HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Citizen of the World
McEachran hnked Heine not with his Romantic
generation but with an earher one, with the generation
of Lessing, Herder, and Goethe. The midnineteenth
century poet was, politicahy speaking,
a cosmopolitan of the eighteenth-century tradition.
He was a good European but he also had a distinct
flair for the peculiar quahties of the various nations
and he, therefore, looked forward to a concert
of nations rather than to the abolition of the
sovereign state. This good European wanted human
beings and political entities to cooperate in a
voluntary union for the greater good of all but at
the same time he did not want to see their distinguishing
characteristics eradicated. He had a strong
sense of individual personality: "It is indeed this intense
feeling of individual worth which provides
the key to the apparent dualism in his nature, the
combination of opposite quahties which so astonished
the contemporary world. Fundamentally he
was an individual of an aristocratic aloofness who
believed in liberty but not in equality, and was in
fact poles removed from any idea of leveling out
the social classes. ... He was a hberal in that he
urged men to throw off the shackles of despotism
in both thought and deed, but he urged it for individuals,
not for humanity-at-large. This is why
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