READING HEINRICH HEINE

98 Reading Heinrich Heine
know – the ‘communal immediacy’ of gesture celebrated among the fisher
folk of Norderney. 12
Heine’s great ‘pictures of travel’ return to this possibility of ‘diplomatic
meaning’ where what a casual listener or reader imagines has been
said in reality neglects the text and its full implications. In the pseudoautobiographical
‘Reisebild’ Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand (Ideas: The Book of Le
Grand)Heine offers a different model from the allusive and allegorical pattern
we have seen in the Harzreise.Between extravagant self-stylization and
fictionalized autobiography in this text, Heine is able to generate a thematic
structure organizing personal relationships and entanglements (‘love’), the
political freedom represented by the French Revolution of which Napoleon
is the emblem and standard-bearer, and the difficulties encountered by an
author working under conditions of censorship. Famously, these difficulties
are summarized in the four words making up chapter 12 amid a welter
of dashes that represent the censors’ imagined excisions: ‘The German
censors – [etc.] idiots’ (B 2, 283). This extremely undiplomatic style distracts
from a sublinguistic or paralinguistic practice of communication that
develops the allegorical implications that emerge in the Harzreise.
The possibility of another level or mode of communication appears at
the very centre of the narrative in the figure of the drummer Le Grand,
who is quartered with Heine’s family during the Napoleonic occupation
of Düsseldorf. Although they have no common language, Le Grand is
able to ‘drum’ the history of the Revolution for young Heine’s benefit, so
that political communication is possible without direct discourse. Thus,
although Heine’s narrator has little or no French, drumming the rhythm of
the ‘Marseillaise’ expresses ‘liberté’; and the beat of the revolutionary song
‘Ça ira, ça ira – les aristocrates àlalanterne’ renders the violent ‘égalité’
that will simply string up the aristocracy (B 2, 271). Le Grand can articulate
Heine’s political satire by associating the idea of stupidity with the Dessau
March and Germany itself with a rhythm transcribed as ‘dum – dum –
dum’: dumb. The point is made by association. Such indirection is sketched
for the reader in other terms, however: in contrast to the emblematic tropes
of the Harzreise,inIdeen. Das Buch Le Grand Heine draws attention to an
art of mnemonics and quotation. Heine’s autobiographical narrator recalls
the day when the Grand Duchy of Berg, where he grew up, was ceded to
Napoleon, and the Elector departed (in fact to become King of Bavaria).
After this abdication of power, the text records the arrival of French troops –
but thereafter order is restored and school resumes. This return to normality
allows Heine at the beginning of chapter 7 an apparently innocent segue
into the regular curriculum, and he tells us what had to be learned by