OUR LEGACY: ON FREEDOM AND EXILE IN HEINRICHH HEINE'S WORLD AND IN OURS

3 5 R O U R L E G A C Y O N F R E E D O M A N D E X I L E I N H E I N R I C H H E I N E ’ S W O R L D A N D I N O U R S F R I T Z S T E R N Translated by Je√rey L. Sammons This text is a slightly shortened version of the Willy Brandt Lecture of 2015, which the New York historian Fritz Stern gave at Humboldt University in Berlin at the invitation of the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation. At a memorial service organized by the Austrian Socialists for Willy Brandt in the chapel of the United Nations in New York, on 10 November 1992, I quoted Heinrich Heine. (When the organ played the ‘‘Internationale’’ at the close of the ceremony, tears almost came to my eyes.) Just the evening before I had found by chance some words by Heine that fit Brandt very well: ‘‘It is a peculiar thing about patriotism, about real love of the fatherland. One can love one’s fatherland while living to be eighty years old, and have never known it; but then one must have stayed at home. One does not perceive the nature of the springtime until winter, and next to the stove one composes the best May songs. The love of freedom is a dungeon flower, and one feels the value of freedom only in prison. Thus the love of the German fatherland begins only at the German border, primarily upon the sight of German misfortune from abroad.’’ Heine continued, ‘‘However, the Ger- 3 6 S T E R N Y man patriotism I mentioned earlier consisted in hatred of the French, hatred of civilization and liberalism.’’ Please allow me two confessions: first, I am a historian and not a German literary scholar, but since my childhood I have loved Heine. And second, exile and the love of freedom are not foreign themes to me; they have marked my life. When I was a child under National Socialism, the forbidden freedom was a burning dream, and the dungeon was a lethal metaphor. National Socialism for me meant heartless bellowing and violence, fear of truncheons and torture, horrors in the shadow of which I grew up. When I was a child in Paris in the winter of 1933–34, my father was already reading Heine to me over and over, and, at my request, especially from Germany, a Winter’s Tale. After those brief months in Paris came four more years back home in Breslau, where Heine became a secret refuge. But there were other travels in Europe: France, England, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland. In this Europe I discovered a world that was not German and that seemed to me intact, a world in which I felt well. Then in the fall of 1938 came a new beginning when our family moved to the United States. The country was still in economic distress and being shaken up by Franklin Roosevelt, who appeared to us as the bearer of hope for the democratic world. Already, in 1933, he had recognized the danger of Hitler’s Germany, very much sooner than the statesmen of Germany’s neighbors. Parting from Germany was easy for me; my homeland had been expropriated , lost. America was that blessed child of Europe that still kept itself in ‘‘splendid isolation.’’ Today, some Americans, threatened by new terrors, are apparently ready to exchange bits of their freedom for a supposed security, but the country still has the strength for reform, for reconsiderations; I see signs of reason amid the bleak decline. Usually exile includes a hope of return – but not for me. To be sure, I have never separated myself from Europe, and the Atlantic Ocean for me is not a boundary, but a connection. Instead of a physical return to Europe I found in friendships a cherished substitute, so I have the good fortune, I think, to be at home in two worlds and two languages. Heinrich Heine was born in 1797, in French-occupied Düsseldorf , in...