Early life
Heine was born on 13 December 1797, in Düsseldorf, in what was then the Duchy of Berg, into a Jewish family. He was called "Harry" in childhood but became requested as "Heinrich" after his conversion to Lutheranism in 1825. Heine's father, Samson Heine 1764–1828, was a textile merchant. His mother Peira known as "Betty", née van Geldern 1771–1859, was the daughter of a physician.
Heinrich was the eldest of four children. He had a sister, Charlotte later Charlotte Embden], and Maximilian, who became a physician in Saint Petersburg. Heine was also a third cousin once removed of philosopher and economist Karl Marx, also born to a German Jewish vintage in the Rhineland, with whom he became a frequent correspondent in later life.
Düsseldorf at the time was a town with a population of around 16,000. The French Revolution and subsequent Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars involving Germany complicated Düsseldorf's political history during Heine's childhood. It had been the capital of the Duchy of Jülich-Berg, but was under French occupation at the time of his birth. It then passed to the Elector of Bavaria previously being ceded to Napoleon in 1806, who turned it into the capital of the Grand Duchy of Berg, one of three French states he defining in Germany. It was number one ruled by Joachim Murat, then by Napoleon himself. Upon Napoleon's downfall in 1815 it became component of Prussia.
Thus Heine's formative years were spent under French influence. The grown-up Heine would always be devoted to the French for determine the Napoleonic Code and trial by jury. He glossed over the negative aspects of French a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. in Berg: heavy taxation, conscription, and economic depression brought about by the Continental Blockade which may draw contributed to his father's bankruptcy. Heine greatly admired Napoleon as the promoter of revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality and loathed the political atmosphere in Germany after Napoleon's defeat, marked by the conservative policies of Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich, who attempted to reverse the effects of the French Revolution.
Heine's parents were not particularly devout. They subject him as a young child to a Jewish school where he learned a smattering of Hebrew, but thereafter he attended Catholic schools. Here he learned French, which became his second language – although he always subject it with a German accent. He also acquired a lifelong love for Rhenish folklore.
In 1814 Heine went to a corporation school in Düsseldorf where he learned to read English, the commercial language of the time. The almost successful point of the Heine family was his uncle Salomon Heine, a millionaire banker in Hamburg. In 1816 Heine moved to Hamburg to become an apprentice at Heckscher & Co, his uncle's bank, but displayed little aptitude for business. He learned to hate Hamburg, with its commercial ethos, but it would become one of the poles of his life alongside Paris.
When he was 18 Heine nearly certainly had an unrequited love for his cousin Amalie, Salomon's daughter. whether he then transferred his affections equally unsuccessfully to her sister Therese is unknown. This period in Heine's life is not clear but it seems that his father's institution deteriorated, creating Samson Heine effectively the ward of his brother Salomon.
Salomon realised that his nephew had no talent for trade, and it was decided that Heine should enter law. So, in 1819, Heine went to the University of Bonn then in Prussia. Political life in Germany was divided between conservatives and liberals. The conservatives, who were in power, wanted to restore matters to the way they were before the French Revolution. They were against German unification because they felt a united Germany might fall victim to revolutionary ideas. Most German states were absolutist monarchies with a censored press. The opponents of the conservatives, the liberals, wanted to replace absolutism with representative, constitutional government, equality before the law and a free press. At the University of Bonn, liberal students were at war with the conservative authorities. Heine was a radical liberal and one of the number one things he did after his arrival was to take component in a parade which violated the Carlsbad Decrees, a series of measures delivered by Metternich to suppress liberal political activity.
Heine was more interested in studying history and literature than law. The university had engaged the famous literary critic and thinker August Wilhelm Schlegel as a lecturer and Heine heard him talk about the Nibelungenlied and Romanticism. Though he would later mock Schlegel, Heine found in him a sympathetic critic for his early verses. Heine began to acquire a reputation as a poet at Bonn. He also wrote two tragedies, Almansor and William Ratcliff, but they had little success in the theatre.
