READING HEINRICH HEINE

96 Reading Heinrich Heine
the end of Book 1 of Die Romantische Schule,Heine admits to nothing but
admiration for the Olympian figure he had encountered:
Even in great age Goethe’s eye remained as divine as it had been in his youth. Time
may have covered his head too with snow, but it could not make him bow. He held
it high and proud, and if he stretched out his hand it was as if, with his finger, he
could prescribe the path the stars were to take in the sky. Some have claimed to see
a cold trait of egotism about his mouth; but this feature too is characteristic of the
eternal gods, indeed of the father of the gods, great Jupiter himself, with whom I
have already compared Goethe. (B 3, 405) 6
By implication, however, Goethe’s identification with Jupiter is already
present in the Harzreise.
Heine organizes the material of his travel picture both geographically
and through the alternation of day and night, of lived experience and
emblematic dreams. The second of these recounts a version of ‘the old
fairy-tale of how a knight descends into a deep well where the loveliest
princess has been paralysed in sleep by a magic spell’. In his attempt to
liberate the princess, Heine the knight is assailed by an army of dwarves,
who ‘horribly wag their heads’. Heine goes on to explain: ‘It was only as
I struck out at them and the blood spurted out that I realized they were
the bearded red thistle-heads that I had sliced off with my stick the day
before on the country road’ (B 2, 121). 7 To see how the fuller meaning of
this passage is mediated – how Heine challenges the Olympian Goethe – it
is necessary to note the detail of the German text: Heine notices ‘daß es die
rotblühenden, langbärtigen Distelköpfe waren, die ich den Tag vorher an
der Landstraße mit dem Stocke abgeschlagen hatte’ (my italics). The image
of striking off thistle-heads explicitly recalls the opening lines of Goethe’s
famous poem on ‘Prometheus’ in which the Titan shouts to Zeus (Jupiter):
Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus,
MitWolkendunst,
Und übe, dem Knaben gleich,
DerDisteln köpft,
An Eichen dich und Bergeshöhn... 8
Cover up your heaven, Zeus,
With misty clouds
And try your strength, just like a boy
Slicing the heads off thistles,
On oaks and mountain tops.
We should note that Zeus is the one like a boy hacking at thistles.
Through an allusion to Goethe’s poem, Heine identifies himself with the