SOURCE: Pizer, John. “Heine's Unique Relationship to Goethe's Weltliteratur Paradigm.” Heine-Jahrbuch 41 (2002): 18-36.

[In the following essay, Pizer discusses Heine's application of Goethe's theory of a “world literature.”]

Transnational trends in the marketing, reception, and even writing of literature since the collapse of Soviet Communism have focused a great deal of scholarly attention on Goethe's conceptualization of Weltliteratur because his disparate formulations of this paradigm seem to anticipate such literary globalization. Revitalized interest in world literature as Goethe understood it can be traced back to Fritz Strich's monograph »Goethe und die Weltliteratur«. This book was published at the war's end and contains a useful compendium of Goethe's utterances on world literature.¹ Already in the 1952 Festschrift for Strich, one can see divergent attitudes developing toward the universalized book distribution and comprehensive international literary interchange Goethe seemingly anticipated. While Anni Carlsson maintained that Goethe positively highlighted the works specifically addressed to an international audience in formulating his concept, a tendency bound to further develop as communicative networks bring the world closer together², Erich Auerbach bemonaed the sameness and uniformity from which literary creation must suffer under precisely these conditions.³ Multiculturalism across the globe and the development of the internet in the last decade have enhanced interest in Weltliteratur as a discursive, heuristic principle, and many of those who seek to understand it continue to look to Goethe as an original, prophetic voice in this regard.⁴ Indeed, at the 116th convention of the Modern Language Association, both the American Comparative Literature Association and the Goethe Society of North America held sessions on the concept of world literature, particularly in its contemporary manifestations, and most of the papers delivered at these sessions at least took Goethe's foundational perspectives into account.⁵

Drawing on Goethe's scattered musings on Weltliteratur in attempting to understand the contemporary movement toward ever-increasing literary globalization, whether one feels this tendency is to be decried because of its bringing-about of homogeneity or to be celebrated for its putative cosmopolitanism, is understandable and indeed commendable; at the very least, such reference to Goethe's ideas provides a laudable historical perspective as we seek to grasp a seemingly all-encompassing cultural transnationalism. I have myself attempted to show that Goethe not only anticipated these current trends, but suggested an antidote to the loss today's writers might feel as their sense of national identity becomes dissolved, namely, a focus on their discrete local, or at least subnational, cultural space.⁶ However, in treating Goethe's Weltliteratur formulations through the lens of current developments, it is easy to lose sight of the historically conditioned nature of his views.

When Goethe coined the term (in an 1827 issue of »Über Kunst und Altertum«) in response to a review of a French translation of »Torquato Tasso« (1790) commended in the Paris journal »Le Globe«⁷, Vormärz restoration values and politics still held sway in Germany. German intellectuals were still more disappointed and crushed than dynamized by the absence of the national unification and individual liberty they had hoped the Napoleonic Wars would bring in their train, and a reawakening of vibrant German nationalism still awaited the full flowering of the Junges Deutschland movement. The brief dormancy of German nationalism, as much as the technological developments underscored by Goethe, allowed for a boom in what he celebrated as supranational literary interchange. In the later phase of Junges Deutschland, but particularly after the 1848 revolutions, nationalism in Germany and the rest of Europe became so dominant that the positive cosmopolitan strain inherent in Goethe's reflections on the term virtually disappeared until Strich revived it in 1946. Between 1848 and 1946, the term »world literature« was either regarded by readers of various nations as literature produced outside their national boundaries (as, when uncritically conceptualized, it still is today), or as canonic literature, the ›greatest books‹ produced on the globe regardless of time and place.⁸ When the dynamic, cosmopolitan element in Goethe's definition was cited, it was generally distorted, nationalized, or ridiculed. Even Thomas Mann, who would come to draw frequently on Goethe's political cosmopolitanism in rallying his countrymen against the Nazis, asserted in his pre-Third Reich essay »Nationale und internationale Kunst« (1922), after underscoring what he believed were the uniquely German elements in Goethe's Weltliteratur concept, that there was no such thing as cosmopolitanism pure and simple, that only »nationale Kosmopolitismen« existed.⁹ He speaks of the contemporary realization of the cosmopolitan element in Goethean Weltliteratur in highly derisive terms:

Goethe's Verkündigung der Weltliteratur ist heute in hohem Grade verwirklicht. Der Austausch ist allgemein, der Ausgleich—man könnte gehässigerweise sagen: die demokratische Einebnung—beinahe erreicht. Es gibt Franzosen, die den breiten Humor Britanniens an den Tag legen, ins Pariserische entartete Russen und Skandinavier, die die Synthese von Dostojewski und Amerika vollziehen. Dergleichen darf man Internationalisierung der Kunst nennen.¹⁰

Much like contemporary analysts of Goethe's paradigm who fail to take into account that he could not possibly have foreseen the emergence of such globalizing instruments as the World Trade Organization or the internet, Mann in his early conservative phase conveniently ignored the antinationalist context in which Goethe's formulations on Weltliteratur came about, and many intellectuals prior to Strich but even today altogether fail to reflect on the term's Goethean derivation. In considering Goethe's musings on world literature in their historical specificity, this essay will attempt to substantiate the following two propositions: 1. Despite his personal and political antipathy toward Goethe, Heine was a mediator of Weltliteratur as the sage of Weimar understood the concept. 2. Though, as far as is evident, Heine himself never directly mentioned the concept, the Junges Deutschland writers who did analyze it often make Heine a central figure in their discussions. Their writing, influenced as it was by rising nationalism, allows Heine to emerge as the only mediator of Weltliteratur in its specifically Goethean constellation to enjoy international, historically transcendent renown.