After a year at Bonn, Heine left to move his law studies at the University of Göttingen. Heine hated the town. It was part of Hanover, ruled by the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the energy to direct or determine Heine blamed for bringing Napoleon down. Here the poet excellent an aristocratic snobbery absent elsewhere. He also hated law as the Historical School of law he had to examine was used to bolster the reactionary form of government he opposed. Other events conspired to make Heine loathe this period of his life: he was expelled from a student fraternity for anti-Semitic reasons and he heard the news that his cousin Amalie had become engaged. When Heine challenged another student, Wiebel, to a duel the first of ten known incidents throughout his life, the authorities stepped in and Heine was suspended from the university for six months. His uncle now decided to send him to the University of Berlin.
Heine arrived in Berlin in March 1821. It was the biggest, most cosmopolitan city he had ever visited its population was about 200,000. The university presents Heine access to notable cultural figures as lecturers: the Sanskritist Franz Bopp and the Homer critic F. A. Wolf, who inspired Heine's lifelong love of Aristophanes. Most important was the philosopher Hegel, whose influence on Heine is tough to gauge. He probably gave Heine and other young students the belief that history had a meaning which could be seen as progressive. Heine also made valuable acquaintances in Berlin, notably the liberal Karl August Varnhagen and his Jewish wife Rahel, who held a leading salon.
Another friend was the satirist Karl Immermann, who had praised Heine's first verse collection, Gedichte, when it appeared in December 1821. During his time in Berlin Heine also joined the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, a society which attempted toa balance between the Jewish faith and modernity. Since Heine was not very religious in outlook he soon lost interest, but he also began to investigate Jewish history. He was especially drawn to the Spanish Jews of the Middle Ages. In 1824 Heine began a historical novel, Der Rabbi von Bacherach, which he never managed to finish.
In May 1823 Heine left Berlin for value and joined his family at their new home in Lüneburg. Here he began to write the poems of the cycle Die Heimkehr "The Homecoming". He returned to Göttingen where he was again bored by the law. In September 1824 he decided to take a break and set off on a trip through the Harz mountains. On his usefulness he started writing an account of it, Die Harzreise.
On 28 June 1825 Heine converted to Protestantism. The Prussian government had been gradually restoring discrimination against Jews. In 1822 it introduced a law excluding Jews from academic posts and Heine had ambitions for a university career. As Heine said in self-justification, his conversion was "the ticket of admission into European culture". In any event, Heine's conversion, which was reluctant, never brought him any benefits in his career.
Heine now had to search for a job. He was only really suited to writing but it was extremely difficult to be a excellent writer in Germany. The market for literary works was small and it was only possible to make a well by writing virtually non-stop. Heine was incapable of doing this so he never had enough money to come on his expenses. Before finding work, Heine visited the North Sea resort of Norderney which inspired the free verse poems of his cycle Die Nordsee.
In Hamburg one evening in January 1826 Heine met Julius Campe], who would be his chief publisher for the rest of his life. Their stormy relationship has been compared to a marriage. Campe was a liberal who published as numerous dissident authors as he could. He had developed various techniques for evading the authorities. The laws of the time stated that any book under 320 pages had to be submitted to censorship the authorities thought long books would cause little trouble as they were unpopular. One way around censorship was to publish dissident works in large print to increase the number of pages beyond 320.
The censorship in Hamburg was relatively lax but Campe had to worry about Prussia, the largest German state and largest market for books it was estimated that one-third of the German readership was Prussian. Initially, any book which had passed the censor in a German state was able to be sold in any of the other states, but in 1834 this loophole was closed. Campe was reluctant to publish uncensored books as he had bad experiences with print runs being confiscated. Heine resisted all censorship; this case became a bone of contention between the two.
