Heinrich Heine

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (born Harry Heine; Düsseldorf, 1797 – Paris, 1856) was a German poet and essayist of Jewish origin who straddled German and French culture. He is regarded as the last major poet of Romanticism and, at the same time, as the one who undid it from within, using its images and motifs to dismantle it. His importance lies in giving the German language a precise simplicity and in raising minor forms, such as the newspaper article or the travel account, to literary status.

He was born in Düsseldorf, in the Duchy of Berg, a region shaped by French occupation and the Napoleonic era. As the eldest son of a textile merchant, he was called Harry in childhood. The exact date of his birth was long uncertain, partly because he liked to joke that he had come into the world in 1800. His education was mixed, first Jewish and then Christian, and he learned French, which he always spoke with a German accent. Around 1816 he moved to Hamburg to work in the bank of his wealthy uncle Salomon, who would support him for decades. The young man, however, showed little talent for business, and the cloth shop his uncle later entrusted to him collapsed because he spent more time on his verses than on the accounts.

Between 1819 and 1823 he studied law at Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin, without real enthusiasm for it. At Bonn he attended lectures by August Wilhelm Schlegel, first admired and later mocked. At Göttingen a duel after an antisemitic insult cost him a suspension. In Berlin he attended Hegel's lectures and frequented the salon of Rahel Varnhagen. He published his first poems and the tragedies Almansor and William Ratcliff, which had little success on the stage. In 1825 he was baptized into the Protestant Church, a step meant to ease the way to an academic career that Prussian law closed to Jews. Heine presented it as his 'ticket of admission into European culture'.

Success came with the Book of Songs (1827), which went through twelve editions in the author's lifetime. Its short, direct poems were later set to music by Schumann, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Heine went on to write travel sketches, journalism and political satire. In 1831 he settled in Paris as an exile and spent his last twenty-five years there. His books were banned in Prussia in 1833 and across the German Confederation in 1835, yet censorship only increased his fame. His publisher, Julius Campe, grew rich from them, but Heine never achieved stable financial independence, a precariousness that unsettled his private life and weakened his political influence.

His style joins lyricism, irony and a corrosive wit, and his solitary stance earned him enemies on every side. Today he is one of the most translated and quoted German-language poets. Under the Third Reich his name was invoked as the archetype of the influential Jewish columnist. He is also remembered for the line 'Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also', which proved tragically prophetic in the Holocaust.