Heinrich Heine has been called “the first modern intellectual” - and with good reason. During the 1830s and 1840s, when living in Parisian exile, Heine made an art of commenting on the modern urban experience. From what might be called a progressive perspective, and in the feuilletonistic style of which he was a pioneer, he examined the “social significance” of all manner of phenomena, from major political occurrences, as the July Revolution of 1830, to the arrangement of fancy new commodities in shop windows. In doing so Heine developed further the genre of literary reportage he had begun to cultivate in the early 1820s, at the very beginning of his career, when in a series of desultory dispatches, Briefe aus Berlin [Letters from Berlin, 1822], he evoked Berlin as seen by that quintessentially Modern character: the ironic, incisive urban flâneur. He also furthered his project of cross-cultural understanding. Through the long essays Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland [On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1835] and Die romantische Schule [The Romantic School, 1833], Heine imparted to a French audience basic German intellectual tendencies. And through his reflections on French culture, many of which were written for German newspapers, he related to German readers the political and artistic situation in France.
Thematically, Heine's body of works extends much farther. In an early text, Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand [Ideas: The Book of Le Grand, 1827], which, like many of his prose writings, resists genre classification, he claims: “In mythology too I did well. I loved the pack of gods who ruled the world so happily nude. I do not believe that there was ever a student in ancient Rome who studied the main art of his catechism, for example, Venus's love affairs, more closely than I did”. And, indeed, Heine proved to be a dedicated student of pagan mythology. Drawing on Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie [German Mythology, 1835) as well as on his own research, he repeatedly sketched the fate of Hellenic gods in later mythological traditions. From Grimm Heine learned the story of Venus and Tannhäuser, which he inserted into his Elementargeister [Elemental Spirits, 1835]. This text, in turn, is where Richard Wagner encountered that motif. The ballet libretto Die Göttin Diana [The Goddess Diana, 1848] and the literary essay Die Götter im Exil [The Gods in Exile, 1854] take up similar themes - themes that are among the most durable in Heine's work - more dolorously. Elementargeister holds out the possibility that Hellenic “sensualism” might be reconciled with the Christian “spiritualism” that drove it underground. The later texts do not.
In his praise for the Hellenic gods Heine acted on beliefs that also inform some of his texts in which those gods are not explicitly mentioned. This includes the critique he expresses in Die romantische Schule, namely, that German Romanticism was overly dark and even nihilistic, and that German culture would be better served by more life-affirming art. He also picked up on criticisms leveled in the often comic Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. According to this text, German idealist philosophy is a progressive force insofar as it combats superstition, but, in its abstraction of thought processes, is ultimately also a form of “spiritualism”. As such, for Heine, idealist philosophy is potentially hostile to the material world, to life, and it should be counter-balanced by a “happy” sensualism.
Better known than these critiques are Heine's personal polemics and social satires. In “Die Bäder von Lucca” [“The Baths of Lucca”], which is part of his Reisebilder III [Travel Pictures III, 1829], Heine launches a devastating attack - laden with sexual innuendo - against Graf August von Platen, a poet and known homosexual who had slighted him. And in his notorious Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift [Ludwig Börne: A Memorial, 1840] Heine inveighs against Börne, a well-respected and recently deceased author, with similar relentlessness, once again aiming barbs at the sexual proclivities of his target. On the other hand, Heine's witty parodies of German society - and especially Prussian values - in Ideas: The Book of Le Grand and the long poem Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen [Germany: A Winter's Tale, 1844) have resonated greatly.
