Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German revolutionary democratic poet. Born on December 13, 1797 in Dusseldorf to a Jewish businessman family. After graduating from high school, his parents wanted him to go into business. In 1816, he went to live with his uncle Solomon Heine in Hamburg, fell in love with his cousin Amalie, and began to write lyric poetry. In the autumn of 1819, he entered the University of Bonn to study law. He listened to O.W. Schlegel's German language history class and often interacted with him, so he was influenced by the Romantics. Next he studied at the University of G?ttingen and the University of Berlin. While in Berlin, he listened to Hegel's philosophy courses, met romantic writers such as Chamisso and Fouquet, and actively participated in the work for the liberation of the Jews. Received a doctorate in law in 1825.
Between 1821 and 1830, Heine traveled throughout Germany, Poland, England, and Italy. The first "Collection of Poems" was published in 1822, followed the following year by "Tragedy - Lyrical Interludes". In 1827, he collected and published his early lyric poems under the title "Songbook", which caused a sensation and established his position in the literary world. During this period, he also wrote prose works such as "Travel Notes in the Harz Mountains", which also aroused great repercussions. Most of Heine's lyric poems and travel notes of this period describe his personal experiences, feelings, and longings, with sincere feelings, beautiful language, and obvious romanticism.
The July Revolution broke out in France in 1830. Heine was deeply inspired and decided to go to Paris. Here he met writers such as Alexandre Dumas, Belanger, George Sand, Balzac, and Hugo, and musicians such as Liszt and Chopin. He also interacted with followers of the utopian Saint Simon, and was also influenced by this aspect. . During this period he wrote two books: "On the History of German Religion and Peace" (1835) and "On the Romantics" (1836). In order to fight against the empty "tendency poetry" of radical poets, he wrote the long poem "Atta Troll, a Midsummer Night's Dream" (1843). At the end of 1843, Heine and Marx met in Paris. During this period, his poetry creation reached a new peak. He published the "New Poems" (1844), which included a part of the political poem named "Poetry of the Times" and the long poem "Germany, a Winter's Fairy Tale" ( 1844). These poems achieved high achievements in both ideological content and art, and became the strongest voice of the era on the eve of the 1848 Revolution.
After the failure of the revolution in 1848, Heine endured the pain of paralysis and composed many excellent poems by dictation in the "mattress tomb", including "Romanzero" (1851), "1853 to 1854 Collected Poems" and some posthumous poems. Although some of these works are filled with sadness, anger and melancholy, most of them are still full of fighting pride and firm confidence in the future of the motherland and mankind. Heine died in Paris on February 17, 1856 and was buried in Montmartre Cemetery.
Initial literary success
The Lorelei Fountain (Heine Monument) in New York. Heine had already published his first poems in Berlin in 1821. Then, in 1823, a number of tragedies were published, including a lyrical interlude. In 1824, a collection of 39 poems was published, including "Lorelei", Heine's most popular work in Germany. In the same year, while traveling in the Harz Mountains, he went to Weimar to visit Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom he greatly admired. Two years ago he had sent the privy councilor the epigraph for his first collection of poems. But this visit was quite disappointing to Heine, because he himself - contrary to his temperament - behaved restrained and awkward, while Goethe received him only politely and with a distance.
In 1826 Heine published his travels in the Harz Mountains. In the same year he started a business relationship with the Hamburg publishing house Hofmann & Kemp. Julius Camp was supposed to have been Heine's publisher until his death. In October 1827, he published the collection of poems "Songbook", which established Heine's reputation and is still loved today. The romantic, often folk-inflected style of these and later poems - which were set to tunes many times, such as in Schumann's songbook Les Poets d'Amour - not only struck a chord with readers of the time. Heart. Those poems, such as "Beautiful May" and "A Boy Loves a Girl", touched the heartstrings of Heine's contemporaries and readers in the 21st century.
But Heine soon transcended the Romantic style. He undermined it with satire and also applied the artistic characteristics of Romantic poetry to poetry with political content. He calls himself a "romantic on the run."
In 1827 and 1828, Heine saw the sea for the first time when he traveled to England and Italy. He described his impressions in his later travel notes published between 1826 and 1831. Works from this period include: "The North Sea Collection", "The Baths of Lucca" and "Le Grand Collection", the latter book expressing support for the achievements of Napoleon and the French Revolution. During this period, people gradually realized that Heine was a great literary genius. From the 1830s, Heine's reputation began to spread in Germany and Europe.
The Paris Years
Heine came increasingly under attack, especially in Prussia, for his political views, and he was disgusted by German censorship. Therefore, Heinrich Heine went to Paris in 1831 after the July Revolution broke out in France. Here he began the second stage of his life and creation. Throughout his life, Heine missed Germany. But he could only see his motherland twice. Eventually, Paris became Heine's place of exile, since his works - and all his subsequent works - were banned in Prussia in 1833; Banned. The same was true for the poets of Young Germany. The resolution of the Federal Assembly stated that the purpose of the members of this organization is to "unscrupulously attack Christianity in a literary form acceptable to all classes, belittle the current social situation, and destroy all discipline and morality."