To be sure, the thesis that Heine played a significant role in the development of world literature as Goethe understood it is not entirely novel. As the title of Bodo Morawe's 1997 monograph »Heines ›Französische Zustände‹. Über die Fortschritte des Republikanismus und die anmarschierende Weltliteratur« indicates, this author believes the articles penned by Heine for the »Allgemeine Zeitung« which contain his views on French politics and society in the early phase of Louis-Philippe's regime and which were published under the collective title Französische Zustände constitute a paradigmatic example of what Goethe meant by the term »Weltliteratur«. Morawe's book borrows the term »anmarschierende Weltliteratur« from Goethe's letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter dated 4 March, 1829¹¹, though he ignores its negative connotation. The letter suggests that Parisian theatrical excesses are causing damage to German drama through the steadily advancing process the expression »anmarschierende Weltliteratur« connotes.¹² Morawe underscores the technical progress, improved communication, enhanced intellectual exchanges, broader journalistic information, and increasing translation activity evident in Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur and sees Heine's work as an exemplary instance of these trends. In Morawe's view, Goethe's understanding of »anmarschierende Weltliteratur« is immanent to the genre (»Werkform«) of the Französische Zustände; Heine is engaging in journalistic reportage, providing the perspective of a German writing in France on French events and tacitly holding up that nation's Republicans as a political model to the citizens of his own native land. In his final brief analysis of the Goethean Weltliteratur dimension of the Französische Zustände, Morawe alludes to the work's consciously conceived reception aesthetics, which draw on new communicative and integrative processes. These create Heine's ability to provide immediate »feed back« (Morawe's term) to his audience on the conditions in France as they evolved, a dynamic practice which then retroactively impacts the ongoing development of the work and its author.¹³

Cursory though it is, Morawe's analysis of the Französische Zustände as an early exemplar of Goethe's Weltliteratur is valuable in underscoring Heine's highly-developed awareness of the communicative and technical media, and of the stylistic and generic proclivities subtended by the development of these new modalities, inherent in Goethe's understanding of the term. To be sure, Goethe didn't have political reporting in mind when he articulated his concept; in most instances, he employs it in connection with imaginative literature. However, Heine's political leanings can never be left out of account even when he is considered a mediator of belles lettres, and considerations of Heine's relationship to world literature since the appearance of Morawe's book continue to consist mainly of influence and comparative studies which do not take into account Goethe's understanding of the concept¹⁴, so Morawe should receive due credit for his original insights.

Another Heine scholar who has productively broached the subject of Heine's role as a mediator of world literature as Goethe defined it is Walter Hinck. In his monograph on Heine's poetry in the context of nationalism, Judaism, and anti-Semitism, »Die Wunde Deutschland«, Hinck stresses Heine's cosmopolitanism, his self-conscious role as a bridge between the German and the French peoples rather than emphasizing his adroit manipulation of improved, more rapid communicative possibilities, the focus of Morawe's analysis of Heine's role in the »anmarschierende Weltliteratur«. Hinck cites Heine's well-known letter to a friend in Hamburg from April 1833 in which he describes his goal of making the French familiar with German intellectual life, of bringing the Germans and the French closer together. This is the letter in which Heine describes himself as »der inkarnirte Kosmopolitismus« (HSA XXI, 52). In analyzing this letter in the context of Goethean Weltliteratur, Hinck emphasizes that neither Heine nor Goethe denied the existence or significance of national literatures.¹⁵ For our purposes, this is already an important step in historically contextualizing Heine's relationship to the world literature concept, for today »world literature« as a discursive signifier is associated with the breakdown of national literatures, that is, literatures putatively informed by the discrete customs, values, and languages of individual countries. Homi Bhabha, for example, draws on Goethe's paradigm to propose that:

Where, once, the transmission of national traditions was the major theme of a world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees—these border and frontier conditions—may be the terrains of world literature.¹⁶

Heine, of course, was a political refugee of sorts in Paris, and his experiences as they shaped his exile writing may help Bhabha and others when they draw on historical precedent to help establish such world literary terrains. Nevertheless, Hinck is completely correct in suggesting that Heine is an agent of world literature in the politically and culturally more restricted sense envisioned by Goethe. Hinck quotes Goethe's remarks from 1827 in »Über Kunst und Altertum« which assert that Weltliteratur does not connote a complete correspondence of thought among the various nations, but only that these nations should become aware of each other, understand and tolerate one another. Hinck justifiably sees an identity between these remarks on world literature's function as a cosmopolitan ideal and the goal Heine expressed in the letter to a friend in Hamburg of bringing the people of Germany and France closer together.¹⁷

To be sure, as Hinck also indicates, the letter displays a politically more radical sensibility than is evident in Goethe's remarks on world literature in »Über Kunst und Altertum« by associating patriotic narrow-mindedness with the aristocracy, who profit from fostering nationalist prejudices.¹⁸ Privy Counselor Goethe could only subtly attack aristocratic machinations through the cloak of fiction. No-one could accuse the noblewoman Germaine de Staël of wanting to foment discord between the peoples of Germany and France; her goal in writing »De l'Allemagne« (1813) was the furtherance of the same enlightened mutual understanding between the nations promoted by Heine in his letter and by Goethe in his remarks on »Weltliteratur« in »Über Kunst und Altertum«. Nevertheless, Heine composed his two primary essays written to inform the French about German literature and philosophy, published in their final German form as Die romantische Schule and Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland and in French under the same title as Madame de Staël's book, largely in reaction to what he believed was the misinformation spread by Madame de Staël. It is unnecessary to rehearse Heine's exhaustively-treated personal, political, and literary antipathy toward the French noblewoman, but a brief consideration of the two De l'Allemagne will allow us to see why Heine's work corresponds to Goethean notions of Weltliteratur's form and function far more closely than does Madame de Staël's. In this regard, the divergence in their views on German culture in general and Romanticism in particular is not nearly as important as their respective target audiences, and, concomitantly, their choice of literary venues. With respect simply to content, Madame de Staël may be said to come closer to the ideal of Weltliteratur evident in Goethe's first employment of the term in 1827, when he claimed: »es bilde sich eine allgemeine Weltliteratur, worin uns Deutschen eine ehrenvolle Rolle vorbehalten ist«.¹⁹ If we are to believe Madame de Staël, the role of the German Romantics in European literary culture—which, as we will see, was equated by Goethe with the world literary scene—was far more honorable and worthy of emulation than Heine would have it.

