[In the following essay, Holub examines Heine's conversion to Protestantism as it relates to his Confessions.]

Heine's Confessions [Geständnisse], one of the last works he published before his death, is an unusual text in both intention and composition. Originally conceived as a new introduction to an earlier work, De l'Allemagne, which had appeared in the mid-1830s, it moves through several generic styles and perspectives, never settling on any one mode of presentation. In the foreword to the work Heine announces that he wrote the Confessions as a kind of appendix or emendation to his major essays on German literature and philosophy, but after employing a confessional style for a few paragraphs, he soon turns to an extended and satirical reflection on Madame de Staël, whose De l'Allemagne Heine had opposed two decades before with his own version of German cultural and intellectual life. Indeed, although Confessions was published as part of the first volume of Vermischte Schriften, which contained a collection of poems, an essay on mythology, and an extended obituary to Ludwig Marcus, Heine and his publisher failed to dissociate it from the orbit of De l'Allemagne and even neglected to omit a passage in which Heine refers specifically to his intention to describe the origins of his writings during the thirties, as well as “the philosophical and religious variations that have occurred in the mind of the author since its composition” (6/I: 15).¹ After settling scores with de Staël again—he had already taken her to task for her distortions of romanticism and German intellectual life in the first edition of De l'Allemagne—Heine turns to a mixture of autobiography (in which he divulges details of his life in his customarily unsystematic fashion) and attacks against various ideologies and philosophies he now finds repugnant. The text then breaks off abruptly after Heine relates an anecdote from a medieval chronicle whose moral is the vanity of all earthly fame, a story that the author, in his current state of physical debilitation, willingly and humbly applies to himself.

Although Confessions is a strange performance, it is also true to its title in many regards. Heine himself mentions two models for his text: the Confessiones of Augustine and the work by the same title (Confessions) written nearly 1300 years later by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Actually Heine criticizes these two earlier versions of confessional literature as unsuccessful attempts to be truthful about oneself, but despite his recognition of the shortcomings inherent in this genre Heine's own text nonetheless follows the path established by his illustrious predecessors. Like Rousseau, Heine uses his text to present autobiographical justifications for his actions, although he consistently portrays himself as deceived and at fault, whereas Rousseau apologetically defends himself against the persecution of an allegedly unjust world. For this reason perhaps Heine borrows liberally from the criticism that Rousseau's writings experienced in the nineteenth century, judging his claims with extreme severity and accusing him of covering up more severe transgressions with petty disclosures. He concludes by maintaining that Rousseau's self-portrait is “a lie, admirably accomplished, but still a brilliant lie” (6/I: 448). Augustine's Confessiones is obviously more to Heine's liking, and indeed this text from A.D. 400 evidences more affinities with Heine's intentions in the 1850s. In Augustine Heine could identify with the combination of psychological exploration, autobiographical detail, and most important, religious conversion. For Heine's text is centrally about his change of conviction, and it is a change that proceeds in a direction similar to that of his Christian model. Heine had identified himself as a pagan of sorts during the 1830s: he had embraced a pantheistic doctrine, influenced by Saint Simonism and associated with the word Hellenism, which he distinguished from the Jewish and Christian tradition, both of which were part of an allegedly Nazarine tendency in Western culture. Now, in the 1850s, he describes his return to a deistic position, affirming his faith in a monotheistically conceived divinity and rejecting the quasi-atheistic leanings of his earlier years. Unlike Augustine, Heine does not relate any conversion experience; his text is not a dramatic rendition of why he became a believer, or perhaps a believer again. Rather, it is a post-conversion work whose main purpose is to attack the falseness of his earlier opinions. The Confessions Heine writes is a mixed genre, to be sure, but its main objectives are a self-critical reflection on his former beliefs and a validation of his conversion from the perfidious doctrines of his youth.

