SOURCE: "The Evaluation of Heine's Neue Gedichte," in Wächter und Hüter: Festschrift für Hermann J. Weigand, edited by Curt von Faber du Faur, Konstantin Reichardt, and Heinz Bluhm, Department of Germanic Language, Yale University, 1957, pp. 99-107.

One of the great curiosities of German literary history is the division of opinion which has long prevailed on the subject of Heine's stature as a poet. Outside the German-speaking world Heine may properly be named in the same breath with Goethe or Rilke, for an overwhelming majority of non-German critics, even those knowing something of his complex character and personality, have agreed and continue to agree that Heine is a lyric poet of incontestable greatness.¹ Yet Emil Ermatinger, writing in Switzerland between 1943 and 1946, has classed him among "Forcierte Talente," moralistically condemned him for a "Wurzellosigkeit" for which he can hardly be held ultimately responsible, and concluded his discussion of him with these disparaging observations:

"Heine ist, nach Goethe, sicherlich der meistgelesene und geliebte deutsche Lyriker des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts gewesen. Dass er das war, ist ein Zeichen für den langsamen seelischen Zerfall jener Zeit."²

That Ermatinger's is no outmoded or peculiarly provincial viewpoint is clear from the importance—or, better, nonimportance—assigned to Heine in H. O. Burger's recent Annalen der deutschen Literatur, where W. Baumgart, disparaging him as an egocentric with an exhibitionistic "Publikumsbewusstsein," tells us, "Das Buch der Lieder enthält bereits den ganzen Heine, mit alien Vorzügen, nur noch nicht alien Unarten."³ Given this premise, it is not surprising that Heine's lyrics are passed over in complete silence in Burger's own discussion of German letters from 1832 to 1842 (a period of which it is said, "Die Höhe grosser Lyrik erreichen wir wieder mit den Gedichten Friedrich Hebbles," a poet with whom only Eichendorff, Mörike and Droste-Hülshoff are named as of comparable stature) and that in his account of 1843-1850 Heine's Neue Gedichte are conveniently disposed of as a collection containing "neben Natur- und Liebesliedern und Romanzen eine Abteilung 'Zeitgedichte'."⁴

Although moral sensibility and chauvinistic prejudices have at times been important factors in determining the German estimate of Heine, I think it can be shown that the innate shortcomings of biographical and—to a lesser extent—literary-historical criticism have played the decisive rôle in the process which has as it were reduced him to a poet of secondary importance for many twentieth-century German readers and critics. A brief survey of typical evaluations of Heine's Neue Gedichte, the only one of his three great collections of poems about which opinion seems predominantly unfavorable, will serve to make clear the workings of this process; at the same time it will permit me to select from what seem irreconcilably diverse opinions based upon apparently irreconcilable premises certain uncontradicted facts and certain critical constants that may perhaps together constitute a more solid basis for evaluation of Heine's total poetic achievement than has yet been successfully established.

Of the cycle "Neuer Frühling" Max J. Wolff declared that it contains "eininge von Heines besten und zartesten Liedern," but that "als Ganzes bleibt er hinter den früheren Zyklen zurück. Es ist zu viel Virtuosität darin." And after noting that "die besten Lieder … entstammen einer sehr frühen Zeit und sind im unmittelbaren Anschluss an die 'Heimkehr', ja noch vor ihr verfasst worden," he concluded: "Sie bieten keine Klänge, die nicht schon im Buchder Lieder angeschlagen wären; neu ist … höchstens der Ton der Missmut, die ihren Abschluss bildet."⁵ His comments on "Verschiedene" and "Zeitgedichte" are on the whole even less favorable and have their counterparts in many other biographies and biographical-critical sketches; they may be subsumed under H. G. Atkins' view that Neue Gedichte would not have added very greatly to Heine's reputation as a poet if his production had ceased with their appearance" and that, although some of them are "in execrably bad taste," "only when we come to the 'Zeitgedichte' do we find the important new note of the whole collection."⁶ But even so devoted an admirer of Heine as Ernst Elster chose thus to explain why Neue Gedichte had not achieved the same popularity as Buch der Lieder or Romanzero:

