Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Heine remained financially dependent on his uncle Salomon, because his conversion, as already noted, failed to provide an admission ticket to a career in the Prussian bar after he received his law degree from the University of Göttingen. Writing poetry, then as now, was a financially insecure enterprise—even if the poetry of the Book of Songs, published in 1827, had already found a home in the hearts and minds of Germans who loved lyric verse. Heine is often considered one of the most easily translatable German poets into many languages, but all translations of lyric poetry into English are problematic, because of the relatively rigid English word order and absence of convenient case endings to facilitate rhyme. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that Heine’s well-known (in Germany) poem, “The Home-Coming,” written in 1823–24, resounds in this wooden fashion in German ears:

  I ask’d for their aunts and their cousins,

  And many a tiresome friend;

  I ask’d for the little puppy

  Whose soft bark knew no end….

  Then cried the little sister:

  “The small and gentle hound

  “Grew to be big and savage,

  “And in the Rhine was drown’d.”10

  Yet there are other verses, in the same inevitably disappointing translations, that do convey the power of The Book of Songs.

  I call’d the Devil, and he came,

  And with wonder his form did I closely scan;

  He is not ugly, and is not lame,

  But really a handsome and charming man.

  A man in the prime of life is the devil,

  Obliging, a man of the world and civil;…

  My juridical works did he kindly praise,

  His favourite hobby in former days.

  He said that my friendship was not too dear,

  And then he nodded, and look’d severe,

  And afterwards asked if it wasn’t the case

  We had met at the Spanish ambassador’s rout?

  And when I look’d him full in the face

  I saw him to be an old friend without doubt.11

  Heine’s extensive body of prose is, not surprisingly, more accessible than his poetry to those who do not read German. His prose, including satirical essays, travel writing, letters, and clearly delineates his memoir, that his views on religion, Jewishness, Christianity, and his own conversion. In Die Stadt Lucca, based on his travels in Italy and completed after his return to Germany in 1830, Heine attacks all state-established religion—in part because he considered it the chief barrier to the unification of Germany. “Were there no state religion,” he wrote, “no privileging of particular dogmas and rites, Germany would be united and strong and her sons would be glorious and free. But this way our poor fatherland is torn because of religious conflict, the people are split into hostile religious parties: Protestant subjects quarrel with their Catholic princes or vice versa. Everywhere there are suspicions of crypto-Catholicism or crypto-Protestantism, everywhere accusations of heresy, espionage of opinions.”12 (It is understandable that in 1830, with the sectarian religious wars of the seventeenth century in mind, Heine focused on denominational favoritism rather than on the larger issue of whether there should be any relationship at all between churches and state. He could not have anticipated the situation in modern, secular Germany, in which there is no established church but the state is involved in providing some financial support for many religious activities, including education. Nor could he have anticipated that Germany would have, as it does now, one of the largest Muslim populations in Western Europe—which has posed a challenge to the principle, first written into the Weimar Constitution, that church and state be separated but that the state hold a “cooperative” relationship with all faiths. During the past decade, for example, numerous court cases in Germany have involved the relationship between German laws protecting women’s rights, and conservative Islamic religious practices that violate the secular statutes.)

  In any case, Heine was being disingenuous, since he saw Catholicism as a far greater threat than Protestantism to both religious liberty and representative government. As a political liberal, he associated the Catholic Church with a wide variety of anti-modernist social positions, including support for an authoritarian monarchy and the divine right of kings. Most German Jewish intellectuals, who tended to be left of center politically, would never even have considered converting to Catholicism rather than Lutheranism. Heine, grappling with his own shame at having converted to Lutheranism for purely pragmatic reasons, wrote to Moser, “I really don’t know how I can help myself in this bad situation. I might become Catholic and hang myself out of exasperation.”13

  It is impossible to exaggerate the pain and shame entangled with the conversions of many highly educated German Jews of this era. In 1842, while living in France, Heine wrote “The New Jewish Hospital in Hamburg.” His uncle had endowed a hospital in Hamburg and was subsequently denied both local citizenship and admission to the city’s Chamber of Commerce. Salomon Heine then decided that the hospital would be open to Gentiles only if and when full civil rights were conferred upon Hamburg’s Jews. For Heine, this was an occasion to reflect on the misfortune of Jewish birth rather than on the evils of prejudice and discrimination.

