HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
\\'as an affectation and less dazzling than the Oriental
verses of Lamartine or Victor Hugo. His poetry
drew its best nourishment from the soil of European
culture; Occidental feeling and thought were
the fundamental conditions of its development. In
politics he was temperamentally an aristocrat but
the reactionary stupidities of the Metternich regime
drove him into the republican camp. His function
in the war of liberation of mankind was to make
this regime appear foolish in the eyes of all thoughtful
men. Therein he succeeded perfectly. His wit
was the deadly weapon nature placed in his hand
and he wielded it with deadly effect.
In contrast to the unsensational stand of Baeriein
and of Walter is the more argumentative biography
by Ludwig Marcuse, which was written
originally for Germans on the eve of Hitler's rise
to power and which was translated for English
readers in the fateful year 1933. The nervous unrest
of the early Nineteen-Thirties is reflected in
its pages and in its very titie: Heine, A Life Between
Love and Hate. These were the years of
class conflicts and passionately held opinions, when
storm-troops of various ideologies fought for dominance
in the streets of German cities and when
calm objectivity, even on the part of scholars, was
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