SOURCE: Berman, Russell A. “How to Think about Germany: Nationality, Gender, and Obsession in Heine's ‘Night Thoughts.’” In Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, pp. 66-81. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997.

[In the following essay, Berman discusses how Heine's innovative “Night Thoughts” pushes the reader to abandon antiquated notions of self and society in favor of “a focus on the possibility of human action and innovation.”]

I he conceptual redefinition of literary studies as “Cultural Studies,” of which “German Studies” has come to represent one particular variant, appears to have induced a preference for the study of novels or other prose genres and a relative reluctance to engage in lyric poetry. The contemporary thematization of material culture certainly points a critic toward the stuff of everyday life, which is typically displayed to a much greater degree in prose fiction, while the sparse abstractions of verse are presumed to have less capacity for the sorts of political claims that current critical discussions address. To the extent that Cultural Studies involves the constitution and contestation of collective identities, then the novel becomes a privileged genre due to underlying assumptions about its scope, whether these assumptions derive from Lukács' paradigm of totality or Bakhtin's model of dialogism (Berman 10). Conversely, the suggestion that poetry may have less to say directly about political or social concerns reflects the consequences of the autonomy of aesthetics in the early nineteenth century that still structure standard expectations regarding literature. Even when Adorno tried to demonstrate the social substance of lyric, he had to begin precisely from his public's assumption that poetry has little to do with society (73-74). In the age of Cultural Studies, then, with critical attention devoted increasingly to questions of politics in literary representation, a shift away from poetry becomes a fact of scholarly life. Film—a modern expansion of the realist novel—is in; verse is out.

This hierarchy of taste, away from the traditionally “high” form of poetry and toward the popularity of the novel, is not a matter of any logical necessity; there are plenty of examples of political or public poetry that might be cited as likely evidence for the cultural-studies readership. The bias itself may however be taken as a sort of evidence of the practices that underpin contemporary efforts to read other cultures, that is, to read them as novels rather than as poems, whereby the generic opposition is intended to point toward alternative theorizations of culture. A novelistic Cultural Studies examines identity formation against a background of existing structures, that frame, if not determine, the vicissitudes of the subject: as if the anatomical eye of the critic was already anticipated in the voice of the narrator, who prereads the world for the recipient. A security of judgment results, reserving little room for ambiguity, and perhaps even less for innovation. The artifacts of another culture are collected, classified, and preserved, but a recognition of the alterity of culture as a possible source of qualitatively new experience, a specifically poetic project, is missing. Cultural Studies approaches culture as a collection of ethnographic facts within which identities are constructed, rather than as a realm of creativity in which individuals invent new forms. The problem with Cultural Studies is not that it is “Marxist,” as polemical opponents of the academy would have it, but rather that Cultural Studies, like orthodox Marxism, is slipping toward a deterministic and conformist model of culture, which, for all of its verbal radicalism, remains constitutively inimical to change.

How to think about another culture, how to think about Germany: the focus on the construction of identities, intended to demonstrate the non-naturalistic and therefore presumably malleable character of subjectivities, can metamorphose quickly into a simplistic analysis of subsequentiality that may trivialize the material. The preestablished epistemic horizons of discourse are unfortunately understood to set the limits and perhaps even define particular instances or concretizations of fundamental patterns. Nothing new ever happens in an obsessive repetition of the always already given: structuralism had problems with history, and they are inherited, via poststructuralism, in much of Cultural Studies. Yet precisely this determinism undercuts the self-definition of Cultural Studies as radical—when all is said and done, it may only be reductionistic, an illustrated cultural history—unless it can outline alternative approaches to culture that allow for precisely the alterity, as innovation, that repetition proscribes.