der zarte Duft und die Anmut der ersten Sammlung hat sich hier verfliichtigt, und es fehlt noch der wilde Schmerzensklang, die Weltanklage und der grelle Farbenreiz der letzten. Sie [i.e., Neue Gedichte] stehen in der Mitte von beiden, deuten vielfach noch auf die frühere Dichtweise zurück, lassen aber schon manche Züge der späteren Kunst Heines erkennen.⁷

And for what Elster has offered a biographical-historical explanation, Ernst Alker has even given a teleological-historical one, declaring that "die Neuen Gedichte … sich nicht recht durchsetzen konnten, vor allem deswegen, weil sie in vieler Beziehung eine Abschwächung und Wiederholung des Buch der Lieder und einen matten Vorklang zum Romanzero darstellten."⁸

If it is patent nonsense for a collection of poems not to have achieved popularity because it was inferior to a collection that had not yet appeared to rival it, it is nevertheless seriously disturbing that influential interpreters of Heine should disagree about what would seem an objectively determinable fact, viz., whether there are "neue Klänge" in the cycle "Neuer Frühling" or not. Although Geneviève Bianquis, admiring its delicate perfection, was constrained to admit that "ce qu'on peut reprocher à ce recueil charmant, c'est qu'il manque de nouveauté" and even declared, "Le poète a beau n'être plus l'adolescent timide épris d'une cousine, il n'ose encore faire entendre que de tendres plaintes et des soupirs résignés,"⁹ her German counterpart Helene Herrmann insisted that in "Neuer Fröhling" Heine used the forms and techniques of earlier cycles

in einem anderen Sinne … den die neue Stimmung verlangte: Heine gibt sich nämlich nicht mehr als den Leidensbewussten, Tiefenttäuschten, er ist vielmehr skeptisch heiter, melancholisch überlegen. Kein Byronscher Trotz mehr, der sich auflehnt, aber auch kein allzu weiches Lamentieren, das in Spott umschlägt. Überhaupt kein auffallendes Nebeneinander der Gefuhle mehr, vielmehr ein selbstverständliches und wohllautendes Ineinander.¹⁰

It was obviously in full awareness of such conflicting views that Rodolfo Bottachiari concluded his careful analysis of the same group of poems by insisting on "l'organicità lirica di questo ciclo, che a me pare eccessivamente trascurato e a torto giudicato soltanto come une pura e semplice ripetizione di vecchi motivi."¹¹

But Bottachiari himself became a moralist-biographer when he turned to "Verschiedene," of which he said, "Ora è [la sensualitä di Heine] soltanto cronaca biografica di trascorsi lascivi."¹² Elster, more cautious, conceded that "selbst der Duldsame fühlt sich befremdet oder erschrocken, wenn Heine ihn in dieser Abteilung … gleich mit einem knappen Dutzend seiner Geliebten bekannt macht…. Und wenn sie noch liebenswürdig geschildert wären …! … Sie sind meist ziemlich geistlos und in der Regel treulos … und die übergrosse Wirklichkeitsnähe, in der sie erscheinen, wird ihnen gefahrlich."¹³ Although it would be interesting to demonstrate that Treue was not the virtue of the heroine(s) of Buck der Lieder, it is perhaps sufficient to balance Elster's remarks with a statement by R. M. Meyer:

die "Verschiedenen," die er hier besingt—man hat es ihm grausam verdacht, obwohl man es jahrhundertelang den Ovid und Horaz verzieh, wenn sie die lockersten Liebchen feierten—werden zumeist so wenig greifbar, wie die konventionell stilisierte "Geliebte" des Buches der Lieder.¹⁴