  A hospital for the poor and weary Jew,

  For sons of man that suffer three-fold ills;

  Burdened and baned with three infirmities;

  With poverty, disease, and Judaism!

  The worst of all has ever been the last,

  The Jewish sickness of the centuries,

  The plague caught in the Nile stream’s slimy vale,

  The old unwholesome faith that Egypt knew.

  No healing for this sickness! All in vain

  The vapor-bath and douch, vain all the tricks

  Of surgery, vain all this house may bring

  …to its fever-tossing guests.14

  These lines were written in Paris, where Heine lived from 1831 (after the French revolt of 1830, which removed the Bourbons from the throne of France and replaced the reactionary Charles X with Louis-Philippe) until his death in 1856. He had left for Paris in early 1831, after witnessing another round of Hep! riots (partly in response to the turmoil in France) the previous fall. His last attempt to secure a state job with a steady income (as legal officer for the Hamburg Senate) was turned down. The liberal newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung then offered Heine a job as its Paris correspondent, and he left Germany for good. (Although Heine never considered himself a permanent émigré, he returned to Germany just twice—to see his elderly mother—in the twenty-five years before his death.) From Paris, he continued to deliver sharp criticism of autocratic German politics and of the relationship between church and state in the various regions of Germany. Although he was not as dedicated a political liberal as his fellow émigré Börne, he was irritating enough to Prussian authorities that they made a formal request for Heine’s expulsion to the French Foreign Ministry.*6 The French said no.

  Heine, who spoke excellent French (though with a German accent) as a result of his schooling while Düsseldorf was occupied by Napoleon’s troops, was highly regarded by leading contemporary French writers, including Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, and Alfred de Musset. In his mid-thirties, Heine cut a dashing, romantic figure. The writer Théophile Gautier would recall Heine as a “German Apollo” whose “blue eyes sparkled with light and inspiration; his round full cheeks, graceful in contour, were not of the tottering romantic lividness so fashionable at that date. On the contrary, ruddy roses bloomed, classically on them; a slight Hebraic curve interfered, without altering its purity, with the intention which his nose had had of being Greek; his harmonious lips, ‘paired like two fine rhymes,’ to use one of his phrases, had a charming expression when in repose; but when he spoke their red bow shot out sharp and barbed arrows, sarcastic darts which never failed in their aim; for no one was ever more cruel to stupidity. To the divine smile of Apollo succeeded the leer of the satyr.”15
In addition to the comment on a Hebraic curve that prevented Heine’s nose from being Greek, Gautier alludes to the intellectual falseness of Heine’s conversion: “If it was repugnant to him to believe that God made himself man, he had no difficulty in admitting that man had made himself god; and he conducted himself accordingly.”16

  Heine fell in love with a young Frenchwoman, Mathilde Mirat, and married her in a Catholic ceremony—though he did not convert to Catholicism—in the Church of Saint-Sulpice. The ease with which such a marriage, which contradicted just about every Roman Catholic regulation imaginable, could be arranged says much about the anticlerical climate, at least among the educated upper classes, in early-nineteenth-century Paris. Heine and Börne were both witnesses at a similar church wedding in Paris, about which Börne remarked, “Here a baptized Jew from Frankfurt is marrying a Christian woman from England—God only knows what her origins are. The wedding’s in Paris and of the four witnesses, one is a Christian, one is a Jew, and two are converts who happen to be leading German writers and the pride of the German federation.”17

  The quarrels that did arise between Börne and Heine may have been due at least in part to the differences in temperament between a poet and a full-time political writer. Within a few years after their departure for France, both Heine’s and Börne’s works, defined as blasphemous, anti-Christian, and anti-German, were banned by the censors in a number of German states. Heine posed a problem for German readers (including censors) that someone like Börne did not, in that the former wrote poems touching deep feelings about the German land, landscape, and language—while at the same time writing prose that frequently excoriated the social, political, and religious foundation of German life. It was easier for nationalistic German readers (and censors) simply to hate Börne’s works criticizing Germany, because he did not also write poetry that touched other, more emotional chords of attachment to his native land. In this respect, Heine presented much the same dilemma to the German censors of his day that the beloved Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)—a Christian by conviction but a Jew by birth—was to pose in the twentieth century for Soviet censors. When, in his sixties, Pasternak wrote the novel Doctor Zhivago—published not in the Soviet Union but abroad—he questioned the very foundation of the Bolshevik Revolution in ways that were never addressed in his poems. How could the poet of Mother Russia be reconciled with the novelist describing the ruin of a world and the undermining of individual morality by the Leninist and Stalinist state? Such a man could not be allowed to leave the country to accept the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, even though—and because—copies of Doctor Zhivago, in samizdat as well as in editions issued by Russian émigré publishers, had by then been read by many Russian intellectuals.

