Düsseldorf and Heinrich Heine, Germany and Heinrich Heine, German studies and Heinrich Heine – all not an easy relationship. The poet of "Loreley", "Book of Songs", and "Winter's Tale" is one of the greatest lyricists of the German language – and a German baptized Jew who died in Paris.
Although celebrated as a classic and – alongside Goethe – the author of the most beautiful poems in the German language, he has not found peace. Heinrich Heine does not fit into any drawer. You can't get a hold of him. For Heine is an irritating contradiction, as a poet and as a person. The ambiguous makes him appealing. To some, not just the bourgeois, he seems questionable: popular and vilified, famous and notorious, sentimental and ironic, cosmopolitan and "fatherlandless fellow", nightingale and peacock, fable king of German romanticism, prophet and tribune of the people.
Heine, the Jew from Bolker Street in Düsseldorf, where he was born on December 13, 1797, died as a baptized Protestant in Paris and has a burial site in the Catholic part of Montmartre Cemetery. All in all, therefore, a wonderfully uncertain cantonist. For a long time, the relationship of official Germany and his hometown to their 'son' was strained. It took a long time for the university in Düsseldorf to be named after Heinrich Heine, and for his birthplace to be appropriately transformed – today a literary bookstore is housed in the Heine House.
Heine Institute, Heine Prize, Heine Gift, Heine Society allow their namesake to shine worldwide. Heine is initially the poet of the intimately popular tone, for which the "Loreley" stands with its immortal verses. But he is also the mocker and ironic German who traveled his homeland in a sad "Winter's Tale." He is the lovesick person and Lazarus who "makes little songs out of my great pains" and eternally worships the "Venus Dolorosa"; and he is the politically enlightened mind who works with pathos, parody, and pamphlet in the service of humanity. Heine is self-referential and passionately engaged, a highly paid writer (1.3 million were recorded until his death on February 17, 1856) and at the same time a refugee threatened by censorship.
Then again, he confronts us as a supplicant and poor wretch, dependent on the wealthy uncle Salomon in Hamburg, a French state pension, and stock dealings. Heine casually frequents the boulevards and the luxurious salon of Baron Rothschild. In his famous "Silesian Weavers," Heine curses the false fatherland, he demands heaven on earth for the poor and declassed and fears communism. The "wound Heine," which Adorno diagnosed decades ago, may have closed, but the riddle of Heine remains. Thanks be to heaven.
