by Karl Kraus
Heinrich Heine the poet lives only as a canned youthful sweetheart. None is in greater need of reassessment than this one. Youth soaks up everything, and it’s cruel to take many things away from it later. How easily the soul of youth is impregnated, how easily things that are easy and slack attach themselves to it: how worthless a thing has to be for its memory not to be made precious by the time and circumstances of its acquisition! You’re not critical, you’re pious when you love Heine. You’re not critical, you’re blasphemous when you try to talk somebody who grew up with Heine out of his Heine. An assault on Heine is an invasion of the everyman’s private life. It injures reverence for youth, respect for boyhood, veneration of childhood. To presume to judge firstborn impressions according to their merit is worse than presumptuous. And Heine had a talent for being embraced by young souls and thus associated with young experiences.47 Like rating the melody of a hurdy-gurdy, to which I was unstoppably drawn, above Beethoven’s Ninth, owing to a subjective urge. This is why grown-ups don’t have to put up with anyone who wants to dispute their belief that Heine is a greater poet than Goethe. Yes, it’s on the luck of association that Heinrich Heine lives. Am I so relentlessly objective as to say to someone: go, look, the peach tree in the garden of your childhood is quite a bit smaller than it used to be. He had the measles, he had Heine, and he gets hot in recollecting every fever of youth. Criticism should stay quiet here. No author needs reassessment as badly as Heine, no one bears up under it so poorly, no one is so protected from it by every fond illusion. But I have the courage to recommend it only because I’m hardly in need of it myself, because I failed to experience Heine at a time when I would have had to overrate him. There comes a day where it’s no concern of mine that a gentleman who has long since become a banker once crept to his beloved under the strains of “You have diamonds and pearls.”48 And where you become rude at the sight of old brains still being affected by the charm with which this tearful materiality once captivated young hearts, and the syrup of sentimental moods adheres to literary judgments. When you get right down to it, the hankerings of youth could have been satisfied even by Herr Hugo Salus.49 I don’t fancy myself guiltless of giving a bit of culture the benefit of the situation in which I experienced it, or of confusing it with the attendant mood. I retain a warm glow from Heine’s Berlin letters, for example, because the melody “We wind for you a bridal wreath,” which Heine makes fun of there, is congenial to me. But only in my nerves. In my judgment, I am mature and willing to distinguish merits. The memory of how the garden smelled when your first love walked through it is of general concern to the culture only if you’re a poet. You’re free to overvalue the occasion if you’re capable of making a poem out of it. When, once, in a booth at the Prater,50 I saw a lady in tights floating in the air (which I now know was done with mirrors), and a hurdy-gurdy was accompanying her with “Last Rose,” my eyes were opened to beauty and my ears to music, and I would have ripped to shreds the man who told me that the lady was waltzing around on a plank and the tune was by Flotow.51 In criticism, though, unless you’re speaking to children, you have to be allowed to call Heine by his true name.
His charm, according to his grown-up defenders, is a musical one. To which I reply: to be responsive to literature, you cannot be responsive to music, otherwise the melody and rhythm of music will suffice to create a mood.52 I don’t need a mood when I’m doing literary work; I create a mood in myself by working. To get the juices flowing, I use a tone from a miniature spinet that is actually a cigar box and which, if pressed on, emits a few old Viennese notes that have been locked inside it for a hundred years. I’m not musical; Wagner would disturb me in this situation.53 And if I sought the same kitschy stimulus of melody in literature, I could produce no literature on such a night. Heine’s music may, by the same token, suffice for musicians who require more significant disclosures from their own art than his little bit of euphony affords. What, then, is poetry in the Heinean style, what is that German taste in art into whose prettinesses and wittinesses the wild hunt of Liliencron’s language burst, as the avant-gardist Gottfried August Bürger’s once had?54 Heine’s poetry: it is mood or opinion with the Hark! hark! of jingling bells. This poetry is melody—so much so that it demands to be set to music. And it owes more to this music than its own for its success with the philistines. Simplicissimus once poked fun at the kind of German who crosses himself to ward off Heine, only to sing his “Lorelei” later on, blissfully drunk on emotion, “nevertheless.”55 Two images: but the contrast isn’t as glaring as it may seem at first glance. For the philistines who curse Heine don’t rise to the true philistine confession until the second image, when they sing him. When a popular song is made out of a poem, is it insight into the poem’s literary value that makes the song popular?56 How many German philistines would know what Heine means if Herr Silcher hadn’t set “I know not what it means”57 to music? But is it an argument for the poet that this clientele would have clamored for his undifficult poetry even if it hadn’t been delivered to them on wings of song?58 Oh, this narrow-minded hatred of Heine, which targets the Jew, tolerates the poet, and bleats along with a sentimental melody with or without a musician’s later help. Art brings life into disorder. The poets of humanity restore chaos again and again; the poets of society do their singing and lamenting, their blessing and cursing, within a well-ordered world. All those for whom a poem amounts to an agreement