HEINE, HEINRICH. - German poet, born in Düsseldorf on 13 Dec. 1797, died in Paris on 17 Feb. 1856. He spent his early years in his native city and, after an interruption, studied in Bonn and Göttingen, where he earned a degree in law. An unhappy love for a cousin and later for her sister cast a shadow of melancholy over his life and inspired all his early lyric poetry. He was a bitter enemy of philistinism and Prussianism; as a Jew, he possessed a keen and refined but restless, egocentric, volatile, and contradictory spirit. Politically, he extolled the Revolution and Napoleon, posed as a mediator between France and Germany, and later belonged to the Young Germany movement.
Despite his fierce sarcasm against false liberalism and false German poets (Die Harzreise) and his merciless indictment of contemporary Germany (Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen), he loved the land of his affections, memories, and songs. The collection of his early lyrics (Buch der Lieder, 1827), translated into nearly all languages, remains the best of his works and one of the purest gems of German lyric poetry for its immediacy of inspiration, sobriety of expression, and melodic richness. Far inferior in artistic value are his two tragedies: Ratcliff and Almansor. As a prose writer, H. excels in the Reisebilder, pages of lyrical prose filled with pathos, sparkling humor, and that irony—far from cerebral—characteristically Heinean, a marvelous fusion of the real and the unreal, truth and legend, sensuality and sentimentality, secret tears and restrained laughter, where one does not know—and the poet himself does not know—“where irony ends and heaven begins.”
Stricken by an incurable illness that each day took a further toll on his body, H. lay dying in his final years in a “mattress tomb,” yet never ceased to sing, dominated by a tragic sense of his own life, his soul torn between rebellion and supplication. He then saw the entire universe in its fleeting existence. And in the lyrical cycles of the Romanzero, he sang of the Geschichten of the injustice that governs the world, and in the Lamentationen he wept for the ghosts of a happy past, seeking a light of comfort in the faith of his fathers (Hebräische Melodien), without, however, rising to God through sincere and humble resignation. Yet the vision of the Jews dispersed throughout the world, marching unheeded in long caravans toward the city of faith and love, guided by the sweet song of a poet, Jehuda, is Heine’s final vision, yearning for a heaven of serenity and peace. Works by him are listed in the Index: De l'Allemagne (published 22 Sept. 1836); De la France (published 22 Sept. 1836); Reisebilder (published 22 Sept. 1836); Neue Gedichte (published 8 Aug. 1845).