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Originally published in 1980.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691643717 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #583 |
| Pages: | 462 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Heinrich Heine
A Modern Biography
By Jeffrey L. Sammons
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10081-4
CHAPTER 1
The Birthdate Riddle
One straightforward and reasonable way to begin a literary biography would be to start with the author's birth: to mention its time and place and then get on with it. It is altogether characteristic of the problems we face in recounting Heine's life that an effort to begin this way at once plunges us into exasperating difficulties; if we were to recapitulate the problem in all its details, it would take him almost as long to get born as Tristram Shandy. For we are dealing here not only with a fuzziness in the empirical record; that would not be much more than a pedantic nuisance. Rather, the problem of Heine's birthdate is symptomatic of the pattern of misdirection often encountered in reconstructing his life; we suffer, not from a dearth of evidence, but from a surfeit, some of it obviously wrong, and most of that generated by Heine himself. After some decades of scholarly attention, we think we have established the birthdate, although the result still has not satisfied everyone; what we do not know is why the problem became so entangled in the first place.
December 13, 1797, is now generally accepted as the date of Heine's birth. There is no birth certificate or other explicit documentation, but the evidence recoverable from Heine's youth all indicates a date in 1797 or early 1798. The recollections of his boyhood friends, all close to him in age, the classes he attended in school, and other indications that must have proceeded from Heine himself, all suggest this. Since the circumcision records of the Jewish community in Düsseldorf had been destroyed, the rabbi of the community was asked in 1809 to reconstruct them from memory, and he gave Heine's birthdate as February 1798. This discrepancy, which may be regarded as still outstanding, need not concern us here; the two dates fall into the same year of the Jewish calendar. As late as 1843 a Prussian government report gave the year of his birth as 1797. All the confusion that had emerged in the meantime was introduced by Heine himself.
Shortly after his arrival in Bonn, he promptly got into trouble with the authorities. The protocol of his interrogation by the Academic Court in November 1819 begins: "The summoned studiosus juris Harry Heine from Düsseldorf, 19 years old." Perhaps Heine, who was a good deal older than most other students, wished to impress the court with his youth. But in 1823 his father in a document gave his age as twenty-one rather than twenty-five, suggesting that there may have been some family involvement in the problem. The real difficulties, however, begin in 1825, the year of Heine's university graduation and also of his conversion, under duress, to Christianity. In his application of admission for his doctoral examination he wrote: "Natus sum mense Decembri anni 1779 Dusseldorpii ad Rhenum." Obviously this is a slip of the pen. But for what? The common error of numerical transposition suggests that Heine meant 1797, but the sequel shows that the error is a symptom. For, two months later, his baptismal certificate gives the date of his birth as December 13, 1799. From now on all is confusion; the pattern is, however, that Heine regularly supplies a date later than 1797 and usually at the end of 1799. His passport from England, dated August 14, 1827, gives his age as twenty-eight, which, if he was born in December, indicates 1798. But his passport to Italy a year later, dated August 8, 1828, again gives his age as twenty-eight, which yields 1799. After this the end of 1799 begins to establish itself, quite conceivably because it gave him an opportunity to present himself as a figure of transition and modernity; he first suggests this in the form of a joke in The Baths of Lucca of 1828:
"And how old are you, Dottore?"
"I, Signora, was born on New Year's Eve 1800."
"I already told you," remarked the Marquis, "he is one of the first men of our century."
Heine liked the year 1800 well enough to supply it as biographical information to a French journalist, and in the preface to the French edition of the Travel Pictures of 1853 he says that he was "né au commencement du XIXe siècle." On his marriage license he gave the date as December 31, 1799, and the "first man of the century" dating is repeated in the memoirs of his niece. His brother Maximilian, however, canonized the date December 13, 1799.
