[In the following essay, Jennings provides a detailed comparison of parallel scenes in Immermann's Die Epigonen and Heine's Florentinische Nachte.]

As a poet, Heine is deeply concerned with a theme both profound and simple: the struggle of beauty with the forces of death and decay. As a satirical journalist he was concerned with a number of more contemporary matters which have received a good deal of critical attention and will not be discussed here. The threatened effacement of beauty, however, obviously underlies even such a seemingly innocuous poem as the familiar 'Du bist wie eine Blume', and it is probably one of the few things about which Heine is sincere beyond all question. It is also a point with respect to which both his affinity for and his departure from Romanticism can be made plain. Heine is Romantic in his aestheticism, his glorification of an almost unearthly beauty, but highly unromantic in that this beauty is firmly anchored in this world and will be destroyed rather than liberated by the casting off of earthly shackles. At times there is, to be sure, an alliance of beauty with death to produce a weird dream world of lotus blossoms and nightingales; but there is not, as with Novalis, the feeling that this is a better or more complete world lying beyond the familiar world of the senses or coming after our sojourn upon Earth. He yields to death as to a dream from which there is no awakening, perhaps even pleasant, at least in its preliminary stage, as a realm in which time is suspended and the senses seem to achieve a satiety impossible during fully conscious life. This lotus and morphine world, however, is recognized as an inferior grade of reality, not a superior one, a realm of illusion and impermanence. As regards personal immortality, there is nothing to indicate that the grave misgivings he expresses in the poem 'Der Abgekuhlte' do not represent his well-considered and final view on the subject: 'Ja, ich bin bang, das Auferstehen/Wird nicht so schnell von Statten gehen.' It is to Heine's credit that he never accepts a comforting solution nor seeks to make of life more than it is. Even his professed return to the belief in a personal God (in the epilogue to the Romanzero) in no way detracts from his basic conviction that a life apart from physicality and sense experience, and one not subject to death, cannot be conceived. The dismal conclusion of the poem 'Morphine'—that death is better than sleep but the best thing would be never to have been born at all—escapes banality as a philosophical pronouncement (however heartfelt the despair that gave rise to it) by virtue of its implication that the problem-free, ideal state belongs to a realm of non-existence that we cannot even conceive of. On the other hand, it is to Heine's credit that, despite his despair at finding no answer to his questions about life (other than a mouthful of earth, which he rightly finds inadequate, in the poem 'Lass die heilgen Parabolen'), he progressively abandons the non-metaphysical humanistic ideologies that seek to develop the meaning of life from within life and human society itself. It is evident, again in the epilogue to his Romanzero, that he is instinctively aware of the pitfall of such undertakings: the creation of new religious (and less attractive ones at that) in the belief that one is abolishing religion. Meaning is usually imposed from without, and Heine realizes that this process is ultimately self-defeating, and, as expressed in the poem 'Fragen', only a fool will expect the riddle of life to be solved.

Thus, in his mature appraisal of life, Heine arrives at an honesty almost unique among his contemporaries. He avoids all easy solutions, whether idealistic or materialistic in nature. He sees death neither as the curtain separating us from a better world nor as the incidental cessation of a meaningful life. One can surrender to it or abhor and combat it, but one cannot pretend it is not there, nor conceive of life without it. This is not to say that life thereby becomes more meaningful; it merely becomes more precious, whereas its ultimate meaning, if there is one, still remains inaccessible. Though Heine can frequently be said to affirm life in his later years, the striking thing is the degree of despair which persists alongside the affirmation, and the lighthearted tone which is nevertheless maintained.

Although, as noted, a realm of beauty-in-death cannot be overlooked in Heine's poetic world, the more typical situation is one in which beauty is equated with vitality and is indeed seen as the essence of life. Even before Heine's confinement to the 'Matratzengruft', the validity of beauty lies precisely in its fleeting, earth-bound quality. When, in Florentinische Nachte (1837), he writes of party-going Parisiennes who, like wraiths of doomed brides dancing on their graves, greedily indulge in the pleasures of the world before icy death can claim them, we may take this as a valid expression at least of one phase of the general pattern of Heine's poetic outlook. Though there are overtones of Saint-Simon's doctrine of rehabilitation of the flesh, perhaps, too, of a fashionable decadence and 'Weltschmerz', the passage is typical of Heine's fascination with a beauty robbed of its idealistic foundation and hence vulnerable to decay. Though Heine's experience is personal and intense, the problem is one engendered by the literary and intellectual scene in Germany in the post-Romantic and post-Classical years.

