SOURCE: Holub, Robert C. “Heinrich Heine on the Slave Trade: Cultural Repression and the Persistence of History.” The German Quarterly 65, no. 3-4 (summer-fall 1992): 328-39.

[In the following essay, Holub discusses Heine's denunciation of the slave trade in his poem “Das Sklavenschiff.”]

On 3 August 1492 Christopher Columbus, born Cristoforo Colombo, set sail from Spain on a voyage he presumed would take him to the coast of Asia. Since at that time the Julian calendar was in use, the actual date of the voyage was 24 July 1492, almost exactly five hundred years prior to the AATG convention that commemorated this event by making its theme European-American relations.¹ When, a little over two months later, Columbus set foot on an island in the Bahamas, probably San Salvador or Watlings, he inaugurated a connection between Europe and the so-called New World that would have profound effects on world history. In the Western World, particularly in the United States, the import of Columbus and his voyages has usually been reduced and subjected to a somewhat racist and certainly Eurocentric ideological hegemony. What most of us learned in school—both Europeans and Americans—and what was still considered the official position in celebrations in October of 1992 in the United States, is that Columbus was a valiant explorer who discovered a largely uninhabited hemisphere of the earth and opened it up to colonization and civilization from Europe. That Columbus was a greedy adventurer who bargained for ten percent of the proceeds from all future voyages along his route to India, that he was primarily interested therefore in enriching himself with gold and other treasures that would be stolen from the lands he reached, and that he was decisively wrong about so many geographical facts that even in his own day were widely known and scientifically confirmed—these features of his personality and beliefs have usually been neglected in his Eurocentric reception.²

The other great area that has been ignored in our haste to celebrate the connection between Europe and the “New World” is the import for non-Europeans of the so-called discovery. While Columbus's voyages opened up two continents for settlement, exploration, and raw materials for Europeans, and while the wealth found in the “New World” helped to fuel the industrial revolution of the Old World, the populations of the Third World were dragged into a state of affairs in which they suffered some of the most horrible treatment known to humankind. For most of the indigenous peoples of North and South America, the results of what should properly be called a European invasion of their territory were enslavement, genocide, and economic and spiritual depravity. Other indigenous peoples fared just as badly. Undoubtedly the most horrendous by-product of Columbus's voyages for Africa and Africans was the opening of the slave trade. Indeed, Columbus was himself the inaugurator of the transatlantic trade, although the direction in which he first transported slaves, from the West Indies back to Europe, would be a route seldom replicated in the subsequent four centuries. In the log from his first voyage, he notes that he will bring a dozen inhabitants of the islands back to Spain, but later speaks of only seven, adding: “should your Majesties command it, all the inhabitants could be taken away to Castile, or made slaves on the island. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”³ We can understand Columbus's suggestion better if we remember that the Portuguese, who had obtained the rights to exploit the West Coast of Africa, had been importing African slaves into Europe since the 1440s; Columbus, competing with the country that had rejected his services, wants to demonstrate to the Spanish crown that the West Indies are equally exploitable.

The subsequent suppression of the circumstances and impact of Columbus's voyages has had ramifications for almost everything that concerns Western history. Even the reading and evaluation of German literature has been affected by the repression of the darkest side of the European legacy. Paradoxically, this tendency also prevails when the legacy is itself thematized. In Heinrich Heine's “Das Sklavenschiff,” a poem that refers directly to the cruelty and hypocrisy of the slave trade, we encounter a model case of the manner in which literary scholarship unwittingly promulgates a tradition of repression. Although recognized by Heine experts as an exemplary piece of social satire, this late poem has nevertheless received less critical acclaim than other, less compelling, writings. Compared with “Die schlesischen Weber,” perhaps the only poem in Heine's oeuvre with which it compares as a direct social protest against injustice, it has not fared well at all. It is found less frequently in anthologies and collections of Heine's verse, and it has attracted the attention less often of scholars and critics.⁴ Part of the attraction of “Die schlesischen Weber” for Europeans has been its reference to exploitation in Germany. Since a good part of Heine's work before 1848 deals with German and European affairs, and since this poem makes reference to a well-known event in 1844, there is some superficial justification for the interest it has drawn. But this focus on Europe's subjugation of its own working class tends to obfuscate the very insights that were most important in Heine's later writings: the exportation of European hegemony and exploitation into all corners of the globe. Even among Marxist critics, the “opening of the Indian age,” as Peter Hacks's play dubs the post-Columbus era, has been judged Eurocentrically as an “advance” of capitalism over a decrepit feudal order, while the plight of the non-European world is virtually ignored.⁵ Heine's “Sklavenschiff,” along with other late poems such as “Vitzliputzli” and “Bimini,” recognized more directly the price that native peoples had to pay for these advances.⁶

