READING HEINRICH HEINE

44 Reading Heinrich Heine
the development of Heine’s later poetry, society had evacuated the subject,
on Heißenbüttel’s account, here in the journalism of Lutetia any subjective
selectivity gives way before the documentation of historicity:
Everything that belongs within the domain of social, historical and experiential
actuality is sayable and must be said. 15
In attempting to define the new aesthetic project envisaged in Heine’s work,
Heißenbüttel returns to the passage from the epistle dedicatory to Lutetia
where Heine proposes the daguerreotype as a model of his journalism.
His earlier Heine essay used the same image to identify the alternative
to ‘metaphorical discourse’, which Heißenbüttel sees in Heine’s commitment
to a variety of linguistic documentary, precluding the old aesthetic
categories of reflection (and of reflexivity). In the later case, Heißenbüttel
identifies the ‘daguerreotypical’ method of Heine’s texts with the elements
of polemic and prurience, deviance and frivolity which make the most
personal aspects of Heine’s writing so signally short of (moral) character
(‘Charakterlosigkeit’ is the word Heißenbüttel uses, parodying the shocked
tones of Marggraff). Heine’s virulent polemic against the homosexual
Platen (a commonplace in the tradition of Heine criticism since Kraus)
is cited in illustration, but one might as readily think of his prurient interest
in Börne’s domestic arrangements in Ludwig Börne: eine Denkschrift,
or the celebration of the goddess Hammonia at the end of Deutschland.
Ein Wintermärchen.
The daguerreotype represents the fly as well as it does the noblest horse,
Heine had written; for Heißenbüttel this method opens up those areas
of language and experience which previously had been foreclosed by the
imposition of moral categories. Seen in this way, Heine’s notorious attack
on Platen can be understood in broader terms. For in his Memoiren,
Heißenbüttel reminds us, Heine also drew a parallel between his own
maternal dependency and the public gossip surrounding Grabbe’s relationship
with his mother. 16 Heißenbüttel believes that, in this respect, Heine
even anticipates Freud: the dark side of the Romantics is turned outwards
from the Gothic and supernatural to suggest an account of political and
social, and literary behaviour in terms of primal drives, the libido and the
unconscious.
Such a reading presents a final response to Karl Kraus. Heißenbüttel’s
earlier essay ‘Materialismus und Phantasmagorie im Gedicht’ had recalled
Kraus’s complaints of irony and cynicism, a lack of seriousness, and a
linguistic randomness in Heine. Here, in the later study, Heißenbüttel
identifies such randomness as the principle of literary selectivity established