READING HEINRICH HEINE

In the diplomatic sense: reading Reisebilder 97
role attributed to Zeus by the Promethean speaker of the poem: for in
the Harzreise Heine is the one who dreams of himself slicing at thistles;
Goethe had been identified with the god, and tacitly Heine’s narrator hence
challenges the Olympian author of the poem. This complex trope had
been prepared in the first of the dream sequences of the Harzreise. There,
the narrator dreams he is back in the Law School at Göttingen University
where Themis, the Titanic goddess of justice herself, beleaguered by
the dry scholasticism of academic lawyers, finally cries out that she can
hear ‘the voice of dear Prometheus, bound by scornful power and silent
force to the rock of his martyrdom’ (B 2, 109–10). It seems more than likely
that the figure of Prometheus here alludes emblematically to Napoleon,
though Heine may also see himself as the spirit of freedom who cannot
be liberated by the anachronistic discourse of German academic law, and
from which he has fled into the other freedoms of the landscape. 9
Because the force of gesture and speech within traditional communities
have been lost to modernity, Heine devises the emblematic and allusive
methods that we see at work in the episodes from the Harz journey
considered here. Yet because the implications of ‘a single sound, a single
facial expression, a single silent movement’ cannot any longer be assumed,
Heine’s Reisebilder repeatedly draw attention to the possibilities of reading
and interpretation. In the Harz journey, the need for interpretative vigilance
is expounded in relation to the theatre in Berlin. One of the students
staying on the Brocken describes his recent trip to the city, concentrating
on a restaurant and the gossip of the theatrical world. This cues Heine’s
narrator to offer extensive, scurrilous commentary on the significance of
costume in a city so devoted to appearances. Finally, as the most difficult of
the aesthetic practices under consideration, Heine explains ‘the diplomatic
significance of the ballet’ (B 2, 147). According to this reading, when the
dancer ‘gradually rises to full expansion’ (B 2, 148), for instance, he actually
represents ‘our excessively large friend in the east’, Russia. 10
Heine’s anxieties about the likely response of the Prussian censors to this
passage of satire were well founded. 11 Yetitisnot the specific allusion to
themes and issues in German and Prussian post-Napoleonic politics that is
important here, so much as the possibility of allegorical reading that Heine
is able to introduce. In a contrast that has been taken as representative of
Heine’s own writing, he exclaims: ‘how great is the number of exoteric and
how small the number of esoteric theatre-goers!’ (B 2, 148). The esoteric
audience must be alerted to the second order of significance from which the
‘exoteric’ outsiders are supposedly excluded. Such a community of reading
can restore – for political purposes in modernity and for those in the