The research that does exist on “Das Sklavenschiff” has tended to concentrate on two issues. The first is the source for Heine's poem. There seems to be a consensus—at least in the older research that concerned itself with such matters—that Jean Béranger's poem “Les Nègres et les marionettes,” either in the original French or in Chamisso's translation (“Die Neger und die Marionetten”), and Prosper Mérimée's short story “Tamango” served as Heine's inspiration.⁷ Because of Heine's familiarity with French literature and his proximity to both authors, it is not unlikely that he was familiar with both works. On closer examination, however, Heine's poem does not appear to be directly dependent on either of these French sources. Béranger's poem, which narrates in five strophes the obviously fictitious events aboard an anonymous slaver, is only superficially related to Heine's, and all similarities can be explained either with reference to generic norms or the historical record. For example, the fact that Béranger has the captain of the slaver speak at the beginning of his poem, and that he, like Heine's supercargo Mynher van Koek, is concerned about the deadly ennui killing off his slaves, are striking similarities only if we are ignorant of the tradition of anti-slave-trade poetry and historical fact. Several other poems on the slave trade, for example William Cowper's “Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce” or John Greenleaf Whittier's “The Slave-Ships,” likewise begin with the words of a captain's persona,⁸ and the concern with keeping slaves alive is ubiquitous in all discussions. Indeed, the melancholia diagnosed by the doctor on Heine's slaver is not necessarily derived from “l'ennui” in Béranger's first strophe or the “humeur mélancolique” in the last stanza, since much of the literature on the slave trade makes direct reference to the depressed mental state of the captured Africans.⁹ One might add that deep depression and total apathy are understandable responses to the prospects of a life in bondage in a foreign land thousands of miles from friends and family. Similarly, Mérimée's story, which relates the embarkation, voyage, and mutiny aboard a slaver, contains nothing special that would relate it directly to Heine's poem. What has led some researchers, nonetheless, to postulate a connection, the forced dancing of the slaves on the deck of the ship, is a minor occurrence in Mérimée's tale, but more importantly, as I will show in a moment, nothing out of the ordinary in contemporary accounts.¹⁰

The second concern of most commentary on “Das Sklavenschiff” is to show how the poem fits into Heine's allegedly resigned and bitter worldview toward the end of his life. Discussions usually emphasize Heine's altered perspective on the world, the failure of the European revolutions, and his religious conversion, stressing in particular his pessimism about human nature in general. “Das Sklavenschiff” is then viewed as one in a series of poetic statements about the triumph of evil and foolishness and the concomitant degradation of human beings. Laura Hofrichter's remarks are typical in this regard. Placing “Das Sklavenschiff” together with “Der Philanthrop” and “Jung-Katerverein für Poesie-Musik,” she contends that all three poems—and undoubtedly others in Heine's late lyric collections—are similar in that they do not conceal suffering and pain with the veil of beauty.¹¹ No doubt, there are connections between “Das Sklavenschiff” and other writings from Heine's later years, and it would be difficult not to recognize that in these works he repeatedly thematizes the ubiquity of inhumanity and pettiness in his contemporary world. But by embedding “Das Sklavenschiff” so firmly into this general framework of pessimism and despair, most commentators have missed precisely the specificity of “Das Sklavenschiff” to its topic. Unlike Béranger's poem, whose last strophe—untranslated in the Chamisso version—makes it apparent that the amused slaves are symbolic for all oppressed peoples,¹² Heine's “Sklavenschiff” alludes to a series of facts and motifs that remove it from the realm of a general plaint and connect it with actual historical abuses.¹³ This poem is thus not only, and perhaps not primarily, a part of Heine's pessimism in the “mattress grave” but, more significantly, a part of his growing understanding of the problems inherent in a corrupt and capitalist European society. He does not proceed from a general picture of the world and use the slave ship as a microcosm for misery and suffering, as does his predecessor Béranger; rather, he proceeds from a quite detailed and precise knowledge of slaving that then confirms and reinforces aspects of his mature worldview.

In his letters, we find evidence that “Das Sklavenschiff” is less the consequence of a poetic tradition stretching from Cowper and Southey to Béranger and Whittier than the result of Heine's reading of travel literature about Africa and slaving. The most direct testimony occurs on 5 November 1851, when Heine writes to Georg Weerth, with whom he corresponded frequently about Europe and the New World: “… meistens lese ich jetzt Reisebeschreibungen, und seit zwey Monathen bin ich nicht aus Sengambien und Guinea herausgekommen. Der Überdruß, den mir die Weißen einflößen, ist wohl Schuld daran, daß ich mich in diese schwarze Welt versenke, die wirklich sehr amüsant ist. Diese schwarzen Negerkönige machen mir mehr Vergnügen, als unsre heimischen Landesväter, ob sie gleich ebenfalls von Menschenrechten wenig wissen und die Sclaverei als etwas Naturwüchsiges betrachten.”¹⁴ From the various texts Heine had at his disposal, he must have acquired a good sense for the dimensions and geography of the slave trade. The details in his poem exhibit in this regard a specificity that exceeds most other verse on this topic, which usually exhausts itself in general condemnations.¹⁵ What is unusual about Heine's poem is not, however, the emphasis on profit, something for which he has been frequently praised in secondary literature; almost every poem and narrative contain references to the market, to the slaves as commodities, to buying and selling of human beings, or to trading. The denunciation of the dehumanized practice of purchasing and transporting men, women, and children was widespread by Heine's time. The most important writings against the slave trade had, after all, been produced in the second half of the 18th century and during the first decade and a half of the 19th century. By the time Heine pens “Das Sklavenschiff,” officially condoned trading of slaves had been outlawed by all European nations for three decades. Indeed, the negative ethical force connected with the purchase of human labor in the form of direct ownership was effectively marshaled by Karl Marx in his comments on the ownership of human labor power. I believe it is probable that Marx utilized echoes from the widespread condemnation of slavery—the notion of the human being/the labor power of the human being as commodity—to censure capitalism by association.