between themselves and the poet, sealed with rhyme, flee to Heine. All those who wish to join the poet in his pursuit of urbane allegories and his establishment of relations with the outside world will consider Heine a greater poet than Goethe. But those who consider a poem to be the revelation of a poet lost in his observation of Nature, not of a Nature lost in the observations of the poet, will be satisfied to reckon Heine a technician skilled at pleasure and sorrow, a speedy outfitter of stock moods. When Goethe shares in—and shares with us—the “silence on every peak,” he does it with such intensely felt kinship that the silence can be heard as an intimation.59 But if a pine tree in the North stands on a barren peak and dreams of a palm tree in the Orient, it is an exceptional courtesy of Nature to oblige Heine’s yearning allegorically. Seeing an artful fake like this in the show window of a confectioner or a feuilletonist might put you in a good mood if you’re an artist yourself. But does that make its manufacturer one?60 Even the plain outline of a perception of Nature, from which barely visible threads spin themselves out toward the soul, seems to me more lyrical than the dressing-up of ready-made moods, because it presupposes empathy. In this sense, Goethe’s “Stillness and Sea” is lyric poetry, as are Liliencron’s lines: “A river babbles its happy way across the land, a field of ripe rye gathers in the west, then Nature leans her head upon her hand and, weary from her work, takes rest.” Deeper moods arise from a reflecting heathscape on a summer morning than from reflective palms and pine trees; for here Nature rests her head upon her hand, while there Heinrich Heine pressed his hand on Nature’s cheek … You’re ashamed that between fears and tears there ever existed such slick intercourse that went by the name of poetry; you’re almost ashamed of polemics. But you should open the Book of Songs and try reading the right-hand and the left-hand pages higgledy-piggledy, interchanging the lines. You won’t be disappointed, if you’re not disappointed with Heine. And those who are already disappointed will, for the first time, not be. “The little birds, they chirped so fine / Glad lovesongs did my heart entwine.” That can stand right or left. “In those darling little eyes of thine”: this need not simply rhyme with “My dear darling’s mouth as red as wine” and “blue little violets of thine eyes sublime” or, again, with “thine little red-rosy cheeks divine”; at every point the plea could stand: “Dear little darling, rest thy little hand upon this heart of mine,” and nowhere in this dear little chamber of poesy would the transposition of mine and thine be felt as a disturbance. On the other hand, Heine’s entire “Lorelei,” say, could not be substituted for Goethe’s “Fisher,” even though th
e only seeming difference is that the Lorelei influences the boatman from above, whereas the watery woman influences the fisher from below. Truly, Heinean verse is operetta lyrics, which even good music isn’t ruined by. Meilhac and Halévy’s lines wouldn’t be out of place in the Book of Songs:
I am thine
Thou art mine
What heavenly luck is ours
A pair of doves
So much in love
Cannot be found beneath the stars.
This is exactly the sort of shallowness that, in combination with Offenbach’s music, generates genuine emotive value or takes on deeper satirical significance.61 Offenbach is music, but Heine is merely the words for it. And I don’t believe that a real poet wrote the lines:
And when I wailed to you about my pain,
You all just yawned in mute disdain;
Yet when I set it out in lyrical phrases,
You couldn’t wait to sing my praises.
But it’s an epigram; and it perfectly captures the mass appeal of Heine’s love poetry, in which the little songs are merely the ornament of big sorrows, not their naturally inevitable expression. The same mass appeal by which the poet Heine feels so rewarded. This is a poet who writes, in one of his prefaces, that his publishers have shown the most gratifying faith in his genius by means of the large first printings they’re wont to make of his work, and who points proudly to the account books in which the popularity of his poetry stands registered. How, indeed, could lyrical work in which ideas are candied, rather than crystallized, fail to be greeted with universal satisfaction? At no point before, say, his deathbed poetry did verse become for Heine such a creative necessity that it had to be verse; and these rhymes are papillotes, not butterflies: paper ruffles often folded for no other reason than to demonstrate a fold. “I could have said all of that very well in good prose,” an amazed Heine writes after setting a preface in verse, and he continues: “But when one reads through the old poems again to polish them up with a view to republication, one is unexpectedly surprised by the jingling routine of the rhyme and meter…” It is indeed nothing but a journalism that scans: that keeps the reader minutely informed about his moods. Heine is always and overplainly informative. Sometimes he says it with blue flowers from someone else’s garden, sometimes directly. If the factual poem “The Holy Three Kings” had been written by a poet, it would be a poem. “The little ox bellowed, the little child screamed, and the three holy kings did sing.” This would be the mood of factuality. In Heine’s hands, though, it’s merely a dispatch. This becomes quite clear in a passage of the “Vitzliputzli”:62
One hundred sixty Spaniards
Met their death that day;
More than eighty others
Were taken by the Indians.
Seriously wounded, too, were many
Who only later died.
Nearly a dozen horses were lost,
Some killed, some captured.
According to our local correspondent. And, as with the factuality, so with the feeling, so with the irony: nothing immediate, everything utterly graspable with that second hand that can grasp nothing but the material. In the petting of mood, in the tickling of wit.
