READING HEINRICH HEINE

160 Reading Heinrich Heine
that the liberal camp would be split unnecessarily. Heine’s intentions, in
terms of style, or structure, or argument in the Denkschrift remain profoundly
obscure because they escape the categories of ethical indignation
and universal aspiration that Börne’s model – his Titanic sword – sets out to
impose.
incidental writing
The presentation of the figure of Börne in the Denkschrift is constantly
interrupted. The book begins conventionally enough with a childhood
memory of seeing the great man in Frankfurt, but the expository tone
(which is already ironic when Börne’s very gait is described as revealing
‘something secure, definite, characterful’ (B 4, 10,myemphasis)) soon gives
way to a different tone. Heine turns from his ostensible theme to make
other, apparently casual remarks. A key word for this procedure is ‘incidental’
(‘beiläufig’), as in the broadening of his theme which Heine introduces
in the following way: ‘Prose nowadays, as I should like to remark in passing
(‘beiläufig’), has not been created without much effort, consideration, contradiction
and difficulty’ (B 4, 11). This instance of the incidental occurs
in a passage which itself appears to move away from Börne’s reputation
to a discussion of what might also seem incidental – the relationship of
his journalism to the history of style. The anecdotal and associative move
shifts the focus of the opening of the Denkschrift from Börne’s stature as
a critic (which the first paragraphs have gently guyed) to the activity of
writing as such. In this way, by abandoning the rhetoric appropriate to
his own text, as a posthumous celebration or even an extended obituary,
Heine can resist and examine the authority which, he recognizes, Börne
transferred from theatre criticism to criticism of politics, but without necessarily
arrogating the same authority to himself. The Börne book remains
neither an apologia nor a critique, but instead contests the authority of a
style.
The casual or incidental quality of Heine’s writing itself stands in a parodic
relation to what Heine calls Börne’s ‘jumps’ and ‘jumping from one
subject to another’ (B 4, 62, 63). In Book 3, Heine ascribes this feature of
Börne’s conversation (which the Denkschrift regularly and wittily impersonates)
to ‘moody madness’ (B 4, 63)–that is, to a real mania – rather than
to ‘mad moods’ that might pass as quickly as they come. What is involuntary
for one writer becomes a calculation of style for the other; but in this
too Heine challenges Börne on the terrain of his own authorship, where