Memory and Myth: The Narrator's Salvation in Heine's Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand

Memory and Myth: The Narrator's Salvation in Heine's Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand George F. Peters University of New Mexico In chapter 3 of Heinrich Heine's Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand the narrator exuberantly declares that he has no need for an afterlife, since he experiences eternity in the present by "living backwards": Jeder Augenblick ist mirja eine Unendlichkeit ; . . . und ich brauche mir von keinem Priester ein zweites Leben versprechen zu lassen, da ich schon in diesem Leben genug erleben kann, wenn ich rückwärts lebe, im Leben der Vorfahren, und mir die Ewigkeit erobere im Reiche der Vergangenheit.1 (B II: 254) Having ostensibly been pulled back from the brink of suicide by the glance of his heartless beloved at the end of chapter 2, the narrator here breaks into a veritable paean on the joys of life: albeit fragile and absurd, the creation of a wine-soused god and just as transitory, the world offers life, and life is to be embraced, immeasurably preferable to the alternative, "das kalte, schwarze, leere Nichtsein des Todes" (B II: 253). "Gottlob! ich lebe!" concludes the narrator, "In meinen Adern kocht das rote Leben, unter meinen Füßen zuckt die Erde ..." (B II: 254). Yet even the most naive reader is going to question the sincerity of this sudden reavowal of life. Is it to be taken any more seriously than the elaborate preparations for suicide in chapter 2? After all, ironies abound: the Olympian gods carouse "à la française," the steamship is listed alongside the Iliad, Plato, the battle of Marathon, Moses, the Strassburg cathedral, the French Revolution, and Hegel as a pretty good notion on the part of the Creator (B II: 253). Every German schoolboy knows Schiller actually wrote "Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht." And mention of Heinrich von Kleist's suicide hardly strikes an upbeat note. The narrator's euphoria rapidly deflates at the end of the chapter anyway, and there follows the rather maudlin vision of his own death in chapter 4. So much, it would seem, for "Gottlob! ich lebe!" The problem is one that has plagued readers of the Buch Le Grand from the beginning. Can anything in this first-person narration be taken seriously? Is it not all simply a marvelous "Tohuwabohu" of brilliant thoughts, a kaleidoscopic collection offragmented memories, 169 170Rocky Mountain Review essaistic aperçus and lyric flights of fancy? 2 (Elster 1: 80) Heine would seem here to have fashioned a narrator of monumental unreliability, one who leads his fictitious addressee (and in her person also the reader) around by the nose, introducing his story with the false pathos of "das alte Stück" and letting it trail off in the endless "la-la-las" of Weber's bridal chorus. Recent sensible scholarship has succeeded in demonstrating that there is method in the apparent madness of Le Grand, thereby considerably elevating its stature among Heine's works. It has been shown that the narrator's shifting ironic poses reveal an important progression in the development of Heine's artistic persona3; and a highly detailed structural analysis of the work uncovers a cohesive logic unifying the seemingly disparate themes, motifs, and images of Le Grand (Großklaus). In short, while the verbal fireworks, humor, and irony on the surface continue to make delightful reading in and of themselves, there is purpose and meaning to the work. Returning then to the narrator's comment that he is capable of securing immortality by "living backwards" in the realm ofthe past, I would like to suggest this casual observation offers a key to understanding the narrator's ironic point of view in Le Grand. For actually the past is a major theme, perhaps the major theme of the narrative, not simply events which took place in the past, but the past as such and the problem of dealing with it. The "Stück" which prefaces chapters 1 and 2 and then again the final chapter of the work is "alt" in more ways than one: "Sie war liebenswürdig, und Er liebte Sie; Er aber war nicht liebenswürdig, und Sie liebte Ihn nicht" (B II: 248...