More revealing in Heine's poem than the characterization of Africans as commodities is the cast of characters and the indirect references to national complicity with slaving. The very first line—“Der Supercargo Mynher van Koek”—identifies the commanding officer as a Dutchman.¹⁶ Heine had made various disparaging remarks about the Dutch in earlier works, but this reference is not merely an extension of his aversion to the narrow mercantilism he associated with the Netherlands. Rather, it reflects the fairly active role the Dutch played for at least a brief period of time in the slave trade.¹⁷ Indeed, during the latter half of the 17th century, the low countries had been one of the leaders in the sale of Africans to the “New World.” Heine had already made reference to the Dutch connection with the slave trade in Französische Zustände. It occurs in a “Zwischennote” written in October of 1832 and is situated in the context of his criticism of aristocratic privilege from his introduction to Kahldorf über den Adel. Heine is explaining with some irony that the aristocracy in Germany is not entirely devoid of liberal traits. To demonstrate the absurdity and inconsistency of their “liberalism”—and the “liberalism” of Dutch slave merchants as well—he compares the attitudes of Graf Moltke, the addressee of Kahldorf's correspondence, and Myn Heer van der Null, a Dutch merchant Heine claims to have met on his journeys through Holland:

Der Graf Moltke ist gewiß der festesten Meinung, daß der Sklavenhandel etwas Widerrechtliches und Schändliches ist, und er stimmt gewiß für dessen Abschaffung. Myn Heer van der Null hingegen, ein Sklavenhändler, den ich unter den Bohmchen zu Rotterdam kennen gelernt, ist durchaus überzeugt: der Sklavenhandel sei etwas ganz Natürliches und Anständiges, das Vorrecht der Geburt aber, das Erbprivilegium, der Adel, sei etwas Ungerechtes und Widersinniges, welches jeder honette Staat ganz abschaffen müsse.¹⁸

Although, as I stated above, the official slave trade had already been outlawed in all European states by 1820, it continued to flourish in illegality well into the second half of the century. One must therefore conclude that van der Null—or the person for whom this name stands—was engaged in an illegal activity. With regard to “Das Sklavenschiff,” this brief reference is important for two reasons: (1) It shows that Heine had some acquaintance with, or thoughts about, the slave trade well before his intensive reading of travelogues in the 1850s. Since the slave trade was a common target of condemnation in European liberal circles, it is possible that his reference here is simply the reflection of a general attitude drawn from the circles which he frequented. It is also possible, however, that Heine was familiar with the slave trade from more specific sources. A likely and possible source was Albert Hüne's two-volume work, Vollständige historisch-philosophische Darstellung aller Veränderungen des Negersclavenhandels.¹⁹ The author of this first comprehensive history of the slave trade, published in Göttingen in 1820, was a Privatdozent at the University of Göttingen, where Heine, of course, had studied in 1821 and again in 1824. (2) This passage connects the slave trade with a general pattern of injustice legitimized by a false appeal to nature. Significantly, in his letter to Weerth, Heine criticizes the African rulers for similarly justifying the abuse of human dignity and rights by having recourse to nature (“etwas Naturwüchsiges”). It is this unreflected acceptance of something as natural that thus connects the aristocracy, the slave traders, and the African kings.

In the course of the next twenty years, Myn Heer van der Null is transformed into Mynher van Koek and given command of a slaver that obtains Africans from a port near the Senegal river and delivers them to Rio de Janeiro. Both of these place designations also have a historical significance. The region around the Senegal river was the principal site of French slaving factories when the French were active in the slave trade, while Rio was a central international embarkation and disembarkation point during the first three quarters of the 19th century in a country that imported more Africans than any other country in the world.²⁰ However, despite the specificity of nationalities and places, and despite Heine's alleged conversation with van der Null about his mercantile ventures, the voyage depicted in “Das Sklavenschiff” is not very realistic for the 1850s. By the middle of the last century, it would have been rare that a ship with a Dutch flag would carry slaves, and unlikely that six hundred of them would be loaded from the Senegal region.²¹ Heine's point here, it would seem, is not accuracy to any particular real voyage, but rather an attention to details that emphasize the European nature of the slave trade. Although Heine had occasionally criticized the Dutch in earlier works, his satire is aimed at a mentality that was pervasive throughout Europe for the previous three and a half centuries. Heine is not seeking to highlight the inhumanity of any single European nation. Significant for this poem, and for his later thought in general, is that he transcends the theme of nationalism, which had been a preoccupation of his for almost 30 years, and begins to frame issues of social injustice in more global terms.

