Heinrich Heine: German Lyric Poet and Jewish Political Agitator
A hundred years before Adolf Hitler assumed power an event occurred in Germany that was a harbinger of worse things to come in the relations between Germans and Jews. It was the German reaction to the “Young Germany” movement led by several young Jews whose aim it was to introduce certain liberal social reforms, including greater opportunities for Jews in all aspects of German society. In the course of their campaign, the participants said and did things that German authorities and large segments of the population found insulting and offensive. At the center of the movement and considered by many the personification of the Jewish mentality and nature was world-famous poet Heinrich Heine.
Heine was a sorely conflicted man. While still young he quickly rose to be recognized as Germany’s greatest Romantic poet after Goethe. Because of the beauty and subject matter of his poetry, he was thought to be a man who loved his homeland, especially the Rheinland region, but by middle age he had morphed into a bitter, sarcastic critic, hostile to almost everything and everyone he had previously loved or admired. In the absence of any other known cause, his life and personality, even his health, seem to have been wrecked by a psychological clash between his genetic makeup, essentially his core Jewish nature, and the culture of the world in which he lived. In his Faust, Goethe had the appropriate line to describe the condition: “Two souls dwell in my breast, alas, forever warring with each other.”
Born in 1797 to ethnically Jewish parents who lived comfortably but modestly in Duesseldorf, young Harry Heine, as he was so named, entered life in an essentially Roman Catholic city whose Jewish residents, but only a minority of the German majority, had welcomed the liberal reforms introduced by Napoleon. Harry’s parents put the poet-to-be in a German kindergarten at age four while concurrently instructing him in Jewish traditions at home and making available additional instruction in the Jewish religion in a private school. Harry attended the local Lyceum in a Franciscan cloister run and taught by Catholic priests, often Jesuits. Discipline was strict— designed to provide useful subjects of Napoleon. Read more