It is in this context of the confessional mode that Heine broaches a topic he had not discussed openly in any of his previous works—his conversion from Judaism to Protestantism. It occurred, as we know, in June of 1825, shortly before Heine completed his doctoral degree in jurisprudence at the University of Göttingen, and although Heine later characterized it in a famous bon mot as his “entrance ticket to European culture” (6/I: 622), we suspect with good reason that it had a great emotional impact on him. Conversion, of course, was not unusual for German Jews in the early years of the restoration, and we often hear the undoubtedly correct observation that many assimilated Jews, having already become integrated into German society, converted to Protestantism in order to facilitate professional life.² The Napoleonic Code, which had brought some degree of emancipation to the Jews of Germany, especially in those areas under the direct jurisdiction of the French, had been negated by restoration authorities, and Jews who had ambitions to enter the German civil service, which encompassed, of course, a large number of professional positions from university professors to doctors at hospitals, found themselves faced with a choice of professional proscription or conversion. Thus, many of Germany's intellectually enlightened Jews—I cite the names of Eduard Gans, Ludwig Börne, and Heinrich Marx (the father of Karl Marx) by way of example—opted for a formal conversion to a belief to which they adhered in name only. Although there were some cases in which the converted Jew genuinely embraced his new religion, Heine's conversion of the 1820s, in contrast to his conversion of his later years, was certainly of the insincere variety: We have no record of his attending church and no evidence whatsoever that he believed in a Christian God. In Confessions he writes that he embraced Protestantism because it did not embarrass him (6/I: 482), which is hardly an enthusiastic endorsement of the evangelical faith. If he subscribed to anything in Protestantism, it was, as he suggests, the protest that he later associated with Luther's defiance of the Catholic hierarchy. Heine informs us that he remains “now as always, a protesting Protestant,” who now protests against the damage done to his good name by the false rumors and accusations concerning his religious convictions (6/I: 491).

Heine had been extremely reticent about his conversion before the 1850s. In his correspondence from the 1820s we note that Heine is hesitant to report his baptism openly, even to his closest friends. A little over a month after he had become a Protestant, he writes to his sister Charlotte Embden, telling her to communicate to her husband that he “has become not only Dr. Jura, but also,” leaving what he has “also” become intentionally unnamed. He continues by stating that “it rained yesterday, just as it had rained six weeks ago.”³ Heine had mentioned his impending conversion to Moritz Embden prior to the event,⁴ and in this letter he is obviously letting his sister know that it has occurred—the mention of rain is an indirect reference to the baptismal water. But in letters to his best friend Moses Moser, written directly after the baptism, Heine says absolutely nothing about his abandonment of Judaism. Three months after his conversion, at the beginning of October, he drops a hint that he has become a Protestant. In the same letter he speaks about Eduard Gans's conversion.⁵ Gans had been the leader of the Association for Culture and Scholarship of the Jews, an organization to which Heine and Moser had also belonged, and which was now on the verge of extinction because of Gans's conversion and the subsequent lack of leadership. But Heine did not speak directly of his own baptism until almost six months after it had occurred. On 14 December 1825 he wrote to Moser that he wouldn't have had himself baptized if the theft of silver spoons had been allowed.⁶ A month later he expressed his regrets that he converted, since he was now accepted by neither Christians nor Jews and had suffered only misfortune since then.⁷ But Heine was generally silent about conversion in his letters after January of 1826, preferring to include his reflections on the topic in a somewhat distorted, and often humorous or satirical form in his literary works.

