READING HEINRICH HEINE

From the private life of Everyman: Buch der Lieder 67
verb, with its suggestion of painful effort, indicates a mismatch between
the cosiness enacted by the folksy diminutives and the represented human
situation. This incommensurability is present as a visual effect of distance
in Heimkehr III, the poem read by Adorno as a document of modern
alienation:
Jenseits erheben sich freundlich,
In winziger, bunter Gestalt,
Lusthäuser, und Gärten, und Menschen,
UndOchsen, und Wiesen, und Wald.
(B 1, 108)
Beyond in coloured patches
So tiny below, one sees
Villas and gardens and people
And oxen and meadows and trees.
(D 77)
The friendliness of the idyll serves only to stress the remoteness of such an
unspoilt world from the lyric subject. The young soldier in his diminutive
sentry-box (‘Schilderhäuschen’) confirms the discontinuity and, of course,
initiates the final movement of the poem towards its death-wish: ‘Ich wollt,
er schösse mich tot.’ The disconnection of the suicidal speaker from the
world of conventionalized Romantic responses converts the idyllic scene
into a list of objective tokens or emblems, signalled by their diminutive
scale.
The grammatical diminutives put in another satirical appearance in
Lyrisches Intermezzo XXXVII. ‘Philister in Sonntagsröcklein’ (‘Burghers in
Sunday clothes strolling’) begins quite simply by belittling its object: the
Sunday promenade of the bourgeoisie becomes for Heine another opportunity
to measure the disparity between a sentimental appropriation of
nature as a kind of ‘objective correlative’ and the philistine mentality – the
‘bourgeois subject’ – which sees itself reflected there.
Sie jauchzen, sie hüpfen wie Böcklein,
Begrüßen die schöne Natur.
(B 1, 89)
Like frisky young goats caracoling,
Salute nature’s beauties again.
(D 63)
The poem ‘Götterdämmerung’ (‘Twilight of the Gods’) at the end of Die
Heimkehr provides a more extended treatment of the same topic. 21 Here