Which of the two thinkers do we consider the greater “realist”? Which the greater optimist? Which the greater healer? At issue here is the degree to which the two men’s approval of Jewish wit was proportional to their respective plans, if any, for Jewish rescue.
Heine
The fountainhead and genius of German Jewish humor was neither Herzl nor Freud but rather Heine, who was also the most controversial figure in modern German literature.7 Coming of age at a moment when Jews were being admitted to German society, Heine knew he had something fresh to introduce into the high culture of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller—namely, a literature less focused than theirs on achieving comprehensive truth and classical perfection, and thus truer to the volatile realities of the day. Had his precursors not set a high bar for German literature, he might not have held himself to a standard of honesty and self-exposure that was bold to the point of recklessness. But whatever the motivation, no Jewish writer ever took more aggressive risks.
Born in Düsseldorf, then under French rule, in 1797, Heine published his first book of poems in 1821. Though he studied law and philosophy, he was a natural poet, pushing the form to the limits of lyrical, political, and critical expression. His writing drew on warring elements in his nature: romantic longing versus analytic skepticism, socialist sympathies tempered by monarchist preferences, and a love of the German language and homeland that endured a quarter century’s residence in France. In his lyrics, Heine proved that he could “do” perfection; over seventy-five composers, including Franz Peter Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner, set his poems to music. Sharing a widespread contemporary attraction to folk poetry, Heine achieved some of its effects of “artlessness” in his art. But he was just as keen to register imperfections—in politics, human nature, and himself. Heine’s trustiest biographer, Jeffrey L. Sammons, advises extreme caution in describing both who Heine was and who Heine thought he was, and the avalanche of arguments over his legacy renders foolish any attempt to provide a definitive characterization of the man and his career.
Controversy over the memorialization of Heine in Germany has kept pace with the controversy over his work. This monument in Düsseldorf’s Swan Market by the sculptor Bert Gerresheim situates an enlarged replica of the author’s death mask in a landscape of ruin. The prominence of the nose in this magnified form disturbed some viewers as a reminder of the anti-Semitic trope of the Jewish nose—a trope exploited for humor by Heine himself.
Heine’s conversion to Christianity, for example—an act that was fairly common among his Jewish contemporaries—acquired notoriety only because he cast himself as at once a renegade Jew and phony Christian. He called his conversion an Entréebillet zur europäischen Kultur—a jibe that had many teeth. By using the French term for “ticket of admission,” he implied that the German language had to pay its own ticket of admission into European culture, just as the Jew paid through baptism for his. In addition, the commercial terminology mocks both conversion as a religious experience and the person who submits to it, not to mention others as well. Christians are ridiculed for accepting inauthentic converts, Jews for trading their culture for one that despises theirs, and enlightened Europeans for exposing the bias at the heart of their liberal affectations by requiring the credential of Christian baptism that they otherwise pretended to spurn. In a single breath, Heine thus damns all parties to the dishonest bargain and himself most of all, since he knew that the teaching post he hoped to gain by his conversion had not come through. Like Samson among the Philistines, he pulls down the pillars of the civilization that had seduced him, accepting—or rather seeking—his own punishment along with that of his seducers.
When I studied eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European literature in college, Heine’s lyric “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam” was presented as the epitome of Romantic longing. It depicts a pine tree standing lonely on a northern height, slumbering under its cover of snow and ice, and dreaming of a palm tree, in the East, that mourns lonely and silent on a blazing cliff.
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Höh.
Ihn schläfert; mit weisser Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er träumt von einer Palme,
Die, fern im Morgenland,
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.8
[There stands a lonely pine-tree
In the north, on a barren height;
He sleeps while the ice and snow flakes
Swathe him in folds of white.
He dreameth of a palm-tree
Far in the sunrise-land,
Lonely and silent longing
On her burning bank of sand.]9
Male pine and female palm, each solitary, majestic, and destined to yearn for what can never be joined, are coupled in the harmonious medium of a lied—German for poem and song—that forges their conciliation across the gap between the two stanzas. The accord of the words supplants the rupture of feeling.
