READING HEINRICH HEINE

From the private life of Everyman: Buch der Lieder 85
Where Herr Schlegel’s translations are perhaps too soft, where his verses are sometimes
like whipped cream, so that when you have taken them in your mouth you
don’t know whether to chew them or drink them, Voß is as hard as stone, and you
must fear that you might break your jaw if you pronounce his verses. But what
marked out Voß so powerfully is the strength with which he struggled against every
difficulty ...(B3, 384)
The variations in metrical regulation which the free rhythms of Die Nordsee
bring about, and the impersonations of the final spondee (or its trochaic
substitute) in German hexameters (‘gedankenbekümmert und einsam’
(‘troubled by thoughts and alone’), ‘Schreiten über den wimmelnden
Marktplatz’ (‘striding over the populous market’)), can give a similar sense
of weight and personal inflection. But the awkwardness of Voß’s versification
is also emblematic for Heine. This significance is most fully apparent in
his critical essays on German culture, thought and religion, ZurGeschichte
der Religion und Philosophie and Die Romantische Schule. Heretwo great
names typically mark out the German tradition of intellectual emancipation
that Heine sketches: Luther and Lessing. When Voß is invoked as
arepresentative of German intellectual resistance to the irrationality and
Catholicism of the Romantic school, his importance is elucidated with
reference to Heine’s other two critical heroes. In Heine’s cultural history,
then, Voß is presented as the ‘greatest citizen [Bürger] in German literature
after Lessing’(B 3, 382), who himself appears in Heine’s account of German
thought as Luther’s greatest successor. Sure enough, the same trio of
intellectual heroes is completed in Die Romantische Schule when Voß and
Luther are linked by their common origins as peasants from Lower Saxony.
In Die Bäder von Lucca the same three authors are invoked in Heine’s
polemic against the aristocratic hauteur of the classicizing poet August von
Platen’s anti-Semitism, as well as his fashionable Catholic sympathies. 48
And in this Italian Reisebild Heine even presents himself as next in line
to Luther, Lessing and Voß. The debates and public polemics launched
by or against Voß relate to his attack on Friedrich von Stolberg, who had
converted to Roman Catholicism. For Heine, Voß therefore represents a
kind of Lutheran earthiness, and the literary cause célèbre to which Heine
refers in his Italian travelogue and in the ideological essays of the early 1830s
was contemporary with the composition of Buch der Lieder. 49 In the later
essays, Heine associates Voß with a polemical style, like Luther’s, that is
direct, even coarse, and virile (‘derbkräftig’, ‘starkmännlich’). The presence
of Voß in the North Sea style hence signifies more than a technical resource
for versification. It also corresponds to Heine’s own ironic rationalism and
his resistance to Romantic obfuscation and moodiness.