The 'frame' situation of this intentionally rambling poetic prose work is macabre enough: the narrator, Maximilian, tells stories to the beautiful but doomed Maria to while away her last days. Although this invention smacks of calculated pathos (while at the same time mildly lampooning this very tendency), its sombre realization that frivolity may at times involve quite urgent matters is shared by as distinguished a forebear as Boccaccio (whose plague, to be sure, is less imminent and inexorable than Maria's malady).

The central episode of Florentinische Nächte is the narrator's encounter, in England, with Mlle Laurence, a street carnival performer who dances amidst a small freakish entourage: a red-faced woman with a tiny head and huge abdomen, who resolutely beats the drum; the wizened, spindly-legged, largeheaded dwarf Turltiti who periodically crows like a rooster (he is later to die in a cradle); and a learned dog who rounds off the motley group. This weird assemblage, abnormal as it seems, is typical of Heine's usual depiction of human society in general; he sometimes approaches paranoia in his insistence upon a widespread conspiracy of prosaic persons given over to practical routine ('Philister') against the man of poetic sensibilities. It is the ludicrous, yet grisly, carnival of life, the summation of the absurd and futile doings which we pompously assume to be important and real.

Mlle Laurence, on the other hand, moves in the sphere of true poetic reality, not that of the mock reality of Philistines. Her dance, not the risque tale of amorous conquest that follows, is the important thing, for the conquest is really an attempt to grasp and explain the phenomenon. It is an enigma to Maximilian, accustomed as he is to solving riddles; it seems to speak in a language of its own and to say something horrible and painful.

Mlle Laurence dances as nature bids man dance; her whole being is engaged. There is nothing rigidly classical and nothing Romantic, macabre, deformed, or medieval here; so the narrator would have us believe. Yet, towards the end of the dance it is described as 'fatalistic' and acquires a distinctly eerie air. The dancer trembles, inclines her ear towards the ground, makes mad, abandoned leaps, listens again, grows rigid, and finally makes compulsive hand-washing motions.

Later the mystery is solved to some extent. Mlle Laurence was born in the coffin of a mother only believed dead (who, however, died soon afterwards). As a result, she is known as a child of the dead ('Totenkind'). Her foster father, an unscrupulous ventriloquist, made her believe that the voice of her dead mother issued from the ground. It is this voice, traumatically ingrained as a recurring auditory hallucination, that she listens to in the midst of her dance.

It is, in short, a dance of life and death that we have before us, a graphic representation of vitality faced with extinction. The enigma is as simple and as complex as this. When the narrator seeks to decipher the symbolism (as he calls it) of his beloved's features and movements, he pays homage to the Romantic belief that a higher meaning shines through such earthly symbols; yet the voice to which she harkens is from below, not from above. It is the voice of nothingness, not of the Absolute. For this 'Totenkind' birth and death are peculiarly compressed, and the most intense life and the most moving beauty occur when the presence of the Destroyer is most strongly perceived. We feel that the core of Heine's poetic work is presented here in pure form, and that he himself stands in some awe of his creation. He is puzzled as to its supposed ulterior meaning and is perhaps reluctant to admit the tragic secret which one may continually grasp and expound only to be confounded anew by it: that there is no beauty without death. Like his heroine, he washes his hands of the knowledge.

In his pondering over a possible higher meaning, Heine is Romantic; in his failure to solve the riddle or to discover any secrets, he belongs to a later age. The deformed performers appear again as ghosts in Mlle Laurence's boudoir, and she arises entranced to dance to their tune; but these figures are not so much emissaries of a spirit world as shadowy remnants of the world we know, which is itself shadowy and fleeting enough.

The music provided by the freakish performers, it is interesting to note, has some of the essential features of Heine's own work, to judge by his description. It is ungainly yet titillating, melancholy, impudent, bizarre, yet characterized by a singular simplicity. The last feature we may readily believe, since Heine repeatedly insists that it is produced by a triangle and a drum.

Karl Immermann, though at times almost feverishly satirical and as fantastically inclined as is consistent with the prosaic spirit of the times which he finds so oppressive, lacks the saving grace of lightness as well as the unshakeable certainty as to his own position and the incisive eye for foibles and weaknesses that lends perennial freshness to Heine's work. The two authors were born within one or three years of each other (depending on which of Heine's birth dates is authentic), and both recognize the waning of purely abstract and idealistic art. Immermann is, if anything, more successful in eschewing the paraphernalia of Romanticism. Heine, in fact, displays few compunctions in borrowing the most effective techniques from Romantic authors while denouncing these slightly older contemporaries as reactionary and backward-looking; but, since he delights in playing the literary rogue, our criticism of such procedures is disarmed from the outset.