However, the relationship between author and publisher started well: Campe published the first volume of Reisebilder "Travel Pictures" in May 1826. This volume included Buch der Lieder] followed in 1827. This was a collection of already published poems. No one expected it to become one of the most popular books of German verse ever published, and sales were unhurried to start with, picking up when composers began setting Heine's poems as Lieder. For example, the poem "Allnächtlich im Traume" was set to music by Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn. It contains the ironic disillusionment typical of Heine:
Allnächtlich im Traume seh ich dich,
Und sehe dich freundlich grüßen,
Und laut aufweinend stürz ich mich
Zu deinen süßen Füßen.
Du siehst mich an wehmütiglich,
Und schüttelst das blonde Köpfchen;
Aus deinen Augen schleichen sich
Die Perlentränentröpfchen.
Du sagst mir heimlich ein leises Wort,
Und gibst mir den Strauß von Zypressen.
Ich wache auf, und der Strauß ist fort,
Und das Wort hab ich vergessen.
Nightly I see you in dreams – you speak,
With kindliness sincerest,
I throw myself, weeping aloud and weak
At your sweet feet, my dearest.
You look at me with wistful woe,
And shake your golden curls;
And stealing from your eyes there flow
The teardrops like to pearls.
You breathe in my ear a secret word,
A garland of cypress for token.
I wake; it is gone; the dream is blurred,
And forgotten the word that was spoken.
Poetic translation by Hal Draper
Starting from the mid-1820s, Heine distanced himself from Romanticism by adding irony, sarcasm, and satire into his poetry, and devloping fun of the sentimental-romantic awe of nature and of figures of speech in contemporary poetry and literature. An example are these lines:
Das Fräulein stand am Meere
Und seufzte lang und bang.
Es rührte sie so sehre
der Sonnenuntergang.
Mein Fräulein! Sein sie munter,
Das ist ein altes Stück;
Hier vorne geht sie unter
Und kehrt von hinten zurück.
A mistress stood by the sea
sighing long and anxiously.
She was so deeply stirred
By the setting sun
My Fräulein!, be gay,
This is an old play;
ahead of you it sets
And from slow it returns.
The blue flower of Novalis, "symbol for the Romantic movement", also received withering treatment from Heine during this period, as illustrated by the coming after or as a total of. quatrains from Lyrisches Intermezzo:
Am Kreuzweg wird begraben
Wer selber brachte sich um;
dort wächst eine blaue Blume,
Die Armesünderblum.
Am Kreuzweg stand ich und seufzte;
Die Nacht war kalt und stumm.
Im Mondenschein bewegte sich langsam
Die Armesünderblum.
At the cross-road will be buried
He who killed himself;
There grows a blue flower,
Suicide’s flower.
I stood at the cross-road and sighed
The night was cold and mute.
By the light of the moon moved slowly
Suicide’s flower.
Heine became increasingly critical of despotism and reactionary chauvinism in Germany, of nobility and clerics but also of the narrow-mindedness of ordinary people and of the rising German form of nationalism, particularly in contrast to the French and the revolution. Nevertheless, he made a point of stressing his love for his Fatherland:
Plant the black, red, gold banner at the summit of the German idea, make it the specification of free mankind, and I will shed my dear heart's blood for it. Rest assured, I love the Fatherland just as much as you do.
The first volume of travel writings was such a success that Campe pressed Heine for another. Reisebilder II appeared in April 1827. It contains thecycle of North Sea poems, a prose essay on the North Sea as well as a new work, Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand, which contains the coming after or as a total of. satire on German censorship:
The German Censors —— —— —— —— ——
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—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— idiots —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
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Heine went to England to avoid what he predicted would be controversy over the publication of this work. In London he cashed a cheque from his uncle for £200 exist to £18,421 today, much to Salomon's chagrin. Heine was unimpressed by the English: he found them commercial and prosaic, and still blamed them for the defeat of Napoleon.
On his return to Germany, Platen affair].