This is the kind of poetry at which Heine excelled, but it was not the only kind. Another way of expressing the same Zerrissenheit—the condition of being torn apart—was through wit. This, too, yokes opposites, although instead of harmonizing the disjunction, wit accentuates it by means of verbal surprise. In fact, Heine was superb at puncturing the very ideals of love and beauty that he elsewhere upheld. Although by no means the only practitioner of the aggressive wit that came to be known as Judenwitz (a form also practiced by non-Jews), he became its master.
If I were teaching European Romanticism today, I might tweak the syllabus to include, alongside “Ein Fichtenbaum,” one of Heine’s comic takes on the Romantic poet (that is, himself) who wrote it. “The Baths of Lucca,” one of his four so-called travel pictures, has the added advantage of being a send-up of Jews. The parody begins with the genre. Modeling himself on then-popular accounts of which the best known was Goethe’s Travels in Italy, Heine confesses that “there’s nothing more boring on this earth than to have to read the description of an Italian journey—except maybe to have to write one—and the writer can only make it halfway bearable by speaking as little as possible of Italy itself.”10 Accordingly, the Tuscan resort town of Lucca serves Heine merely as the setting for an encounter among displaced German Jews who have come to take the baths.
The plot of this travelogue is minimal. The implied author, identified as Heine, doctor of laws, drops in on Lady Matilda, whom he had previously known in London. The narrator recognizes a second visitor as the converted Jewish Hamburg banker Christian Gumpel, now the Marquis Christoforo di Gumpelino, who pronounces himself madly in love with Matilda’s countrywoman, Lady Julie Maxfield. To while away the time, the two prospective suitors set out to visit Gumpelino’s local Italian lady friends. Huffing and puffing through the picturesque hills of Lucca, they encounter Gumpel’s valet, also recognizable to the author as Old Hirsch, his former Hamburg lottery agent. While the author and Gumpelino pay an extended visit to the Italian courtesans, the servant is dispatched to arrange an evening rendezvous for his master with Maxfield. The erotic adventure subsequently falls through, and the work concludes with an improbable discussion of poetry in which the “author” makes merciless fun of August von Platen (1796–1835), a fellow poet in real life. This part of the work damaged Heine’s reputation harder than it did von Platen’s.
In the sunny opening chapters of “The Baths of Lucca,” the main target of ridicule is Gumpelino, the Jewish convert to Catholicism and newly minted marquis. Matilda reveals her prejudice against this man when she tells Dr. Heine not to be put off by his nose, which then becomes the focus of a shpritz (a “spray” or “squirt,” as in a squirt of flavor into a soda, later a Jewish American term for an extended comic riff):
Matilda’s warning not to knock against the nose of the man was sufficiently well-founded, a little more length and he’d have surely poked my eye out with it. I don
’t want to say anything bad about that nose; quite the contrary, it was of the noblest form, and in a sense it’s what gave my friend the right to add a Marquis’ title to his name. For one could tell from his nose that he came from noble stock, that he descended from an ancient international family with which even our Lord God established nuptial ties without fear of rendering Himself déclassé.11 This family has indeed come down in the world a notch or two since then, so that, ever since Charlemagne’s day, most are compelled to earn their living by peddling old trousers and Hamburg lottery tickets, albeit without in the least letting up on their pride of ancestry or ever abandoning hope of recuperating their old holdings, or at least receiving adequate compensation for emigration, if ever their old legitimate Sovereign fulfills his promise of restoration, a promise by which He’s already led them around by the nose for two thousand years. Did their noses perhaps grow so long from being so long led around by the nose? Or are these long noses a kind of uniform whereby Jehovah, the King of Kings, might recognize His old yeomen of the guard even if they deserted the ranks? The Marquis Gumpelino was just such a deserter, but he still wore his uniform, and it was ever so brilliant, adorned with little crosses and stars and rubies, a red coat of arms in miniature and plenty of other decorations, too.12
Ah, that nose. Where Matilda mocks Gumpel’s protuberance, the narrator, speaking as a proper Protestant and without betraying his Jewish origins, beats her at her own game by mocking the bloodline that as a Christian, she shares. Religion is treated as a social commodity. Judaism gets the brunt of the ridicule, but the credulous Jewish tribe comes off more appealingly than does the Jew who believes he is trading up by discarding it. Like Freud in the passage quoted earlier, Heine draws attention to the “noble stock”—ancient and related to God—that he simultaneously puts down, with the nose as the ambiguous marker of both superiority and slavish servitude. Underlying this ambiguity is the reality of Europe, some of whose autocrats were intent on preventing the “progress” of their restive subjects. In such changeable times, did Jews prove their mettle by staying Jewish or by leaving their Jewishness behind?
