READING HEINRICH HEINE

94 Reading Heinrich Heine
model of objective description. Heine claims that Goethe’s Die Italienische
Reise (Italian Journey) can represent a land and its people ‘in their true
forms and their true colours’ (B 2, 221). It will remain for later generations,
he argues, to discover other meanings in what, for Goethe himself,
remains naively unconscious. What is apparently objective is in fact full of
implications.
As we have seen, the poetry of Buch der Lieder seems dedicated to an investigation
of the way in which the vocabulary of lyrical subjectivity cannot any
longer be securely deployed. There too the guarantees of linguistic affect
have been cancelled. In the first of Heine’s pictures of travel, and the one
which achieved his first fame and notoriety, the Harzreise (Harz Journey),
he demonstrates in a series of examples how the language of ‘nature’ and the
assumptions of the pathetic fallacy have been corroded by utilitarianism,
by the sheer currency of literary language, particularly in the ‘educated’
middle class of ‘philistines’, and by the growth of tourism – in this case
around the Brocken mountain itself. Inherited values and meanings can
still be recognized in the lives of simple folk, but they remain the objects
of nostalgia for the modern traveller – unless he is vouchsafed the poetic
insight to glimpse a fairy-tale ‘Princess Ilse’ in the Ilse valley, as Heine’s
narrator does during his final ascent of the Ilsenstein. 2
The miners encountered in the course of the Harz journey, in Klausthal
and Zellerfeld, take on the role that the fishing communities of Norderney
will come to play in Nordsee III.
However quietly static the life of these people may seem, it is a truthful, living life
all the same. The ancient trembling woman sitting by the stove, opposite the great
cupboard, may well have been sitting there for a full quarter of a century, and her
thought and feeling is without doubt closely interwoven with every corner of the
stove and every single carving on the cupboard. And so the cupboard and stove are
alive, for a human being has poured part of her soul into them. (B 2, 118)
At this point in his Harz narrative Heine moves on to describe the living
significance of physical objects as they are experienced in the traditional
fairy-tale, and relates this intensity of meaning to the pre-modern engagement
of human and objective worlds in the pastoral simplicity of the mining
community or of childhood. Such a profound, as it were un-alienated, life
of the senses (‘solch tiefes Anschauungsleben’ (B 2, 119)) Heine paraphrases
in terms of the same immediacy (‘Unmittelbarkeit’) he will find again on
Norderney and in the forms of Goethe’s self-expression (B 2, 213, 221). What
is apparently direct and immediate in childhood and in the folk world of
the miners or fishermen is understood as the ‘pure gold of intuition’ which