And it is possible to balance Wolff's "Unmoralisch mögen die Gedichte sein, aber die Hauptsache ist, dass sie unmoralisch wirken, weil sie unkunstlerisch sind, weil sie in dem persönlichen Erlebnis stecken bleiben,"¹⁵ with Mme. Bianquis'

On aurait tort cependant de prendre ces poésies galantes pour une confession pure et simple. Il y a beaucoup d'art dans la composition de ces médaillons…. Les estampes plus légères dont s'est épouvantée la pudeur allemande … nous font tout au plus sourire…. Ces héroïnes auxquelles on a reproché leur basse extraction et leurs manières vulgaires nous semblent bien naïves et sans vices…. Ces accents libertins ne déparent nullement une poésie qui a d'autre part … chanté tous les moments de l'amour ideai, éthéré, tendre ou mélancolique.¹⁶

The poems dealing with what Gottfried Keller, in Der Apotheker von Chamounix, unkindly called "die Totenmädchen von Paris" (although some obviously had English and German prototypes) seemed neither novel nor scandalous to Charles Andler, who observed:

Volontiers [les Allemands] se croient les héritiers des Grecs, mais ils n'osent être des païens. Dès que Goethe publia ses admirables Elégies romaines, ce fut une levée de boucliers, parmi une critique composée surtout de pasteurs. Heine n'a pas atteint Goethe en hardiesse, et ne l'a pas atteint en plasticité non plus. Imaginons cet être passionné, tenaillé par une douleur tenace, renouvelée. Comment évitera-t-il la tentation du désespoir, du suicide, si ce n'est par la consolation charnelle? Il n'y a lá rien que de jeune, peut-être d'un peu vulgaire, mais d'humain. Les Anciens savaient sauver cette vulgarité des "amours diverses" par la perfection de la forme. Goethe s'y est essayé et Heine après lui.¹⁷

But whereas Andler saw the difference between Goethe and the Heine of "Verschiedene" as one of two different types of artistic genius, Fritz Friedländer, in an admirable monograph on Heine and Goethe, came to the equally plausible conclusion that, despite the sharp distinction between Heine's satiric-ironic outlook and Goethe's "Weltfrômmigkeit," in Neue Gedichte

trifft Heines Tonfali die grosse lyrische Form der kleinen Lieder Goethes; er beherrscht mit souveräner Gebärde das Arsenal der metaphorischen und allegorischen Vorstellungen; wiederum rollt in dem Zyklus "Verschiedene" das Eros-Thema in unerschöpflichen Variationen an uns vorüber, während die prächtigen Zeitgedichte … das Niveau der plastischen Anschaulichkeit Goethes innehalten.¹⁸

By this point the reader has no doubt been tempted to cry, despairingly, "Quot homines tot sententiae" and "A plague on all your critics." Yet if he looks back through the opinions I have cited it will quickly become clear to him that the poems of Neue Gedichte have on the whole inspired favorable reactions when critics have simply examined their effectiveness as poetic statements, and that they have been less favorably judged when critics—sometimes the same ones—have read them as fragments of a presumedly literal autobiography or as unscrupulous falsifications of biographical truth. And the more biographers have concerned themselves with Heine's moral and poetic development and minimized the external details of his life, the more valid or at least more critically useful seem to have been their comments on this collection and its several parts. Thus Jules Legras, one of the few interpreters of Heine to have considered the group "Verschiedene" superior to the cycle "Neuer Frühling" (it has the virtue of not being "insipide … dans son ensemble"), suggested that "Verschiedene représentait peut-être pour Heine une parodie du Buch der Lieder, ou tout au moins du désespoir amoureux qui domine ce recueil"¹⁹—an interpretation which, regardless of his own somewhat negative evaluation οf Neue Gedichte, has the virtue of in fact insisting that this collection is somehow distinct in character from its more popular predecessor. That there may be, moreover, a measure of truth in his suggestion seems confirmed by Heine's expression, as early as 1830, of the desire to find a new poetic style.²⁰