The dramatic construction of this work assigns to Matilda the meaner prejudice and to the Heine stand-in a loftier skepticism—one that also distinguishes him from Gumpelino’s wholehearted devotion to his new religion and position. Both men are converts, but Gumpelino is sincere—in his adopted Catholicism, acquired romanticism, and passion for a married woman. An all-purpose worshipper, an enthusiast of nature, he declares Heine a torn man, a torn soul, “a Byron, so to speak.” But the Byronic author revels in the discordances of his life. “Whosoever claims that his heart is still whole merely acknowledges that he has a prosaic … heart.” Once upon a time the world was whole, but since then the world itself has been ripped in two. “[The] wretched worldwide tear of our time runs right through my heart, and for that very reason I know that the great gods have shown mercy and deemed me worthy of a poet’s martyrdom.”13 The divided being personifies the spirit of the times, and none more so than the Jew, living in one place while belonging to another, claiming election and experiencing subjection, and in Heine’s case, raised in one religious tradition and acculturating to another without wholly letting go of the first.
It is worth recalling that Heine’s near-contemporary Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810), the Hasidic master from western Ukraine whom I will discuss in the next chapter, is credited with having said Es iz nito keyn gantsere zakh vi a tsebrokhn harts, “there is nothing as whole as a broken heart.” (A folk tradition added, “a broken Jewish heart.”) The novelty of these insights lay in their elevation of rupture into the defining condition of modern people. The Bible describes how after Moses shattered the first tablets of the law, he returned for a new, unbroken set, thereby upholding the ideal of moral perfection while acknowledging the difficulty of attaining it. For their part, Nahman and Heine accept fracture—the former in metaphysical and the latter in earthly terms. Yearning is Nahman’s expression of faith in the ultimate, messianic reunion beyond the world as we know it. Heine treats his yearning as a comic relic, as if the human were longing for its absent tail.
Another comically bifurcated modern is Gumpelino’s valet, Old Hirsch, the third Jew of “The Baths of Lucca,” who never converts to Catholicism like Gumpelino or to Protestantism like Heine, but instead accepts the position of servant as the price of remaining the Jew he is. As he approaches from the distance, the narrator tells us,
I recognized someone whom I’d have sooner expected to meet on Mount Sinai than on the Apennines, and that was none other than Old Hirsch, sometime resident in Hamburg, a man who had not only made his mark as an incorruptible lottery collector but who was likewise so knowledgeable about foot-corns and jewels that he could not only distinguish between the two but also skillfully excise the former and precisely appraise the latter.14
On drawing closer, Hirsch hopes that the author will still recognize him even though his name is now … Hyazinth. Gumpelino is outraged at his servant’s revelation of their common past, but Hirsch-Hyazinth compulsively blurts out what his master has tried to conceal. The entire passage is a palimpsest of the newly minted European superimposed on the ghetto Jew—a figure who has adapted to his new condition and name without shedding his old skin. Heine, who else-where pits Hebraism against Hellenism, here forges a character in whom Jew and Greek are improbably combined. No wonder this man should be a connoisseur at once of bunions and gems, the irritants and adornments of living. Hyazinth later boasts about the money he has saved by retaining his initial when he changed his name—a little joke at the expense of the author, who had presumably enjoyed a similar economy when he exchanged Harry for Heinrich, but who turned out to be both less competent and less well adjusted.
