Heine, Heinrich (Vol. 147) - Gerhart Hoffmeister (essay date spring 1994)
Gerhart Hoffmeister (essay date spring 1994)
SOURCE: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. “The Poet on the Margin and in the Center: Heinrich Heine and the German Condition.” Michigan Germanic Studies 20, no. 1 (spring 1994): 18-32.
[In the following essay, Hoffmeister discusses Heine's marginalized place in German letters.]
Like an inverted Don Quixote, Heine rode onto the stage of European letters and politics driven by his “crazy” desire to instill “die Zukunft allzu frühzeitig in die Gegenwart,”1 a thankless task that earned him nothing but rejection, ostracism and severe pain. No wonder that, according to Theodor Adorno, Heine suffered from a “Wunde” partly self-inflicted, partly a symptom of his time and still festering in twentieth century Germany.2
I will try to show in this essay how Heine was marginalized by society, in other words, how and why he was compelled to live on the brink where racial,...
[The entire page is 6559 words long]
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