READING HEINRICH HEINE

130 Reading Heinrich Heine
such as Cologne’s cathedral, Schelling’s God, the Prussian constitution etc., also
happened with Atta Troll –itwas never finished. In this unfinished form, passably
underpinned and rounded out only in outward appearance, I present it before
the public today, in obedience to a pressure which certainly does not come from
within. (B 4, 493; D,419)
Heine’s anxiety about the fragmentary nature of his poem when it reached
its final form is in stark contrast to his confident assurances to prospective
publishers four years earlier, in 1842. Cotta is told that the ‘little comic
epic . . . only needs a final polish’ – though even at this stage the question
of form is present. Heine thinks Atta Troll could do very well for Cotta’s
morning paper, the Morgenblatt,‘on account of its form – as a matter of fact,
it consists of very short pieces, as in the Cid ’(B4, 985). This suggests that
Heine was thinking of a serialization. His letter to Laube, who did eventually
publish the first version of the poem in the Zeitung für die Elegante Welt,
outlined a whole cultural-political programme of collaboration, as well as
offering Atta Troll as ‘the most significant thing I have written in verse’. The
poem was to be an ‘Evénement’ for the reading public and certainly worth
10 Louis d’or to Laube’s proprietor, and is clearly conceived by its author as
part and parcel of a specifically political project of some urgency. 3 It is worth
noting that at this stage Heine thinks the poem will be ‘done and dusted and
copied in my own hand [fix und fertig und eigenhändig abgeschrieben]’
(HSA XXII, 37) inanother week, after two weeks of final polishing. This
may well be self-advertisement, but only a month later Heine wrote to
Laube complaining of the difficulties he had encountered in completing the
poem:
I took refuge in these alterations, as I sadly now cannot do one part of the poem
that would be essential to round out the whole thing artistically, and nevertheless
wanted to give you a rounded, makeshift whole. The knot that holds the whole
plot together is missing – but the public won’t notice. They only ever look at
details. How right Goethe is when he says: ‘if you’re doing a piece, be sure it’s done
in pieces’. (HSA XXII, 43)
There is a sense in which Heine’s concern about the artistic coherence
of his work resulted from the circumstances of its publication.
Laube was full of anxieties about the effects of Heine’s frivolity, and the
result was textual revision to the point of self-censorship: the ‘tameness’ of
the journal that originally published Atta Troll and its editor’s political anxieties
imposed severe limitations. 4 In fact the failure of Laube’s solidarity
probably represented the greatest barrier to the satisfactory completion of
the poem. Its political problems remained unresolved because they could