The way in which conversion appears in these texts is anything but a simple reflection of the actual event or its genuine place in Heine's psychic economy. Instead, Jewish apostasy is depicted in a series of distortions, displacements, and refractions. An especially important technique Heine employs is projection; self-accusations and thoughts that may have occurred to him about conversion are projected onto others. This form of projection is complicated by the fact that Heine does not simply take his own thoughts and feelings and impute them to other people or to the quasi-fictional characters in his works. Rather projection functions, I believe, in ways of which Heine himself may not have been totally aware. The most famous example of this technique is probably Heine's poem “To an Apostate,” which scholars presume was written about Eduard Gans, the leader of the previously mentioned Association for the Culture and Scholarship of the Jews. Heine's poem castigates his unnamed apostate for betraying his own youthful ardor, selling out to social pressures, and hypocritically embracing a faith that he had recently despised. It closes with a strophe that blames erudition, or at least the exposure to conservative thought for the renegade's actions:

“EINEM ABTRüNNIGEN”

O des heilgen Jugendmutes!
O, wie schnell bist du gebändigt
Und du hast dich, kühlern Blutes
Mit den lieben Herrn verständigt.
Und du bist zu Kreuz gekrochen,
Zu dem Kreuz, das du verachtest,
Das du noch vor wenig Wochen
In den Staub zu treten dachtest!
O, das tut das viele Lesen
Jener Schlegel, Haller, Burke—
Gestern noch ein Held gewesen,
Ist man heute schon ein Schurke.

(1: 266)

[Oh, the holy spark of youth—
Oh, how fast it's by the board!
In cold blood you have, in truth,
Made a deal with the good Lord.
To the cross you crawled your way
That you scorned with scorn profound,
Cross that, just the other day,
You would trample to the ground.
You read Schlegel, Haller, Burke,
Whom reaction keeps in vogue—
Once you did a hero's work,
Now you're nothing but a rogue.](8)

Unusual about the list of persons is that Heine otherwise does not associate them with Gans. Obviously Friedrich Schlegel and Karl Ludwig von Haller may have been included because of their own conversions; both men left the Protestant faith for Catholicism; Schlegel in 1808, Haller—with much fanfare—in 1820. Edmund Burke is oddly out of place in this group, having undergone no religious conversion; he belongs with Schlegel and Haller only as a fellow conservative thinker, a feature that Gans does not share. In any case, the grouping is odd because of their dissimilarity with Gans on political issues. But more germane for our concerns is the obvious and frequently remarked displacement of self-accusation and self-betrayal onto a third party. Gans had done the same thing in October of 1825 that Heine had done several months earlier: he had abandoned the religious tradition of his youth, and, like Heine, we presume he had done so without any real religious conviction and for precisely the same practical reasons that are usually attributed to Heine.⁹

If we examine closely Heine's literary works from the years immediately following his conversion, we notice several instances of his uneasy conscience with regard to his own baptism. The most obvious of these examples comes from the Baths of Lucca, where the main character, the former banker Christian Gumpelino, has abandoned not only his Hamburg name, Lazarus Gumpel, and his class—he has been ennobled with the title Marquis—but also his religion. The irony here, of course, is that Heine, not Gumpel, was a religious apostate who left Hamburg to travel in Italy. Here conversion is ridiculed and viewed as an artificial contrivance of the nouveaux riches trying to abandon their roots and assimilate, in this case into a Roman Catholic society. But conversion in this period also injected itself into Heine's writings in more surreptitious ways. In chapter 15 of Ideas. Book le Grand, written at about the time that Heine became a Protestant, the narrator relates a different and humorous sort of conversion, from the party of the fools to the party of the reasonable ones. The text is obviously not an allegory in which Jews and Christians line up precisely with fools and reasonable ones; Heine's displacement in this case, and in most cases, does not operate with one-to-one correspondences. Rather this passage repeats themes and sentiments that are bound up in Heine's religious conversion and refracts them in various ways. At the outset the reasonable ones are said to have been at war with the fools for 5588 years, a clear reference to the date according to Jewish calculations. At another point, Heine relates the hatred of the fools for him:

I, poor thing, am especially hated by them [the fools]; they assert that I originally was one of them, that I am an apostate, a deserter who has broken the holiest ties, that I am now even a spy who secretly reveals what they, the fools, have garnered together for the purpose of exposing them to the laughter of my new associates, and that I am so stupid that I do not recognize that the latter are all the while laughing at me and will never regard me as one of their own. And about this the fools are perfectly right.

