HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

The Wandering Jew
early received his heritage of hate and his baptism
of fire. Untermeyer did not take Heine's Hellenism
too seriously. He felt that Heine assumed it purely
as a decoration, as a poetic garment. In his heart of
hearts, he was ever the Jew — in his overheated
hatred no less than in his luxuriant desires, in his
voluptuous love of the color and flavor of things,
in his feverish imagination and in his confident egoism,
in his tragic irony and in his hand-in-handwith-God
attitude.
In a later biography of Heine, published in 1937,
Untermeyer probed every aspect of the poet's paradoxical
personality — the biography bore the title
Poet and Paradox — and concluded that, although
Heine became superficially a Christian-German
lawyer, a French journalist, and an expatriated cosmopolite,
he still remained in the deepest reaches
of his soul a Jew. He was a Jew by birth, by early
training, by inner conviction. From his boyhood
in the Hebraic Cheder, through his Berlin experiences
in the Society for Jewish Culture and Science,
until the agonizing years of his mattress grave,
he never escaped his Jewish fate; nor, despite his
baptism, did he really wish to escape it.
If, as his co-religionists insisted, Heine was to be
appraised primarily as a Jew and not as a German,
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