HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Bard of Democracy
rejected as a confession of weakness. Marcuse's biography
has therefore less value as a statement of
facts than as a collection of insights and intuitive
flashes and as a seismograph of the German state
of mind during the dying days of the Weimar Republic.
Heine is shown as a bourgeois revolutionary
and as a discomfited pagan — traits equally characteristic
of his biographer. Much is made of his
role as a link between Germany and France —
again an ideal of his biographer, then also on the
verge of exile. The fact that Germany tolerated
no memorial to Heine leads Marcuse to the following
interesting conclusion: "He has a memorial in
every soul that understands his songs. He has a
memorial in every mind that realizes his — our —
situation between unbehef and the soul's nostalgia,
between bourgeois culture and a post-bourgeois social
order. But if he is ever to have a memorial that
is not only in the heads and hearts of individuals
but is the recognition of a community — then let
it be on the day when France and Germany abandon
their centuries' old enmity. And let it not be
in Diisseldorf that is ashamed of him, nor in Hamburg
where his only pleasure lay in thinking himself
superior to everyone else — but somewhere
along the frontier between France and Germany,
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