I’ve decided to give this blog a bit of culture by writing occasional posts about socialist literature and art. 2006 was the 150th anniversary of the death of Heinrich Heine, apart perhaps from Brecht the best-known of all German socialist writers; so it seems appropriate to start with him.
Heinrich Heine is best known today for his lyric poetry - and in the English-speaking world for one poem, Die Lorelei, so much an emblem of German culture that whole verses are quoted in basic phrase-books for English tourists. It is possible from this to come to the conclusion that Heine, though a great poet, was a bit soft. This is far from the case.
Heinrich Heine was an early convert to the socialist movement in exile in Paris just after the European revolutions of 1830, where, with the exception of one clandestine visit back to Germany, he lived for the rest of his life - indeed exile is a theme of some of his most memorable poetry. In Paris, like Marx, but a decade before him, he met his first socialist comrades, the utopians of the Saint-Simonian school. He subsequently moved beyond utopianism and became a great friend and supporter and frequent correspondent of Marx, though at one point they fell out (as Marx did with many of his comrades, deserving and undeserving of his formidable wrath). Nonetheless, Heine along with the less distinguished Georg Herwegh wrote, so to speak, the lyrics to the Revolution and has been a favourite of Marxists ever since - his song for the Silesian weavers’ uprising of 1844 was translated into English by Engels:
“Doomed be the fatherland, false name,
Where nothing thrives but disgrace and shame,
Where flowers are crushed before they unfold,
Where the worm is quickened by rot and mould -
We weave, we weave.”
A century later, Heine’s complete poems were translated into English by none other than Hal Draper (if anyone can tell me where to get a copy of this book I would be very grateful). For now, this post will have to rely on my impromptu translations from memory (apart from the above, which is Engels’) - sorry for not doing justice to the original.
Heine’s political poetry is worth a read, especially for lovers of acerbic wit. There is no greater mocker of sentimental reaction or of bourgeois pretension and pseudo-radicalism. Heine specialised in blowing big soapy bubbles and then suddenly pricking them with a pin piercingly sharpened by his own unique method. “From afar I hear with joy”, he wrote to one would-be-radical bourgeois philistine, “how everyone is full of your praises, and how you are the Mirabeau of the Lueneburg Heath” (the German equivalent of Salisbury Plain, where military exercises took place).
Socialists of the nineteenth century had the works of Heine always at the back of their minds, and no wonder. His most influential work was probably not a lyric poem but the satirical “state of the nation” survey “Deutschland : Ein Wintermaerchen“ (”Germany: A Winter’s Tale”), in which every aspect of every privileged class is mercilessly attacked. This long poem was published by Marx in Vorwaerts, the paper of the German socialists, of which he was then the editor. A couple of verses spring frequently to mind. Here he sums up in four lines what was wrong with the backward-looking utopia of what Marx was later to call the “reactionary socialists”:
“What a beautiful mediaeval sight!
The knights, and the flunkey classes,
Bearing their loyalty in their hearts
And coats of arms on their arses.”
So inescapably did this verse attach itself to its theme that Marx himself couldn’t help paraphrasing it, perhaps unconsciously, in his great programmatic statement: those familiar with the Communist Manifesto will recognise the last line from the section on the “reactionary socialists”. And seeing the beginnings of the German romantic bourgeois chauvinism that the Nazis were to call “Kultur” a century later, Heine summed that up brilliantly too:
“Yes, this is German air!
My hot cheek felt its hand!
And this lump of muck in the road
Is the shit of the Fatherland!”
If, by the way, anyone has heard a better description of Griffin, Irving and their crew than “the shit of the Fatherland” I’d like to hear it!
Of course, all was not necessarily sweetness and light, even among pioneer socialists. Marx mocked Heine for his lifelong passionate interest in his Jewish identity and culture, something Marx himself had consciously distanced himself from (not, as ignorant Tories sometimes charge, in the name of anti-semitism, but of being a “citizen of the world”). Heine himself had “converted” to Protestantism in order, under the reactionary laws of his day, to be able to go to university and study under Hegel. Some Jewish commentators have considered this a betrayal, but Heine was an atheist (though he later became interested in religion) and he certainly never “betrayed” the Jewish people or culture.
In later life Heine came to be a sympathiser of Moses Hess, a great Jewish socialist and (eventually) precursor of Zionism who had introduced Engels to communism and persuaded Marx to embark on his first study of socio-economics (the “Paris Manuscripts”). Seeing and experiencing the growing tide of anti-Semitism in Germany, Hess was developing in the direction of believing racism to be the primary form of oppression, or at least one that had to be eliminated first in order for socialism to become possible. Six years after Heine’s death, he wrote the historic Rome and Jerusalem, the first book advocating a modern, secular Jewish state.
Marx’ reaction was mild by his standards, but at times a bit silly. He called Heine “Ikey” for his exaggeration of the importance of his Jewish heritage (this really would never have occurred to Marx as racially offensive; remember, he was Jewish himself). Appropriately to the subject, he satirised the poet’s new sympathies in an epigram - or tried to:
“Oh Ikey, Oh Ikey, what thought was in your mind
When you hooked up with Hess and every idiot you could find?”
In this instance at least I have no qualms about translation - in fact I venture to suggest I’ve improved on Marx’ couplet!
Despite their disagreements, Marx, Engels and Heine never lost their comradely regard for each other. Heine rightly believed that - as Hess later wrote - “Even an act of conversion cannot relieve the Jew of the enormous pressure of German anti-Semitism. The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race - they hate the peculiar faith of the Jews, less than their peculiar noses.” Marx, equally rightly, pointed out in his essay “On The Jewish Question” that this prejudice has been the consequence of the economic structure and political history of German society in its development over many centuries. Of course, it would the opposite of satisfaction to all three of them, following the failure of socialist revolution in Germany, to be proved most horribly right.
As a Jew and a communist, Heine was the subject of ferocious persecution even after his death in 1856. A proposal in the 1890s to put up a memorial to him in his native Duesseldorf led to anti-Semitic riots stirred up by the reactionary Junkers (the statue can be seen today in the Bronx, of all places - yet given Heine’s commitment to the working class and other oppressed groups he would surely have been pleased). Later, the Nazis insisted, absurdly, that those of Heine’s poems that were too well-known to ban - everyone had learnt them at school - should be marked “author unknown” in anthologies!
Ultimately, Heinrich Heine belongs to the working class, to all oppressed and marginalised people and to those who struggle for emancipation and socialism, now and throughout the ages. He could have wished for no finer epitaph, and would have wished for no other.
