HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Bard of Democracy
a foreboding of the air attacks which in June, 1940,
were increasing in violent intensity over the British
Isles. Heine's apocalyptic visions had become stark
reahty.
Did he not foretell — thus ran the Heine comment
in England at the height of the Second World
War — that in Germany there would be played
a drama compared to which the French Revolution
would seem but an innocent idyl and that, as
on the steps of an amphitheater, the nations would
group themselves around Germany to w itness the
terrible combat? Did he not implore Germany's
neighbors for their own good to be ever on guard,
etemally vigilant, weapons ui hand? Did he not
foresee the collapse of Westem culture and its replacement
by a new order that would be ruled by
the passions of the uncultivated rabble, a new society
that would ostracize pure art and expel the
idle poet, a society that might be compared to an
equally shorn and equally bleating herd over which
mled a smgle herdsman with an kon staff? How
easily his words could be re-interpreted as a prophecy
of the Nazi-dominated Europe at the opening
of the Nmeteen-Forties! Did he not also advise late
descendants to come into the world with a very
thick skin, because the future reeked of blood, disas-
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