  In his preface to the epic poem Germany: A Winter’s Tale, written in France and published in 1844, Heine described the dilemma posed by censorship with a candor that Pasternak, living inside a repressive police state, could not. Although Heine insisted that he had “hastened without fail to soften or cut out whatever seemed to be at odds with the German climate,” he found that his Hamburg publisher wanted still more rewrites to evade the censors. “In my hasty-spirited annoyance,” Heine acknowledged, “I have torn the fig leaves off some naked thoughts, and perhaps have given offense to ears of fastidious primness….But what I foresee with even greater regret is the hue and cry that will be raised by those pharisees of nationalism whose antipathies coincide with those of the governments….I can already hear their beery voices: ‘You even slander our colors, you despiser of the fatherland, you friend of the French, to whom you want to surrender the free Rhine!’ Calm yourselves. I shall respect and honor your colors when they deserve it, when they are no longer a pointless or servile triviality. Plant the black-red-gold flag on the heritage of German thought, make it the banner of a free humanity, and I will give my heart’s blood for it.”18 Heine also declared that he would never surrender the Rhineland to the French, “for a very simple reason—because the Rhine belongs to me.” He described himself as “the free Rhine’s much freer son” and said he did not see why the area should belong to anyone but Germans.

  Yet, in 1834, in his On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Heine had warned that a united Germany might be capable of enacting a bloody drama “compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll.” It would be anachronistic to see this famous quotation as a prediction of what was to come in Nazi Germany, but it could certainly be seen as a harbinger of the brutality and crazed nationalistic militarism of the Franco-Prussian War. If it is difficult to reconcile the two Heines on display in these quotations, separated by only a decade, it is next to impossible to pass judgment on the multiple loyalties and layers of personality involved in his attitudes toward the religion of his birth; the nominal Protestantism of his conversion; and the “fatherland” he felt he could not inhabit without converting.

  •

  There are, however, a number of indisputable realities behind what one scholar calls Heine’s “transparent masks.”19 He was an outsider many times over—an exile in France who never became a French citizen; a nominal Protestant; a German and a Jewish writer, considered both (or only one, depending on the reader’s politics) by his countrymen. The German Lutheran theologian August Nodnagel bluntly made the case against any consideration of Heine as a purely German, Christian writer: “Indeed, one can see through him and not without reason he claims several times that he is a Protestant. He can say this a hundred times. We will continue to believe…that he is a Jew.”20 Heine spoke contemptuously of all religion, but his antipathy toward Catholicism, for political and theological reasons, was clearly stronger than his distaste for any other faith. In Germany (no wonder thoughts of that land kept him awake at night), his critiques of Catholicism were often dismissed on the grounds that, as a Jew by birth, he had no “standing” in disputes between the various branches of Christianity: only real Protestants had the right to attack the Roman Catholic Church. Heine had made himself a soft target for these essentially anti-Semitic arguments by his own denunciations of his conversion.

  Heine’s poem “Disputation,” based on the many public disputations between rabbinical and Christian scholars in late medieval Spain, skewers both Catholic and Jewish teaching, but the choicest barbs are reserved for the Catholic side. The Franciscan debater begins by exorcising demons supposed to reside in his rabbinical opponent and moves on to the essential doctrine of Catholicism.

  Having thus expell’d the devil

  By his mighty exorcism,

  Comes the monk, dogmatically,

  Quoting from the catechism.

  He recounts how in the Godhead

  Persons three are comprehended,

  Who, whenever so they will it,

  Into one are straightway blended.

  ’Tis a mystery unfolded

  But to those who, in due season,

  Have escaped from out the prison

  And the chains of human reason.21

  The rabbi replies:

  That three persons in your Godhead,

  And no more, are comprehended,

  Moderate appears; the ancients

  On six thousand gods depended….