Madame de Staël's role in inspiring Die romantische Schule is evident in Heine's opening remarks. He notes her »De l'Allemagne« is the only comprehensive work the French thus far possess on Germany's intellectual life. Rather than immediately attacking her views, Heine simply notes that much has changed in Germany since her book appeared. The most important event in the intervening period is said to be Goethe's death, which brought »Die Endschaft der ›Goetheschen Kunstperiode‹« in its train. Heine's first use of sarcastic invective occurs as an allusion to »De l'Allemagne's« style and mode of presentation. After labelling it a »Koteriebuch«, Heine continues:

Frau v. Staël, glorreichen Andenkens, hat hier, in der Form eines Buches, gleichsam einen Salon eröffnet, worin sie deutsche Schriftsteller empfing und ihnen Gelegenheit gab sich der französischen zivilisirten Welt bekannt zu machen

(DHA VIII, 125).

Heine, of course, was not a foe of the literary salon; indeed, he proposed entitling a book encompassing some his poetry and prose »Salon« in 1833 (B III, 710), and he learned much through his participation in salon society conversations. Nevertheless, in labelling Madame de Staël's »De l'Allemagne« a »Koteriebuch«, he underscored what he believed to be the elitism of its intended audience, and, thereby, of the book itself. Unlike Heine, Germaine de Staël spent her entire life within the rarified confines of Europe's aristocracy and the small circle of the continent's bourgeois intellectuals. These were the individuals who frequented her isolated salon at Coppet (along with the occasional well-heeled American), and these were the people to whom »De l'Allemagne« was addressed.

This does not signify haughtiness or close-mindedness on Madame de Staël's part; she was, for example, a great admirer of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who maintained her own well-regarded salon in Berlin²⁰, which Heine frequented as a young man. Indeed, Heine praises those portions of Madame de Staël's book where her own voice is clearly manifest. It is the influence of German Romantics themselves which Heine finds objectionable, particularly that of August Wilhelm Schlegel, one of the few relatively permanent guests at Coppet. Heine believes their putative obscurantism must work against both Enlightenment values and the untrammeled intellectual traffic in Europe he wishes to further and which Goethe articulated as the key element in Weltliteratur, even though Goethe ascribed such unhindered exchange to improvements in communication, book distribution and an increase in the quantity of literary journals rather than greater political freedom. Such a journal—»L'Europe littéraire«—was Heine's venue for publishing portions of his De l'Allemagne, and it is his choice of this medium for this work that allows Heine to express the belief to a friend in his previously-cited letter of April 1833 that he is engaging in the peaceful mission of bringing Germany and France closer together, and that he is the very embodiment of cosmopolitanism (HSA XXI, 51 f.). Of such organs, Goethe noted: »Diese Zeitschriften, wie sie sich nach und nach ein größeres Publikum gewinnen, werden zu einer gehofften allgemeinen Weltliteratur auf das wirksamste beitragen«. He stressed as well the importance of developing a common public spirit (»Gemeinsinn«) for this same purpose of developing a »Weltliteratur«.²¹ This goal presupposes the establishment of points of convergence, harmonious accords among the national literatures. Here, too, Heine more closely approximates Goethe's Weltliteratur ideal than does Madame de Staël. For as Renate Stauf has noted with respect to Germany and France:

Hatte Madame de Staël ihren völkerpsychologischen Vergleich überwiegend auf der Figur des Kontrastes aufgebaut und die Fremdheit der literarischen und philosophischen Systeme beider Länder betont, so geht es Heine auch darum, Aspekte aufzuzeigen, die diese Fremdheit überwinden helfen.²²

Though Goethe and Heine—contrary to postcolonial, postmodern critical praxis—underscored the necessity, inevitability, and value of national particularities, they both felt that the »Fremdheit« of which Stauf speaks must be overcome somewhat if a productive literary interaction among the cultivated individuals of different nations was to take place. With respect to this dichotomy, Heine's views mesh with Goethe's comments concerning Weltliteratur to a greater degree than is the case with other prominent German literary figures.

One factor which historically dates Goethe's Weltliteratur concept and makes it less applicable to present-day considerations of this topic is his equation of ›world literature‹ with ›European literature‹.²³ In spite of the interest he displayed in the world outside his own continent in such poetic works as »Vitzliputzli« and in wide-ranging readings of Asian, North American, and South American literature²⁴, Heine's critical focus was European literature as well, and his interest in transnational intellectual exchanges can be seen, like Goethe's, to revolve around Europe. Nevertheless, in comprehensively treating Goethe's concept of world literature, critics almost always make at least a brief reference to his poetic cycle »West-östlicher Divan« (1819). This is justifiable, for these poems are not only the most celebrated example of Goethe's cosmopolitanism on an international scale, but contain a theoretical apparatus—the »Noten und Abhandlungen«—which help supplement and clarify his scattered remarks on Weltliteratur. Thus, in his essay »Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur«, Hendrik Birus draws on the »Noten und Abhandlungen's« comments on translation to show that Goethe's paradigm does not presuppose the submersion of national particularities (»Besonderheiten«) within the world literature matrix. One cannot become acquainted with national particularities by reading in translation; as the »Noten und Abhandlungen« make clear, such translations are mainly valuable in attracting and introducing the reader to a foreign culture.²⁵ Heine's comments in Die romantische Schule on the »Divan«, which contrast this work with writings on the Orient by the Romantic School, are therefore of interest for our purposes.

This contrast is fully in accord with Heine's positing of a political antithesis between the Romantic School's supposed conspiratorial, narrow-minded patriotism, its reactionary support of aristocratic restoration, and the cosmopolitanism he associates with Lessing, Herder, Jean Paul, Schiller, and Goethe; naturally, Heine identifies with this latter faction (DHA VIII, 141 f.).

Heine notes at the outset of his remarks on the »West-östlicher Divan« the relative French ignorance of this work; Madame de Staël would not have been aware of it before »De l'Allemagne« was published, as Goethe's poetic cycle appeared six years later. His assumption that France's lack of familiarity with the work is to be equated with its absence from Madame de Staël's discussions shows the supreme influence he ascribed to her with respect to the French reception of contemporary German literature. Heine assumes the »Divan« accurately reflects »die Denk- und Gefühlsweise des Orients«, and his own exotic, metaphoric descriptions of Goethe's imagery in the verse reflect the European view that the Orient's manner of thinking and feeling is rooted in profound, intoxicating sensuality. Because such liberated sensuality was consistently a key element in Heine's utopian formulations, his approval of Goethe's sensualism is unsurprising. Indeed, Heine describes the »Divan« as a »Selam«, as a greeting and gift of the Occident to the Orient, but also as a sign the West is weary of its ethereal spiritualism and wishes to recover by refreshing itself through an immersion into the Orient's »gesunden Körperwelt« (DHA VIII, 160 f.). Heine emphasizes this carefree but healthy voluptuousness in the »Divan« in order to contrast it with the Sanskrit studies of the Brothers Schlegel.