Thinking about Germany and thinking differently about Germany are the topics of Heine's “Night Thoughts,” (“Nachtgedanken”), one of the best known poems of the German canon, especially its opening verses: “Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, / Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht”.¹ Written early in 1843, it appeared as the last of the twenty-four “Political Poems” (Zeitgedichte) that constitute the final section of the volume Neue Gedichte (New Poems), published in the autumn of 1844. In this concluding section, the poem gains saliency as a programmatic statement, although the thematic ambivalence of the text has historically elicited a contradictory reception. The initial reference to Germany, as well as later, decidedly ironic pointers, invite the reader to attribute the poet's sleeplessness to conditions in Germany, in which case the text is cast as a political poem with a critical message. This account is however immediately modified by the poet's explanation that his long separation from his mother produces his sorrow. The political question recedes behind the privacy of filial love or, rather, the two become inextricably linked, especially in light of the biographical context: Heine's exile from Germany, his residence in Paris, and, hence, the distance from his mother in Hamburg were themselves results of political conditions. Thus, with reference to “Night Thoughts,” Max Brod wrote in 1934: “The love for his mother remained one of the most solid bases of Heine's love. It mixes in a touching way with his homesickness for Germany” (25, my translation). Sixty years later, Jost Hermand similarly suggests an overlap of the personal and the political: “His criticism of Germany, no matter how sharp or malicious or perhaps even just witty, was always based on the yearning of an unloved son, who would have much rather stayed at home with ‘mother’ than to wander around in foreign countries” (270, my translation).

Brod's sentimentalist insistence on Heine's yearning leads him to overlook the critical tones in the poem; Hermand maintains an ear for the criticism, while recognizing Heine's own identification of mother and Germany. This antinomic tension traverses the reception history. Like Brod, Joachim Müller also presents a sentimentalist account: “The yearning for the mother is the yearning for Germany, and the yearning for Germany is the yearning for the mother. Wherever Heine loves most ardently, from a natural tie, that is his Germany” (425). In contrast (and explicitly critical of Müller), Werner Psaar foregrounds the political material by pointing out how the yearning was an expression of exile's bitterness: “‘Night Thoughts’ demonstrates better than any other poem in German the real misery of exile, the suffering in the nights, the anxiety about returning, yearning and fear, engagement and denial, allegiance, despair, and the search for comfort” (114). While the critics vary, then, on the precise balance of the personal and political, they do all agree that the poem gives sincere and mournful expression to Heine's concerns with Germany, be they merely personal or of a wider scope. Nor can there be much doubt that the poem does indeed thematize Germany and asks questions about the constitution of national identity. Yet the focus on the question of the relationship between the representations of Germany and motherhood has distracted attention from another tension in the poem.

The ten stanzas of the published poem announce the poet's noctural worries about Germany and his mother, tracing his thought processes or rather staging the processes of obsession that beset the lonely subject. Yet as the poet's reverie grows increasingly anxious, the final stanza releases him as the sun breaks in, his wife enters the room, and the geographical setting returns emphatically to Paris:

Gottlob! durch meine Fenster bricht
Französisch heit'res Tageslicht;
Es kommt mein Weib, schön wie der Morgen,
Und lächelt fort die deutschen Sorgen.(2)

German worries are banished with French sunlight: the passage suggests that the standard question of the reception history regarding the relationship of the political topic of Germany to the private concerns with the mother may give way, by the final stanza at the latest, to a contrastive staging of national identity characteristics, in particular the tension between the two women, the German mother and the French wife. In other words, the topic of the poem is not the poet's distance from his mother but the distance between the alternatives of mother and wife, Germany and France.

“Night Thoughts” should therefore be read as an opportunity to consider the substance of Cultural Studies—“Denk ich an Deutschland”—and the conditions, limits, and possibilities of such thinking. In particular, the poem raises questions regarding the mediation of gender and nationality as an available topic of such thinking. The reception history of the poem, in contrast, has focused primarily on the relationship between homeland and mother, surely a conventionally conservative definition of the issues at stake, rather than addressing the competition between female figures and between nationalities. The appearance of the French material only in the final stanza is surely no evidence of its marginalization, as Müller claimed (425). For the conclusion of the poem and of the volume is hardly an unmarked location; on the contrary, one can more convincingly claim that it represents the conclusion of the whole book which leads, so to speak, from German Romanticism to French light. It is hard not to conclude that sentimentalizing readings of the poem have hesitated to address the role of France and of the wife due to a sense of standard piety toward the tropes of filial homesickness, even though the poem labors to overcome precisely such nostalgic devotion; the reception of the poem, in other words, still has to catch up with the poem itself.

