READING HEINRICH HEINE

The real Heine: Atta Troll and allegory 145
Traum der Sommernacht, phantastisch
Zwecklos ist mein Lied! Ja, zwecklos
Wie das Leben, wie die Liebe!
Wittert nicht darin Tendenzen –
Atta Troll ist kein Vertreter
Von dickhäutig deutscher Volkskraft,
Undergreift nicht allegorisch
Mit der Tatze in die Zeit ein –
(B 4, 989–90) 29
Summer night’s dream, full of fancy,
Aimless is my song. Yes, aimless
As is love, as life is aimless!
Don’t go hunting ideology –
Atta Troll does not speak for
Thick-skinned German national forces,
Noryet does he, as an allegory,
Get his paws on current history.
Heine’s final version of this programme skips the gesture towards his aesthetic
opponents. His poem is now grandly
...zwecklos
Wie die Liebe, wie das Leben,
Wie der Schöpfer samt der Schöpfung!
(B 4, 501)
...aimless
As is love, as life is aimless,
As Creator and creation.
(D 426)
This solution reverts to principles that Heine had identified in Die Romantische
Schule when describing the debate between the Schillerian and
Goethean schools of thought: Goethe’s supporters, he notes,
...remarked with a smile that the Goethean heroes could hardly be represented
as moral, but that this promotion of morality that people demanded of Goethe’s
works was in no way the purpose of art: for as in the order of creation itself there
were no purposes. 30
Heine’s appeal in Atta Troll Canto III to Goethean heterocosmism – to art
as an independent other world (B 3, 393) aligns him with the principles
of what he himself called the period of art that coincided with Goethe’s
lifetime. But while he clearly distances himself in this way, even in the form
of satire, from the moral demands of political Tendenz, the independence of