Other details of the poem are similarly unrelated to any specific voyage, but nonetheless proximate to accounts that were readily available in the 19th century. Although the amount of profit that van Koek stands to make seems to be exaggerated—he states that he can make 800٪ if only half his cargo lives—the records we have indicate that profits could be substantial. Demand for slaves remained high throughout much of the 19th century; because risks were considerably greater after the slave trade was outlawed, and because the illegality of the trade reduced competition, merchants could often charge significantly higher prices for illegally transported slaves than for those shipped half a century before. With the absence of regulations concerning sanitation and care, conditions on board a slave ship worsened during the 19th century as avaricious traders—many “upstanding” merchants having deserted slaving—sought to maximize profits by transporting more slaves. The logbook of Captain Theophilus Conneau, which appeared in the same year as Heine's poem, indicates a profit of ＄41,719 from the sale of 217 slaves. (The ship sailed with 220.)²² Sample profits on the sale of slaves taken from the last years of legal trade indicate that owners netted between £ 25 and £ 65 per slave in voyages from the port of Liverpool.²³ Although some recent scholarship has indicated that profits were modest,²⁴ it is difficult to believe that owners would have entered the trade in such numbers, and that the trade would have prospered despite its prohibition for so many years, if the prospects of profit had not been considerable. Heine's supercargo may exaggerate, but the figures he calculates in his cabin are probably only a reflection of the common expectations of enormous profits.

Among the other details that Heine lifted from reports known to him were the descriptions of the surgeon van der Smissen. We might note first that it was common on voyages transporting slaves for a doctor to be present. Particularly during the era of legal slaving, many companies required a physician. Indeed, Rawley reports that “the Dutch appear commonly to have had surgeons aboard,” and that frequently serving on a slaver was something like an apprenticeship before employment in a hospital or at a university.²⁵ Among the surgeon's duties was a daily report to the captain, such as the one van der Smissen gives to van Koek. Since surgeons were often paid according to the number of slaves that arrived healthy in the New World (which was called head money), they, too, had a stake in keeping their African cargo healthy. Van der Smissen's report of death and of the disposal of bodies, which are then eaten by sharks, is documented in several travel accounts, and the diagnosis of melancholia, which at least one doctor felt was the cause of dysentery, was, as noted above, frequent aboard slavers.²⁶ Perhaps the most frequently noted characteristic of slave ships is alluded to in van der Smissen's brief explanation of why the slaves are themselves responsible for their own demise: “Ihr schlechter Odem hat die Luft / Im Schiffsraum so sehr verdorben” (l. 67-68). That the air emanating from the ship's storage cabin was bad, although obviously not due to the foul breath of the slaves, was well documented in many accounts. The report of Dr. Jose E. Cliffe, native of the United States, naturalized citizen of Brazil, who testified before the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1850, emphasizes the poor air quality. When asked about the high mortality, he attributed it in part “to the confinement and foul air.”²⁷ Since temperatures in the hold reached 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and since bodily excrement and dead bodies were removed only periodically, the “fetid state of the atmosphere” is quite understandable. Indeed, one of the few accounts written by a slave, Olaudah Equiano's autobiography, mentions twice the “pestilential stench of a Guinea ship.”²⁸ Ransford's monograph on the slave trade sums up the dominant attitude as follows: “Sailors said that a slave ship could be smelled a mile away at sea and nearly all accounts stress the fetid stench that wafted out of a slaver's hold and then hung about the ship like a sickening blanket.” Van der Smissen's comments, far from being a product of Heine's fantasy or a reflection of his own depressed state of mind in the “mattress grave,” are actually close to the written testimony available to him.

Undoubtedly, the element that has attracted greatest critical attention in Heine's poem is the dance of the slaves. The problem that van Koek and van der Smissen face is the rising rate of mortality among the slaves. We might recall that in Béranger's poem the same predicament is “solved” by amusing the slaves with a marionette show in which the victory of the black devil over Polichinelle raises their spirits. This staging of a Punch-and-Judy show on board ship appears to be a total invention on the part of Béranger, but it obviously fits in well with his allegorical message of pacifying the oppressed with glitter and false dreams. Because critics have assumed Heine's dependence on Béranger's poem, and have believed that Heine, like his French predecessor, was imparting a general message about evil or hegemonic relations in the world, the decision of the Dutch sailors to have the slaves dance has been viewed as a cruel variant of the marionette show. Most comment on these passages of the poem, which comprise a good deal of the second part, considers the dance to be a literary motif with high symbolic value. Brian Murdoch, whose knowledge of the slave trade appears to be drawn from poetry and from the Encyclopedia, considers the danse macabre to be one of Heine's “literary allusions that go beyond the historical context.” He likens it to Psalm 137 and concludes that in its wider context it is “an indictment of the human tendency to inhumanity and hypocrisy in general, or more philosophically … an indictment of the precarious nature of life itself.”²⁹ Leonard Forster points to a literary relationship with Celan's “Todesfuge,” where, similarly, a group of captives is forced to dance.³⁰ Indeed, Forster argues convincingly that there are also other significant parallels: for example, between the hypocritical character van Koek, concerned with the perfection of tulips, and the German guard, who writes to his blond-haired Margarethe.³¹ Jeffrey Sammons, who considers “Das Sklavenschiff” “the masterpiece of Heine's relatively few poems of this type,” relates the dance to Heine's “own theme of Dionysiac ambivalence and demonic anarchy,”³² thus divorcing to some extent the specific historical message from a literary embellishment.³³ Finally, Hofrichter finds the tableau of the dancing slaves to be an appropriate use of a common motif:

