READING HEINRICH HEINE

156 Reading Heinrich Heine
In this version Heine does not even take note of Laube’s advice, offered in
the earlier memoirs, that the book should include an ideological ‘mountain’
as a substantial alternative to Börne’s political position. But there is other
evidence to suggest that, in spite of minor variations, the gist of Laube’s
story is true. In a letter to him, just after publication, Heine himself recalls
the discussion of the ‘mountain’ which has not saved him from the political
manoeuvrings of his opponents, and particularly Karl Gutzkow; he adds:
Joking aside, my Börne is a very good book – yesterday evening I read two-thirds of
the Gutzkow Börne –God knows it had the same effect on my brain as a narcotic
draught. I slept soundly all night through. It is boring beyond measure. (DZ 288)
‘Joking aside’: the better book easily disqualifies its rival, Gutzkow’s Life,
and the aesthetic thereby disqualifies the tedious political correctness which
the moral tone of Börne’s commemoration was thought to demand. Heine
is convinced in all these cases of his own achievement, and the frivolity of
his (non-)self-defence repeats the style of the book itself. Although there is
some evidence that he was shaken by it, Heine does his best not to take the
criticism of his Denkschrift seriously. 12 He adopts instead a strategy of asides
and distractions, a focus on the apparently tangential – because at bottom
a certain kind of seriousness was the very thing that his facetiousness and
wit were designed to combat.
Campe had sensed that the German public had been wounded where it
was most sensitive, ‘in its innocent opinion’. And this seems to hint that
Heine’s Börne book cannot be read innocently – that it is a work of (and for)
careful reflection and calculation. 13 After the July Revolution, when Heine
moved to Paris, he had done his best to keep at arm’s length the German
republicans living there in exile. His resistance to their conspiratorial goingson
is extremely complex, but as he presents it, it begins with an intolerable
experience of men in smoke-filled rooms:
Imagine my shock: when I attended one of the popular gatherings I’ve just mentioned
in Paris, I found all these national saviours with tobacco pipes in their gobs,
and the whole room was so full of evil-smelling tobacco smoke that it went straight
to my chest, so that it would have been flatly impossible for me to say a single
word ...(B4, 75)
Heine’s allergic response to tobacco smoke is parallel to his famous repugnance
at the thought of shaking hands with the ‘Volk’:
Thus, e.g. you have stoutly to shake hands with all the audience, all these ‘brethren
and neighbours’. It may be meant metaphorically when Börne claims that, in the
event that a king ever shook his hand, he would hold it in the fire to purify it; but