According to Heine, the Brothers Schlegel found Indian religion and customs attractive because of Hinduism's putative bizarreness, vagueness, and indulgence in mortification of the senses, as well as its character as a civilization rooted in a strict caste system. The Schlegels' penchant for India's culture is grounded in this culture's apparent parallels with Catholicism. It must be emphasized that Heine doesn't claim these parallels exist. Rather, he believes the Schlegels discovered these attributes in Indian society; they viewed the region as the originary locus of Catholic order and practices (DHA VIII, 160 ff.). While Goethe engages in a genuine interchange with Persian Islam, the Schlegels, in Heine's view, mold India into the shape most amenable to their Catholic perspective. As Azade Seyhan puts it:

In contrast to the Schlegels' ideological appropriation of the Indian identity that served to promote a false consciousness of the subject, Goethe's representation of the Islamic Orient resists identification with a textual construct.

Thus, in Heine's interpretation of the »Divan«, »the subject institutes an exchange, a kind of dialogue with the object«.²⁶ Engagement in such intersubjective dialogue is at the heart of Goethe's Weltliteratur ideal, and in embracing such congress while refuting its relational antithesis in the Schlegels' supposed confiscation of Indian ideology for the promotion of their religious agenda, Heine tacitly shows his own ideological affinity to the world literature concept as Goethe formulated it. Heine also clearly associated the Schlegels' Catholicism with conservative, nationalist politics and Goethe's pantheism with his cosmopolitanism and genuine openness to cultural and religious alterity; these latter perspectives are obvious preconditions for enacting the world literature paradigm in its broadest aspect.

As we noted, Goethe's enunciation of Weltliteratur does not signify a diminished interest in understanding discrete national attributes through the act of reading foreign literature. Such particularities can only be correctly appreciated through reading such literature in the original language, but translations can at least draw a reader to an initial interest in and acquaintance with a foreign culture. This may in turn inspire the reader to attain a reading knowledge of the original idiom and thereby a more genuine comprehension of its unique elements. Heine, too, was attracted to the »schönen Besonderheiten« of different cultures. As Stauf maintains in citing this expression from Ueber Polen, this tendency stands juxtaposed with Heine's desire to disempower national discourses in favor of a European discourse, a dichotomy which he shared with Goethe, Herder, and others.²⁷ Michel Espagne has cogently argued that, late in life, Heine passionately embraced translation, which is, broadly speaking and ideally in Heine's view, an act enabling a productive flight into the Orient both as a locus of oblivion and as a way to critically confront contemporary Europe's quotidian philistine realities.²⁸ This would certainly help to explain Heine's appreciation for the »Divan«, which he believed was capable of transporting the reader into a sensual space of genuine revivifying alterity rooted in exotic particularities. This allows the reader, in Heine's view, to forget frigid Europe but also to critically reflect on the restrictions it sets to the life of the spirit and the senses.

As Andreas Huyssen allows us to see, the Romantics had a quite different focus on the relationship between translation and Weltliteratur, a perspective radically at odds with that of both Goethe and Heine, and which may help explain Heine's antipathy toward the Romantic School. Citing a passage from Novalis's novel fragment »Heinrich von Ofterdingen« (1801), Huyssen shows how translation in the Romantics' view is intertwined with—and stands in the service of—the fatherland. Translation for them is an act imbued with a kind of patriotic eschatology; Germans are the master translators, and they translate not only world literature, but also the past into the future. German talent at translation and, thereby, at appropriation, preordains the German nation to lead Europe into a future golden age. Thus, Huyssen closes his book with a reference to a »literarisch geistigen Utopie von einer ›deutschen Weltliteratur‹« conjured by the Romantics.²⁹ This vision obviously reverses the priorities and goals in Goethe's Weltliteratur formulations, which, while they presume an honorable role for the Germans and an even more intense degree of participation than is the case with other nations, presuppose a genuine dialogue of equals leading to the benefit, acculturation, and enlightenment of all involved. Equality between languages and nations is presupposed in Goethe's assertion that:

diese Bezüge vom Originale zur Übersetzung sind es ja, welche die Verhältnisse von Nation zu Nation am allerdeutlichsten aussprechen und die man zur Förderung der vor- und obwaltenden allgemeinen Weltliteratur vorzüglich zu kennen und zu beurteilen hat.³⁰

Heine is capable of praising both the Romantics' critical investigations of world literature and the quality of their translations; he rates Friedrich Schlegel's lectures on literature as second only to Herder's writings in their comprehensive overview of the literature of all the world's peoples, and he extols A. W. Schlegel's translations of Shakespeare (DHA VIII, 167 f., 168). Nevertheless, his cosmopolitanism and his embrace of translation as a means for both imaginatively escaping and critically reflecting upon Europe in general and France and Germany in particular inevitably put him at odds with the imbrication of German nationalism, translation, and Weltliteratur by the German Romantics and closer, with respect to both theory and practice, than any other significant writers to sharing Goethe's Weltliteratur ideal.

