The German Jew was a new phenomenon of European culture. For German anti-Semites, this posed an almost unbearable emotional problem, epitomized in Heine. They could not deny his genius; they found its expression in German intolerable. His ghostly presence, right at the centre of German literature, drove the Nazis to incoherent rage and childish vandalism. 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’.
