The New International Encyclopædia/Heine, Heinrich
HEINE, hī'ne,  (1797-1856). The
greatest lyric poet of modern Germany, born in
Düsseldorf, December 13, 1797 (some authorities,
1799). He was called by himself the last
of the Romanticists, and by Matthew Arnold
the continuator of Goethe, and was the only
writer of primary importance in German literature
since Goethe's death. “Your grandfather,”
he says he was told, “was a little Jew, and had a
big beard.” He had shrewd sons, for all of them
won a competence, and Heine's uncle Salomon
became one of the wealthiest bankers of Hamburg.
His father had but small part in his life. His
mother (named von Geldern), to whom he showed
a constant devotion till his death, gave to his
fantastic and romantic nature a joy of life and
a spirit of naturalism that make him akin
to Goethe. He was a precocious boy, educated
in a desultory way by Roman Catholic monks
and French ‘philosophes,’ with the result that
he became a skeptic before he had any faith
to lose. He seems to have suffered little from
race prejudice in youth, and for that he was
grateful to France and to Napoleon, for whom
he retained a kind of hero-worship, and so had
little sympathy with the War of Liberation
(1813-14), that ‘contracted the heart so that
men learned to hate what was foreign and in
ceasing to be citizens of the world became only
narrowly German.’ No reproach belongs to him

that he found small inspiration to patriotism
in the thirty years that followed Waterloo.

While preparing himself to become a merchant
and learning English, French, and Italian, he
began to write poetry under the inspiration of
a child-love for ‘Veronica,’ probably also the
‘Reseda’ of early poems. He conceived a passing
affection, too, for an executioner's daughter,
Josepha, the subject of several poems, of
his “Dream Pictures,” and of the most exquisite
passage in his memoirs. She was, he says,
his ‘love's purgatory’ before he fell into love's
hell in his unrequited affection for his cousin
Amalie at Hamburg, whither he went in
1816. He tried to set up a business there
in 1818, but he liked neither the business nor
the city. For Amalie, under the names Ottilie,
Maria, Clara, Evelina, Agnes, Juliana, he voiced
his passion in many beautiful songs, and it has
since been made the subject of two novels,
Zianirtza's Heinrich Heine der Liederdichter
(1864). and Dietz's Heinrich Heines erste Liebe
(1870). He failed in business, and at the
expense of his uncle and Amalie's father, who
aided him generously through life, he went
in 1819 to study law at Bonn, where he came
under the influence of A. W. Schlegel, and the
Romantic School, in so far as it stood for the
reawakening of the poetic spirit of the Middle
Ages. He shared with them also a gift of irony,
though in him this sprang from the incompatibility
of two elements in his nature, a Greek joy
of life inherited from his mother, and fostered by
the influence of Goethe, and a congenital Hebrew
earnestness. There was never harmony between
these antinomies of his character, and from
their jarring came a mocking spirit that he
possessed in higher degree than any writer of
the century. At Bonn under this new influence
Heine wrote more lyrics and had begun a
tragedy, Almansor, when he left Bonn for
Göttingen, and being soon suspended from the
university there for participation in a frustrated
duel he went to Berlin, where he came under the
philosophic influence of Hegel and associated
with Grabbe, Immermann, Willibald Alexis,
Gans, Moser, Zunz, Chamisso, Fouqué, and
particularly with Varnhagen and his Rahel, who
led him to a juster appreciation of Goethe,
though he never became one of his unqualified
admirers.

In Berlin, Heine's genius found warm
appreciation. He essayed journalism, and in 1822
published a volume of poems (Gedichte), which
for delicacy, fancy, conciseness, originality, and
depth of lyric expression had no equal in
Germany. A second volume (1823) contained the
Lyrisches Intermezzo, which served to carry off
two tragedies, Almansor and Ratcliff, his sole
dramatic efforts. The Intermezzo is more bitter,
reckless, sensual, than the Poems, but contains
some of his most perfect lyrics. At home, Heine
tells us, his mother read it and did not like it;
his sister tolerated it; his brothers did not
understand it, and his father did not read it at all.
In 1823 a visit to the North Sea inspired Heimkehr,
which with the later North Sea cycle
(Nordsee) are Germany's best poems of the sea,
worthy to rank with the best of Byron or Shelley.
The year 1824 brought him to Göttingen again,
and in June, 1825, he submitted to baptism that
he might obtain an advocate's license. “I assure
you,” he writes to a friend, “if the law had