Heine also addressed social ills in sober tones. In fact, one of his most famous poems pays homage to Silesian weavers who in the 1840s rebelled against oppressive working conditions. Another poem speaks to the lingering horror of the slave trade. Yet Heine did not want to be known as a politically engaged poet. This, of course, was difficult for an exiled writer who was associated with the politically charged “Young Germany” literary movement and whose works were subjected to Prussian censorship and, in 1835, to a ban within the German Confederation. And occasionally Heine rebelled against his reputation. In Ludwig Börne he boasts of how, upon arriving in Paris, he went directly to the National Library to look at medieval manuscripts, rather than to the Bastille. Here Heine may have engaged in provocative and fictitious self-stylization. But he did have a point. Much of his poetry does not have immediate political content. His early Buch der Lieder [Buch der Lieder, 1827] propelled him to prominence and has been set to music many times, most notably by Franz Schubert in 1828. It became so popular in Germany that even the Nazis were unable to prohibit its distribution, and it uses the rhythms of folk melodies to great rhetorical effect, and without activist content. The frequently brooding poems Heine wrote between his mysterious physical breakdown in 1848 until his death in 1856 - he referred to his bedridden state as his time in the “mattress grave” - are less ironic and accessible than those in his Buch der Lieder. Yet they are, in general, no more political. In his late poetry Heine, understandably, often turns to themes of death and dying, as well as to the Jewish culture of his forebears. Romanzero (1851), for example, includes sections entitled “Hebräische Melodien” [“Hebrew Melodies”] and “Lamentationen” [“Lamentations”] and celebrates the medieval Jewish poet Jehuda ha-Levy. These poems are not Heine's most popular works, but they have received much critical acclaim. Even some of his most draconian detractors, like Karl Kraus, have publicly admired their force.
When exactly Heine was born is not known. Scholarly consensus sets the date on 13 December 1797: Heine himself is responsible for the confusion. He grew up in modest circumstances in the German city of Düsseldorf, where the university is named after him. His mother, born Peira van Geldern and known during his lifetime as Betty Heine, came from a prominent German-Jewish family. She and Heine seem to have been extremely close. In his works he paints her picture adoringly and in flattering colors. He says much less about his father, Samson, a Jewish textile merchant who hailed from Hanover. But here too Heine's tone is quite affectionate. There was considerable, indeed enormous wealth on his father's side of the family, brought about through Samson Heine's brother Salomon, or “Uncle Salomon”. One of the richest commoners in Germany, he left behind an estate whose worth has been estimated at forty-one million francs. Unsurprisingly, Heine took notice of his proximity to such riches, and appears to have resented his uncle for not supporting him with greater generosity, leaving a record of his frustration scattered in letters and literary works. Salomon, who seems never to have appreciated Heine's literary efforts, did try to help him, however. In 1818 he established for Heine a business in Hamburg, “Harry Heine & Co.”, an outlet for the goods Samsons' business was unable to sell. Much to Salomon's chagrin, Heine's interests lay elsewhere - already an aspiring writer, he had little time for the business, which soon dissolved. In 1819 Heine went to study law in Bonn.
As was common in those days, Heine soon went to another university, the University of Göttingen, which he disliked. From there he went to the University of Berlin, where he thrived, making valuable connections, some of which he maintained for decades. He became acquainted with the progressive thinking of the “Young Hegelians”, listened to Hegel himself lecture, and attended the salons of Rahel Varnhagen. Heine also became involved with the “Society for Culture and Science of the Jews”, which had been formed in 1819, and whose animating spirit was Eduard Gans, who was known as one of Hegel's most promising students. The mission of the “Society” was to deal with the dilemma of “assimilation versus isolation”. Its founders held that by studying Jewish culture in a modern, “scientific” way, Jews could remain connected with their heritage, while becoming part of the European cultural community. Certainly Heine was not one of the most active members of the “Society”. But it was in the context of the work he did for it that he began to learn about medieval Jewish culture, and to write the fragmentary novel Der Rabbi von Bacherach [The Rabbi of Bacherach, 1840].
In 1825, around the time he completed his doctorate in law (back in Göttingen), Heine converted to Protestantism , calling it his “entry ticket into European culture”, though what exactly he hoped to gain from converting is not so clear. Having established himself as a prominent writer and poet, Heine most likely did not want to dedicate himself to the law. But supporting oneself as a free-lance author was not a very real possibility at that moment, and so he needed other means of income. Finding one proved to be extraordinarily difficult. The next years were hard ones for Heine. Collaborating with Julius Campe, who became his longtime publisher, Heine achieved fame with the book publication of his Buch der Lieder. But he still traveled between several cities, never really settling down. When his father died in 1828, he reached an emotional low point in his life.
