READING HEINRICH HEINE

From the private life of Everyman: Buch der Lieder 77
and the world. Far from steadying our focus on the subjectivity of the texts
(in both senses), it can be increasingly disturbed.
A sequence of three poems in the Homecoming (Heimkehr XXXVII–
XXXIX) usefully demonstrates what is at stake. The first of these is ‘Die heilgen
drei Könige aus Morgenland’ –apoem probably best known because
of Richard Strauss’s setting. The three stanzas retell the journey of the Magi
to Bethlehem:
Die heilgen drei Könige aus Morgenland,
Sie frugen in jedem Städtchen:
‘Wo geht der Weg nach Bethlehem,
Ihr lieben Buben und Mädchen?’
Die Jungen und Alten, sie wußten es nicht,
Die Könige zogen weiter;
Sie folgten einem goldenen Stern,
Der leuchtete lieblich und heiter.
Der Stern blieb stehn über Josephs Haus,
Da sind sie hineingegangen;
Das Öchslein brüllte, das Kindlein schrie,
Die heilgen drei Könige sangen.
(B 1, 126)
The three holy kings from eastern lands
Ask everyone who passes:
‘Where is the road to Bethlehem,
My dear little lads and lasses?’
Not young nor old can tell them where,
The kings go on aweary;
They follow a star of golden light
That shines down bright and cheery.
The star stands still at Joseph’s house,
They go in gifts abringing;
The little ox lows, the little child bawls,
The three holy kings are singing.
(D 91–2)
Both the ‘four-square’ rhyming (of ‘weiter’ with ‘heiter’ in stanza 2 and
‘hineingegangen’ with ‘sangen’ in stanza 3) and the cacophony that ends
the poem suggest a degree of irony which is hard to define or fix. Strauss’s
setting probably provides the finest commentary, with the penultimate
line sliding chromatically across a sequence of diminished sevenths, full of
uncertainties, before arriving in the last line at C major, towards the end of