HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
roots was indeed more frequent and was voiced by
George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and the poet's coreligionists.
In the main, however. Englishmen did
not place unusual stress upon his Jewishness. They
accepted it as an additional aspect of his complicated
personality and appraised it without love or
malice. During waves of anti-German feeling, it enabled
the English to make an exception in his behalf
and to see him as the Pan-European and Internationalist
rather than as a typical German. During
the First World War and during the Nineteen-
Thirties, when wrath against imperial Prussianism
and against Hitler's Third Reich was at its height,
Heine did not suffer detraction to the same extent
as did Wagner, Nietzsche, or his Romantic contemporaries.
He was rather accepted as an apostle of
democracy and as a prophet of European cataclysms
and world rebirth.
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