Heine inherits the project of a contrastive staging of France and Germany from Madame de Stäel's De l'Allemagne (1810). As early as 1831, just after his arrival in Paris, he deploys the imagery of a sleeping Germany and an active France, as the location of a revolutionary politics, in his introduction to Kahldorf (114). Harald Weinrich refers to this as Heine's “parallel thinking” of the two countries, a term effectively borrowed from Heine, who wrote of the “eternal parallelism” between the two (116).

The parallel in the poem, however, involves less identity and similarity than contrast, most obviously in the visual imagery: Germany is the locus of darkness and noctural brooding, while France is associated with the arrival of morning's light. This implies a shift away from the cultural codes of German Romanticism, as exemplified by Novalis's “Hymnen an die Nacht” (Hymns to the Night), which had themselves entailed a rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment. That Enlightenment, in the form of the metaphor of light, is reestablished at the poem's end, although now with a new set of associations. The sensuality of the wife and her smiling optimism banish the obsessions of the night, initiating a new and, in this context surely, revolutionary day: While the Germans sleep, the French act. Elsewhere Heine associates the revolution with the crowing of “der gallische Hahn,” [the Gallic cock], and Marx, whose acquaintance Heine would make in the autumn of 1843, would soon conclude his introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which appeared in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844, with the same metaphor: “When all the inner conditions ripen, the day of German resurrection will be proclaimed by the crowing of the Gallic cock” (Weinrich 112; Tucker 65).

Given the extensive and often emphatically political tone of the Neue Gedichte, it is arguable that Marx's engaged deployment of the metaphor is quite consistent with its significance in Heine's poem of the same period. It is not merely a matter of a contrast between Germany, asleep, benighted, and romantic, with a France of Enlightenment rationality. Dreaming Germany is not only being awakened to the light of reason; it is also being freed from its nightmares by a female enfigurement of revolution. Yet because the nightmares concern the memory of the mother, evidently misread by the sentimentalist tradition, and the revolutionary woman is linked intertextually to a trope of national arousal, the Gallic cock (which may have a phallic resonance but is clearly transgendering by casting the woman as a rooster), any inquiry into nationality in the poem necessarily involves an exploration of the implicit terms of gender identity.

“Night Thoughts” evokes a competition for the attention of the male poet, torn between devotion to his mother and the reveille of his wife; his concern for the mother has occupied him through the night, kept him away from his wife, and trapped him in a trancelike obsession: “die alte Frau hat mich behext.”³ The allusion to witchcraft indicates how the mother is located within the tropes of German Romantic poetry and its dependance on folk traditions. Indeed the first verse of the fifth stanza—“Die Mutter liegt mir stets im Sinn”—uses a phrasing reminiscent of the second of the “Heimkehr” poems of Heine's first poetry volume, The Book of Songs (Das Buch der Lieder), the so-called “Lorelei,” in which an old legend is described as “Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.”⁴ Both Lorelei and mother seize possession of the lyric subjectivity and represent a mortal danger: in the former case the boatsman sails to his death, while in the latter, the poet loses himself in morbid thoughts. Of course some twenty years separate the two poems; if, however, Heine's self-citation indicates that the mother in “Night Thoughts” can be taken as a recurrence of the Lorelei, then she assumes all the features of uncanny threat associated with the siren figure of the earlier poem, and the Marianne of revolution emerges as a genuine competitor, arriving in the morning to rescue her lover from the mother/sorceress with whom he had spent the night. The competition between the women consequently implies a tension within the poet, wavering between alternative definitions of masculinity, as son and as husband.

