Heinrich Heine Writes about His Life

I. Phantom Wounds

None of Heinrich Heine's (1797–1856) manuscripts suffered as much speculation or provoked as much anticipation during his lifetime as his projected memoirs, which he pursued over many decades. Indeed, already in 1823 the young Berlin law student who attended Hegel's lectures was eager to apply these lessons to a vision of his own life. In those years, Heine describes his life as "tumultuous" on the outside and "dark" and dreamlike on the inside. He writes to his Jewish friend Immanuel Wohlwill,

Yes, amice, I had great luck; just as I left the philosophical lecture hall, and entered the circus of worldly affairs, I could construct my life philosophically, and I can look at it objectively now—even though I lack that higher calm and contemplation that would be necessary for a clear rendering of a large theater of life.¹

Heine calls this project his Bekenntnisse² in an allusion to Rousseau's Confessions, but quickly abandons the title for the sake of other alternatives. Years later Heine takes up the concept of confessions again and this time translates it into the more legal term Geständnisse.³ The Geständnisse, authored in the 1850s, were to preface his observations on Germany and were intended to counter Mme. de Stael's De l'Allemagne, as well as celebrate his own arrival in Paris two decades earlier.⁴ But these Geständnisse would also speak of the distance Heine had traveled from his early discipleship of Hegel to embrace a less "abstract" philosophy and affirm a newly regained sense of religion.

In 1823, however, Heine's Bekenntnisse had not yet taken that turn. Instead, he was eager to remove from them any personal considerations and to turn them into a picture of his times; he intended to include portraits of relatives and friends. Thus, Heine soon uses the term Memoiren⁵ and claims to have begun a work that would not only counter Rousseau's famous confessions but also Goethe's autobiography. Heine wanted not only to write about his times, but to invent a new genre of life-writing that would be appropriate for a new age. Memories, not confessions, were called for, that is, a picture of the times, not just the inner life of an individual. This genre would also imply the introduction of a French tradition into the world of German letters.

Heine's work seems to have progressed well, even though he wrote in fits and spurts. In 1837, over a decade after he began his autobiography and a few years after his move to Paris, Heine reports to his Hamburg publisher Julius Campe about his work. The story of his life had already turned into an "extensive work" that would be ready for perusal soon and would constitute not just a simple descriptive narrative or Lebensbeschreibung,⁶ but an extensive novel or Roman. "Day and night I labor over my great project," Heine writes, "and work on the novel of my life."⁷

He refers to his book with similar exuberance in letters to his friend Giacomo Meyerbeer. By 1838, Heine was once again preoccupied with his financial situation, which had remained precarious since his father's bankruptcy years earlier. Meyerbeer was to help him negotiate a yearly pension from his uncle, the wealthy Hamburg banker Salomon Heine, who had assumed responsibility for his brother's family.⁸ In the following years, Heine mentions his work off and on again in letters to his sister Charlotte and to friends and business acquaintances,⁹ but his uncle, too, was well aware of his project, and anxious that Heine would protect the family name. After Salomon Heine's death in 1844, Heine's memoirs became instrumental in negotiations concerning his future pension payments. Salomon Heine did not leave a note regarding future pension payments in his will, and his son, Heine's cousin Carl, refused to honor the full amount of the pre-established payments. Indeed, he was only willing to issue a pension if Heine's memoirs were first sent to him for review, should...