The significance of a similar motif in the work of such temperamentally dissimilar authors might be questioned; it seems more probable, however, that the dissimilarity of the authors actually strengthens the argument that a trend significant for the age is involved. The grim, yet hopeful, import of Immermann's corresponding dance scene is, in any case, nearly identical with that of Heine's.

The dancer is Fiammetta, or Flammchen, of Die Epigonen, a Mignon-like character and curiously modern-sounding exponent of la dolce vita who is clearly intended to represent nature in all its vitality and chaotic intractability. In one episode she disrupts a play by singing a nonsense song with her face painted in all imaginable colours. She mourns her husband in red and yellow garb and favours flame-red stockings, gaily flying ribbons and golden shoes. Her only belief is in 'sweet flesh and blood'. Her vitality is that of the flame—a consumption of vital fluid continually on the verge of extinction, continually reborn.

Flammchen's late husband and his eccentric legacy deserve some comment. One room of the villa he has left behind houses his agglomeration of natural specimens, representing the meaningless variety of nature. A blue, empty room is meant to represent infinity, which, even in 1835, bears a suspicious resemblance to nothingness. A third room, intended to contain a representation of God, is occupied instead by the mummified corpse of the husband himself. It is before this singular specimen of misdirected religiosity, and in terror of it, that Flammchen's dance takes place. She begins in a terrifying trance-like state of expanded consciousness. The music is provided by an uncanny old hag, actually her mother, who is inclined towards devil worship and has unsettling views about the hereafter; after death, she thinks, decay proceeds even in the spiritual realm, until the decomposed souls flutter aimlessly in the air. Flammchen, correspondingly, seems to become a lemur-like, wispy figure dissolving into the air in the more wild and disjointed phases of her dance. At other times she grows stonily rigid, and her typical aspect (as Immermann observes with rather ponderous rhetoric) is that of a dying Magdalene, whose sweet flesh is already attacked by the grim foe of joy.

Immermann's scene is quite seriously presented, with all the horror and pathos due it; Heine is facetious, risque, and morbid in a way that invites the suspicion of a modish indulgence in 'Weltschmerz' and 'Zerrissenheit' after the manner of Byron. Both, however, portray a charming and vital creature hovering on the threshold of another realm: not a harmonious All, but rather the void. The threat of extinction is of course present in all ages, but one period of more intense awareness of the presence results from the collapse, around 1800, of the orderly and benevolent cosmic scheme posited by the Enlightenment and frantically reaffirmed by Romanticism, already with noticeable lapses. The nihilistic strain running from the 'Sturm und Drang' through Jean Paul, the early Tieck and some other Romantic writers and culminating in the odd and monstrous anonymous Nachtwachen des Bonaventura remains to be clearly identified and traced. Both of our authors, however, sense its presence and seek to combat it with a representation of intense vitality in the form of the dance—a type of activity curiously suited to the portrayal both of exuberant life and lugubrious decay. Heine purports to have no qualms about a carpe diem outlook, though he eventually settles for a form of quasi-Romanticism, poignant in its hints of a supernal realm which, in the end, cannot be realized. Immermann, on the other hand, is troubled by the bugbear of sensuality and, when not preaching a pious doctrine of wholesomeness, finds himself torn between the chaotic abundance of colourful nature and the colourless emptiness of attenuated spirit—between bleakness and inanity and the intense vitality that leads to dissoluteness and dissolution. It sometimes seems to him, as it does to his aforementioned uncanny hag, that the Devil is responsible for vital things and God only for the realm of sameness, that is, of nothingness.

Our authors, at any rate, seem almost puzzled and disconcerted by the charming images of bold but vulnerable life that they have conjured up. Heine, though more willing than Immermann to condone animal exuberance as a way of life, likewise seems happier in the role of pensive spectator. The ultimate aim of both authors is the same: the establishment of a meaning in life which does not presuppose some realm beyond life as its source. They envisage a life bearing its fullness within itself, lending an ear to the voice of gravity and gloom the better to defy it. The resulting gyrations anticipate Nietzsche's madly triumphant dancing over the abyss and dramatically bear witness to the need for eschewing the prevalent glorification of grey abstraction. The battle of vitality and decay can never be won; but these colourful images do much to dramatize the import of the battle.