Heine's adulation of his mother, Betty van Geldern, has frequently been noted by his biographers; it stands out as a conventionally Biedermeier aspect of a poet more often judged as radical and audacious. Yet this devotion was, at least in the view of Wolfgang Hädecke, not without negative consequences. Betty's ambitions for her son's professional career were never met by his literary pursuits, eliciting a sense of failure and frustration, as Heine described: “I followed obediently her expressed wishes, but I must confess that she was guilty for the fruitlessness of my attempts and efforts in bourgeois positions, since they never corresponded to my own nature” (Hädecke 39, my translation). While the path of his success would draw him away from the worlds of business and law that his mother had wished for her son, a residue of guilt and obligation remained, to which he would return repeatedly: the same structure of obsession recorded in “Night Thoughts.” Hädecke conjectures that his “tie to his mother is on a very different level than his intellectual and artistic interests; it is a relationship of hidden eroticism, of which Betty was quite unconscious, but which Heine understood quite well” (41). The most telling evidence is the second of the two sonnets dedicated to his mother in the Book of Songs, “Illusion-mad,” (“Im tollen Wahn”), in which the poet speaks of his poor decision to leave his mother and to seek love elsewhere, a love that ultimately he can only find with her:

Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen,
Und ach, was da in deinem Aug geschwommen,
Das war die süße, lang gesuchte Liebe.(5)

“Night Thoughts” still draws on the image of the mother whom the poet cannot leave, but, unlike the Biedermeier tone of the early poem, casts her as a threat, an uncanny figure of nocturnal suffering, a vampire who disappears only at the break of day. The mother he cherished so much in the Book of Songs has grown into a lugubrious threat in the New Poems, but, in Paris two decades later, he can envision an alternative to his youthful romanticism.

Heine visited his mother in Hamburg before leaving for Paris in 1831, and when writing “Night Thoughts” in 1843, he had not seen her for the twelve years mentioned in the second stanza. In Paris in October of 1834, he had met Crescentia Mirat, whom he came to call Mathilde, and they began to live together in 1835. Hädecke comments that Heine's “sensitive mother-dependency” prevented him from developing a sexual relationship with the intellectual women with whom he interacted, such as Princess Cristina von Belgiojoso-Trivulzio or George Sand. Instead he finds Heine writing to his friend Heinrich Laube on 27 September 1835: “I am damned to love only the low and the foolish” (319, my translation). We know that Mathilde knew no German, and there is no evidence that she and her husband shared parts of his literary or intellectual life.

We nevertheless also know of his devotion to her and of his concern for her well-being; in the midst of the controversy with Salomon Strauss in the wake of the Börne polemic, the couple married on 31 August 1841 in Saint-Sulpice. Yet there is ample evidence of tension in the marriage and a certain tone of defensiveness creeps into Heine's letters when he reports on Mathilde. To his sister Charlotte he confesses that they married even though they “had previously quarreled daily for more than six years,” and to his friend August Lewald he used the image of a “matrimonial duel, which will not end till one of us be slain.” Most telling, though, is a letter to Betty of 8 March 1842, hardly half a year after the wedding:

My wife is—God be praised!—quite well. She is a most excellent, honorable, good creature, without deceit or malice. But, unfortunately, her temperament is very impatient, her moods unequal, and she often irritates me more than is good for me. I am still devoted to her with all my soul; she is still the deepest want of my life; but that will all cease some day, as all human feelings cease with time, and I look forward to that time with terror, for then I shall have to endure the burden of the caprices without the alleviating sympathy. At other times I am tormented with realizing the helplessness and want of decision in my wife in case I should die, for she is as inexperienced and senseless as a three-year-old child.

(von Embden 56)

