READING HEINRICH HEINE

In the diplomatic sense: reading Reisebilder 95
the modern sensibility has ‘effortfully changed into the paper money of
book definitions’ (B 2, 119). A little later, in Die Reise von München nach
Genua, Heine himself will operate with a more abstract symbolism. The
crucifix he describes there, propping up and also overgrown by a vine, has
been taken to represent the opposition between the life-affirming force of
Heine’s own ‘Hellenism’, celebrating the sensuous Greek affirmation of the
body, and the deadly asceticism of Christianity. 3
The way in which immediacy of meaning and expression have been
traded in for a bookish mediation of what is meant to be spontaneous is a
recurrent issue in Heine’s Harzreise.Just as in Lyrisches Intermezzo XXXVII
of Buch der Lieder, where the middle-class strollers greet nature as if they
have read Goethe’s famous salutation in ‘Mailied’ once too often, so too
the various tourists and travellers encountered on the Harz journey distort
their direct apprehension of the natural world by the literary frame they
impose on it. This literary deformation of experience reaches its climax in
an encounter that ironically echoes the deeply human perception of the
ancient cupboard (‘Schrank’) in Klausthal. During Heine’s overnight stay
on the summit of the Brocken, two students, under the excessive influence
of alcohol and Ossian, mistake a wardrobe (‘Kleiderschrank’) for an open
window, and, standing before it, address Night in tones of high melancholy.
They have evidently been reading Goethe’s Werther (who similarly recites
long passages from the fake Celtic bard) and in all likelihood too many odes
by Klopstock (mediator of Werther’s passion for Lotte) into the bargain. 4
This episode is one of a number of aspects of the Harzreise that play on
Heine’s reception of Goethe. This Goethean subtext of the book can provide
a striking example of the way Heine deals with the failure of immediacy in
modern experience, by embracing patterns of mediation and indirection
in order to recreate the community of meaning he had seen in the fishing
community of Norderney. In the modern context, however, it is recreated
for critical purposes.
The Harzreise breaks off and announces itself as a fragment before Heine’s
narrative of his real journey, in September 1824,reaches his notorious visit
to Goethe in Weimar. The misplaced oratory of the two students on the
Brocken amounts to a casual parody of the great man’s first novel; and the
entire project can be seen as an allusion to Goethe’s own Harz journey in
1777 and to the enigmatic poem that recalls it, ‘Harzreise im Winter’ (‘Harz
Journey in Winter’). 5 However, disappointed by the frailty of the elderly
poet in 1824, ashis letter to Rudolf Christiani of 16 May 1825 makes very
plain, Heine establishes himself in explicit competition with his predecessor.
When the visit was finally written up for public consumption in 1833, at