READING HEINRICH HEINE

chapter 5
In the diplomatic sense: reading Reisebilder
Throughout his life Heine liked to identify himself as the ‘author of the
Reisebilder’, those ‘travel pictures’ that brought him his first public success,
whether as fame or as notoriety – cardinally through the cheeky combination
of wit and sentiment in his Harzreise. While it is possible to identify
models for Heine’s prose methods, both in the rationalistic, political
travel writing of Georg Forster’s Ansichten vom Niederrhein (Views of the
Lower Rhine, 1791–94) and in the divagatory style of Laurence Sterne in A
Sentimental Journey, Heine constantly develops his allusive methods independently
and, in this way, generates a unique vehicle for cultural, social,
and political critique. The pictures of travel Heine wrote between 1825 and
1830, and among which he subsequently included some earlier texts on
Berlin, combine the freedoms of a fictionalized autobiography, the critical
aims of the essay proper, and the cultural and topographical description
of the places he visits. Here I consider, particularly in the works dealing
with cities, the ways in which Heine’s innovative style responds to aspects
of the transition to modernity under conditions of censorship. If, on the
one hand, the censor makes any form of direct political engagement difficult,
Heine recognizes that other factors – economic and cultural changes –
also play a part. The Reisebilder deal tactically and thematically with these
conditions. Heine’s style is a coruscating display of self-fashioning and
feigned self-disclosure, capable in the texts on Italy in particular (Die Reise
von München nach Genua (The Journey from Munich to Genoa), Die Bäder
von Lucca and Die Stadt Lucca (The City of Lucca)) of grotesque satire,
astonishing personal animus, and sustained social and political reflection.
The present discussion focuses on earlier and later texts that address the
question of direct or indirect communication, as an aspect of the original
genre of which they are examples.
Heine’s sustained innovation in the pictures of travel remains connected
to the lyrical project we have considered in Buch der Lieder, and to the
failures of affect that Heine puts on show in an exhausted poetic vocabulary.
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