text available that poses a formidable challenge scholarship has yet to recognize in its fuller implications. With this translation, Heine’s work is now completely translated into English. Instructively contextualizing what was likely Heine’s oddest literary adventure—it led to the greatest estrangement from his readers, which Heine, however, never really understood, to the challenge of a duel and, as a consequence, to Heine’s committing to his wife in marriage—the introduction highlights the complicated and multifaceted agenda that informs the composition of this text. The translation is precise and Sammons does a superb job in reflecting the tone and diction of the original. The translation is also aptly annotated, to the point, and succinct. As simple and straightforward as the text often pretends to be, Heine’s Börne book is one of his most intricate and complex literary performance acts as it employs the figure and character of Börne in a complicated play of self-clarification and mystification. The consistently sober and clearly worded translation serves the challenge well, rendering Heine’s “bravura performance, wildly imaginative, brilliant, yet often subtle in its stylistic effects” (xl) into an English that translucently reflects the intricate structure of Heine’s most dramatic act of self-staging behind the surface of blunt simplicity. Sammons renders the text’s highly dramatic performance with exacting precision. Heine artfully builds up the semblance of a straightforward narrative only to twist and expose it at every turn. Heine has the tension of his narrative build up on the basis of a style that is at the same time both seemingly direct and mischievously complex. Sammons does full justice to Heine’s use of underhanded irony and its linking of critique and self-critique. Sammons’s translation reproduces this sophisticated play in sovereign manner, congenially rendering Heine’s act of performance with the ironic suspense that is key to Heine’s literary prose. With his translation, Sammons has extended an invitation to return to a central scene in Heine’s writing that holds important keys for a critical understanding.

In Ludwig Börne: A Memorial, Heine weaves an intricately wrought web of cultural, political, religious, and literary motives that highlights the constitutive function of their mutual interdependence. With this constellatory effect of interweaving seemingly disparate moments and movements, Heine articulates a position that argues for the dynamic coherence of the “poetical-political” and “ethico-poetical” link that demands a rethinking of the traditional distinction between aesthetics, politics, and ethics and suggests a constitutive bond that Heine however reimagines as profoundly different from conventional aesthetics. Ludwig Börne: A Memorial is Heine’s signal text that calls for a redrawing of the fronts and alliances along cultural and political borders that demand creative...