The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine

by Heinrich Heine, H. Havelock Ellis (Foreword)

The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine, by Heinrich Heine, with a forward by Havelock Ellis was originally published in 1887. The work is a collection of the English works, from a variety of previously translated sources. Pieces included Reisbilder Ideas, Last Words, English Fragments, The Liberation, Jan Steen, The Romantic School, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Florentine Nights, Don Quixote, Gods In Exile, and Confessions.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Classics, Fiction

177 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1887

About the author

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was one of the most significant German poets of the 19th century. He was also a journalist, essayist, and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder (art songs) by composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. Heine's later verse and prose is distinguished by its satirical wit and irony. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities. Heine spent the last 25 years of his life as an expatriate in Paris.

Reviews

[Zadignose]

I've spent quite a lot of time with this snarky bastard. He's a wit, a poet--of course--, an enigmatic figure, occasionally brilliant, often crude; and candid, which means he's quite capable of making a fool of himself. Is he ambivalent, or multi-valent? He's rocketing back and forth (through the decades--let's be fair, he lived a life) between atheism and theism, deism, Christianity, semi-sincere reverence for his own Jewish ancestry which he only occasionally 'confesses' to; love for, envy of, and dissent for Goethe; opposition to art-for-art's sake in preference for art-for-man's-sake--a position which he then undermines and then repudiates; Free-Thinking, revolutionary love for his fellow man, and a distaste for commoners; a romantic attachment to that spiritual-medieval-backwards-looking-superstitious-Catholic-claptrap that he despises, disowns, denies, then flatters with sugared--if only semi-sincere--phrases; and he's unhealthily and unreasonably obsessed with questions of national character.

And he's only known today as a lyric poet, and here I am mucking about with his prose works.

Well, I've gotten to know him, and I've gotten a new friend-acquaintance-foil from the 18th century whom I'll probably never really come to terms with. One who wrote a book of investigation into the philosophy of his teacher Hegel but then burned it unpublished because he feared Hell-fire, and because he resented the fact Hegel had fooled him into thinking himself a God.

I highlighted somewhere in the range of 200 passages. Dude's quotable. But I'm lazy now, so I'll just quote the very damned end of his writings and life, a passage from the end of his 'Confessions':

...In the spiritual as well as in the worldly hierarchy I have attained neither office nor rank; I have accomplished nothing in this beautiful world; nothing has become of me--nothing but a poet.

But no, I will not feign a hypocritical humility, I will not depreciate that name. It is much to be a poet, especially to be a great lyric poet, in Germany, among a people who in two things--in philosophy and in poetry--have surpassed all other nations. I will not with a sham modesty--the invention of worthless vagabonds--depreciate my fame as a poet. None of my countrymen have won the laurel at so early an age; and if my colleague, Wolfgang Goethe, complacently writes that 'the Chinese with trembling hand paints Werther and Lotte on porcelain,' I can, if boasting be in order, match his Chinese fame with one still more legendary, for I have recently learned that my poems have been translated into the Japanese language.

...But at this moment I am as indifferent to my Japanese fame as to my renown in Finland. Alas! fame, once sweet as sugared pine-apple and flattery, has for a long time been nauseous to me; it tastes as bitter to me now as wormwood. With Romeo, I can say, 'I am the fool of fortune.' The bowl stands filled before me, but I lack a spoon. What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in the choicest wines, and drunk from golden goblets, when I, myself, severed from all that makes life pleasant, may only wet my lips with an insipid potion? What does it avail me that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with laurel-wreaths, if meanwhile the shrivelled fingers of an aged nurse press a blister of Spanish flies behind the ears of my actual body. What does it avail me that all the roses of Shiraz so tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas! Shiraz is two thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where, in the dreary solitude of my sick-room, I have nothing to smell, unless it be the perfume of warmed napkins. Alas! the irony of God weighs heavily upon me! the great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, wished to show the petty, earthly, so-called German Aristophanes that his mightiest sarcasms are but feeble banter compared with His, and how immeasurably he excels me in humour and colossal wit.

[Richard S · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fabulous collection of writings by Heine, frequently funny, brilliantly insightful, and eerily prophetic. I just loved the attitude that he takes towards art and life. Poets should do more than just write poems, they have a great insight into life.

[Vincent Konrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

what a babe