Die Weisheit des Silen. Heinrich Heine und die Kritik des Lebens (review)

Ralph Häfner's impressive book is the seventh volume in the respected de Gruyter series of Comparative Studies "spectrum Literature" and represents a milestone of sorts in contemporary Heine criticism. Häfner has integrated a thorough mastery of Heine literature with a comprehensive understanding of modern European cultural history to produce a major study that offers fresh, frequently original perspectives on Heine's significance in the emergence of modernism. Although this is hardly an original thesis, the multitude of new and newly explained illustrations linking Heine to a wide spectrum of intellectual and artistic figures reaching into the 20^th century both broadens and deepens our understanding of how keenly Heine was aware of the tenor of his times and how fully he anticipated the radical departure of literary expression from the traditions in which he matured.

Based on theoretical approaches emerging from the new Cultural Studies and drawing on diverse cultural discourses, Häfner's lengthy and richly documented study offers a wealth of insight for both the seasoned Heine scholar and the comparatist studying the complex literary and cultural cross-currents flowing among the Continent, England, and the United States during the 19^th century's agitated progression from Romanticism through Realism to the fragmented forms of modernism. Not for the timid, the book demands close, attentive reading and, ideally, a firm grasp of Western literature, art, and music from antiquity to the early 20^th century. Excerpts from the writings of poets, philosophers, painters, and composers from Abelard to Zola abound, frequently in the original. Numerous illustrations invite the reader to follow Häfner's explication of paintings and lithographs alongside poems and essays. The line of argumentation is bold, at times startling, and occasionally obscure; it is never boring. Using example after example from the rich cultural and intellectual milieu that surrounded Heine in Paris, Häfner weaves a complex web of associations, crosscurrents, and influences that places the German poet at the center of the modern discourse that was to define the role of art and the artist in the turbulent political and social landscape of the later 19^th century.

If this sounds a bit like Heine himself it may be no coincidence. Häfner eschews linear or chronological composition in favor of an associative technique that leads from one subtext to the next within six major chapters that he calls "'Mikrohistorien,' die sich in dem gemeinsamen Fluchtpunkt der Bewusstseinsgeschichte verlieren" (13). Häfner contends that these overarching themes with the poetic titles "Gesten des Scheiterns," "Die Wirklichkeit des Bildes," "Quellen des Trostes," "Imaginäre Tableaux," "Aurora Borealis," and "Pasquinaden," all touch on ideas and attitudes that are both fundamental to Heine's life and writings and characteristic of the intellectual and artistic climate of the time. What emerges is less a definitive study on any one of the numerous topics Häfner raises that are familiar to the Heine scholar—Heine and Byron, say, Heine and his French contemporaries, or Heine as critic of the Salon—but rather a psycho-cultural history of Europe in the 19^th century with Heine as touchstone.

As the title of the book suggests, a deep strain of melancholy underlies what at times reads like a flâneur's stroll through the galleries, drawing rooms, and concert halls of Paris during the July Monarchy. It is Heine the skeptical observer, the outsider, marked by a lifelong Byronic malaise, who inhabits these pages. Häfner concedes that the "wisdom of Silenus," the awful secret that the only thing better for man than to die is never to have been born at all, may strike a discordant note in a study of Heine who, after all, embraced life, championed the Hellenic ideal, and held out the promise that earthly joy would triumph over deadly spiritualism. But for Häfner, Heine is a Euphorion figure, boldly dancing over the abyss but doomed to fail...