READING HEINRICH HEINE

The real Heine: Atta Troll and allegory 139
tiger, suggests that Heine had noticed this slip. Through his parody, the
local detail of the source text becomes the brief focus for the allusions he
had promised.
Each of these details sets in play a host of resonances, but none of them
provides a settled point of reference in terms of which the poem can be
unequivocally decoded. Canto VIII finds Atta Troll in the bosom of his
family. He is well into his stride denouncing the corruptions of humanity,
and he turns to a denunciation of progressive philosophers of religion –
the ‘atheists’ Feuerbach and Bauer. Against this the bear sets his own understanding
of the divine:
Selbst das kleinste Silberläuschen,
DasimBart des greisen Pilgers
Teilnimmt an der Erdenwallfahrt,
Singt des Ewgen Lobgesang!
Droben in dem Sternenzelte,
Auf dem goldnen Herrscherstuhle,
Weltregierend, majestätisch,
Sitzt ein kolossaler Eisbär.
(B 4, 515)
‘Even the smallest lice that nestle
In the beard of hoary pilgrims
And thus share their holy journey–
They too sing eternal praises!
‘In the starry tent above us,
On the golden throne of lordship,
Ruling all the world, majestic,
Sits a polar bear, a titan.’
(D 436)
The appearance here of the ‘starry tent’ directs the reader to Schiller’s
‘Ode to Joy’ – ‘Brüder – überm Sternenzelt / Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen’
(‘beyond the starry tent / there must dwell a loving father’). 21 Once this allusion
is recognized, the anomalous ‘silvery louse’ in the pilgrim’s beard offers
itself for scrutiny. Schiller was not the only poet to have hymned the cosmic
harmony; and Klopstock’s ‘Frühlingswürmchen,/ Das grünlichgolden
neben mir spielt’ (‘Springtime grub, / playing near me, green and gold’)
in ‘Die Frühlingsfeyer’(‘Spring Festival’) 22 provides a possible point of reference
– not a source, necessarily, but a context for the diction which is
being guyed by Atta Troll’s rhapsody. (Indeed, it has been claimed that,
earlier in the same passage, Heine has the saccharine nature-piety of the