Wider recognition that the poems of "Neuer Frühling" represent more than minor variations on the substance and style of "Lyrisches Intermezzo" and "Heimkehr," and that those of "Verschiedene" are not experiments in poetic realism (Heine never included the experimental An Jenny, beginning "Ich bin nun fünfunddreissig Jahr alt," in this group, and he wisely excluded from it a goodly number of equally witty and equally bitter poems whose effectiveness depends primarily on their realistic tones), might contribute much to the establishment of Heine's full poetic stature both in Germany and elsewhere. H. Herrmann made an important contribution, therefore, when she emphasized that poems of both of these cycles

erinnern zuweilen an Rokokopoesie. Es liegt aber keine Nachahmung vor, sondern ein Hineinfinden in die Art eines solchen Stils auf Grund ähnlicher Erlebnisse, wie die, welche diesen Stil hervorgebracht hatten…. Das Misstrauen in die Dauer der Gefühle zeitigt eine Art Rokokophilosophie: Sinn fur den Reiz des Vergänglichen in Gefühlen und Situationen, Vertrauen in die Unermesslichkeit des Moments und überlegene Freiheit dem eigenen Fühlen gegenüber, dem man ebenso wie dem fremden misstraut.²¹

That Heine was actually conscious of his poems' affinities with Rococo verse seems evident, however, from his use of In Gemäldegalerien, the twelfth and last poem of "Neuer Frühling" in 1831, as Prolog to the expanded cycle published in 1844: the motif of cupids binding a hero with chains of flowers is patently pre-romantic and should have compelled more readers than have so far done so to evaluate in a non-romantic frame of literary reference the poems that follow Prolog. And H. Herrmann in a sense confirmed this when she observed that

in den sprachlichen Mitteln drückt sich der Charakter der neuen Dichtung Heines besonders stark aus. Das was wir das Rokokohafte nannten, tritt hervor in der Scheu vor schwerwiegenden Worten, aber ganz anders als in der Zeit des Intermezzos und der "Heimkehr". Das kindlich Lallende, das jene Dichtung suchte, wird verschmäht. Alle Bezeichnungen für Lust und Schmerz, alle Gefühlsworte der Liebe sind gedämpft, ins Heitere gewendet; die Worte "zärtlich," "Zärtlichkeit," "verliebt," früher selten genug, werden jetzt häufig. Ja, in einer preziös-archaisch wirkenden Weise wendet Heine das Wort "zärtlich" auch auf die körperliche Erscheinung an….

Yet, writing when the only important form of the lyric was still generally held to be the "romantic" one, she could but conclude that the lyrics of Neue Gedichte represented a transition "von dem Stil des Intermezzo, von diesem etwas blutlosen Stil einer Epigramm- und Stimmungslyrik hinüber zu dem Spätstil, der ganz mit Leben, Farbe, Bewegung gesättigt ist."²²

Now that it is once more possible, even in Germany, to recognize that other non-romantic types of the lyric than those represented by ode and elegy may embody positive literary values, the biographical readings of "Neuer Frühling" and the literally realistic interpretations of "Verschiedene"—Wolffs "Der Dichter schildert seine Strassen- und Zufallsbekanntschaften mit tagebuchartiger Genauigkeit"²³—should finally be superseded by sounder, more objective criticism. I therefore venture to prophesy that the author of Neue Gedichte will ultimately be acknowledged as the creator and only nineteenth-century German master of a form of serious anacreontic verse for which few close analogues might be found in the long history of poésie galante. And that this creation of his resulted from conscious artistic effort, was no chance consequence of literary-historical forces larger than himself, would seem to be proclaimed by the otherwise strange presence of six—later seven—Schôpfungslieder in the section "Verschiedene." For although this group of poems has been condemned as mediocre, I think unjustly, by critics as diametrically opposed in their approach to Heine's work as Wolff and Barker Fairley, it is at least an effective and witty announcement that Heine shared the great Baroque poets' view that any subject could be made, by a great creator, the medium of universally meaningful poetic statement: "Der Stoff," declares its Lord, "gewinnt erst seinen Wert / Durch künstlerische Gestaltung."