As much as Heine surely loved Mathilde, the relationship was deeply troubled, as the letter to the mother indicates. If, in “Night Thoughts,” the poet has spent the night with his mother rather than his wife, who only enters in the morning, Heine's private circumstances may be the source of the depiction. “After only a few years,” writes Hädecke, “the two seemed to have largely refrained from sexual relations, certainly also a consequence of Heine's progressive ailment—in 1844 he wrote to Charlotte that they had maintained separate bedrooms for years and that there was no prospect of children” (323). The point is not to reduce the poem to the biographical facts, but to invoke the biography in order to illuminate problems in the text. Just as the evidence of Heine's strong attachment to his mother can be cited to relativize the sentimentalist understanding of the figure of the mother in the poem, so too does the nature of his relationship to Mathilde provide a new perspective on the conclusion. Surely his own anxieties regarding the intellectual and social mismatch contribute to the representation, which is, in effect, an introduction of Mathilde to his German family and public, i.e., Heine is insisting on the grace and virtue of his “Weib,” until only recently his mistress, no matter what class prejudices might be operating against her.⁶ At the same time, the opposition between mother and wife, in particular the manner in which the wife supersedes the memory of the mother in the historical progression of the poem, concedes the actuality of the very tensions which Heine's gesture of introduction is designed to overcome.

In any case, Heine's celebration of his wife is surely not naive or devoid of complex motivations. The twenty-fourth and final text in the “Political Poems” is intended certainly to resonate with the twenty-fourth and last of the “Romanzen” in the same volume of New Poems: “Unterwelt” (“The Lower World”), in which Pluto regrets his marriage to Prosperine and longs for the joys of his bachelor years. As in “Night Thoughts,” a realm of darkness contrasts with a realm of light, but the valorization is reversed: Pluto is only too happy to give Prosperine leave to spend half the year on the surface of the earth with her mother, while he can indulge in the pleasures of forgetfulness far away from the light of day:

Süße ruh! Ich kann verschnaufen
Hier im Orkus unterdessen!
Punsch mit Lethe will ich saufen,
Um die Gattin zu vergessen.(7)

The dovetailing of the two poems is complex: in “Lower World,” the desire to forget the wife contrasts with the obsessive memory of the mother in “Night Thoughts,” and the polarization of light and darkness is inverted. Yet the structure of “Lower World” is ironized further, in so far as it is none other than the god of the underworld who is celebrating Hades, the corollary to Germany in “Night Thoughts.” With this in mind, one might take the romance as a back-handed confirmation of the validation of the world of light, which in turn would draw the positionings of the two poems quite close together as expressions of a programmatic Enlightenment. Yet as convincing as such an account of the New Poems may be, there remains much evidence of Heine's constant attraction to Germany and to the complex of nocturnal tropes as the source of his artistic creativity: “Anno 1839” of the same collection is perhaps the most salient example.

Considerations of Heine's relationships to Betty and Mathilde therefore make a reading of “Night Thoughts” more complex without providing any definitive conclusion. What has conventionally been taken to be a loving portrait of his mother turns out instead, in light of biographical conjectures, to depend on a more problematic network of Romantic images. Meanwhile, the apparently triumphal entry of the wife in the final stanza may relate less to the victory of the Enlightenment and revolution and more to the exigencies of Heine's efforts to legitimate Mathilde to Betty. He would visit his mother in Hamburg in the autumn of 1843, on his first trip back to Germany; he would not introduce Mathilde to Betty personally until the second and last trip in the summer of 1844.

If standard readings of the poem have focused on the nature of the homesickness and the balance between private and political elements, this interpretation has sought to demonstrate some internal tensions within the imagery: Germany and France, mother and wife, realms of darkness and light. To navigate among these polarities entails the recognition that the poem concerns the reciprocal definitions of gender and nationality, which can lead to at least three distinct conclusions. The first involves the manner in which gender roles and sexualities are mobilized as parts of national definitions. For Heine, Germany seems to suffer from a deficient masculinity. According to Lucienne Netter, Heine appreciated a bellicose and conventionally masculine element in the French character, insisting on “the positive aspect of this burning impatience: courage,” while he shared with other Emigrés a sense of disappointment that none of the Germans in Paris had participated in the fighting of July 1830 (66): it would have been an opportunity to demonstrate a heroic manliness, not typically associated with Germany. This may have been a more widely held belief in the nineteenth century: Nietzsche would conclude the 209th aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil with a vignette from the sexual competition between France and Germany: “[…] it was not so long ago that a masculinized woman [Mme. de Stäel—RB] could dare with unbridled presumption to commend the Germans to the sympathy of Europe as being gentle, goodhearted, weakwilled, and poetic dolts. At long last we ought to understand deeply enough Napoleon's surprise when he came to see Goethe: it shows what people had associated with the ‘German spirit’ for centuries. ‘Voilà un homme!’—that meant: ‘But this is a man! And I had merely expected a German” (Nietzsche 323). “Night Thoughts” therefore stages a passage from a Germany of deficient manliness to an implicitly normative sexuality of France. Interestingly Nietzsche's account implies the importance for Germany to overcome the legacy of a transgendered de Stäel, i.e., to overcome its romanticism, a positioning he shares with Heine.

