Heine [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION 'One of the first men of this century . . That is what Heinrich Heine affected to call himself when he claimed to have been born in the early hours of 1800. Here, as in most of his autobiographical writings, we must temper the poetic worth of what he is saying with scepticism as to its factual validity. For Heine was primarily a poet-a poet whose popularity has been restricted in his native land by his sharply critical tongue, and is abroad based chiefly on the early lyrics made immortal by the settings of Schubert and Schumann. Yet it is precisely these poems which are least typical of the mature Heine: semi-precious gems of great brilliance though many of them are, and saved from cloying sentimentality by the sharpness of their contours, they mark only a stage through which Heine had to pass in his search for a mature and personal poetic language: it is to the late poems that we must turn to find the authentic blending of imagination and discipline, gaiety and squalor, pain and indomit-able courage that makes Heine unique even in a nation of great lyric poets. Heine was born at Düsseldorf in the Rhineland on 13 December, and probably in 1797, the son of a colourful but not particularly efficient or successful Jewish tradesman, and a courageous, stable mother who came from a respected and comfortably placed medical family in Düsseldorf; she was likewise Jewish. Heine in his autobiographical writings paints vivid pictures of his parents - especi-ally of his father, with his love of dogs and horses and military display. And it was following the whim of his father, whose great joy in business was the importation of English cloth, that young Heine, the eldest of four children, was called Harry: the name of the Liverpool merchant who supplied Sámson Heine's business with much of its material. Düsseldorf was a pleasant little backwater in Heine's time, a town of somé 15,000 inhabitants; it had a distinguished artistic past, and it was to flourish again in the future. The French occupation of the Rhineland brought civic rights for the Jews, who numbered no more than 300 in Düsseldorf, and did not live in a ghetto; the popu-