  That the Jews in truth destroy’d him

  Rests upon your showing solely,

  Seeing the delicti corpus

  On the third day vanish’d wholly.22

  This poem has often been criticized, especially by Orthodox Jews, as an example of Heine’s “Jewish self-hatred,” because the last verse quotes a Spanish noblewoman who says that both the rabbi and the Franciscan friar are in “stinking condition.” Nevertheless, Heine definitely gives the rabbi the best and wittiest lines in this poem about the sort of disputation a Jew could never win, because, even if his arguments were deemed by the audience to be more clever than the Catholic case, the “winning” Jew would be either driven out of town or killed.

  •

  In February 1848, wh
en the ultimately doomed democratic revolutions were springing up throughout Western and Central Europe, Heine suffered a seizure of some type that left him half paralyzed and half blind. He was largely confined to bed for the rest of his life, but his mental powers were unaffected (which suggests that the persistent gossip that he suffered and died from syphilis was unfounded). Heine wrote some of his most beautiful, witty, satirical, and politically powerful poems (including “Disputation”) during the years of his drawn-out, painful dying. When he was physically unable to write, he dictated both prose and poetry. During these years, although Heine made it clear that he had no more use for Judaism as a religion than he did for Christianity, he wrote certain poems, notably “Princess Sabbath,” that were not nostalgic but elegiac in their portrait of certain Jewish traditions. He envisions a prince named Israel, who has been transformed into a dog. And who, “As a dog, with dog’s ideas, / All the week, a cur, he noses / Through life’s filthy mire and sweepings, / Butt of mocking city Arabs.” Once a week, though, the dog is transformed back into his real form.

  But on every Friday evening,

  On a sudden, in the twilight,

  The enchantment weakens, ceases,

  And the dog once more is human.

  And his father’s hall he enters

  As a man, with man’s emotions,

  Head and heart alike uplifted,

  Clad in pure and festal raiment.23

  Needless to say, “Princess Sabbath,” with its lovely echo of the traditional Jewish “Sabbath Queen,” is the poem most quoted by observant but liberal Jews who wish to claim Heine as a Jewish poet and give him a pass on the conversion engendered by the German Jewish conundrum.

  Many words, used more often than not as epithets, were employed by Heine’s Jewish and Gentile contemporaries and by subsequent generations to describe his religious beliefs. They include “atheist,” “pantheist,” “apostate,” “false convert,” and just about every variant of “devious Jew” that can be imagined. He is probably best described by the Enlightenment term “freethinker,” which leaves room for everyone from atheists to those who believe in a personal, albeit not an institutional, god. In the immense volumes of apocrypha concerning well-known antireligious figures, including Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and Robert Ingersoll, nothing is more persistent than the rumor that they recanted on their deathbeds and begged for God’s forgiveness.*7 Although Heine did not alter any of his views about Catholicism, Protestantism, or Judaism, he did, as he stated unambiguously in the 1851 postscript to the volume Romancero, return to belief in some sort of personal god. There is no question that his physical agony played a role in this change of heart, because he explicitly states that he is not talking about a deist or pantheist god, who may have set the world in motion but subsequently plays no part in the affairs of men. “When one longs for a God who has the power to help,” Heine acknowledges, “then one must also accept his persona, his otherworldliness, and his holy attributes as the all-bountiful, all-wise, all-just, etc. The immortality of the soul, our continuance after death, then becomes part of the package so to speak, just as a butcher gives a fine marrow-bone free to a good customer.”24 Eternal life as a succulent marrow bone is, it must be admitted, a more inviting prospect than a heaven with harps and winged creatures. Heine must, however, have wondered whether he had purchased enough ordinary stewing meat during his lifetime to merit the butcher’s choicest offering. There is a pervasive sadness in Heine’s religious journey, from his ambivalence about being a Jew, through a conversion motivated entirely by temporal, secular needs, to a death in which he—in contrast to more committed freethinkers, like Paine and Ingersoll—made a tentative attempt to hedge his bets as he neared the end. But, then, Paine and Ingersoll never had to live out their lives with the double message that filled the minds of so many German Jews: You’re better and smarter than your countrymen / You’re worse because you’re a Jew.