Daß im “Sklavenschiff” ein Tanz den Höhenpunkt bildet, ist bezeichnend für die Rolle, die dem Bilde zukommt. Denn das Bild ist, in diesem Zyklus wie in allem anderen, untrennbar mit Heines Fühlen verschmolzen. Der zur lärmenden Musik von Steuermann, Koch, Schiffsjung und Doktor erzwungene Tanz ist ein Sinnbild für die fürchterliche Degradierung des Menschen, die Vergewaltigung des Besten in ihm, denn Tanz ist bei Heine immer mit dem Begriff des Künstlerischen, des Schöpferischen, des Lebensvollen verbunden.³⁴

Only in selected works of more recent commentators—for example, in the structuralist interpretation by Karlheinz Fingerhut or the monograph on sexuality in Heine's poetry by Irene Guy—have I found a recognition of Heine's reliance on the actual history of slaving.³⁵ If one were to summarize most previous observations on the dance of the slaves in Heine's “Sklavenschiff,” however, one would have to conclude that it is a literary motif that is drawn from a longer tradition in Heine's works, and thus unrelated to the historical subject thematized in the poem.

Critics are probably not incorrect in their remarks on the grotesque dance, and Heine does much to contribute to the hasty conclusion that this is purely a literary motif. His personification of the sharks, who are eagerly awaiting another serving of human flesh (although the mention of sharks devouring slaves thrown overboard, or who throw themselves overboard, is not unusual either),³⁶ and the general bacchanalian atmosphere of lust and revelry suggest a fantastic and poetic origin for this scene. But the critical commentary on this surreal scene reveals simultaneously the Western repression of the real as it pertains to the history of Europe and the New World. Far from being a product of Heine's imagination, the image of slaves dancing aboard a slave ship could frequently be found in 18th- and 19th-century accounts. Fearing losses from death or illness, and wanting to maintain as healthy a commodity as possible, slave captains and their crew often permitted or compelled their captives to “exercise” on deck. The report of Captain Thomas Phillips concerning the voyage of the Hannibal in 1693 mentions these exercises as routine hygienic measures: “We often at sea, in the evenings, would let the slaves come up into the sun to air themselves, and make them jump and dance for an hour or two to our bag-pipes, harp, and fiddle, by which exercise to preserve them in health.”³⁷ Dr. George Pinckard, who served aboard an English slaver in the last decade of the 18th century, offers a similar account:

Mirth and gaiety were promoted among them: they were roused to bodily exercise, and care was used to divert their minds from dwelling upon their change of state, and loss of home: and I may truly say, that a more general air of contentment reigned among them than could have been expected. While many were dancing and singing, and playing together, others were giving their assistance in working the ship.³⁸

Oliver Ransford, citing Equiano's autobiographical writings, points to similar occurrences:

It was considered sensibly prophylactic to exercise the slaves while on deck by ‘dancing’ them to native drums and xylophones, their activity being encouraged by the whip. One captive (Equino) [sic] noted with surprise that before sailing ‘rude and uncouth instruments as are used in Africa’ were brought aboard and he only realized the reason for this a little later when he was made to dance to their music on the first day out.³⁹

Indeed, one gets the impression that the practice of exercise through dancing was quite routine. Rawley, in summarizing the measures taken by the Dutch West Indies Company, explains that “with an eye more to business than to beneficence the company prescribed a healthful diet and a hygienic regimen for the slaves. … To ease their tensions, slaves were given tobacco and conducted in singing and dancing toward the end of the passage.”⁴⁰ The striking image that appears in the second section of “Das Sklavenschiff” is thus neither exclusively literary in origin nor entirely divorced from the historical realities that form the core of the poem. Like most of the details Heine incorporates into his satirical poetic account of the slave trade, the image of the dancing slaves is founded in a thorough knowledge of actual procedures.

The critical reception of Heine's “Das Sklavenschiff” thus discloses a state of collective amnesia, a deficiency in historical consciousness that is unfortunately paradigmatic for our Eurocentric tradition. Reading the poem primarily as a literary product of an imaginative poetic mind, most critics (including myself) have previously underestimated the historical accuracy and the factual basis for Heine's creative endeavors. Temporal proximity obviously has something to do with Heine's familiarity with particulars of the slave trade. If we judge by the success abroad of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, to which Heine also alludes in his Geständnisse,⁴¹ there was a good deal of European interest, or at least curiosity, in the topic of slavery in general.⁴² In 1849, France outlawed slavery in its colonies, and many intellectuals followed closely debates on the slave trade and slavery in the legislative bodies of Europe and the United States. But over the past century and a half, the knowledge that Heine had obtained, perhaps from no single or specific source, seems to have become more remote from us. That his later poetry on the New World has usually been treated within the context of a purely literary tradition, and analyzed primarily for its imagery and its thematic consistency with his other works, indicates not only our historical distance from Heine but also, and more disturbingly, our repression of the dark side of a history that was still present to him. In some ways, the critical tradition—and here I include not only Heine criticism but literary and cultural studies in general—has moved in the opposite direction from the trajectory of an intellectual like Heine. While he expanded his worldview in his later years and became acutely aware of European responsibility for the evils of slavery, colonialism, and exploitation of indigenous peoples, since his death we, his interpreters, have tended to reduce more and more his contributions and our own focus to a narrow European, or even German, scale. As we start the second half of the millennium that was opened by Columbus's invasion of the “New World,” perhaps we can hope to recapture the historical insight that formed and informed Heine's late poem “Das Sklavenschiff,” and then proceed to a critique, correction, and rectification of the injustice Columbus's voyages initiated.