To be sure, the cosmopolitanism of Goethe and that of Heine vary in many particulars, and this circumstance has led Benno von Wiese to assert that Heine's leftwing politics manifest a clear break with Goethe's Weltliteratur concept. One can summarize Wiese's views as follows: while Europe, the locus of Weltliteratur as articulated in the early nineteenth century, constituted for Goethe an already existent universe in harmony with his spiritual, intellectual proclivities and which he merely sought to further develop, this continent was for Heine, after Goethe's death, a primarily political domain, the site of revolutions he optimistically hoped were portents of world-wide emancipation. Like Hinck, Wiese cites Heine's letter of April 1833 with its announcement of Heine's mission to bring the world's people together. But while Hinck saw in this letter Heine's tacit embrace of Weltliteratur's ideal of productive transnational interchange, Wiese reaches the opposite conclusion. He doesn't interpret the letter's pronouncements as expressing a cultural goal inscribed with the spirit of peace: »Was die Völker miteinander verbinden kann und soll, ist jetzt nicht die Idee der Weltliteratur, sondern die Idee der Weltrevolution und ihre zukünftige Realisierung«.³¹ Given Heine's bellicose pronouncements in the letter to his friend against an aristocracy served by Goethe and which actually took him into its ranks, Wiese's contrast is plausible. Nevertheless, this letter, as Hinck indicates, underscores what Heine's journalistic activities promoting transnational understanding of German and French culture firmly establish: Heine was an agent of Weltliteratur as defined by Goethe. The justification for Wiese's point of view is grounded in the diachronic perspective he establishes. However, I believe the truth about Heine's relationship to Goethe's Weltliteratur paradigm can only be expressed when we synthesize Hinck's and Wiese's antithetical perspectives. This leads to the following conclusion: while Heine mediated world literature in the manner elucidated by Goethe, Goethe's death during the early phase of Heine's life in Paris marked the beginning of the end of Weltliteratur as a distinctly Goethean paradigm. For in the period immediately before and after Goethe's death, the Junges Deutschland movement, with Heine in its midst, literally wrote this paradigm off. Heine was not only its only mediator to achieve immortal distinction, he was also a key inspirer of its demise.

Before we take up why Heine and Junges Deutschland can be said to bring Goethean Weltliteratur to an end, it is worth considering in somewhat more detail why Heine's activities not only mark its beginning, but the only genuine phase of its existence. We have already cited Morawe's suggestion that Heine was perhaps the first pan-European writer to exploit the technological and communicative improvements at the core of Goethe's definitions of the term. The most significant organ to embody these improvements and inspire in Goethe the belief that the Age of Weltliteratur was at hand was the Parisian journal »Le Globe«. As we noted, Goethe was first inspired to use the term after he read a »Globe« review of a French translation of »Torquato Tasso«; particularly the »Globe« essay and others he read in this magazine instilled in him the belief that a genuine transnational dialogue was taking place with respect to literature. In general, Goethe held the contemporary journalistic media of his time, especially the daily newspapers to which he had access in Weimar, in low esteem. But in »Le Globe«, he believed the spirit of the time was given clear and powerful expression. It became his press organ of choice for keeping up with current political and cultural events and opinions in Europe, and he made copious notes on its articles.³² As Jeffrey Sammons has remarked, Heine became an avid reader of »Le Globe« as well around 1828. Sammons even suspects that the paean printed in this journal to mark Heine's arrival in the French capital was actually written by him.³³ Heine also expressed the belief that the cosmopolitan spirit of his century was given clear expression in this journal. Its scientifically democratic writers precisely dictate (»genau diktiren«) what Heine termed »die Welthülfsliteratur« (DHA VII, 507).

The tone and vocabulary of Heine's praise reflect his pleasure at France's intellectual upheavals, and point to a significant difference between his cosmopolitanism and that of Goethe. In this regard, it is significant to note than in October 1830, the Saint-Simonians took over the editorship of »Le Globe«, and while this shift only increased Heine's high regard for it, its new partisan spirit provoked Goethe's displeasure.³⁴ Both men were uniquely confluent in their prescient esteem for early nineteenth century press organs like »Le Globe«, transnational with respect to content, ideals, and (because of new technology) transmission. However, Heine's nascent Saint-Simonian leanings led him to recoin, consciously or unconsciously, Goethe's already cosmopolitan term. »Welthülfsliteratur« reflects the movement's activist, utilitarian spirit, its belief that all social means—including literature—must serve and promote the interests of the world's masses, not just those of the aristocratic and intellectual elite. Heine's employment of the term in the context of praising the objective, research oriented, scientific young democrats who wrote for »Le Globe« helps to justify Wilhelm Gössmann's reference to »Die Koppelung von Weltliteratur und Wissenschaft, wie sie Heine in seinem Werk vollzogen hat«.³⁵

The distinction in tone and purport between the terms »Weltliteratur« and »Welthülfsliteratur« should not be taken to signify that Goethe's paradigm lacked a societal dimension. This dimension is evident in the following remark from 1828:

Wenn wir eine europäische, ja eine allgemeine Weltliteratur zu verkündigen gewagt haben, so heißt dieses nicht, daß die verschiedenen Nationen voneinander und ihren Erzeugnissen Kenntnis nehmen, denn in diesem Sinne exisitiert sie schon lange, setzt sich fort und erneuert sich mehr oder weniger. Nein! hier ist vielmehr davon die Rede, daß die lebendigen und strebenden Literatoren einander kennenlernen und durch Neigung und Gemeinsinn sich veranlaßt finden, gesellschaftlich zu wirken.³⁶

However, as Victor Lange has noted, this passage cannot be understood outside its historical context, and does not equate Weltliteratur with a contribution to concrete political reality or to social criticism. Rather, it signifies that writing is only world-literary in scope if its author composes in a conscious spirit of communal understanding, possesses an awareness of the great tasks before the world as a whole, contributes to and is open to his epoch's knowledge.³⁷ Because he believed »De l'Allemagne« contributed to such transcultural understanding and promoted knowledge of Germany abroad, Goethe, unlike Heine, gave unqualified praise to Madame de Staël's book.³⁸ Though Heine's own De l'Allemagne does veer into the social critical role highlighted as ungoethean by Lange, it is nevertheless imbued with the same cosmopolitan spirit of understanding and contributing to intercultural knowledge Lange associated with the Weltliteratur paradigm in its historically restricted, early nineteenth century ambience.

