HAIFA, Israel — Heinrich Heine was loved and hated by the two nations to which he belonged.
The Germans loved his lyrics and disliked his political poetry. The Jews liked to attribute his genius to themselves and disliked his conversion to Protestantism, which he often joked: “What do you want? I found it impossible for me to belong to the same religion as Rothschild without being as rich as him.”
Heine was a doctor of law. The German poet was baptized to become a lawyer, but Germany did not give Dr. Heine the right to practice her laws, and he began to describe her iniquities. Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich deemed Heine unworthy to be a professor of German literature, and he became its creator. In one letter, Heine claims that his move to France was due “not so much to his passion for wandering the world as to painful personal circumstances, for example, his Jewishness, which cannot be washed away”. He believes that he harmed himself by converting to Lutheranism: “As soon as I was baptized I was scolded as a Jew. […] I am now hated equally by Jews and Christians. I very much regret that I was baptized: not only did it not make my life better, but on the contrary — since then I have nothing but trouble and misfortune.”
In “Jewish Melodies,” Heine, who was baptized at the age of 27, longed for the Jewish people he had lost. He approached the Jews by choosing the poet Yehuda Halevi as the object of his poetry. Thus, was born Heine’s poem Yehuda ben Halevi. If for Byron “Hebrew Melodies,” which he published in 1815-1816, was the realization of the idea of the British musician Isaac Nathan, later to become the first Australian composer, to write poems to old Jewish melodies, for the German poet, bedridden by illness, “Jewish Melodies” was a return to his childhood and youth.
Weakened by an incurable illness, the German poet is immersed in the world of Jewish imagery and customs in which he grew up and stayed during the Jewish 27 years of his life. Perhaps in the year he wrote “Jewish Melodies,” while in a “mattress grave” (his expression), he wanted to gain strength from the people from whom he departed in the second 27 years of his life. In 1850 he said: “I never made a secret of my Jewishness, to which I did not return, for I never left it.” In his irony of believers of all faiths, Heine valued the integrity of the spiritual outlook of the Jews, their ideological firmness and spiritual courage: “The Jews were the only ones who defended the freedom of their religion at a time when Europe was becoming Christian.”
Heine led a double life as a German and a Jew. He believed that Germany and the Germans were degenerating. While Hegel saw Prussia as an ideal state, Heine believed that Germany was backward and reactionary. Heine saw his hometown of Düsseldorf, occupied by the French, as a city liberated from German primitive nationalism in which the occupiers granted Jews equal rights. It was in France that Heine, fearing arrest, found refuge for the rest of his life.
In 1844, on Heine’s 40th birthday, Engels published the following announcement in an English newspaper: “The great poet Heinrich Heine has joined us and published a collection of political poetry preaching socialism.” To count Heine among the socialists was an exaggeration of the 24-year-old Engels. Heine, poet, journalist, satirist, had no doctrine, he did not join any political current. In those years, however, attempts were made to portray Heine, a student of Hegel at Berlin University, as a “mediator” between Hegel and Marx, trying to make him the John Baptist of Marx’s “Jesus.” Heine was too delicate a person and too profound a personality to be painted in one color, and in red.
In 1855, in the preface to the French edition of Lutetia, Heine wrote: “If the republicans represented for the correspondent of the Augsburg Gazette (Heine himself. – A.G.) a very touchy subject, then an even more touchy subject was represented by the socialists, or let us call the monster by its real name – the communists. […] This confession that the future belongs to the Communists, I made with infinite fear and longing. […] Indeed, it is only with disgust and horror that I think of the time when these grim iconoclasts will reach power.” In writing these lines the poet saw before him “my unyielding friend Marx,” one of the “godless self-gods”.