Notes

1. The convention was held in Baden-Baden on 19-22 July. A shorter version of this paper was scheduled to be delivered on 22 July.

2. It is noteworthy that in both Europe and the United States a number of publications devoted to Columbus and his voyages have sought to counter the dominant “popular” image. Unfortunately, in the United States these publications seem to have little impact.

3. Cited from Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976) 51-53.

4. Typical in this regard is Hans Kaufmann, who devotes seven pages to “Die schlesischen Weber” and mentions “Das Sklavenschiff” only once in passing. See Hans Kaufmann, Heinrich Heine: Geistige Entwicklung und künstlerisches Werk (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1976).

5. For a non-Eurocentric view of the economic developments in the world, see Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989).

6. For an excellent interpretation of “Vitzliputzli” and of Heine in Latin America, see Susanne Zantop, “Lateinamerika in Heine—Heine in Lateinamerika: ‘das gesamte Kannibalencharivari’,” Heine-Jahrbuch 28 (1989): 72-87 and “Colonialism, Cannibalism, and Literary Incorporation: Heine in Mexico,” Heinrich Heine and the Occident: Multiple Identities, Multiple Receptions, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Sander L. Gilman (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991) 110-38. For a discussion of “Bimini,” see Robert C. Holub, “Heine and Utopia,” Heine-Jahrbuch 27 (1988): 86-112 and “Heine and the New World,” Colloquia Germanica 22 (1989): 101-15.

7. Béranger's poem is found in his Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Perrotin, 1834) 221-23. Chamisso's translation is more an adaptation than a direct rendition; only the first four stanzas were translated. See Chamissos Werke, ed. Hermann Tardel, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, n.d.) 141-42. Mérimée's short story appeared originally in 1820 and can be found in his collection Mosaïque (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1888) 59-100. See André Meyer, “Une Poésie de Heine et une nouvelle de Mérimée,” Revue germanique 15 (1909): 83-87 and Barker Fairley, Heinrich Heine: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1954) 127: “for ‘Das Sklavenschiff’ he [Mérimée] was, with Tomango, probably the chief source.” Fairley's is an odd interpretation; he contends “that it is the sharks that give the poem its brutality,” thus deflecting attention, as Heine does not, from the real horrors of the slave trade.

8. William Cowper, “Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce or, The Slave-Trader in the Dumps,” The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Henry Frowde, 1905) 374 and John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Slave-Ships,” The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1876) 39-40.

9. See Oliver Ransford, The Slave Trade: The Story of Transatlantic Slavery (London: John Murray, 1971) 88: “The captains were concerned too when the slaves went down with what was rather quaintly termed ‘fixed melancholy,’ especially as it could spread with alarming rapidity. In this condition the Negroes simply lost heart; they exhibited complete negativism and mutism, and lay about in an apathy which usually ended in death.”

10. For a comparison of “Tomango” with Heine's poem, see Marian Musgrave, “Heinrich Heine's Anti-Slavery Thought,” Negro American Literature Forum 6 (1972): 91-93. In the commentary to “Das Sklavenschiff” in Heines Werke, ed. Stuart Atkins (Munich: Beck, 1978) 2: 1260, Stuart Atkins calls attention to an important pictorial representation of the slave trade, J. M. W. Turner's painting, “Slaves throwing overboard the dead and dying—Typhoon coming on,” which was displayed in the Royal Academy in London in 1840. Although the painting bears some remarkable similarities with Heine's poem—perhaps the most noticeable element being the presence of sharks around the slaver—we have no indication that Heine was familiar with it. Because the motifs that Heine used were common knowledge for those concerned with the slave trade, it is unnecessary to assume direct influence. It is just as likely that Turner and Heine merely drew from the same sources.

11. Laura Hofrichter, Heinrich Heinrich Heine: Biographie seiner Dichtung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966) 174. Perhaps the most unusual interpretation is Gerhard Schmitz's in Über die ökonomischen Anschauungen in Heines Werken (Weimar: Arion, 1960). In contrast to most Western critics of that era, Schmitz recognizes the importance of the actual slave trade for Heine's poem, but blinded by Marx's comments on original accumulation of capital, he views “Das Sklavenschiff” as a comment on preindustrial Europe. There is nothing in the poem to indicate that Heine's setting is in the past; it is just as likely that he was making reference to the current abuses of the illegal slave trade as that he was commenting on the era of early slaving.

12. Ainsi, voguant vers l'Amérique
    Où s'aggraveront leur destins,
    De leur humeur mélancolique
    Ils sont tirés par des pantins.
    Tout roi que la peur désenivre
    Nous prodigue aussi les joujoux.
    N'allez pas vous lasser de vivre:
    Bons esclaves, amusez-vous.

