Review Essay: The Bicentennial of Heinrich Heine 1997: An Overview

JEFFREY L. SAMMONS REVIEW ESSAY: The Bicentennial of Heinrich Heine 1997: An Overview TAKING NOTICE OF ANNIVERSARIES IS a familiar feature of liter ary life, especially in Germany. But the notice taken of Heinrich Heine's (alleged) 200th birthday was, no doubt predictably, hypertrophic , and seems to demand explanations that are perhaps best left to the German culture generalist s. The phenomenon is, as it seems to me, overdetermined, driven in some proportion that I would not venture to estimate by an urge to Wiedergutmachung; a retained tradition, though with altered values, of requiring the Dichterfürst of the past to supply guidance and identification to the culture of the present; a degree of self-replicating academic fashion; and conceivably , now and again, a genuine interest in and fascination with Heine. One possible way of grasping the evolution of the phenomenon over the past quarter century might be to bracket it between the ambitious Düsseldorf conferences of 1972 and 1997.The 175thbirthday event of 1972 took place amidst the political unrest ofthat time, exacerbated in the particular case by the persisting refusal of the faculty senate to name the recently founded university for Heine. There was a certain amount of unruliness both within and without the hall. Most amusing within was the sight of the radicals of the bourgeois West scandalizing the mandarins of the socialist East with rudeness about Goethe.1 Without, a cabaret attempted parodically to devalue Heine's Lieder and their traditional compositions while elevating the political verse with settings redolent of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. By 1997 the matter of the naming of the university had been settled for nearly a decade. The conference opened with a concert by a markedly subdued Wolf Biermann, ruminating on, among other things, the contents of his Stasi file. (The revisions forced on Biermann in the hard school of experience can, of course, enrage the remaining true believers; see the assault on him by Paul Goethe Yearbook 347 Peters in L 42, 304-5 η. 47. For the sake of fairness, cf. the interview with Biermann in L 11, 63-77.) Perhaps more emblematic than the drone of the sixty full-length lectures was the seven-room, millionand -a-half mark, son-et-lumière exhibit in the Kunsthalle, with visual materials collected from around the world and exotically dressed actors and actresses wandering about, reciting Heine texts, which elsewhere in the city fluttered from flagpoles and were otherwise ubiquitous. Not everyone, to be sure, is persuaded of the efficacy of all this publicity. Fritz J. Raddatz remarked in an interview: "Was die Stadt sich mit dem Heine-Spektakel hat einfallen lassen, ist eine einzige Peinlichkeit. Sie macht aus Heine eine Art Michael Jackson,"2 and, in fact, there was an explicit intention to appeal, if possible, to schoolchildren .3 What is striking is how diffuse the effect can get once it radiates beyond the academy.This is perhaps a permanent dilemma; the guild of literary scholars may often wish that the objects of its attention might come to be of interest to a general readership, but they may become quite adulterated if, in Wallenstein's pungent if self-deluding phrase, they go out "in des Lebens Fremde," as I argued was already Heine's case a number of years ago.4 Gross misunderstanding and distortion continue to circulate tirelessly.A dispiriting example is a piece by Rudolf Augstein prominently displayed in Der Spiegel (L 3). It retains gossip and old canards, provides a chronicle that leaves out Heine's late works, gets dates and figures wrong, and is in general a tangle of partial truths and misapprehensions . What is frustrating is that these are not esoteric matters; the information is ready to hand as a result of the vast publicity Heine has been given in our time. Another sign of the curious impermeability of the larger discourse is an ill-conceived translation of one of the most useless contemporary books, Ernst Pawel's grossly inaccurate and absurdly cranky The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris (NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).5The translation (L 41) repairs the errors in the German quotes and adds references...