HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
mently was the official governing class: the stupid
legislators who had interdicted his writings and had
kept him an exile. He yearned for the spiritual Germany,
its hallowed traditions, its marvelous legends,
its august historic memories, while he opposed the
material Germany, given over to the rule of tyrants
with their satrapies of bigots and fools.
Michael Monahan's volume was the earliest of
nine full-length biographies of Heine, which appeared
in Enghsh in the interval between the two
World Wars. Ludwig Diehl's biographic novel,
published in 1926, borrowed its title The Sardonic
Smile from Arnold's essay of 1863. Lewis Browne's
That Man Heine was a best seller in 1927. Other
biographies followed in rapid succession: by Henry
Baeriein in 1928, H. G. Atkins in 1929, H. Walter
in 1930, Ludwig Marcuse in 1933, Antonina Vallentin
in 1934, and Louis Untermeyer in 1937.
These books and the unending flood of translations,
scholarly monographs, and popular arricles attested
to the continuing vogue of this many-sided personality
in the 1920's and 1930's.
Henry Baerlein's biography, Heine, the Strange
Guest, best exemplified the sane, uncontroversial
approach during the eariier decade. It gave the
known facts accurately and soberly. It avoided
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