The oddity of this situation is compounded by Heine's own manner. In the record he left behind, he obscured the question while at the same time drawing attention to it. Two documents from late in his life strongly reinforce this impression. The first is a letter of November 3, 1851, to Saint-René Taillandier, again supplying information for a French biographical account, in which he admitted that the birthdates in his various biographical notices were not exact, and continued: "Entre nous soit dit que ces inexactitudes semblent[!] provenir d'erreurs yolontaires qu'on a commises en ma faveur lors de l'invasion prussienne, pour me soustraire au service de Sa Majesté le roi de Prusse. ... En regardant mon acte de baptême, je trouve le 13 décembre 1799 comme date de ma naissance." That might seem plausible to someone who did not know that his certificate of baptism was issued when he was twenty-seven years old; even so, the evasiveness of the formulation is patent. In any case, the inaccuracies to which he refers were of his own making and, so far as the French were concerned, consisted in the date 1800, no great difference after all. The explanation offered for the discrepancy raises another problem to which we shall return presently.
The second document is more striking; it is a letter Heine wrote to his sister a year and a half later, supplying biographical information, perhaps for an encyclopedia article. Here he writes:
"With regard to my date of birth, I observe to you that, according to my certificate of baptism, I was born December 13, 1799. ... Since all our family papers were destroyed in the fires in Altona and Hamburg and the date of my birth in the Düsseldorf archives cannot be correct, for reasons that I do not wish to mention, the above date is the only authentic one, in any case more authentic than the recollections of my mother, whose aging memory cannot replace lost papers. In this connection I observe to you, dear Lottchen, that you are perhaps much younger than mother thinks, since you came into the world many years after me."
One cannot escape the impression that this letter communicates pretty nearly the opposite of what it purports to assert. Heine's mother cannot know the birthdate of her first-born child; if there are any official documents (there are not, as far as we know), they cannot be correct for reasons that a fifty-five-year-old man cannot discuss with his own sister; only the baptismal certificate, a wholly arbitrary document, can be authentic.
In the face of such stonewalling, it is not surprising that observers have come to suspect that a body is buried somewhere. The logic of the situation, along with a couple of cryptic remarks dropped by Heine here and there, suggested the notion that he might have been illegitimately born or, to put it more exactly, born before his parents' civil marriage could be performed. This situation is not unthinkable in nineteenth-century Jewish life, when Christian communities placed severe legal restrictions upon the number of Jewish marriages that could take place. But the explanation fails to satisfy completely. Such circumstances could not really be regarded as dishonorable, especially from the point of view of Heine's convictions; why beat around the bush late in life to his sister? On the other hand — and this is always the more difficult question with these problems — if it were true, Heine could have hid it much better than he did. In any case, we need not go into the extensive body of argument on this point, as it was convincingly established a number of years ago that Heine's parents were married on February 1, 1797, which makes him legitimate by any reckoning.
The collapse of the illegitimacy theory has given impetus to the draft-dodger theory, which again derives from Heine himself, in the letter to Saint-René Taillandier cited above. Though it still has its adherents, it is also open to damaging objections. The age of conscription in Prussia was twenty. Heine was never old enough to be drafted into Prussian service during the Napoleonic Wars; by the time he was twenty, at the turn of the years 1817-1818, Napoleon was long gone, and Heine was not resident in Prussia, but in the independent city-state of Hamburg. The letter to Taillandier was written one month before the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon. It seems likely that Heine thought it a suitable moment to call attention to his youthful Bonapartism; in the very next sentence he refers to his early poem "The Grenadiers," "qui vous fera voir que tout mon culte d'alors était l'empereur." For he could state quite the opposite when he thought it politic to do so, and did. In his application for his doctoral examination of 1825, apparently adapting himself to the nationalist atmosphere of that time, he claims that he had volunteered for the Prussian campaign against Napoleon. There is no evidence that this is true, and it is hardly possible; some of his classmates did volunteer in the spring of 1815, but Heine had left school by then.
The long and the short of it is that we do not know why Heine created such a confusion about his birthdate. The record gives an impression that he had a reason for doing so and that it may have been a fairly serious one in his own mind. No one has been able to discover what it was. I think it at least possible that he actually did not know when he was born. In one early biographical notice he sent to a publisher in 1821, he gave his age as twenty-four (thus making himself older rather than younger, as later became his custom), and then put a question mark after it. One's birthdate is not, after all, a datum of experience, but a fact derived from documents and hearsay. In Heine's case there is no document and he seems concerned to discredit the hearsay. Yet there hardly would be an issue if he had not made one of it. The problem incapsulates, further, a point that any biographer of him must keep in mind.
