Heine

Michael Jones:

During the summer of 1830 Heinrich Heine was a little known poet vacationing on the island fortress of Helgoland with a soprano of the Hamburg opera who got a free summer vacation in exchange for serving as his mistress. His summer idyll was interrupted by the arrival of a newspaper announcing that revolution had broken out in France again, and immediately this Jewish convert to Protes-tantism felt the ancestral call of the race he had abandoned to advance his literary career. "Gone is my longing for peace and quiet," Heine wrote a few days later, "Once again I know what I want, what I ought, what I must do .. .I am a son of the revolution and will take up arms.'  Almost before putting the newspaper down, Heine decided that he had to go to Paris to be part of the revolution there.
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Heine was dismissed by many Germans as the quintessential rootless cosmopolitan Jew. Both Heine and his friend Ludwig Boerne were "born provocateurs, ewige Ruhestoerer, arousers, intellectual troublemakers. Both were at home first and foremost in the language. Their rootlessness provided a kind of Archimedian vantage point from which they assess the world with greater freedom wit, and acuity than others could. With Heine and Boerne, a new kind of engaged liberal intellect, soon decried as typically Jewish entered German life." According to Elon, "Both were baptized but remained Jews psychologically. Both were liberal polemicists, their recurrent theme liberty."

According to Heinrich von Treitschke: "With Boerne and Heine the eruption of the Jews into German literary history began, an ugly and infertile interlude.'' Heine, of course, wasn't a Jew, not unless race trumped religion. He was a converso, if by that term we mean a Jew who converted into an insincere Christian for apparently opportunistic reasons. Heine became famous for saying that the baptismal certificate was "the entrance ticket to European culture." His cynical manipulation of the sacrament showed that religion was not something his age took as seriously as race, and his baptism of convenience ensured the rise of racial consciousness as well, a rise he knew would not bode well for Jews.

Heine converted to Christianity, but his hoped for position never materialized, and so he was forced to live off his rich uncle Salomon from Hamburg.

The conversion to Christianity didn't do much for Heine's morals. He contracted syphilis in his youth and died of the malady in 1856. When he was 18, Robert Schumann met Heine in Munich in 1828 and was struck by his "bitter ironic smile." Schumann, who set many of Heine's poems to music, also died of syphilis. The "bitter ironic smile" was to become Heine's trademark and a characteristic of the Jewish revolutionary manque who turned to literature as a way of pursuing the revolution by other means.
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In 1835, Heine's works were banned in Germany and his return was therefore made impossible. In order to console himself for the loss of a country, Heine went on to make the acquaintance of the leading literary and revolutionary figures in the French capital. It was there that he met Marx and Engels. It was there that he met Ferdinand Lassalle, with whom he corresponded on a number of subjects including the music of Felix Mendelssohn, a talented Jew (Heine ignored Men-delssohn's conversion almost as much as he ignored his own) who wasted his talent, at least in Heine's view, on Christian themes. "I cannot forgive this man of independent means," Heine wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle in 1846, "because he sees fit to serve the Christian pietists with his great and enormous talent. The more I admire his greatness, the more angry I am to see it so iniquitously misused. If I had the good fortune to be Moses Mendelssohn's grandson, I would not use my talents to set the piss of the Lamb to music." As a result of his friendship with Marx and Engels and Lassalle, Heine had some prophetic things to say about Communism. In 1842, he wrote:

Though Communism is at present little talked about, vegetating in forgotten attics on miserable straw pallets, it is nevertheless the dismal hero destined to playa great, if transitory role in the modern tragedy ... [It will bel the old absolut-ist tradition ... but in different clothes and with new slogans and catch-phrases ...There will then be only one shepherd with an iron crook and one identically shorn, identically bleating human herd ... Somber times loom ahead .. .! advise our grandchildren to be born with a very thick skin.

Heine soon made a literary name for himself in Paris, where he associated with the leading literary figures of his day, Victor Hugo, Honore Balzac, Alexander Dumas, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset and George Sand. His poetry came out in French. He was patronized by wealthy Jews like Baron James de Rothschild, but that didn't stop him from writing poetry that appealed to the communists. His poem on the impoverished weavers of Silesia found sympathy among the communists. Friedrich Engels translated "The Weavers" into English, and in the 20th century it became the name of a folk singing act in America of communist persuasion.Treitschke, speaking from the point of view which had banned Heine's poems in Germany, claimed that he possessed "the graceful vice of making the mean and loathsome attractive for a moment."

Even though Heine became famous in France, he never became a French citizen, in spite of the fact that he married a French Catholic. He became instead the alienated cosmopolitan, the German poet of Heimweh in exile, and a model for European Jews who had tired of imitating Mendelssohn. Metternich admired Heine as "the best mind among the conspirators." Indeed, that admiration led Metternich to orchestrate the banning of his writings in Germany, an act which simply confirmed the German Jews in their cosmopolitanism.

Paul Johnson, following Metternich's lead, saw Heine as the quintessential subversive Jew. "It was as though," Johnson continued, "a superfine talent had been building up in the ghetto over many secret generations, acquiring an ever more powerful genetic coding, and then had suddenly emerged to find the Ger-man language of the early nineteenth century its perfect instrument.''
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Elon writes that "Heine's last several years were spent in the throes and excruciating pain of a viral disease that paralyzed half his body and severely affected his vision.'' Other biographers were less evasive, claiming that "After 1844 Heine suffered financial reversals and painful physical deterioration from syphilis, the disease which also affiicted Schumann. He spent the last several years of his life in his 'mattress-grave' in a Paris apartment." During his later years, his followers saw in him a Christ-like figure which had more to do with his doleful appearance than his morals. When asked about preparing his soul for the next life, Heine responded by saying "If I could walk with crutches I'd go to church, and if I could walk without I'd go to the whorehouse."

Quote from the book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit And Its Impact on World History