With increased prominence came increased surveillance. And by 1831 Heine, who had repeatedly expressed great admiration for Napoleon and various other subversive sentiments, felt so harassed by the police state in Baron Metternich's German Confederation that he fled to Paris. He lived there for the rest of his life, and also found his lifelong partner, a Belgian woman named Crescence Eugénie Mirat, whom he met in 1834, and whom he publicly called Mathilde. They were married in 1841. It was in Paris that Heine became one of Europe's preeminent writers, winning the respect of many discerning readers including Nietzsche and Freud, and important figures as Empress Elisabeth of Austria. In addition, Heine's fame was spreading beyond the German and French-speaking realms. In 1862 the vaunted British critic Matthew Arnold wrote about him: “He [Heine] is (and posterity too, I am quite sure, will say this), in that quarter century of European literature which follows the death of Goethe, incomparably the most important figure”. Heine's rise in stature was the result of years of steady productivity between 1831 and 1847. During his time in Paris he published Die romantische Schule; Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland; Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen; the long comic poem Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum, [Atta Troll: A Midsummer Night's Dream , 1847] and many other key texts ranging from a prose version of the Pygmalion motif to collections of writings on modern culture and politics to a slashing verse account of Cortés' conquest of the Aztecs. He also made many new connections, including George Sand, his fellow émigrés Karl Marx and Richard Wagner, and the French poet Gérard de Nerval. The French government recognized the importance of Heine's literary activities by supporting him with a secret pension. Well-known artists solicited Heine's participation in ambitious projects, which is how his two ballet libretti The Goddess Diana and Der Doktor Faust [Doctor Faust, 1851] came into being. When Heine, the victim of an unknown, paralyzing and exceedingly painful affliction, lay bed-ridden from 1848 during the last eight years of his life, he was visited by an array of cultural luminaries. He died in Paris on 17 February 1865 and was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.
But if Heine won acclaim and veneration, he also became a privileged target of anti-Semitism, especially during his “radical phase”, in the tense period leading up to the Revolutions of 1848, when his attacks on German politics became severe. Critics like Wolfgang Menzel and Peter Pfizer pilloried Heine, labeling him an un-German, Frenchified artistic fraud. Wagner added his voice to the defamation in 1850, and portrayed Heine as an emblem of the Jews' foreignness to German culture. Such invectives persisted into the twentieth century and at times increased in intensity. In the 1880s and early 1890s the historian Heinrich von Treitschke made Heine responsible for what he called the “degenerate currents” in German literary culture. Most vituperative of all was the proto-Nazi critic Adolf Bartels, whose book Heinrich Heine: Auch ein Denkmal [Heinrich Heine: Also a Monument, 1906] is the single largest act of Heine-bashing. At the same time, however, a different sort of interest in Heine's Jewish identity evolved. German Jews who reflected on the process of Jewish assimilation and its cultural possibilities saw in Heine a fascinating case. In 1907 one such German Jew, Lion Feuchtwanger, wrote his dissertation on Heine's Rabbi von Bacharach. Several decades later, Hannah Arendt lionized Heine as the paradigmatic self-aware Jewish pariah, and suggested that he was one of the few successful examples of Jewish cultural integration during the nineteenth century.
Bartels's title refers to the debate about whether to memorialize Heine with a monument: to debates that began in the 1880s when the city of Düsseldorf made plans to commemorate Heine on the centenary of his birth. The conflict soon took on large proportions and involved public major figures like Heinrich Mann, Franz Mehring and Alfred Kerr, all of whom spoke out in favor of memorializing Heine with a monument. Eventually Heine was celebrated with a sculpture in Germany - but well past his one-hundredth birthday, and only after Heine monuments had been unveiled in the Bronx and on Corfu. In 1913 the city of Frankfurt unveiled a Heine monument. It was later damaged by the Nazis.
Since the Second World War, Heine has enjoyed a lively and altogether more balanced reception, although, as one of his biographers has put it, he still attracts abundant attention from “extremists and crackpots”. This period witnessed the production of several comprehensive critical editions of his works, and a number of extensive biographies. Quite a bit of that material was engendered in the GDR: Heine has been claimed for many causes, and communism figures prominently among them. His critical reception might well have reached its apogee, at least with regard to sheer mass, during the mid-1970s, when over two hundred books and articles appeared annually. There is now a ‘Heinrich Heine Institute' - and a well-appointed Heine archive - in Düsseldorf, where the university bears his name. Today Heine's place in the German cultural canon appears to be secure.
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Citation: Reitter, Paul. "Heinrich Heine". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 September 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2067, accessed 30 January 2026.]