To summarize and conclude my argument that Heine was the first writer of note who was a mediator of Weltliteratur in Goethe's sense of the term, several points bear repeating. As Morawe has indicated, Heine was one of the earliest writers to become aware of and exploit technological, communicative, and distributive advances highlighted by Goethe in his adumbrations of the paradigm. Heine's employment of these improved media allowed him to reach a larger, more diverse audience than was the case with predecessors such as Madame de Staël, whose own »De l'Allemagne« targeted and reached only a select group of aristocrats, intellectuals, and others who frequented literary salons. This more comprehensive and freer intellectual commerce is a key element in Goethe's understanding of Weltliteratur. Heine's unique two-way role in not only furthering the transmission of German literature and thought in France through his own De l'Allemagne, but reporting to the Germans his impressions of French events and culture in such works as Französische Zustände, Französische Maler, and Ueber die französische Bühne must also be mentioned in this regard. Given France's political, linguistic, and cultural status in the eighteenth century, one can find far more journalistic reporting on France in Germany than on Germany in France prior to Madame de Staël and Heine. However, the target audiences of such reporting on the French scene were generally the personages of European courts; I am thinking here particularly of the readers of Friedrich Melchior Grimm's famous eighteenth century Correspondance littéraire. Other transmitters of French culture to Germany were primarily academics and intellectuals writing and toiling for other academics and intellectuals in relative obscurity.³⁹ Heine was the only writer working at the close of the Goethezeit completely committed to Weltliteratur's cosmopolitan, universalist ideals who personally enjoyed (and still enjoys) world literary status.

It remains to elucidate why Heine was not just the first but the only internationally-renowned purveyor of Weltliteratur as a Goethean construct, and to this end we must examine the Junges Deutschland engagement with this paradigm. Hartmut Steinecke, who has devoted an article to this topic, has pointed out that a response to Goethe's elucidation of the term only began to become widespread in 1836, four years after Goethe's death. In this year, Eckermann's »Gespräche mit Goethe« were first published; it is here that Weltliteratur received its most famous articulation. Steinecke notes that the Junges Deutschland adherents, with their interest in combining literature and science, were initially predisposed in favor of Weltliteratur as an ideal, since such a comprehensive concept presupposes not only the transcending of national borders but of the traditional divisions between imaginative literature on the one hand, and scientific and political writing on the other.⁴⁰ Heine's coining of the term »Welthülfsliteratur« in praising the scientism of »Le Globe's« writers (DHA VII, 507 f.) reflects the synthesizing inclination of which Steinecke speaks. In his essay »Goethe und die Welt-Literatur« (1835), Ludolf Wienbarg lauds Goethe's principle that art and life are inseparable.⁴¹ Such approval reflects Junges Deutschland's objectifying tendency and its embrace of Goethean Weltliteratur for this purpose, even though the movement is, with respect to literary criticism, most famous for its pillorying of the privy counselor. However, Wienbarg's praise also has a political dimension; the enunciation of the paradigm allows him to express certainty that a universal brotherhood binding the peoples of the world will continue to grow stronger, bringing about an ever more cordial interchange among the earth's literatures.⁴² These are the same dreams which sustained Heine and allowed him to become Weltliteratur's premier mediator.

Despite Wienbarg's expression of a cosmopolitan spirit shared by Heine and others affiliated with Junges Deutschland, it is primarily the movement's nationalist strain which put an end to Weltliteratur as Goethe understood it. This nationalism was partly sincere and partly a tactical response to the relentless jingoist diatribe directed against the group, particularly by Wolfgang Menzel, whose loathing for Goethe was partly based on the sage of Weimar's universalist tendencies.⁴³ Heine tried to counteract such virulent »Teutomanie« through both ironic satire and positive prophetic visions which would channel nationalism in a positive direction.⁴⁴ A year after Wienbarg's essay was published, Karl Gutzkow's treatise »Ueber Göthe im Wendepunkte zweier Jahrhunderte« appeared. In this work, Gutzkow cautiously defended Weltliteratur by highlighting what he saw as its productive relationship with national literature. He argues in world literature's defense that it neither displaces nationality nor forces one to renounce homeland mountains and valleys in favor of cosmopolitan images. Indeed, world literature secures the viability of nationality. Given the absence of viable preconditions for a national literature in Germany, the world literary condition (»weltliterarischen Zustand«) justifies Germany's native literature, for the outside world acclaims this literature while it is condemned to death at home (i.e., through censorship). Gutzkow proceeds to rebut the calumny endured by Heine, who has achieved fame throughout Europe with his extraordinary talents.⁴⁵

Gutzkow is clearly trying to sustain here the dialectic and dialogue of national and international literature which was so central to Goethe's Weltliteratur paradigm and to Heine's unique, albeit unconscious, practical realization of it. Gerhard Kaiser sees in Gutzkow's essay an early instance of the narrow-minded nationalism soon to be so prevalent in Germany,⁴⁶ but it seems more likely that Gutzkow is taking a defensive posture, reacting to the polemics of Menzel and his followers as well as to the repressive political atmosphere which culminated in the edict against five members of the Junges Deutschland movement on 10 December, 1835. A truly pronounced partisanship for national literature vis-à-vis Weltliteratur is more evident in Theodor Mundt's discussion of Goethe's paradigm in the former's »Geschichte der Literatur der Gegenwart« (2nd ed. 1853). Here Mundt claims Weltliteratur has primarily a commercial and political significance and asserts:

Die schärfste Ausprägung der eigenthümlichen Nationalität ist vielmehr in jeder Literatur als der wahre Kern und der höchste Reiz zu betrachten, und ein überhand nehmender universalistischer Geist der Bildung, der eine Verallgemeinerung der Nationalität zuwegebringt, kann nur die Verderbniß und Verschlechterung der Literatur erwirken.⁴⁷

This perspective reverses a trend found in earlier Junges Deutschland engagements with the paradigm, namely, the tendency to label those works with the label Weltliteratur which are qualitatively superior to others. As Steinecke notes, the equation of value with world literary status was addressed only indirectly by Goethe (and, we might add, by Heine), but it has influenced discussions of world literature from the 1830's to the present day⁴⁸, when works supposedly deserving of this appellation are still equated with the canon. More importantly, Mundt's comments mark a definitive break in German literary criticism with Goethe's paradigm as he defined it and as Heine put it into practice. Mundt's view that Weltliteratur is fundamentally a commercial rather than aesthetic signifier was an exaggeration of Goethe's views, but was also repeated in the twentieth century.⁴⁹