In this context it is important to recall a poem written during Heine's studies in Bonn when the reactionary weight of the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819 put an end to the progressive aspirations shared by many at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It was published in 1822 with the title “Germany. A Fragment” (“Deutschland. Ein Fragment”); in its description of counter-revolutionary Germany, the image of “mothers' boys” (“Muttersöhnchen”) figures prominently, anticipating the similar configuration in “Night Thoughts” of maternal dependency and retrograde politics: genuine freedom, by extension, is a matter for grown men. In the early poem, the agonistic heroism is more sharply contoured, however, as the poet, claiming a vantage point of superiority, looks down on the degraded country: “Schau' ich jetzt von meinem Berge / In das deutsche Land hinab” (Hädecke 109-10).⁸ By the time of the supposedly more radical New Poems, Heine had developed a more acute awareness of his own imbrication in the structures of backwardness he chose to attack. “Night Thoughts” does describe a passage from filial subordination to phallic masculinism, but it is not a simple or irreversible transition, given the degree to which it concedes the poet's own nocturnal anxieties.

In addition to the sexual history of the poem, a second line of inquiry proceeds from the first verse and its announcement of thinking about Germany in order, however, to draw out of the text a distancing from the particular mode of thought. On one level this involves the implied transition from the obsessive profundity of a melancholy German mind, and its awakening to a Saint-Simonist celebration of life and flesh in France. This is surely a familiar paradigm, contrasting romantic Germany with rational France and bemoaning what would come to be called Germany's Sonderweg, its special path, different from the implicity normal path of France and England. Consequently the paradox of the poem would be the congruence of a foregrounded homesickness, a looking backwards, so to speak, and an historical imperative pointing in a quite different direction: an obligation to leave Germany or, at least, to leave the culture of backwardness it was taken to represent.

The cognitive reconfiguration implied by the poem, however, is not limited to the national transition, nor is it correctly grasped as a displacement of a German thinking by a French alternative. What is at stake rather is a staging of the limitations of an initial logocentricity, the project of merely thinking about Germany, which remains deficient as long as it is not conjoined with the possibility of action. The curse of the poet in “Night Thoughts” is the inadequacy of philosophy and idealism, overcome only at the end by the entry of the wife representing a very different set of principles: sensuality, of course, in her beauty, but also a postidealism to the extent that her mere smile—and not a word or logos—overcomes the convoluted thoughts of the troubled night and breaks the spell of the sorceress/mother: woman as postlogocentricity. Her smile is an emblem of existentialist affirmation of the possibility of action. As a passage to the materialism of the deed, this final “Political Poem” repeats and reasserts the promise of the first in the collection, “Doktrin,” which is organized around the image of waking people from sleep; the poet in “Night Thoughts” has no sleep, but he too is caught in an inadequate consciousness from which he is awakened only at the end.

The first hypothesis regarding the poem posited a context of a presumed masculinity-deficit in Germany, corrected by the passage of the poem; the second repeats the argument with regard to the contrast between idealist thinking and materialist practice. Both approaches certainly highlight aspects of the text, but one should not lose sight of the fact that both are also themselves thematic components of the poem and therefore not strictly valid as explanations. In other words, the binary opposition performed by the juxtaposition of mother and wife within the poem should be taken more as a device rather than the meaning, a device to underscore the deficiencies in particular thought patterns and not as a programmatic assertion of French reason or Saint-Simonist materialism.