He is also not as funny. Though Heine declares himself the master poet of Zerrissenheit, he assigns to his creation Hirsch-Hyazinth the wittiest wordplays, including one analyzed to death by Freud—“I sat next to Salomon Rothschild, and he treated me as his equal, altogether famillionairely.”15 The servant describes his master Gumpelino kneeling in adoration every evening for a full two hours before the “primadonna with the Christ child”—a painting that cost him six hundred silver coins. He also yearns for “Hamburg with its apes and excellent humans and Papagoyim.” Papageien, German for parrots, are here punned into a species of humans who mimic the Gentiles.16 Do these wordplays highlight the imperfect attempts of people to be other than they are or repair a torn world through comically improbable fusions?
Since this work is also a species of bourgeois comedy, servant gets the better of master. Gumpelino is an overreacher: his nose is too long, and his ambitions are beyond his talents. He imagines himself as Romeo, casting his love for “Julie” in Shakespearean verse; just as friar and nurse mismanage the nuptials in William Shakespeare’s tragedy, Gumpelino’s servant, Hyazinth, gives “magical” salts to the pining lover just minutes before a note arrives from Maxfield saying that she can see him that night after all. The honeypot yields to the chamber pot as Gumpelino is literally flushed out in a cruel scatological jest.
Were this a film by Sacha Baron Cohen or Larry David—two contemporary comics who resort to bathroom humor—the purgation of Gumpel during the night of intended bliss would have constituted its climax. But Heine aims higher. More than Gumpelino’s pretensions, at stake for Heine is the reputation of poetry—the supreme form of human expression, quintessence of a nation’s achievement, and trustiest manifestation of the zeitgeist. To the ideal of poetry, Heine transfers the respect that he denies to formal religion, declaring it sinful to cheapen the sublime art and heretical to use it to evil ends. Gumpelino spends his night of agony reading Poems of Count August von Platen, a book “scented with that curious perfume not in the least related to eau de cologne, and perhaps to be ascribed to the fact that the Marquis had spent the whole night reading it.” Shifting the target of his satire from the consumer to the producer of smelly art, Heine in the last th
ird of the work drops the travelogue frame in order to fatten von Platen up “as the Iroquois do with the captives they look forward to feeding on at a future festivity.”17
Many critics, then and since, have pounced on Heine for his ridicule of von Platen, which the Oxford literary scholar Sigmund Prawer calls “a disgraceful performance.”18 Prawer was so distressed that he omitted any discussion of the offensive passages in his eight-hundred-page book Heine’s Jewish Comedy. With somewhat-greater latitude, the German literary critic Hans Mayer, who was both a Jew and homosexual, suggests that in this contest between two social “outsiders,” Heine exposed anxieties about his own manhood as well as von Platen’s.19 All this is just to say that the affront of the satire does not appear to have dulled with time. Heine had no use for the forced metrics of von Platen’s verse or his veiled, mawkish way of treating his homosexuality. He taunts von Platen’s alleged pedophilia (which he has in common with Nero) and practices that have him listening “a posteriori to the intimate doings of his enemies.” Von Platen’s chief offense, however, was to have written a play, The Romantic Oedipus, which “outed” Heine as a former Jew. This clumsy exposure is what earned Heine’s retaliatory exposure of von Platen as a beggar pretending to be an aristocrat, a dishonest romancer, an inferior versifier, and a sexual deviant:
Through a few slight modifications in the play’s storyline he might … have made better use of Oedipus, the key protagonist of his comedy. Instead of having him kill his father Laius and marry his mother Jocasta, he should, quite the contrary, have had Oedipus kill his mother and marry his father.
No Joke Page 4