Heine and Critical Theory by Willi Goetschel (review)

Willi Goetschel's Heine and Critical Theory does perhaps more than any book before it to investigate the missed encounter between the Frankfurt School and Heinrich Heine. Despite general scholarly consensus that Heine was snubbed by Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Kracauer, and others associated with the Frankfurt School, Goetschel argues that Heine's facility for representing displacement between politics, religion, history, and aesthetics and his notion of what Goetschel calls emancipatory Jewish difference were formative for critical theory. On the one hand, Goetschel shows the Frankfurt School's reception of Heine as being much richer than it is usually portrayed and, on the other, he allows Heine to emerge as a formidable critical theorist avant la lettre in his own right, whose thought shares correspondences with that of the Frankfurt School's members, if it did not exert influence outright.

The book's approach could be said to have two main parts, the first of which might be called "genealogical," for its reconstruction of direct ties between Heine and the Frankfurt School. This part of the book comprises the first three chapters: Heine's reception by the Frankfurt School in American exile; Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as readers of Heine; and Adorno's complex Heine reception, respectively. In these chapters, Goetschel brings neglected texts and similarities into the conversation about Heine and critical theory. Goetschel shows, for instance, Heine's importance for Leo Löwenthal and Max Horkheimer as a Jewish thinker and German exile, engaging with Löwenthal's essay for Commentary and "Heine's Religion: The Messianic Ideals of the Poet," Heine's vision of emancipatory Judaism, and reporting an obscure anecdote about Horkheimer's great interest in the rededication of the Bronx's Heine memorial while The Institute for Social Research was exiled in New York City. The following chapter, on the Heine reception of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, highlights Heine's impact on modern critical discourse by tracing Heine's "correspondences" with these thinkers, as opposed to his influence on them. For example, rather than taking up Heine's ideas directly, Marx admired his poet friend's rhetorical "courage" and this, Goetschel argues, may have been formative for the development of Marx's own power of narrative (63). Goetschel also brings attention to Adorno's obscure lecture from 1949, "Toward a Reappraisal of Heine." Written in English in Los Angeles, this "reappraisal" shows Adorno defending Heine's legacy much more than in his well-known 1956 radio speech "Die Wunde Heine," where he takes a Karl Krausian line of critique, describing Heine's poetry as a commodification of poetic discourse. Adorno's 1949 text makes many similar points as "Die Wunde Heine," but draws conclusions from them that are more favorable to Heine. Goetschel's parallel reading of the two texts is an important step in the study of the Frankfurt School's engagement with Heine and is among the most illuminating moments of the book.

The second part of Goetschel's approach could be called "speculative," an expansion on his claim in the book's introduction about Heine's ironic style that "Heine's literary voice has been so completely assimilated that his voice, even more so than Goethe's, has become an indistinguishable part of modern German thought and expression" (7). Chapters 4 through 8 offer an exposition of how Heine explored philosophical concepts through his "playfully dissonant, colorful, and burlesque comedy," as opposed to systematic investigation (11). Much ground is covered in these chapters: namely, Heine's thinking on language, history, the relationship of mind and body (an area of Heine's thought that was strongly influenced by Spinoza, according to Goetschel), the continuity of secularism and religion, and his concept of emancipatory Judaism. Of course, Heine does not work out his thoughts in these areas as a philosopher unpacks concepts, but as a highly ironic poet and feuilleton writer. Heine's approach, argues Goetschel, actively resists "the concept's sedimentation in the process of conceptualization" (12), which resonates with the...