HEINE, HEINRICH. - German poet, b. in Düsseldorf on 13 Dec. 1797, d. in Paris on 17 Feb. 1856. He studied in his early years in his native city and, after an interruption, in Bonn and Göttingen, where he took his degree in law. An unhappy love for a cousin and then for her sister cast a shadow of melancholy over his life and inspired all his youthful lyric poetry. He was a bitter enemy of philistinism and of Prussianism; as a Jew, he had an agile and refined spirit, but restless, egocentric, fickle and full of contradictions. In politics he exalted the Revolution and Napoleon, posed as a mediator between France and Germany, and later belonged to the Junges Deutschland.
Despite the fierce sarcasm against false liberalism and false German poets (Atta Troll) and despite the merciless rebuke of the Germany of his time (Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen), he loved the homeland of his affections, his memories, his songs. The collection of youthful lyrics (Buch der Lieder, 1827), translated into almost every language, remains the best that the poet left behind and one of the purest gems of German lyric poetry for immediacy of inspiration, for sobriety of expressive means, for melodic richness. Much inferior artistic value, on the other hand, is possessed by the two tragedies: Ratcliff and Almansor. As a prose writer H. excels in the Reisebilder, pages of lyrical prose, full of pathos, of scintillating humor and of that irony, by no means cerebral, characteristically Heinean, a marvelous fusion of the real and the unreal, of truth and legend, of sensuality and sentimentality, of secret weeping and restrained laughter, where you do not know and the poet himself does not know « where the irony ends and heaven begins ».
Struck by an inexorable illness, through which each day he lost a part of his body, H. agonized in his last years in a « grave of mattresses », without however ceasing to sing, dominated by a tragic sense of his own life, preserving his soul divided between rebellion and supplication. He then saw the entire universe in its fleeting life. And he sang, in the lyrical heavens of the Romanzeno, the Historien of the injustice that governs the world, and in the Lamentationen he wept over the phantoms of the happy past and sought the light of comfort in the faith of his fathers (Hebrische Melodien), without however managing to raise himself up to God through a sincere and humble resignation. Nevertheless the vision of the Jews dispersed throughout the world, setting out in long caravans toward the city of faith and love, guided by the gentle song of a poet, Jehuda, is the last vision of H., yearning for a heaven of serenity and peace. Of his works, the following are on the Index: De l'Allemagne (decree of 22 Sept. 1836); De la France (decree of 22 Sept. 1836); Reisebilder (decree of 22 Sept. 1836); Neue Gedichte (decree of 8 Apr. 1845).
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