At one level of judgment, it is necessary to say that Heine was careless of the truth. He developed an irrepressibly opportunistic habit, though it not infrequently led him astray, for he was not able to connect it to reliable insight into other people and objective circumstances. He did not strike his contemporaries as a person of integrity, and it must be said in frankness that he cannot always appear so to his biographer today. Many modern observers, concerned to erect him into an icon of revolutionary morality, would object to such a judgment as a device of petty-bourgeois moralism with a disingenuous purpose of discrediting him. It is true that he often conducted his life as a singular kind of guerrilla warfare against a hostile and dangerous environment; it is always possible to argue that he kept his eyes fixed firmly upon a higher purpose — at least Heine wishes us to do so. But the biographer can do nothing about the circumstance that he regularly and demonstrably reshapes the truth to his particular ends, and the difficulty is not so much moralistic as methodological, for it makes one uncomfortably dependent upon speculation, inference, and one's own sense of the probable.
CHAPTER 2The Mother's Side
Heine's mother, Peira van Geldern (1771-1859), known to everyone as Betty, came from a family of considerable standing in the German Jewish community. Her father, Gottschalk (1727-1795), was a prominent physician, as was his son. Their father, Lazarus van Geldern (d. 1769), had been like his father before him a wealthy court Jew, a financial advisor to the ducal court of Jülich-Berg, of which Düsseldorf was the chief city. Their period of genuine wealth lay, however, well back in the eighteenth century; it became a victim of the arbitrariness with which Jewish financiers in their adventures with absolutist princes always had been treated.
Biographers have experienced some difficulty in separating Betty Heine's true character from the picture of her that Heine was pleased to project. It does not seem altogether possible to do this, except to note that he was rather inclined to heighten her stature by various stratagems, and to speculate that their relationship was perhaps somewhat more complex than he himself knew. His concern was to portray her as a forthright, cultivated, Enlightenment personality, a Rousseauist and deist with, as he once remarked in a letter to her, a pronounced dislike of Jews. Most observers have concluded that he overestimated her learning, though some preserved letters from her younger days, written in Hebrew characters, not in Yiddish but in a somewhat faulty German, indicate that she was observant, a reader of modern eighteenth-century literature, and could play the flute. She did not marry until she was twenty-five, a rather advanced age for a Jewish girl of her time. Whether this was on account of independence of character, lack of means, or simply that she had not won anyone's favor, no one can tell; one factor was probably the turmoil of the time and another her grief at the death of her father and brother in quick succession. When she did choose to marry, she did so with determination, energetically arguing with the local community for her husband's right of residence. If Heine's account is to be trusted, she governed her husband with similar energy from then on. One of his boyhood friends recalled her as a strict mother, not hesitant to box her son's ears as well as those of the other children in the neighborhood. 3 Heine tells us further that she took command of his education with ambitious ends in view, altering in detail as the world changed: in the Napoleonic age she dreamed of him as a high official in military uniform, afterwards as a great banker, then as an influential civil servant, sending him off to the university to study law. He presents her as trying to keep her eye on the main chance, the locus of power, and in his Confessions says that she even entertained the notion of having him become a Catholic priest, which the aging Heine expands into an exceedingly comic fantasy of himself as an urbane, dignified prelate, eventually becoming pope.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Heinrich Heine by Jeffrey L. Sammons. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Preface, pg. vii
- Contents, pg. xi
- List of Illustrations, pg. xv
- Introduction, pg. 1
- Part I: ORIGINS Düsseldorf–Frankfurt–Hamburg 1797–1819, pg. 9
- PART II: THE STUDENT POET, pg. 53
- PART III: DRIFT, pg. 111
- PART IV: THE PROMISED LAND, pg. 157
- PART V: THE RADICAL PHASE, pg. 247
- PART VI: THE MATTRESS-GRAVE, pg. 293
- Aftermath, pg. 345
- References, pg. 355
- Selected Bibliography, pg. 401
- Indexes, pg. 411