“Night Thoughts” shows how the poet, worrying about his mother, proceeds to worry about all his loved ones in Germany and, from there, quickly forges ahead to a compulsive counting of cadavers, a sort of unproductive worry that keeps him awake until his wife arrives to put an end to his melancholy. This debilitating mentality is the concern of the poem, rather than the German reality which underlies the insomniac's concerns: the topic of the poem is not Germany but thinking about Germany, “Denk ich an Deutschland,” and “deutsche Sorgen” or, in other words, Cultural Studies. The text in fact demonstrates how the poet's thinking of a proleptically generalized Germany, the “Deutschland” of the first verse, sets him on an erroneous path that necessarily magnifies anxiety and distorts his affection for his mother: his legitimate concern for her well-being disappears behind images of mass death: “Mir ist als wälzten sich die Leichen / auf meiner Brust […].”⁹ An affect of longing slips into anticipatory mourning that then explodes into a full blown melancholic disorder. Put differently, the problem of the poem is not Germany but a particular mode of thinking about Germany. There is some evidence that Heine codes this mode as feminine: it includes the mother's writing described in the poem, and it may also involve Heine's underlying resistance to de Stäel, as Diana Justis has argued (9). Yet there are plenty of German Romantics in Die romantische Schule, who could serve as examples of Heine's male targets.

More importantly the neurotic exaggerations that devolve from the imagery of Germany are themselves dismantled by the text through its representation of a complex arrangement of gender and sexuality. The representation of gender, therefore, functions as a corrective to the negative nationalism of the poetic verse, i.e., a Romantic rhetoric that stages Germany as a site of infinite threat, a threat which he text exposes and critiques. Gender operates in a complex way on two different levels: the misogynist desire to overcome Germany's deficient masculinity and thereby escape the political reaction is undermined by the poem's depiction of gender complexity in the tension between wife and mother. In other words, if Germany backwardness appeared to entail a threat of effeminization, Heine demonstrates that progressive France, the political alternative, is equally a site of female agency. In turn, the Romantic characterization of lugubrious Germany loses its legitimacy; by implication, the poem posits a German Studies that, rather than repeating “Märchen aus alten Zeiten” [old fairy tales], might study Germany instead of its traditional representations, no matter how seductive these noctural thoughts and horror stories might still be to the willing executors of the romantic legacy.

In “Night Thoughts” and in general in the New Poems, Heine was returning to poetry for the first time since his first volume, the Book of Songs of 1822. Most of his work in the intervening years had been in prose, particularly his travelogues and his reports from Paris; this generic choice was quite consonant with prevailing aesthetics, which claimed that contemporary society could best be captured in prose, while poetry was treated as nearly obsolete. Reclaiming poetry, Heine raises an issue at the core of Cultural Studies, the relative values of the accumulation of material in the prose text and the alternative possibility of concentrated expression and formal innovation in verse. “Night Thoughts” parodies obsessive concern with preservation, a sentimentalism toward the past, and a self-deceptive exaggeration of suffering and threat, and it attempts to clear the way for an alternative approach to Germany, one that could focus on the possibility of human action and innovation, rather than on the ineluctable and structural. It demonstrates the trap of a premature generalization of Germany, therefore eliciting a distance from the totalizing aesthetic of the novel as form. Finally, it directs us away from mere documentations of conditions or discourses presumed to shape lives and allegedly construct identities, while demonstrating instead the capacity of human action, even as subtle as a smile, to announce the possibility of freedom, which ought to be the topic of studies of culture.