(2: 298)

Here Heine repeats the reproaches or imagined reproaches that a converted Jew would have suffered from his old coreligionists, as well as the suspicions that Heine himself harbored about many of his new coreligionists. The resentment toward a traitor, which Heine himself expressed in his poem about Gans, the inability to become a Christian despite one's profession of a change in faith, the furtive ridicule a convert experiences from those who do not truly accept him—all of these motifs, which are sentiments expressed privately in Heine's correspondence, are contained in the passage from Ideas in distorted and displaced form. At this point in his life Heine was unable to speak about his conversion openly; indeed, as we have seen, he refers to it infrequently even in his correspondence with his most intimate friends. But in a displaced fashion his status as an apostate finds its way nonetheless into his published writings with a frequency that suggests it was a major force in his psychic economy.¹⁰

After a period in which Heine shows little evidence of anxiety over his conversion or religious status, we find him again concerned with such matters around 1840, possibly as a reaction to the Damascus affair. In the Börne Memorial, for example, conversion is a topic discussed by the two Jewish men. In the heavily fictionalized meeting between Heine and Börne in book one, Heine places the following sentiments into Börne's mouth:

Baptism is now the order of the day for rich Jews, and the gospels that have been preached in vain to the poor of Judea are now in floribus with the rich. But since embracing it is only self-delusion, if not an outright lie, and hypocritical Christianity sometimes contrasts very sharply with old Adam, these people expose themselves in a dubious fashion to jokes and ridicule. Or do you think that inner nature can be changed entirely through baptism? Do you think that you can transform lice into fleas if you pour water on them?

(4: 31)

This passage, written long after both Börne and Heine had chosen to change their putatively “parasitic” nature by leaving the religion of their birth, is projected backward into a time when both were themselves recent converts. It is quite possible, of course, that Börne may have uttered something like this to Heine at some point. But one must suspect, again, that Heine is projecting his own feelings onto the person purportedly accompanying him through the Frankfurt ghetto. As we have already witnessed, a half-year after his conversion Heine recognized that baptism was a futile concession to the Christian world. The difference between his private comments in 1826 and Heine/Börne's public remarks in the Börne Memorial is considerable, however. In the 1820s Heine is bitter; his conversion has not brought him the opportunities that he desired. He has abandoned his heritage without apparent gain. In 1840 he is less concerned with his own status as an apostate; secure in his adherence to no positive religion, he appears neither to regret his baptism nor to accept its religious consequences. As he makes clear in the Memorial, he belongs to the Hellenes, not to any species of Nazarene.

That Heine had difficulties in the psychological processing of his conversion is further evidenced by a conversation reported by Alexandre Weill. Responding to the question of why he converted, Heine evidently answered in a rather strange manner. He spoke of his return from visits to Italy and England, and that he felt no strong sentiments for his religious heritage. He then brings up his appointment to edit a German journal and states that as a Jew he could not possibly assume that position. He then cites Börne as a similar example since Börne likewise could not have edited Die Wage without having himself baptized.¹¹ The reason Heine gives for his conversion is thus one of employment, but the time line that he has established is well off the mark. Heine's sojourn in London occurred from April until June of 1827; his short-lived editorship of the Neue Allgemeine Politische Annalen, the only journal to which he could have possibly referred in his conversation with Weill, began in January of 1828 (and lasted less than a year); he traveled to Italy only in August of the same year. If Weill's report is at all accurate, then Heine's recollection is faulty, as it so often was in connection with this important and traumatic event. His conversion in June of 1825 happened before his European trips and well before he could have conceived of becoming the editor of a political journal.