If the question of the novelty of the motifs and symbols of Neue Gedichte be disregarded—although there is more novelty than most critics have conceded²⁴—, it should still, I believe, be possible to recognize that this collection represents an achievement very different from, yet no less meritorious intrinsically than, that of Buch der Lieder. In forms of the romantic and Heinesque-romantic lyric "Neuer Frühling" develops the timeless and universal theme of man's sense of the transitoriness of things and feelings with an impersonality of tone patently absent in both earlier and later lyric cycles by Heine. (This impersonality is particularly evident in the function assigned to dreams in the cycle: in "Lyrisches Intermezzo," in "Heimkehr," and again in "Lamentationen" Träume are immediate personal experiences in present time, but here they are either illusions at once recognized as such—"Hab' ich nicht dieselben Träume / Schon geträumt von diesem Glücke?"—or symbols of pessimism and disillusionment, as in "Ernst ist der Frühling, seine Träume / Sind traurig" and in "Spätherbstnebel, kalte Träume, / Überfloren Berg und Tal.") This general theme, traditionally associated with the Baroque sonnet and the ode, is developed in a new mode and with brilliant variations in "Verschiedene" (how important it was to Heine that it receive full emphasis is especially clear if the Clarisse of Neue Gedichte is compared with that of Salon I ; not only have poems too vigorous in tone been excised, but the little group ends with the newly added lines, "Nur wissen möcht' ich: wenn wir sterben, / Wohin dann unsre Seele geht? / Wo ist das Feuer, das erloschen? / Wo ist der Wind, der schon verweht?"), then is treated in "Romanzen" with reference both to erotic situations clearly not involving the poet personally and to non-erotic ones, finally to be illustrated by the transitory emptiness of contemporary German political life as poetically mirrored in "Zeitgedichte."

The charge of frivolity brought against Heine the author of Neue Gedichte would be strictly applicable to him if he were merely a late-born Rococo poet. But his scepticism is surely more pessimistic than it is frivolous, and in this collection he might be said to voice Baroque despair in a nineteenth-century secular-nihilistic form. In a masterly profile of German literature during the Restoration, an essay in which equal attention is paid to the stylistic and intellectual-historical facets of that literature, Friedrich Sengle has, like H. Herrmann, made much of the similarities between Heine's writing and that of the Enlightenment. Instead of depreciating Heine's achievements in the realm of what she called "Epigramm- und Stimmungslyrik," however, he claims—with considerable justness, I think—that Heine

hat das in dieser Zeit absterbende Epigramm alter Art durch neue Kleinformen der "Lyrik" ersetzt…. Aber seine Sprache halt in besonders reiner Weise den alten Instrumentalcharakter fest…. Der elegante Spötter … verkleidet sich so dicht mit einer Maske, dass sein eigentliches individuelles Gesicht, so sehr diese Feststellung der heutigen Auffassung widersprechen mag, kaum zu erkennen ist…. Er steht dem Rokoko, auch seinen modernen Erneuerungen, näher als dem echten Realismus…. Wenn das Ausland immer noch den Romantiker Heine verehrt und Deutschland wegen seines innigeren Verhältnisses zur deutschen Sprache den Pseudoromantiker verachtet, so verstellen sich beide den Weg zu einer gerechten Einordnung und Einstufung.²⁵

At least one literary historian has, then, established a frame of reference in which Heine's total poetic achievement can be judged with greater critical objectivity than was ever possible before. Perhaps his example will encourage biographers and interpretative critics to examine Heine's works with new eyes and so offer evaluations of their significance less mutually contradictory than those I have shown to be explicit and implicit in even a small sampling of critical opinion on so relatively neglected a work as Neue Gedichte.