In the period between Goethe's death and the 1848 revolution, Heine's name became a fulcrum for both opponents and proponents of both Junges Deutschland and the ideal of Weltliteratur. We have already noted Gutzkow's defense of Heine in the context of his argument for the efficacy of a world literature-national literature dialogue. Those who held antipathetic views toward Goethe's concept and the Junges Deutschland movement drew on Heine and his francophile leanings to sustain their argument. Steinecke notes, citing Menzel, that for these conservative nationalists:

Weltliteratur bedeute in der Praxis—siehe Heine—Anpreisung des Französischen, damit Auslieferung der deutschen Kultur an die französische und Unterwerfung unter die gefährlichen politischen Ideale der Revolution.⁵⁰

Steinecke's inference that these opponents of Weltliteratur equated its »Praxis« with the name of Heine evinces 1830 Germany's correct grasp of the veracity of my own central thesis, which since the nineteenth century has been lost sight of; Heine was the foremost practitioner of Weltliteratur as Goethe defined it. At the turn into the twentieth, Germany's eager xenophobic embrace of imperialism made genuine critical support for Goethe's ideal almost inconceivable, and tirades against Heine continued to be a benchmark of this perspective. By this time, the difference between ›national‹ and ›nationalistic‹ literature was largely effaced.⁵¹

Of course, there continued to be writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the German-speaking world and elsewhere who promoted a cosmopolitan spirit in literature, a dialogue among the writers of the world which, ideally, would promote peace and the universal betterment of mankind; one can cite, for example, the ubiquitous international mediating engagements of Stefan Zweig and his good friend Romain Rolland. The mature Thomas Mann, who saw the need to promote international cosmopolitanism when its only alternative became a silent acceptance of Nazi and fascist principles, is another such figure. Such engagements, however, were reactive responses to an infrangible nationalism, not an attempt to promote a national-international dialogue at least partly in the service of national interests, as was the case in the ages of Goethe and Heine. As Steinecke has noted, Goethe believed the articulation and development of Weltliteratur took place in Germany for a particular reason; Germany's retarded development of a discrete national identity in the eighteenth century sharpened its openness to and perception of international contexts and connections (»Zusammenhänge«). Adherents of Junges Deutschland such as Wienbarg also saw Germany's lack of political unity as a positive force for cosmopolitanism.⁵² Though Heine contrasted his own philosophical cosmopolitanism with the old German philistine feelings residing in his breast (DHA VIII, 97), his youth in the disunified political milieu described by Goethe undoubtedly contributed to his pan-European perspective.

Quite possibly the last positive expression of Weltliteratur as an ideal prior to its revival at the end of World War II is to be found in the 1848 »Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei« of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This manifesto, the imagery of which was probably influenced by Heine⁵³, maintains that in the age of international interdependence, intellectual productions of individual nations are shared by all, national narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness become impossible, and a »Weltliteratur« is taking shape out of the diverse national and local literatures.⁵⁴ Contrary to this utopian prophecy, nationalism became so virulent that Weltliteratur lost its idealistic resonance after 1848 and became, as we have seen, associated primarily with canonicity and commerce. Prior to this time, Heine was its most exemplary mediator. In the post World War II age of mass communication, largely anonymous marketers and reviewers took over this role. As this trend has only been enhanced in the current era of the interent, Heine will doubtless remain history's only agent of Weltliteratur in its Goethean sense to have achieved timeless international stature.

Notes

1. Fritz Strich: Goethe und die Weltliteratur. Bern: Francke, 1946, p. 397-400.

2. Anni Carlsson: »Die Entfaltung der Literatur als Prozess.«—In: Weltliteratur. Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. Emil Staiger and Walter Muschg. Bern: Francke, 1952, p. 51-65.

3. Erich Auerbach: Philologie der Weltliteratur. In: Weltliteratur [Anm. 2], p. 39-50.

4. See, for example: Hendrik Birus: »Am Schnittpunkt von Komparatistik und Germanistik: Die Idee der Weltliteratur heute«.—In: Germanistik und Komparatistik. DFG-Symposion 1993. Ed. Hendrik Birus Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995, p. 439-457; Weltliteratur heute. Konzepte und Perspektiven. Ed. Manfred Schmeling. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995; Martin Albrow: »Auf dem Weg zu einer globalen Gesellschaft«.—In: Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft. Ed. Ulrich Beck. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998, p. 411-434.

5. The Goethe Society of North America session was entitled: »Weltliteratur: Goethe's Cross-Cultural Projects«, and the American Comparative Literature Association panel bore the name »World Literature Today: What Literature? Whose World?«.—In: PMLA 115 (2000), p. 1527-1528 and 1532.

6. John Pizer: »Goethe's ›World Literature‹ Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization«.—In: Comparative Literature 52 (2000), p. 213-227.

7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe in 40 Bänden. Ed. Eduard von Heilen u. a. Vol. 38. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1912, p. 95-97.

8. In the 19th century, one sees this attitude exemplified in Georg Brandes's essay »Weltlitteratur«—In: Das litterarische Echo 2 (1899): p. 1-5. For a later manifestation of this view prior to Strich's book, see Albert Guérard: Preface to World Literature. New York: Holt, 1940.

9. Thomas Mann: Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 10. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1960, p. 870. See also his 1925 essay »Kosmopolitismus« in the same volume, p. 184-191.

10. Mann [Anm. 9], p. 871.

11. Bodo Morawe: Heines Französische Zustände. Über die Fortschritte des Republikanismus und die anmarschierende Weltliteratur. Heidelberg: Winter, 1997, p. 86.

12. Goethe, cited in Strich [Anm. 1], p. 399.

13. Morawe [Anm. 11], p. 86-88.

14. I am thinking particularly of the essays presented at the 1997 London Heine Conference edited by T. J. Reed and Alexander Stillmark, published under the title »Heine und die Weltliteratur«. Oxford: Legenda, 2000. An exception is Joseph A. Kruse's essay »›In der Literature wie im Leben hat jeder Sohn einen Vater‹. Heinrich Heine zwischen Bibel und Homer, Cervantes und Shakespeare« (p. 2-23). Kruse's article takes into account the national-international dialogue at the heart of Goethe's understanding of the Weltliteratur paradigm, and finds that Heine believes this dialogue is achieved primarily through music, which overcomes national boundaries (p. 4-6).

