The Kraus Project. Jonathan Franzen
when its imitators are better? Naturally, to appreciate an invention that has since perfected itself into a modern machine, you have to apply historical justice. But in making an absolute judgment, don’t you have to concede that Heinrich Heine’s prose has now been surpassed by the observationally inclined technicians, the style boys, and the swindlers of charm? That this prose, which signifies wit without perspective and perspectives without wit, was quite certainly surpassed by those feuilletonists who not only read Heine but took extra pains to go to the source of sources—to Paris? And that there have since appeared imitators of his poetry who manage the feelings and the newsman’s wrinkle of disdain no less glibly, and who in particular are no less deft in making the little joke of the little melancholy, which the hurdy-gurdy verse helps so nimbly to its feet. Because, after all, nothing is easier to outfit with every modern convenience than a lyrical arrangement. It’s true that nobody would dare compare himself to Heine in the extent of his output and the scope of his intellectual interests. But today every Itzak Wisecrack45 can probably outdo him when it comes to making an aesthetic anesthetic46 and using rhyme and rhythm to turn candied husks of thought into cherry bombs.
Heinrich Heine the poet lives only as a canned youthful sweetheart. None is in greater need of reassessment than this one. Youth soaks up everything, and it’s cruel to take many things away from it later. How easily the soul of youth is impregnated, how easily things that are easy and slack attach themselves to it: how worthless a thing has to be for its memory not to be made precious by the time and circumstances of its acquisition! You’re not critical, you’re pious when you love Heine. You’re not critical, you’re blasphemous when you try to talk somebody who grew up with Heine out of his Heine. An assault on Heine is an invasion of the everyman’s private life. It injures reverence for youth, respect for boyhood, veneration of childhood. To presume to judge firstborn impressions according to their merit is worse than presumptuous. And Heine had a talent for being embraced by young souls and thus associated with young experiences.47 Like rating the melody of a hurdy-gurdy, to which I was unstoppably drawn, above Beethoven’s Ninth, owing to a subjective urge. This is why grown-ups don’t have to put up with anyone who wants to dispute their belief that Heine is a greater poet than Goethe. Yes, it’s on the luck of association that Heinrich Heine lives. Am I so relentlessly objective as to say to someone: go, look, the peach tree in the garden of your childhood is quite a bit smaller than it used to be. He had the measles, he had Heine, and he gets hot in recollecting every fever of youth. Criticism should stay quiet here. No author needs reassessment as badly as Heine, no one bears up under it so poorly, no one is so protected from it by every fond illusion. But I have the courage to recommend it only because I’m hardly in need of it myself, because I failed to experience Heine at a time when I would have had to overrate him. There comes a day where it’s no concern of mine that a gentleman who has long since become a banker once crept to his beloved under the strains of “You have diamonds and pearls.”48 And where you become rude at the sight of old brains still being affected by the charm with which this tearful materiality once captivated young hearts, and the syrup of sentimental moods adheres to literary judgments. When you get right down to it, the hankerings of youth could also have been satisfied by Herr Hugo Salus.49 I don’t fancy myself guiltless of giving a bit of culture the benefit of the situation in which I experienced it, or of confusing it with the attendant mood. I retain a warm glow from Heine’s Berlin letters, for example, because the melody “We wind for you a bridal wreath,” which Heine makes fun of there, is congenial to me. But only in my nerves. In my judgment, I am mature and willing to distinguish merits. The memory of how the garden smelled when your first love walked through it is of general concern to the culture only if you’re a poet. You’re free to overvalue the occasion if you’re capable of making a poem out of it. When, once, in a booth at the Prater,50 I saw a lady in tights floating in the air (which I now know was done with mirrors), and a hurdy-gurdy was accompanying her with “Last Rose,” my eyes were opened to beauty and my ears to music, and I would have ripped to shreds the man who told me that the lady was writhing around on a plank and the tune was by Flotow.51 In criticism, though, unless you’re speaking to children, you have to be allowed to call Heine by his true name.
His charm, according to his grown-up defenders, is a musical one. To which I reply: to be responsive to literature, you don’t need to be responsive to music; all you need from music to create a mood is the melody, the rhythm.52 I don’t need a mood when I’m doing literary work; I create a mood in myself by working. To get the juices flowing, I use a tone from a miniature spinet that is actually a cigar box and which, if pressed on, emits a few old Viennese notes that have been locked inside it for a hundred years. I’m not musical; Wagner would disturb me in this situation.53 And if I sought the same kitschy stimulus of melody in literature, I could produce no literature on such a night. Heine’s music may, by the same token, suffice for musicians who require more significant disclosures from their own art than his little bit of euphony affords. What, then, is poetry in the Heinean style, what is that German taste in art into whose prettinesses and wittinesses the wild hunt of Liliencron’s language burst, as the avant-gardist Gottfried August Bürger’s once had?54 Heine’s poetry: it is mood or opinion with the Hark! hark! of jingling bells. This poetry is melody—so much so that it demands to be set to music. And it owes more to this music than its own for its success with the philistines. Simplicissimus once poked fun at the kind of German who crosses himself to ward off Heine, only to sing his “Lorelei” later on, blissfully drunk on emotion, “nevertheless.”55 Two images: but the contrast isn’t as glaring as it may seem at first glance. For the philistines who curse Heine don’t rise to the true philistine confession until the second image, when they sing him. When a popular song is made out of a poem, is it insight into the poem’s literary value that makes the song popular?56 How many German philistines would know what Heine means if Herr Silcher hadn’t set “I know not what it means”57 to music? But is it an argument for the poet that this clientele would have clamored for his undifficult poetry even if it hadn’t been delivered to them on wings of song?58 Oh, this narrow-minded hatred of Heine, which targets the Jew, tolerates the poet, and bleats along with a sentimental melody with or without a musician’s later help. Art brings life into disorder. The poets of humanity restore chaos again and again; the poets of society do their singing and lamenting, their blessing and cursing, within a well-ordered world. All those for whom a poem amounts to an agreement between themselves and the poet, sealed with rhyme, flee to Heine. All those who wish to join the poet in his pursuit of urbane allegories and his establishment of relations with the outside world will consider Heine a greater poet than Goethe. But those who consider a poem to be the revelation of a poet lost in his observation of Nature, not of a Nature lost in the observations of the poet, will be satisfied to reckon Heine a technician skilled at pleasure and sorrow, a speedy outfitter of stock moods. When Goethe shares in—and shares with us—the “silence on every peak,” he does it with such intensely felt kinship that the silence can be heard as an intimation.59 But if a pine tree in the North stands on a barren peak and dreams of a palm tree in the Orient, it is an exceptional courtesy of Nature to oblige Heine’s yearning allegorically. Seeing an artful fake like this in the show window of a confectioner or a feuilletonist might put you in a good mood if you’re an artist yourself. But does that make its manufacturer one?60 Even the plain outline of a perception of Nature, from which barely visible threads spin themselves out toward the soul, seems to me more lyrical than the dressing-up of ready-made moods, because it presupposes empathy. In this sense, Goethe’s “Stillness and Sea” is lyric poetry, as are Liliencron’s lines: