READING HEINRICH HEINE

134 Reading Heinrich Heine
points of contemporary reference. One is the ideological potpourri which
is satirized in the bear’s speeches. The other is emphasized by Heine himself
when he speaks of so-called political poetry: the muses had been called upon
‘to enter the service of the fatherland – say as army canteen girls of freedom
or as washerwomen of Christian-Germanic nationhood’. 11 This alternative
bridges a certain political divide: it is not only the early political poets of
the 1840s such as Herwegh or Hoffmann von Fallersleben whom Heine has
in view, but also liberal-nationalist authors like Max Schneckenburger and
Nikolaus Becker who distinguished themselves with works like ‘Die Wacht
am Rhein’ during the ‘Rhine crisis’ of 1840. 12 Hence the terms set out in the
preface make no distinction between Vormärz radicals on the left and liberal
patriots. In fact the ‘washerwomen of Christian-Germanic nationhood’
(‘Wäscherinnen der christlich-germanischen Nationalität’(B 4, 494)) are
reminiscent of Heine’s other portmanteau description of the state of play
in German culture after the defeat of Napoleon in Die Romantische Schule:
When German patriotism and German nationhood finally achieved total victory,
what also triumphed definitively was the popular Germanic-Christian Romantic
school – ‘neo-German-religious-patriotic art’. (B 3, 380)
The range of Heine’s targets – from the poets of political Tendenz to the
post-Napoleonic Romantic backlash (of which Tieck is Heine’s favourite
representative) – seems dangerously broad. Indeed, one influential modern
critic has written that ‘the political premises of Atta Troll border on
nonsense’; 13 and more recently that, read by the standards of the ‘animal
fable’, ‘the ideological message gets completely tangled up in contradictions
that cannot be resolved dialectically’. 14 In sum, then, this case for ideological
confusion asserts that even in a context of literary satire, it is hard to see
how the critique of Freiligrath’s poem ‘Der Mohrenfürst’ (‘The Moorish
Prince’), whose doubtful similes are pilloried throughout Atta Troll, and,
on a different level, of Herwegh can be successfully married to the attack
on the Romantics suggested by the washerwomen of the preface.
In his letter to Laube of 20 October 1842,Heine claims to write in some
sense in defence of ‘the old Romanticism that they are trying to club to
death.’ On this view, his work reinstates the old Romantic manner, not
as mere repetition but as a modernization or ‘bringing up to date’. By the
time he comes to write the preface, however, in 1846, Heine himself has
taken a rod to the Romantic past:
Iwrote [Atta Troll] for my own pleasure and enjoyment, in the capricious dreamlike
manner of the Romantic school in which I had passed the pleasantest years of my
youth, finally giving the schoolmaster a thrashing. (B 4, 495; D,421)