allowed stealing silver spoons instead, I should
not have been baptized.” This dishonor, forced
on him by the State, makes a melancholy close
to a brilliant university career. During the
second stay at Göttingen Heine made the
tour of the Harz Mountains and wrote the
Harzreise (1826), the best known of his prose
works. After taking his degree he revisited the
North Sea and wrote Norderncy, incorporated
with the Harzreise in the Reisebilder (Pictures of
Travel), which later embraced also Das Buch Le
Grand and Die Bäder von Lucca. Such light, easy,
sparkling prose, such graceful, daring, bubbling
wit, had never yet been known in Germany, and
the Reisebilder remains an unapproached model.
Heine in this field has never been equaled save
by himself, and he has not always maintained the
level of the Harzreise. The Buch Le Grand, written
in 1820, was revolutionary in tendency and
in its admiration for Napoleon. Heine thought
it safer to abide its publication in England
(1827). It was enthusiastically received and
generally prohibited by the police. It was graceful,
grotesque, cynical, naïve; it had a brilliancy,
a vigor, a keenness of scorn, a fire of enthusiasm
that have seldom been surpassed. Heine made
but a short stay in England, which was not
congenial to him. He said, “The ocean would have
swallowed it long ago if he had not been afraid it
would make him seasick.” He admired, however,
the liberty of England. In September, 1827, he
was again in Hamburg, seeing through the
press his collected lyrics, the now famous Buch
der Lieder. Thence he went to Munich, tried
journalism, hoped in vain for a Government
post, and in July, 1828, went disappointed to
Italy, a journey that he describes after his manner
in Die Büder von Lucca — brilliant, witty,
entertaining, immoral, coarse, revolutionary, and
atheistic. After this Prussia was closed to him;
influential men had been made his mortal enemies
wantonly, and in the case of the poet Platen
Heine's enmity assumed an utterly indefensible
shape. Having been recalled to Hamburg by
his father's death, Heine went in 1829 to
Helgoland, where he gave himself up for two months
to the fascination of the sea. He returned to
his family in Hamburg famous throughout
Germany as the author of the Reisebilder, the third
volume of which appeared early in 1830, but
as much feared as admired, and fiercely attacked
on the part of those whom his reckless satire
had wounded. Prussia, where the government
had prohibited the circulation of the third volume
of the Reisebilder, was now closed to him,
and the thought of a professorship, which he
had long cherished, had to be abandoned. He
turned his thoughts to Paris. The news of the
French Revolution of 1830 reached him in
Helgoland, where he spent the summer of that year,
and filled him with enthusiasm. May, 1831,
saw Heine in Paris, which remained his home
till death.

Heine's first years in Paris were busied with
journalism and dreary feuds with German
Liberals. He soon found himself at home in the
French capital, and enjoyed the society of
Madame Récamier, Balzac, Dumas, George Sand,
Béranger, Thiers, Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, and many
lesser celebrities. He considered it his mission
to draw Germany and France closer together,
and wrote a series of papers on French conditions
for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, which