13. Heine did use the slave trade as a general metaphor, as Béranger had done, in the 1820s in Die Reise von München nach Genua. With regard to the revolt of the people in Tyrol in 1809, he comments: “Tröstet Euch, arme Schelme! Ihr seid nicht die einzigen, denen etwas versprochen worden. Passiert es doch oft auf großen Sklavenschiffen, daß man bei großen Stürmen und wenn das Schiff in Gefahr gerät, zu den schwarzen Menschen seine Zuflucht nimmt, die unten im dunkeln Schiffsraum zusammengestaut liegen. Man bricht dann ihre eisernen Ketten, und verspricht heilig und teuer, ihnen die Freiheit zu schenken, wenn durch ihre Tätigkeit das Schiff gerettet werde. Die blöden Schwarzen jubeln nun hinauf ans Tageslicht, Hurra! sie eilen zu den Pumpen, stampfen aus Leibeskräften, helfen, wo nur zu helfen ist, klettern, springen, kappen die Masten, winden die Taue, kurz arbeiten so lange, bis die Gefahr vorüber ist. Alsdann werden sie, wie sich von selbst versteht, wieder nach dem Schiffsraum hinabgeführt, wieder ganz bequem angefesselt, und in ihrem dunkeln Elend machen sie demagogische Betrachtungen über Versprechungen von Seelenverkäufern, deren ganze Sorge, nach überstandener Gefahr, dahin geht, noch einige Seelen mehr einzutauschen.” Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich: Hanser, 1968-1976) 2: 336. In contrast to the poem “Das Sklavenschiff,” Heine is using here a parallel between slaves/subjects and slave dealers/rulers that Béranger also used in his poem. It is quite possible therefore that Béranger, whose poem Heine may have read at this time in the original French, was the inspiration for this passage, but unlikely that “Das Sklavenschiff” contains anything more than a faint echo of Béranger's verses.

14. Heinrich Heine, Säkularausgabe, (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1972) 23: 148. The tenor of the correspondence between Heine and Weerth is significant for Heine's later works. After the failure of the revolution, both poets appear to widen their horizons, looking beyond Germany and its petty problems. Weerth in particular expresses frequent discontent with Germany and fascination with the non-European world. In June of 1851, for example, he writes to Heine concerning the changing economic picture: “In Kalifornien ist ein mächtiges Reich entstanden in zwei Jahren. Die Produktion der Australischen Küsten ist in kurzer Zeit so sehr gesteigert, daß schon jezt die Wolle unsrer Antipoden das Produkt der adlichen Schafzüchter im Herzen von Sachsen und Schlesien zu verdrängen anfängt. … Dann beginnt der große Kampf; nicht der Kampf des Christenthums mit dem Heidenthum; der Welfen mit den Gibellinen, der Whigs mit den Torys; nein! es heißt: Kampf zwischen dem Golde des Ural und dem Golde Kaliforniens; Kampf zwischen russischem und amerikanischem Getreide; Kampf zwischen australischer und deutscher Wolle; Kampf zwischen der Baumwolle und dem Flachs; Kampf zwischen den westindischen Kolonien und der deutschen Runkelrübe!” Säkularausgabe 26: 296. Unfortunately, only one of Heine's letters to Weerth, the one cited here, has been preserved.

15. This specificity was already pointed out in 1960 by Walter Prochaska in an essay entitled “‘Ich nahm den Toten die Eisen ab …’: Quellenmaterial für den Lehrer zu Heinrich Heines Gedicht ‘Das Sklavenschiff’,” Deutschunterricht (Berlin) 13 (1960): 584-91. Using two articles on the slave trade that appeared at the beginning of the 19th century, Prochaska shows in a limited but convincing way that Heine was familiar with many details of the trade. Prochaska's essay is not very well known and has obviously been slighted by those critics more concerned with Heine's “pessimism” and with demonstrating a consistency of motifs in Heine's writings.

16. The poem was published in the collection Gedichte 1853 und 1854. Found in Sämtliche Schriften 6/1: 194-99; here, p. 194.

17. For an overview and introduction to the Dutch slave trade, see Pieter C. Emmer, “The History of the Dutch Slave Trade: A Bibliographical Survey,” Journal of Economic History 32.3 (1972): 728-47; also Johannes Postma, “Morality in the Dutch Slave Trade, 1675-1795,” The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979) 239-60.

18. Heine, Sämtliche Schriften 3: 225-26.

19. Albert Hüne, Vollständige historisch-philosophische Darstellung aller Veränderungen des Negersclavenhandels von dessen Ursprunge an bis zu seiner gänzlichen Aufhebung, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Johann Friedrich Römer, 1820). The complete title of this impressive early study indicates that its author was a bit too optimistic about the effects of the legal prohibition of the slave trade, which occurred in most European nations just shortly before Hüne started writing. Although I can find no evidence that Heine knew Hüne or read his work, this work seems to be as likely a source for Heine's knowledge of the slave trade as the essays cited by Prochaska or the various belletristic works that are usually mentioned in connection with “Das Sklavenschiff.”

20. See An Exposition of the African Slave Trade from the Year 1840, to 1850, Inclusive (Philadelphia: Society of Friends, 1851; rpt. Detroit: Negro History Press, [1969]). The Society of Friends collected documents, among which was a report by Captain Ricketts, stating: “The Slave trade has recently increased on the east side of this coast [of Africa]. … A large quantity of the vessels, almost all of which go from Rio de Janeiro, escape without capture” (94). Summarizing various reports for the year 1849, the authors conclude that of the ships bound to Africa 56 sailed under the Brazilian flag, 32 under the US flag, 27 under Sardinia, 18 under France, 10 under Portugal, and two under Spain (112).