Because of the obvious uneasiness with his conversion in his literary works and private communications, the inclusion of a discussion of the momentous event from 1825 in the Confessions is significant, besides being unique. But although Heine writes here about his conversion for the first time in a published work, the nature of his comments evidences the same type of psychic distortions and displacements that we witnessed in earlier passages. Answering questions putatively posed about his current religious beliefs, Heine asserts in his Confessions that with regard to Lutheranism, his status remains unchanged. He characterizes his own conversion as one undertaken in a lukewarm, official fashion and maintains, “[I]f I remain a member of the evangelical faith at all, it is because it does not embarrass me now in the least, just as it never embarrassed me very much earlier” (6/I: 482). He continues by claiming that during his stay in Berlin he would have declared himself independent of any organized religion, as some of his friends had done, if the absence of an identifiable confession had not been a reason for denying residence in Prussia and its capital. This explanation is odd. His conversion, as we know, however much it may have been inspired by his experiences in Berlin, did not occur while he was in the Prussian capital, but during his second stay in Göttingen, shortly before the completion of his law degree. And certainly we have no evidence that any of his acquaintances abandoned religion entirely and officially, which, according to Jacob Toury, was a practical impossibility before 1848.¹² He continues in the Confessions to write about his conversion by posing, and then circumventing, the question of whether he has become a believing Protestant. He claims that in former years he appreciated Protestantism because of its association with freedom of thought and German philosophy, which begins with the Reformation. Now, however, he reveres Protestantism for rediscovering and disseminating the Bible (6/I: 483). But after praising the Reformation for fostering the learning of Hebrew and translating the Old Testament from its original language into a modern idiom, he turns to an extended discussion of the Jews as prototypical democrats, and eventually builds his tribute to a climax in a veritable laudatio to Moses as a socialist revolutionary (6/I: 488). In other words, he addresses the question of his Protestantism by writing about Judaism.¹³

What is going on in this unusual passage? Why do we again have mysterious remarks concerning Heine's conversion? Why does Heine appear to be avoiding the issue once again? My hunch is that Heine's discussion of religion and religious conversion in the Confessions has something to do with a displacement involving his more recent and less official conversion. The fact that Heine so easily slips from his conversion in 1825 to his later change of beliefs indicates that they were closely associated in his mind. But what is unusual about his later conversion is the way that it is repeatedly characterized in his writings both public and private. More than anything else Heine depicts his religious transformation in the “mattress grave” as a rejection of Hegel and a renewal of former beliefs. The insistence on a renewal has led some commentators to believe that Heine embraced something akin to Judaism, although Heine insists that his God is a personal one. By “renewal” it seems obvious that Heine simply means that he again harbors a conviction that God, as Supreme Being, exists. The rejection of Hegel, however, is more difficult to explain. It is true of course that Heine writes about Hegel in his earlier works with considerable respect and admiration, as well as occasionally with some humor. We know that Friedrich Engels later considered Heine's Religion and Philosophy in Germany to be the first work of a left Hegelian. And Heine tells us after the fact that he himself composed a lengthy manuscript on Hegel that he consigned to the fire after he rejected Hegelian philosophy (6/I: 477). But there is no strong indication of an avid adherence to Hegel, or even a deep understanding of Hegel, at any place in Heine's writings from the 1820s to the 1840s. Hegel is conspicuous for his marginality in Religion and Philosophy in Germany where he is called “the greatest philosopher that Germany has produced since Leibniz” (3: 633) but also cited for his support of the Prussian state and the Protestant church. And the famous line in the poem “Doctrine,” which equates drumming people out of an inactive lethargy and kissing young salesgirls with Hegelian philosophy (4: 412), is more easily conceived as a vast and ironic oversimplification than as a validation of one of the most eminent minds of the nineteenth century.