15. Walter Hinck: Die Wunde Deutschland. Heinrich Heines Dichtung im Widerstreit von Nationalidee, Judentum und Antisemitismus. Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1990, p. 110-111.

16. Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 12.

17. Hinck [Anm. 15], p. 111.

18. Ibid.

19. Goethe [Anm. 7], p. 97.

20. For a discussion of Madame de Staël's salon and her relationship to Rahel Varnhagen, see Lilian R. Furst: »The Salons of Germaine de Staël and Rahel Varnhagen«.—In: Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature. Ed. Gregory Maertz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 95-103.

21. Goethe, cited in Strich [Anm. 1], p. 398-399.

22. Renate Stauf: Der problematische Europäer. Heinrich Heine im Konflikt zwischen Nationenkritik und gesellschaftlicher Utopie. Heidelberg: Winter, 1997, p. 196.

23. This is evident, for example, in Goethe's comment »Europäische, d. h. Welt-Literatur«. Cited in Strich [Anm. 1], p. 399.

24. See Kruse [Anm. 14], p. 9-10.

25. Hendrik Birus: »Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur«.—In: Weltliteratur heute [Anm. 4], p. 23-24.

26. Azade Seyhan: »Cannons Against the Canon: Representations of Tradition and Modernity in Heine's Literary History«.—In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 63 (1989), p. 502.

27. Stauf [Anm. 22], p. 12.

28. Michel Espagne: »Übersetzung und Orientreise. Heines Handschriften zum Loeve-Veimars-Fragment«.—In: Euphorion 78 (1984), p. 127-142.

29. Andreas Huyssen: Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und Aneignung. Studien zur frühromantischen Utopie einer deutschen Weltliteratur. Zürich: Atlantis, 1969. p. 172-173.

30. Goethe, cited in Strich [Anm. 1], p. 398.

31. Benno von Wiese: »Goethe und Heine als Europäer«.—In: Signaturen. Zu Heinrich Heine und seinem Werk. Berlin: Schmidt, 1976, p. 209-212. Citation on p. 212. Wiese's emphasis.

32. See Heinz Hamm: Goethe und die französische Zeitschrift »Le Globe«. Eine Lektüre im Zeichen der »Weltliteratur«. Weimar: Böhlau, 1998.

33. Jeffrey L. Sammons: Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 160.

34. Hamm [Anm. 32], p. 11.

35. Wilhelm Gössmann: »Die Herausforderung der Wissenschaft durch die Literatur«.—In: Heinrich Heine im Spannungsfeld von Literatur und Wissenschaft. Symposium anläßlich der Benennung der Universität Düsseldorf nach Heinrich Heine. Ed. Wilhelm Gössmann and Manfred Windfuhr. Düsseldorf: Hobbing, 1990, p. 24.

36. Goethe, cited in Strich [Anm. 1], p. 399.

37. Victor Lange: »Nationalliteratur und Weltliteratur«.—In: Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft 33 (1971), p. 30.

38. Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Ed. Erich Trunz. Vol 10. Hamburg: Wegner, n. d.), p. 466.

39. See Wolfgang Theile: »Vermittler französischer Literatur in Deutschland um 1800. Zur Vorgeschichte der Romanischen Philologie«.—In: Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 73 (1992), p. 48-66.

40. Hartmut Steinecke: »Weltliteratur«—Zur Diskussion der Goetheschen »Idee« im Jungen Deutschland.—In: Das Junge Deutschland. Kolloquium zum 150. Jahrestag des Verbots vom 10. Dezember 1835. Ed. Joseph A. Kruse and Bernd Kortländer. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1987, p. 156-158.

41. Ludolf Wienbarg: »Goethe und die Welt-Literatur (1835)«.—In: Literaturkritik des Jungen Deutschland. Entwicklungen—Tendenzen—Texte. Ed. Hartmut Steinecke. Berlin: Schmidt, 1982, p. 156-157.

42. Wienbarg [Anm. 41], p. 164.

43. See Walter Dieze: Junges Deutschland und deutsche Klassik. Zur Ästhetik und Literaturtheorie des Vormärz. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1957, p. 21-35.

44. Examples of both tendencies are provided and discussed by René Anglade: »Heinrich Heine: Von der französischen Spezialrevoluzion zur deutschen Universalrevoluzion«.—In: HJb 38 (1999), p. 46-73, esp. 65-66.

45. Karl Gutzkow: »Aus: Ueber Göthe im Wendepunkte zweier Jahrhunderte (1836)«.—In: [Anm. 41], p. 110.

46. Gerhard R. Kaiser: Einführung in die vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. Forschungsstand—Kritik—Aufgaben. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980, p. 17.

47. Theodor Mundt: Geschichte der Literatur der Gegenwart. Leipzig: Simion, ²1853, p. 567-568.

48. Steinecke [Anm. 40], p. 159. Kruse [Anm. 14] provides a contrasting opinion; he believes Goethe's concept is also a »Qualitätsmerkmal« and emphasizes that »Auch Heine vertritt den Anspruch der Kunst und Qualität in der Literatur« (p. 6).

49. See, for example, Ernst Elster's influential essay »Weltlitteratur und Litteraturvergleichung«.—In: Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Litteraturen 107 (1901), p. 33-47.

50. Steinecke [Anm. 40], p. 161-162.

51. See, for example, Kaiser's discussion of Max Koch's 1891 lecture »Nationalität und Nationalitteratur« in Einführung in die vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft [Anm. 46], p. 18-19.

52. Steinecke [Anm. 40], p. 162.

53. See S. S. Prawer: Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976, p. 139 and 139-140, n. 5.

54. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Werke. Vol 4. Berlin: Dietz, 1959, p. 466.

Abbreviations

B = Heinrich Heine: Sämtliche Schriften. Hrsg. Von Klaus Briegleb. München: Hanser 1968-1976, 6 Bände (6, II = Register)

DHA = Heinrich Heine: Sämtliche Werke. Düsseldorfer Ausgabe. In Verbindung mit dem Heinrich-Heine-Institut hrsg. Von Manfred Windfuhr. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe 1973 ff.

HSA = Heinrich Heine: Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse. Säkularausgabe. Hrsg. Von den Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar (seit 1991: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik) und dem Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Berlin und Paris: Akademie und Editions due CNRS 1970ff.