They suppressed all his books. But they could not erase his poems from the anthologies and were forced to reprint them with what every schoolboy knew was a lie: ‘By an Unknown Author’. They seized a statue of him, once owned by the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and used it for target-practice. In 1941, on Hitler’s personal orders, his grave in the Montmartre cemetery was destroyed. It made no difference. In the last forty years, Heine’s work has been more widely and furiously debated, especially by Germans, than that of any other figure in their literature.