Notes

¹ "Ce qui est incontestablement grand en lui, c'est le poète." Geneviève Bianquis, Henri Heine L Homme et l'œuvre (Paris, 1948), p. 169.—A survey of German critical opinion since Scherer (1883) is offered by Harry Slochower, "Attitudes towards Heine in German Literary Criticism," Jewish Social Studies. III (1941), 355-74.

²Deutsche Dichter 1700-1900, Etne Geisiesgeschichte in Lebensbildern (Frauenfeld, 1948-49), II, 327-34.

³ (Stuttgart, 1952), p. 603 f.

⁴ p. 664.

⁵Heinrich Heine (München, 1922), p. 476 f.

⁶Heine (London, 1929), p. 182 and 187 ff.

⁷ Heine, Werke, 2.Ausgabe (Leipzig, n.d.), I, 267.

⁸Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von Goethes Tod bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1949-50), I, 97.

⁹Henri Heine, p. 74.

¹⁰ Heine, Werke, ed. H. Friedemann et al. (Berlin, etc., n.d), I, 27.

¹¹Heine (Torino, 1927), p. 183.

¹² p. 187.

¹³ Heine, Werke. 2.Ausg., I, 269.

¹⁴ Richard M. Meyer, Die deutsche Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrbunderts, ed. H. Bieber, 7.Auflage (Berlin, 1923), p. 106.

¹⁵Heinrich Heine, p. 478.

¹⁶Henri Heine. p. 76-78. Jules Legras, in Henri Heine Poète (Paris, 1897), similarly asserted that in "Verschiedene"—and in this respect he opposed the cycles to Buch der Lieder—there is not "une seule strophe dont un lecteur modeste puisse être effarouché" (p. 210 f.).

¹⁷La Poésie de Heine (Lyon and Paris, 1948), p. 118 f.

¹⁸Heine und Goethe (Germanisch und Deutsch, H.7—Berlin and Leipzig, 1932), p. 64 f.

¹⁹Henri Heine Poèle, p. 207.

²⁰ So I would interpret the remarks reported in Ludolf Wienbarg's "Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine in Hamburg" (cited Gespräche mit Heine, ed. H H. Houben [Frankfurt a.M., 1926], p. 180): "Ich bin in eine Manier hineingeraten, von der ich mich schwer erlöse. Wie leicht wird man Sklave des Publikums. Das Publikum erwartet und verlangt, dass ich in der Weise fortfahre, wie ich angefangen bin; schrieb ich anders, so würde man sagen: das ist gar nicht Heinesch, Heine ist nicht Heine mehr."

²¹ Heine, Werke. ed. Friedemann, I, 26.

²² Heine, Werke, I, 29-31 passim.

²³Heinrich Heine, p. 480.

²⁴ Novel features of Neue Gedichte not mentioned above include (I) the grouping of sub-cycles to constitute one lyric cycle (a point not noted in her discussion of "Verschiedene" by U. Belart, Gehalt und Aufbau von Heinrich Heines Gedichtsammlungen [Sprache und Dichtung, H.38-Bern, 1925]); (2) the extensive use of fables and fable motifs; (3) conscious echoes of Graeco-Latin elegiac poetry (perhaps not only in several "Romanzen," but also in the use of Philomele instead of Nachtigall in "Neuer Frühling" and of classical-historical allusion in "Zeitgedichte"); (4) the autonomous anthropomorphization of nature and (5) the apparent avoidance of the real comparison in "Neuer Frühling," as pointed out by Alexander Pache, Nalurgefühl und Natursymbolik bei Heinrich Heine (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1904), p. 46 ff.

²⁵ "Voraussetzungen und Erscheinungsformen der deutschen Restaurations-literatur," Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, XXX (1956), 291.