he republished in French. But not a few of
his letters to the German press, even his art
critiques, fell under the censor's pencil. In
1833, however, his acute critical study, Die
romantische Schule, established his fame in
France and opened to him the great Revue des
Deux Mondes, in which he printed his History
of Religion and Philosophy in Germany since
Luther, a work of brilliant suggestiveness, which
afterwards appeared in Heine's own German
version as Zur Geschichte der Religion und
Philosophie in Deutschland. The satiric Memoiren
des Herrn von Schnabelewopski, half
autobiographic, belong to this time. The scandal
caused by his irregular life was checked by
his “conscience-marriage” with Mathilde Mirat
(1834). They were legally married in 1841,
and remained closely attached till the poet's
death. He had provided for her and she lived
till 1883. Financial embarrassments now led
Heine to seek a pension from the French
Government. Though he had always criticised his
patrons freely, the fact was bitterly remembered
against him when it became known in 1848.
From 1834 to 1842 his literary work is
comparatively unimportant. A fragment of a novel,
Florentinische Nächte, an essay on German
mythology, and a slanderous attack on his fellow
exile and journalistic critic Börne, may be merely
mentioned. But in 1842 he wrote Atta Troll
(Hamburg, 1847), a brilliant poetic satire on
German politicians and on the Romantic School,
and in 1843 a brief visit to Germany evoked
Neue Gedichte and Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen
(1844) keenly satiric, which became
immensely popular. Disease now laid an unrelaxing
hand on him. His eyes were affected, then his
vocal cords, then his spine. The death of his
patron, Salomon Heine, and the disgraceful
meanness of his heir added to his sufferings. But
these years of patiently borne sufferings show
Heine in a nobler light than any in which he had
yet appeared. In sleepless nights he composed
wonderful songs on his ‘mattress-grave.’ His legs
were paralyzed; to see he was obliged to hold
up an eyelid with an emaciated finger; his
hearing was weak. It was, he said, “a grave
without rest, death without the privileges of
the departed.” But it brought a deeper,
almost a spiritual earnestness into his life. He
“returned to God like a Prodigal Son, after
tending swine with the Hegelians.” In this
mood he wrote the poems of Romancero (1851),
so tender, so melodious, so exquisite in fancy,
that it seems almost past belief that they
should have been the product of the sleepless
nights of a bedridden sufferer; humorous pieces,
like “The White Elephant,” fierce political songs.
like “The Weaver's Marseillaise,” and the weird
“Lazarus Cycle,” written under the very shadow
of death. Never had Heine been so many-sided as
now. He continued to work as long as he could
hear and speak. Many friends cheered him,
among them, as poems testify, the talented
Camille Selden and his ‘little fairy,’ the motherly
Caroline Jaubert. Two miscellaneous volumes,
headed by Geständnisse, appeared in 1854. His
Memoirs, of which some parts have been
published, occupied him to the eve of his death.
His last words were, “Paper and pencil.” He
died February 17, 1856, and was buried in
Montmartre Cemetery, without religious service.
Heine was essentially a realist, a revolutionary

reformer, but never a blinded partisan. He
speaks for a restless, questioning, dissatisfied age
that has lost for the moment its ethical moorings.
He is the most delicate and graceful song-writer
and incomparably the wittiest, clearest, and
keenest satirist of Germany, and so he is read
with delight by an introspective and critical
generation.

Heine's Works appeared in twenty-one volumes
(1861-63) and in twenty volumes (l865). They
have been often reëdited. Translations of the
Poems by E. A. Bowring are in Bohn's library.
There is an American translation of the Pictures
of Travel and a version of the Works (incomplete)
by Leland. Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos of
Heinrich Heine, by J. Snodgrass (London, 1888),
is a collection of excerpts. The best English
critique of Heine is in Matthew Arnold's Essays.
There is an English Life, Work, and Opinions of
Heinrich Heine, by Stigand (London, 1876). The
most complete German biography is by Strodtmann
(3d ed., Berlin, 1884). Consult also those
by Prölss (Stuttgart, 1886); Karpeles (Berlin,
1888); also his Heine. Aus seinem Leben und aus
seiner Zeit (Leipzig, 1899). Keiter (Cologne,
1891), besides Brandes, Das junge Deutschland
(Leipzig, 1890), and id., Die Litteratur des 19.
Jahrhunderts, vol. vi. (ib., 1891); Zetz, Heine
in Frankreich (Zurich, 1895); Mietzki,
Heinrich Heine als Dichter und Mensch (Berlin,
1895); Nassen, Heinrich Heines Familienleben
(Fulda, 1895); Kaufmann, Heines Liebesleben
(Zurich, 1898); id., Heines Charakter (ib., 1901);
Steinmann, Heinrich Heine; Denkwürdigkeiten
und Ergebnisse aus meinem Zusammenleben mit
ihm (Prague, 17857); Hüffer, Aus dem Leben
Heinrich Heines (Berlin, 1878); Franzos, Heines
Geburtstag (Berlin, 1900).