But the fools made my darling
Slip silent to a rendezvous;
A fool is always willing
When a foolish girl is too.
This joke isn’t made by any real cynic whose love has given him the slip. And no poet calls these words to a girl who is moved by the sunset she is watching:
My girl, now don’t you frown,
This happens all the time;
In front here it goes down
And comes back up from behind.
Not out of respect for the girl; out of respect for the sunset.63 Heine’s cynicism is at the same level as the girl’s sentimentality. And as his own sentimentality. And when, greatly moved, he says of himself, “there I wove my tender Rhymes out of Balm and Moonlight,” you may well want to be as cynical as he is and ask him—Herr Heine, now, don’t you frown—whether he didn’t perhaps mean to write “there I wove my tender Rhymes for Balm & Moonlight,” and whether this might not be the very publishing house to whose account books he was just referring.64 Poetry and satire—the phenomenon of their alliance becomes comprehensible: neither of them is there, they meet on the surface, not in the depths. This tear has no salt, and this salt doesn’t salt. When Heine—what is the phrase?—“punctures the mood with a joke,” I have the impression that he wants to sprinkle salt on the tail of the pretty bird: an old experiment; the bird still flutters away.65 With Heine, the illusion succeeds, if not the experiment. You can prove the contrary to him; to him, but not to his credulous audience. He wasn’t simply taken along through life as an early accompanist of everyday lyrical experiences, he was also always, by virtue of his intellectualism, passed along by people’s youthful idiocy to their more enlightened selves. And they want to be enlightened about everything, just not about Heine, and even if they awaken from his dreams they still have his wit.
This wit, however, in verse and prose, is an asthmatic cur. Heine isn’t capable of driving his humor to the height of pathos and chasing it down from there. He trots it out, but he can’t make it jump. “Just Wait!” is the title of a poem.
Because I flash with such success
You think at thundering I can’t excel!
But you’re all wrong, for I possess
A talent for thundering as well.
Dreadful it will stand the test,
When come the proper day and hour;
You shall hear my voice at last,
The thunderous word, the weather’s power.
The wild storm on that day will cleave
Full many an oak tree tall,
Full many a palace wall will heave
And many a steeple fall!
These are empty promises. After all, what does Heine say about Platen?
In words, a splendid deed
That you intend to do someday!—
How well I know this breed
Who borrow time but do not pay.
Here is Rhodes, now come and show
Your art, this is your chance!
Or hold your tongue and go,
If today you cannot dance.
“A talent for thundering as well”—that sounds like journalism, doesn’t it? But from thunder not a sound and from the lightning only a twinkle. Only glimmerings, only the heat lightning of thoughts that went down somewhere or will sometime.
For just as an original thought need not always be new, so the person who has a new thought can easily have got it from someone else. This will remain a paradox for everyone except those who believe that thoughts are preformed, and that the creative individual is merely a chosen vessel, and that thoughts and poems existed before thinkers and poets—those who believe in the metaphysical way of thought, which is a miasma, whereas opinion is contagious, that is, it requires direct contact in order to be caught, in order to spread. Thus a creative head may say originally what somebody else has already said, and someone else may already be imitating a thought that won’t occur to the creative head until later. And it’s only in the rapture of linguistic conception that a world grows out of chaos. The subtlest illumination or shading of a thought, the tinting, the toning: only work like this goes truly unlost; no matter how pedantic, laughable, and meaningless it may seem at the time, it will eventually come to benefit the general public and yield, in the end, as a well-deserved harvest, those opinions that today are sold unripe with wanton greed. Everything that’s created remains as it was before it was created. The artist fetches it down from the heavens as a finished thing. Eternity has no beginning. Poetry or a joke: the act of creation lies between what’s self-evident and what is permanent.66 Let there be light, again and again. It was already there and can reassemble itself from the spectrum. Science is spectral analysis: art is the synthesis of light. Thought is in the world, but it isn’t had. It’s refracted by the prism o
f material experience into elements of language; the artist binds them into a thought. A thought is a discovered thing, a recovered thing. And whoever goes looking for it is an honorable finder; it belongs to him even if somebody before him has already found it.
In this and only in this way did Heine anticipate Nietzsche with the idea of a Nazarene type.67 He demonstrates, with every word of his polemic against Platen, how far removed he was from the world of Eros and Christianity, which nevertheless shows up in his poem “Psyche” with such neat serendipity. In the transformations of Eros, Heine was able to see only the goal of experience, not the way of it; he applied ethical and aesthetic norms to it, and here, where we arrive at the border between the demonstrably true and the demonstrably silly, he anticipated not Nietzsche but the late Herr Maximilian Harden.68 In the famous Platen polemic—which owes its fame solely to our pulp interest in the persons involved and to the even pulpier pleasure we get from the body parts of the persons under attack, and which would have to have destroyed Heine’s reputation if there existed in Germany a feeling for true polemical power instead of the mere carping of meanness—in this document, Heine chooses to make his erotic confession with the words:69