In 1832, however, Heine found a new source of income by writing a Paris correspondence for Johann Friedrich Cotta's Augsburg Allgemeine, publisher of Goethe and Schiller. Heine's newspaper columns from this period were published in 1833 under the title The State of France.
This year, the first symptoms of the disease - paralysis, headaches, loss of vision - appeared, which confined him to his bed for the last eight years of his life.
But first he enjoyed life in Paris. He met the utopian socialist Saint-Simon and big figures in French and German cultural life, such as: Hector Berlioz, Ludwig Bonnet, Frederic Chopin, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas and Alexander von Humboldt.
This world-class metropolis inspired Heine in the following years. He wrote a large number of essays, political essays, polemics, feature articles, poetry and prose. In works such as "The Situation in France", he tried hard to introduce the situation in France to the Germans and the situation in Germany to the French.
Heine realized the destructive characteristics of German nationalism earlier than most people. Unlike French nationalism, it was not combined with the consciousness of democracy and popular sovereignty.
His important works in those years include "On the Romantics" (1836), "On Ludwig Dorner" (1840) and the novel fragment "The Rabbi of Bacharach" (1840). In 1841, he married Eugénie Crescentia Milla, a shoe saleswoman whom he had met in 1834. One of the reasons why he loved Mathilde - as he nicknamed her - was peculiar: she did not know German and was not even aware of what a great poet her husband was for a long time after their marriage.
In 1843, Heine wrote the poem "Night Thoughts", whose opening sentence is often quoted:
When I think of Germany at night,
< p>I can't sleep peacefully.In the poem, what kept Heine from sleeping peacefully was the political situation in Germany, and even more so, his worry about his old mother who lived alone in Germany. In order to see his mother again and introduce his wife to her, Heine came to Germany twice for the last time, in 1843 and 1844. At that time he met Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lazarus. Later Heine participated in the work of Marx's "Vorw?rts" and "German-French Yearbook".
In the mid-1940s, Heine wrote the great narrative poem "Atta Troll" and "Germany, a Winter's Fairy Tale" inspired by his second trip to Germany.
Heine and Marxism
In the mid-1840s, Heine's thoughts became obviously radical. He was among the first writers to recognize the consequences of the emerging industrial revolution and to consider in his works the hardships of the emerging working class. His poem "The Silesian Weavers" of June 1844 is one such work. It grew out of the weavers' uprising that month in the Silesian towns of Pieterswaldau and Langenbira.
The poem, also known by the name "The Song of the Weavers", was published in Vorw?rts, published by Karl Marx, in July, and an additional 50,000 copies were printed as leaflets in the uprising areas. distribution. In a report to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Prussian Minister of the Interior Arnim described the work as: "an address addressed to the poor among his subjects, full of inflammatory language and sinful expressions." The Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Prussia issued a ban on the poem. In Prussia in 1846, anyone who dared to recite it in public could be jailed. Friedrich Engels - who met Heine in Paris in August 1844 - translated "The Weaver's Song" into English and published it in the Neue Moral Welt in December of the same year.
Although Heine had a friendly relationship with Marx and Engels, he was never a Marxist. He recognized that the demands of the emerging working class were completely reasonable and supported these demands; but he also realized that the materialism and radicalism in communist ideas would destroy the European culture he loved and admired. of many things.
The Failed Revolution
As a staunch democrat, Heine welcomed the revolutions that occurred throughout Europe in 1848, especially the April Revolution in Germany. But soon, as the revolution progressed, he became disillusioned and no longer cared about it.
Because the people who support democracy and the democratic state form are in the minority from the beginning. In the Frankfurt State Council's attempt to establish a national monarchy with hereditary kingship, he saw only a useless, romantic political dream in an attempt to revive the Holy Roman Empire, which had collapsed in 1806.
After the second wave of revolution, the powerful democratic revolution in the spring and summer of 1849, was suppressed, Heine wrote the poem "In October 1849" in frustration.
The Mattress Grave
In February 1848, the same month that the revolution broke out in Paris, Heine's body collapsed. His neuralgia, which had worsened significantly since 1845, permanently bound him to his bed. Heine himself believed he had syphilis, but his well-documented course suggested he had multiple sclerosis. Nearly paralyzed, he spent eight years in what he named his "mattress grave" until his death.
Prior to this, Heine had developed a more moderate assessment of religion, endorsing belief in a personal God in his 1815 will, but he never approached a church or Judaism.
Heine's spiritual creativity did not diminish during his painful bedridden years. Since he could no longer write on his own, he dictated poems and articles to his secretary. In this way, in October 1851, he published the collection of poems "Romancello" and in 1854 his political last words "Lutezia".
Despite his illness, Heine did not lose his humor and passion. In the last months of his life, his suffering was alleviated by repeated visits from his admirer Else Kliniz from Prague - whom he affectionately called his "beauty spot". He calls her his "admired lotus," but this adoration occurs only on a spiritual level due to his weakened body.
The bust of Heine in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. On February 17, 1856, Heine passed away. Three days later he was buried in the Montmartre cemetery. 27 years later, according to the poet's wish, Mathilde also found a permanent residence here.