HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
he did not like the German social revolurionaries
he met in Paris, nor they him. He smelt the Nazarenes
in their doctrines and they in him the unprincipled
aristocrat. Quite rightly so, in so far as
a pagan does not believe in ideals but only in human
personality. . . . Cesare Borgia and Pope Julius II
of the epoch of the Renaissance would have been
Heine's ideal of the future humanity, just as a generation
later they were that of Nietzsche." *
As the struggle between East and West deepened
towards the close of the Nineteen-Forties,
each camp sought to enlist Heine on its side. Writers
of both camps, however, were in agreement on
one aspect of the poet's personality: he was a Citizen
of the World and not primarily a German or a
Jew: he was the forerunner of the Good European
whose fealty was to the United Nations and not
to any single sovereign state: he was the cosmopolite
who broke through the artificial political barriers
that separated one people from another and
whose slogan was "Individuals of the world, unite!"
The first post-War edition of Heine's works in
the original tongue, designed to be circulated in the
zones of all the four occupying powers, therefore
stressed this aspect of the poet. It appeared in Vienna
in 1946 under the editorship of Otto Stober. Simi-
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