READING HEINRICH HEINE

100 Reading Heinrich Heine
act of decipherment. But the idea of a quotation-loan takes up again the
connection between experience, writing, and the economic context that
had been invoked in the bookish paper money that robs the ‘pure gold of
intuition’ of its immediacy in Nordsee III.
In order to ensure that the possibility of a potentially subversive art
of quotation is properly recognized as part of his associative technique,
Heine finally makes a proposal that links his reflections on quotation to the
mnemonic programme outlined earlier: ‘For the benefit of literature, I will
not withhold another invention and will communicate it gratis: namely,
I think it advisable to quote all obscure authors along with their housenumber’
(B 2, 284). The recollection of the function of house-numbers
in the mnemonic strategy described earlier is a sufficient prompt to the
reader to identify the single purpose of these patterns of implication and
insinuation.
The development of a prose style based on the use of significant detail,
isolated from its original contexts, like the art of quotation Heine describes
here, gives some substance to Karl Kraus’s critical remarks on the inauthenticity
of his style, considered earlier. The elements of an allusive form
appear to separate writing from its ‘real’ content. What should be instrumental
in the appropriate description of the world becomes, in Kraus’s
terms, ornamental – at best the quirky evocation of a personality. Paradoxically,
as we have seen, the methods of Heine’s pictures of travel
make explicit the exploitation of allegorical structures of which Kraus
complains.
apt symbols: berlin
Across the range of Heine’s Reisebilder prose, the central intelligence is
urban. This is explicit in the Harzreise with its pastoral appeal to the life
and example of the shepherd boy, alongside the miners of Klausthal, but one
could say that the whole sequence of the travel writing has a metropolitan
frame. From the early 1820s onwards, Heine formed a sketchy plan for what
he calls a ‘metropolitan correspondence’, developing the pseudo-epistolary
form he exploits in the earliest travel writing, the Briefe aus Berlin (Letters
from Berlin (1822)) and the essay Über Polen (On Poland (1823)). Until fairly
recently these earlier travel writings were not printed in association with the
Reisebilder proper, but relegated to a place among Heine’s ‘minor works’. 14
The text on Poland interrupted the Berlin reportage, and the final published
form of the Berlin letters salvaged what was possible from what appeared
originally in Heine’s local newspaper, the Rhein-westfälischer Anzeiger. Yet