The morning and the night, the wife and the mother, are poised in the fragile crystal of the poem, freezing, for a moment, antipodal possibilities: writing and vision, age and youth, myth and enlightenment. Mathilde's triumphalism hardly erases Betty, preserved in the anamnesis which, of course, predominates in the reception history attuned to a remembering of the past more than to the accomodations of exile, which memory may condemn as treasonous betrayals. Yet this poetic territory of lamentation conjoined to redemption is nothing other than the landscape of German poetry, at least between Luther's mighty fortress, embattled but preserved, to Celan's “Death Fugue,” entwining Faustian crime with the Song of Songs. To speak of these voices—Gundolf's phrase “Schicksalsprache eines Volkes” [the language of destiny of a people] comes to mind—implies several cultural claims, including of course the possibility of culture, poetic culture, and its urgency for history, and, with regard to Germany, the constitutive status of Jewish traditions (Gundolf 31). For this is not only an intriguing subtext in “Night Thoughts,” it also takes issue with claims of ultimate incompatibility, e.g., in Gershom Scholem's dismissal of the “German-Jewish symbiosis” or, more recently, the thesis that an eliminationist antisemitism is the defining feature of modern German culture, or that German identity necessarily and with an internal logic led to the Holocaust. Daniel Goldhagen's thesis is relevant to Cultural Studies (and not only to historians, narrowly defined) because his fundamental cultural contentions are based on the same ethnographic turn underlying much of the Cultural Studies movement: witness his repeated reference to the perspective of an “anthropologist,” his interest in antisemitism as a “cultural axiom,” descriptions of the “common sense” of a culture, and ultimately the focus on the “ordinary,” as in “ordinary Germans.” (Goldhagen 1, 9, 14, 15, 419, 460). If it is not exactly the standard Cultural-Studies vocabulary, it rings quite familiar after Geertz, Foucault, popular culture. What sets it apart from Cultural Studies as currently practiced is of course the remarkable gender-blindness of the treatment, as if Germans were “ordinarily” mainly men.

Antisemitism was not some litmus test of authentic Germanhood, not in historically distant periods, not in the nineteenth century, and not in 1933: not even, for that matter, in 1943, as evidenced by Victor Klemperer's reports from wartime Dresden (Klemperer II: 387). Such a pejorative evaluation of Germans may be part of the “common sense” of our culture, but that is another matter that leads to questions regarding the function of American German Studies. For Cultural Studies, the question is whether “common sense” is an adequate object of investigation. Heidegger's Gerede, Adorno's Verdinglichung, Arendt's “banality”: are these the domain of culture or are they not, like the “ordinary,” the very problem to which culture is the answer. Consider the thought experiment: is the goal of education, especially but not exclusively literary education, “ordinariness”? Do we teach our students to be “ordinary”? Is the point of the project some fundamental compliance in an administrative logic of conformism? Surely not, surely it involves aspirations of exceptionality (alterity, if you prefer), and this is the home territory of the poem. How to think about Germany? Cultural Studies stands at a cross roads between aesthetic and ethnographic models of meaning. The choice of direction remains open. We have a choice. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the choice is inconsequential, for our institutions, for education, or for our culture, both national and personal.

Notes

1. “Thinking of Germany in the night, / I lie awake and sleep takes flight” (Draper 407).

2. “Thank God! my window's shining bright / With France's cheerful morning light; / My wife comes in, fair as the morrow, / And smiles away this German sorrow.” (Draper 408)

3. “The dear old woman has cast a spell” (Draper 407).

4. “Will not depart from my mind.” (Draper 76). The original version of the verse from “Night Thoughts” reads “Sie kommt mir nicht mehr aus dem Sinn” (Heine:1983, 770), which differs from the “Lorelei” verse only in the pronoun and the inclusion of the temporal adverb.

5. “But there you came to welcome me again, / And oh! within your eyes I saw it then— / There was the sweet, the long-sought love at last” (Draper 46).

6. “It may be observed that Heine—often very naively—did his best to praise his wife, or, to express it plainly, endeavored to vindicate his marriage to his mistress; but, making every allowance, he was evidently most sincerely devoted to her, and it is in this, as in many things, he shows the extraordinary attachment to domestic life and family ties, which is characteristic of the Hebrew race” (von Embden 84).

7. “Ah, sweet peace! Go take your daughter— / I'll enjoy an easylife, / Mixing punch with Lethe water / To forget I have a wife” (Draper 384).

8. “Look now from my mountain station / Down on Germany's sad waves” (Draper 300).

9. “As if the dead host pressed unknowing / upon my breast […]” (Draper 408).

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