The Poet Dying:
Heinrich Heine’s Last Years in Paris
By Ernst Pawel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 277 pages, $23
`I am dying as a poet who needs neither religion nor philosophy and wants nothing to do with either,” Heinrich Heine thornily wrote to a friend four years before his death in France on Feb. 17, 1856, at age 58, on which occasion, in reply to a well-meaning attendant who urged him to make his peace with the Lord, the poet whispered, according to legend, “Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son metier.” (“God will pardon me. It is His job.”) Although Nietzsche called him the greatest lyricist in the German language, pointedly saying that he “possessed that divine malice without which I cannot conceive of perfection,” Heine spent the last 25 years of his life in exile, the last eight of which, racked by pain and taking massive doses of opium, he was confined to what he called his “mattress tomb.” Deemed subversive, his poetry judged obscene, verboten in his native land, he waited in Paris, raging against the dying of the light.
A convert to Protestantism, Heine was a Jew, and the baptism of Harry Heine at Heiligenstadt on June 28, 1825, as Christian Johann Heinrich was, in Ernst Pawel’s words, nothing less than “a farce,” a “meaningless concession to practical necessity,” simply because “in the wake of the post-Napoleonic reaction, most positions in Prussia were closed to unbaptized Jews.” Focusing in this book on the last, crucial years of Heine’s life, Pawel concludes of this poet, ostracized by his own country and to some degree self-deluded about his sense of place and identity, “His image of himself as a German poet was an illusion understandable enough at a time when Jews began to believe that they could be Germans.”
From 1834 to his death, Heine lived–often sightless, heavily sedated, suffering from muscular dystrophy (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, some say)–with Crescence Eugenie Mirat, a near-illiterate orphaned shopgirl whom he would immortalize as Mathilde and whom he would marry in 1841. (She would live until 1883.) Germany’s most popular poet since the death of Goethe, Heine spoke as early as 1826 about wanting to turn his back on his native land and his hometown of Dusseldorf. His poetry had brought him fame, his prose notoriety. But his discontent was more personal. “What drives me out is not wanderlust but the torment of personal relations, for instance the impossibility of ever shedding the Jew.”
In 1835, the German federal assembly, at the personal insistence of Metternich, banned all of Heine’s writings and the Prussian police issued a warrant for his arrest. He returned only twice to his native land, furtively, in 1843 and 1844, and spent the rest of his life abroad.
Germany was no place for the poetic witticisms, barbs and irreverences of such a poet. Short-lived was the rebellion in 1848-49 of liberal and progressive forces. Uprisings were crushed by the firepower of the Prussian army, defeated rebels hunted down and massacred. Pawel notes, “The defeat effectively aborted the moderating political influence of the rising middle class before it had ever properly begun to make itself felt, and poisoned the intellectual atmosphere for at least a century.”
Heine had no belief, little sentiment. He mocked God. He was cynical and could seldom resist a snipe or wisecrack. (He preferred poultices to religion. “They act more quickly.”) He missed publishing deadlines and overestimated his sales appeal. There were flashes of paranoia, temper tantrums, angry refusals of appeasement, and widely known was the poet’s wild and unrestrained viciousness in personal attacks on enemies or friends he felt had wronged him. He particularly hated Giacomo Meyerbeer, who was born Jakob Liebmann Beer–a fact Heine would never let him forget–and he often publicly denigrated him as a composer, tossing mean-spirited libels and squibs at him, including several scurrilous, undisguised passages about him in the second volume of “Lutezia.”
Despite his severe illnesses, Heine was amazingly prolific during this final period, when he wrote some of his most profoundly moving poetry and prose. (The annual pension he was receiving from the Guizot ministry from 1840 to 1848 did little to stem rumors in Germany that Heine opted to stay in France for the handouts.) Of special significance, along with “Lutezia,” his longest prose work, was his innovative “Romanzero,” as well as his “Miscellaneous Writings,” notably the 23 poems included in the first volume, as well as the “Poems of 1853 and 1854,” especially “Das Sklavenschiff” (“The Slave Ship”), the first anti-racist poem in the German language, which concludes, in the voice of the slave trader, Mynheer van Koek:
“Um Christi willen verschone, O Herr, Das Leben der schwarzen Sunder!
Erzurnten sie dich, so weisst du ja,
Sie sind so dumm wie die Rinder.
Verschone ihr Leben um Christi will’n,
Der fur uns alle gestorben!
Denn bleiben mir nicht dreihundert Stuck,
So ist mein Geschaft verdorben.”
(“For Jesus’ sake, O Lord, spare these
Black sinners’ lives here below!
If they offended you, after all
They’re just dumb cattle, you know.”
“Oh, spare their lives for Jesus’ sake
Who did not die in vain!
For if I don’t keep three hundred head
My business is down the drain.”)
Although an outsider who unhesitatingly defied the Prussian and Austrian censors, ridiculed radicals and revolutionaries alike and seldom backed away from a fight, Heine nevertheless lost some of his prickly aggression as time wore on. He submitted to editing his “Confessions,” to publishing nothing derogatory about his family. He played the stock market, enjoyed the benefits of egalite, even remained a Bonapartist. (He always freely acknowledged his emperor worship.) And yet he was and remained unintegrated, “incapable of the effusive chauvinism so stridently proclaimed,” writes Pawel, “even by the majority of his fellow emigres in Paris.”
He wrote “Memoirs,” he said, but they have disappeared. He told a friend in 1840 that four volumes had been completed, “my views and intentions (which will) be valued by posterity for their historical material.” Most experts tend to believe that members of his family got hold of that manuscript after the poet’s death and destroyed it.
We do have his “Confessions,” “The Gods in Exile” and “In Memory of Ludwig Marcus,” a eulogy of sorts to a political exile who died insane in 1843, a work in which, not without a lot of Marxist platitudes, Heine discusses Judaism. He saw modern anti-Semitism as class-based resentment of Jewish capitalism and thought that it was bound to vanish with the “brotherhood of all the workers of the world, the wild armies of the proletariat, which will do away with the whole business of nationalities in order to pursue a common purpose throughout Europe, the realization of true democracy.” His prose, which was less singular than his poetry, was “designed to dazzle rather than to probe.” His style was always saucy, sarcastic and intimate. As Pawel vividly puts it, “He loosened the bodice of the German language to the point where today any clerk can fondle her breasts.”
A year before he died, a young, fresh-faced intruder named Elise Krinitz turned up on Heine’s doorstep on the avenue Matignon. He dubbed her “Mouche.” This worshipful young admirer brought some sunshine into the dying man’s life. Mouche spoke German and French, unlike Mathilde, who not only never read a line of her husband’s work but also had no idea of his standing in the world. (It is believed Mathilde didn’t even know he was Jewish, and Pawel confesses that Heine’s devotion to her is a puzzle.) Elise later became the mistress of Hippolyte Taine, who eventually ditched her. In 1884 she published her recollections of Heine, “Les Derniers jours de H. Heine,” a sentimental but informative and indispensable work. She inspired six poems of Heine’s that we know of, the last ones he ever wrote.
Ernst Pawel, who died in 1994 and who wrote the award-winning “Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka,” admits to being unpersuaded that it is possible to convey the essence of Heine’s genius in any language but his own, “which is probably as remote from that of Chancellor Kohl as it was from Metternich and Bismarck.” But the selection as an appendix of 20 or so of his poems, including some of the “Lazarus” poems and “The Slave Ship,” makes this biography of the poet’s last years in Paris a memorable one, indeed.