21. Six hundred is rather at the high end for a cargo of slaves, although it is hardly out of the realm of possibility, particularly at the height of the illegal trade. To get an idea of what a typical shipment of slaves was we might consult the figures from the Liverpool trade, which are extremely well documented. From Liverpool, at least, almost all cargoes consisted of fewer than six hundred slaves. See Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents of the History of the Slave Trade to America, vol. II: The Eighteenth Century (New York: Octagon Books, 1969) 496-98, 545-46, 642-45.

22. Captain Theophilus Conneau, A Slaver's Log Book or 20 Years' Residence in Africa (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976) 78-79.

23. See Donnan II: 631.

24. See James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: Norton, 1981) 265.

25. Rawley 295.

26. See Rawley 291.

27. An Exposition 150.

28. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (London, 1789; rpt. Coral Gables, Florida: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1989) 1: 62; “loathsomeness of the stench” (p. 75).

29. Brian Murdoch, “Poetry, Satire and Slave-Ships: Some Parallels to Heine's ‘Sklavenschiff’,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 15 (1979): 323-35; here, p. 328.

30. Leonard Forster, “A Note on Celan's Todesfuge and Heine's Das Sklavenschiff,” German Life and Letters, N.S. 24.1 (1970-71): 95-96.

31. What Forster does not mention are the frightening parallels between the actual conditions aboard the slave ships, described in detail by various participants and obviously well known to Heine, and the treatment of inmates at concentration and death camps during the Hitler era. Like most literary critics, he misses the point: Heine's poem, although obviously exaggerated to make a satirical effect, is closer to the sources than critics allow.

32. Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979) 332-33.

33. Sammons emphasizes the “demonic and amoral quality of music and dance” in “Das Sklavenschiff” as an extension of these themes in Heine's general oeuvre in Heinrich Heine: The Elusive Poet (New Haven: Yale UP, 1969) 405-06.

34. Hofrichter 181. See also S. S. Prawer, Heine the Tragic Satirist: A Study of the Later Poetry 1827-1856 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961) 244-45: “The central image of Das Sklavenschiff—the forced, hysterical dance of the negroes while the sharks are already waiting to devour them—recalls other images of ‘dancing over an abyss’ in Heine's work. … The sufferings of the slaves of Das Sklavenschiff are only a more lurid exemplification of the plight of all mankind.”

35. See Karlheinz Fingerhut, “Strukturale Interpretation und die Tätigkeit des Rezipienten: Untersuchungen an Heinrich Heines ‘Das Sklavenschiff’,” Diskussion Deutsch 8 (1977): 281-304 and Irene Guy, Sexualität im Gedicht: Heinrich Heines Spätlyrik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984) 247-57. Guy is not really exaggerating very much when she states that every detail of this ballad corresponds to reality (p. 248). With reference to van Koek, Fingerhut makes a similar point: “Über das Wiedererkennen der Redeweise van Koeks wird der zeitgenössische Leser also nicht mit einer fremden, sondern mit der geläufigen Sprachregelung der eigenen Gesellschaft konfrontiert” (p. 292). Both Guy and Fingerhut are less concerned about the Eurocentric attitude of critics, however, than about other matters: in Fingerhut's case, the structural system in the interpretation and reception of the poem; in Guy's case, the change in attitude toward sexuality that this poem signals. Guy's observations on the dance are perceptive with regard to Heine's oeuvre. She contends that the sensual and autonomous dance of earlier works is replaced in “Das Sklavenschiff” by a dance that entails “perverted liberation in a life of captivity” (p. 256). Guy thus recognizes the historical roots of the dance, but the logic of her study compels her to connect it ultimately with the literary motif of dance in Heine's oeuvre. For Fingerhut, the dance is important as a norm for the reader, who will recognize its connection with the actual slave trade. He thus fails to distinguish between the reader in 1854 and the readers/interpreters from later periods.

36. William Snelgrave's account of the voyage of the Elizabeth, for example, contains the following gruesome tale of attempted escape: “In our way we saw two Negroes swimming from her [the ship], but before we could reach them with our Boats, some Sharks rose from the bottom, and tore them in Pieces.” Cited in Donnan II: 357.

37. Cited in George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Salem, Mass.: Marine Research Society, 1927) 67.

38. George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806) 233.

39. Ransford 90.

40. Rawley 95.

41. Sämtliche Schriften 6/1: 480-82.

42. Heine's most extensive remarks on slavery occur in the second part of his Denkschrift for Ludwig Börne. There he praises the absence of an aristocracy in “America” and the equality of persons under the law, but notes that a few million people of color are “treated like dogs.” He then makes a rather peculiar comment, stating that slavery itself does not trouble him as much as the discrimination against free blacks and mulattoes and the religious hypocrisy of the other Americans. See Sämtliche Schriften 4: 38-39. Although it is not quite clear why Heine seems to prefer actual slavery to discrimination, one can imagine that he found slavery in the Southern states more in keeping with his image of America as a “gigantic prison of freedom” (ungeheures Freiheitsgefängnis) and thus perhaps less hypocritical than the pretense of equality in the Northern states.