The association of Hegel with Heine's late renewal of faith makes sense—at least psychic sense—if we view it in terms of displacement. We know, for example, that the real Hegelian convert among the members of the Verein was Eduard Gans, and certainly his embracing of Protestantism can be conceived more easily as a rejection of Judaism for Hegelianism than Heine's. That Hegel is not on the list of authors that the apostate read in Heine's poem covers up the one genuine ideological influence Heine could have associated with his friend, and perhaps the one intellectual influence that really mattered in his conversion. But there is another Hegelian convert that could have affected Heine's anti-Hegelian crusade and his depiction of conversion in the Confessions. I am thinking of Karl Marx, another former Jew whose Hegelianism led him precisely to the type of atheism that Heine, in his later writings, decries so vociferously. It was the left-Hegelian socialists and communists, after all, who relinquished all religious belief, and who were banned from Germany because of their political and religious views. In his late reflection on his conversion in 1825, where he recalls friends who abandoned all religion and were banned from Prussia, Heine may have been projecting forward into the 1840s. And in citing the heritage of Judaism in such a pronounced fashion, when he should have been discussing Lutheranism, Heine may have been identifying with the religious roots he shared with the more apparent Hegelian converts Eduard Gans and Karl Marx.

This explanation for the discrepancies in Heine's text is of course highly speculative; there is no way to offer a secure proof since we are dealing with Heine's psychic economy, which was not precise or consistent. I could mount more evidence for the associations I have found, but no textual evidence would be definitive. Indeed, my more general contention is that the autobiographical oddities in Heine's works, especially the strange claims and bizarre statements he sometimes makes, even in his confessional mode, can often be accounted for by the ways in which particularly sensitive issues in his personal life played themselves out in his writings. Conversion was obviously one issue that Heine had trouble confronting or processing mentally. The transition from a German poet of Jewish origins to a converted Lutheran poet with oppositional and pantheistic convictions was a difficult one. In the 1820s we therefore find Heine avoiding the topic of his own conversion, while simultaneously heaping ridicule or scorn on others who had done exactly what he did not want to proclaim in public. Only in his deathbed writings, when another conversion had taken place, is he able to speak about his 1825 conversion a bit more openly. But even then he apparently confuses his own conversion with that of others, confounding his beliefs with theirs, displacing his own views with those that were not quite his own. The confusion and displacement of Heine's autobiographical writings make them of dubious value for facts and actual occurrences, but make them invaluable if we hope to understand the complex workings of Heine's mind.

Notes

1. Parenthetical citations are from Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, 6 vols. (München: Hanser, 1968-6).

2. Jacob Katz, in Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986), notes that there were three main reasons for conversion: religious conviction, material gain, and ideological belief (37-38). Guido Kisch in Judentaufen (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1973) tends to agree with this evaluation and points out that few converts embraced Christianity out of religious conviction.

3. Heine, Heinrich, Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse. Säkularausgabe. (Berlin and Paris: Akademie Verlag and Editions du CNRS, 1970) 20: 208. Cited as HSA.

4. In a letter from 11 May 1825; HSA 20: 196.

5. The letter is dated 8 October 1825; HSA 20: 215-16.

6. HSA 20: 227.

7. Letter from 9 January 1826; HSA 20: 234.

8. The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version, trans. Hal Draper (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), 286.

9. In a letter to Moser from 14 December 1825, Heine indicates the similarity between his conversion and Gans's when he refers to the stealing of silver spoons (HSA 20: 227). Two factors that Heine may have believed distinguished his conversion from Gans' are mentioned by Heine occasionally. Heine claims that Gans actively sought to persuade other Jews to convert, and Gans had more responsibility to remain Jewish because of his leadership role in the Verein.

10. For a discussion of other works relating to his conversion, as well as of the baptism itself, see Ludwig Rosenthal, Heinrich Heine als Jude (Frankfurt/Main: Ullstein, 1973), 218-253.

11. Cited from Rosenthal, 234.

12. Jacob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1847-1871 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977). “Praktisch bestand bis 1848 in keinem deutschen Lande die Möglichkeit, aus der jüdischen Gemeinde auszuscheiden, ohne gleichzeitig einer anderen konfessionellen Gemeinschaft beizutreten” (61).

13. The most extensive treatment of Heine's Judaism, S. S. Prawer's Heine's Jewish Comedy: A Study of his Portraits of Jews and Judaism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), does not focus on the strange way in which Heine's conversion was thematized in the Confessions.