READING HEINRICH HEINE

In the diplomatic sense: reading Reisebilder 101
the Berlin texts already lay the groundwork for the methods and tone of
what is to come: so although Heine himself conceives of travel writing with
a specifically urban focus as a new and different kind of ‘Reisebild’ in a
letter to Moses Moser at the end of 1825, and dismisses the Berlin letters as
‘padding’ in the concluding text of the sequence of travel pictures, in fact
the Berlin letters already demonstrate the development and significance of
the techniques we have considered. 15
Heine famously remarks that the defeat of Napoleon occasioned his
Prussian nationality (B 6/1, 457), 16 and he remained something of a stranger
in the Prussian capital. In the third of his Briefe aus Berlin he gleefully lists
other young authors as ‘not from Berlin’ – and would clearly like to see
himself aligned with them as a new talent in the city. 17 The tension between
the city and the provinces is apparent in Heine’s outsider position in the
very first letter:
Don’t think that I would forget our Westphalia so soon. September 1821 still lingers
too well in my memory. The lovely valleys around Hagen, the friendly Overweg
road in Unna, pleasant days in Hamm, splendid Fritz von B., you W., the antiquities
in Soest, even the Paderborn Heath–Isee it all vividly before me. (B 2, 9)
This introduction is designed to legitimate the letter form adopted and to
guarantee its authenticity: the figures addressed really were the editors of
the Anzeiger, but we can already recognize the tension between a modern
urban world and a vague bond with nature that also displays its rootedness
in German history:
I can still hear the ancient oak forests rustling around me and every leaf whispering:
Here dwelt the ancient Saxons, the last to forfeit their beliefs and their German
essence. I can still hear an ancient rock calling to me: Wanderer, stay, here Arminius
conquered Varus. (B 2, 9)
The allusion to the story of Hermann’s (Arminius’) victory over the Roman
legions seems to open the theme of patriotism, but beyond this sense of the
allusion Heine is also implying the political issue of freedom –afurther
dimension of the tension between Berlin as the capital of Prussia, the evocation
of Heine’s Westphalian home and the German national idea embodied
in Hermann. Within this set of tensions Heine registers the changing sense
of national identity in the transition to modernity that he outlines again
in Nordsee III. There is also a sense that Hermann’s battle against Varus
constitutes the first of a number of literary allusions to the work of the
dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. His play Die Hermannsschlacht (Hermann’s
Battle) evokes the absence of German national unity through the figures