In December 1843, the 25-year-old German exile Karl Marx, a doctor of philosophy, and the 46-year-old disgraced German poet Heinrich Heine, a doctor of law, met in Paris. This acquaintance led to intense, almost daily communication between the two exiles. Their meetings continued until Marx’s expulsion from France in January 1845. The content of the conversations between Heine and Marx is unknown. However, since they both wrote about the Jewish problem at the time of their communication, it can be assumed that they talked about this topic as well. Karl Marx, who was baptized, concealed his Jewish origins. Heine, who was baptized, not only did not conceal it, but criticized the antisemitic Jewry: “There are many Jews who, out of cowardly hypocrisy, talk criminally about being Jewish. They behave worse than Jew-haters from birth. […] Famous writers, in order not to be reminded of their Jewish origins, harm Jews or silence them. It is a well-known, sad and laughable phenomenon.”
Heine’s influence on Marx was great. In 1823, long before Marx, Heine put forward the idea of the class struggle in the tragedy William Ratcliffe. The concept of “class struggle” appeared in Heine’s Lutetia four years before Marx’s publication. Marx borrowed the expression “Religion is the opium of the people” from Heine’s Ludwig Börne: Heine’s derisive statement about religion as “spiritual opium” was the source for Marx’s characterization of religion as “the opium of the people.” Some of Marx’s anti-Jewish outbursts are drawn from Heine’s writings and are the result of his double life as a German and a Jew, his confused and sophisticated bifurcation. It was during their Paris meetings that Marx’s article “On the Jewish Question” was published. The quote “money is the jealous God of the Jews” recalls Heine’s lunge against the indifference of French Jews at the time of the blood libel against the Jews of Damascus: “French Jews, like other Frenchmen, have gold as God and industry as religion,” or “Money is the God of modernity and Rothschild as its prophet.”
However, Heine attacks only capitalism. Marx attacks capitalism and the Jews as the embodiment of capitalism. He sees Jewish history as “a disgrace to theory, to art, to history, to man himself.” Marx’s article attacking the Jews was published on March 7, 1844, and on April 22 of the same year Heine published an article in support of the Jews. Both articles were published during a period of intense communication between them. In that article Marx calls the Jews “an imaginary people” and writes: “The emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from the Jews.”
Heine advocated the emancipation of the Jews. He urged European governments to preserve the Jewish religion even after the emancipation of the Jews: “Speed up emancipation, otherwise you will be too late and you will not find Jews in the world.” Marx, who came from an ancient lineage of rabbis, claimed that the God of the Jews was money; Heine, who came from a lineage of merchants, was proud to belong to the nation that “gave the world God and morality.” Marx and Heine had guilt complexes about the Jews they had left behind. Marx could not forgive the Jews for abandoning them. Heine constantly returned to the Jewish theme. He was a mocker, a skeptic, and a sentimental man, fond of and able to ironize his baptism. In contrast to Marx, he was full of sympathy and compassion for the Jews: “I have always had a predilection for the Jews, though they now crucify my good name.” Heine remained a great poet. Marx remained a great specter of communism.
Heine wrote of the hatred stirred in him by the party of German nationalists, the descendants of the Teutonic Knights, “whose patriotism consists in an abhorrence of all foreign and neighboring nations.” A century before Kristallnacht, Heine anticipated the catastrophe of the German Jews. In 1838, in Shakespeare’s “Girls and Women,” he wrote: “If the day comes and Satan wins, a storm of persecution will fall on the poor Jews, compared to which their previous sufferings are nothing. […] I shudder at the thought, and an infinite pity turns my heart.”
Ninety-nine years before the Nazis came to power, in 1834, Heine addressed the French: “Be careful! I love you and therefore I will tell you the terrible truth. You must fear a liberated Germany and much more than all the holy alliances, the Croats and the Cossacks. There will be a drama in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity suppressed the militaristic gut of the Germans for a time, but did not destroy it; when the restraining influence is broken, savagery will come out again. […] The ancient idols will rise from the ashes and wash the thousand years of dust from their eyes. The column will stride forward with a great hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals. […] The Germanic thunder rolls slowly but inevitably. And when you hear it, and it will be a thunder unheard before, know that it has reached its goal.”
Heine’s dire prophecy came true. On Kristallnacht, the books of Marx and Heine met in the flames of the Nazi bonfires. Communism and Nazism receded into the past. Heine’s poetry lives on, as does the memory of his unique personality and his foresight of the results of the Communist and Nazi rise to power.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 8 books and about 500 articles in paper and online, was published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English and German.