READING HEINRICH HEINE

Ventriloquism in Ludwig Börne: eine Denkschrift 163
the literary circles of Paris, and by collaborating with French journals and
publishers, including Eugène Renduel, who initiated a French edition of
his work. 26 In the context of the Denkschrift,however, Heine senses he must
face sharp competition from Börne on home ground, in the programme of
their German publisher Campe.
In the account of their Frankfurt meeting in 1827, the first after Heine
had glimpsed Börne as a child, the talk rapidly turns to publishers:
Our conversation began with Cotta and Campe, and when, after some customary
complaints, I admitted the good qualities of the latter, Börne confided that he was
pregnant with the publication of his complete writings, and would make a note of
Campe for this project. (B 4, 13)
This sounds like a recommendation. 27 The possibility that Heine did recommend
his competitor is confirmed by Campe’s comment in a letter to
Heine on 28 December 1831: ‘You introduced Börne. He has returned his
verdict on you. Now are you happy?’ 28 But the possessive designation of
Campe in the Denkschrift as ‘publisher of the “Reisebilder”’ (B 4, 14) suggests
Heine’s own sensitivity on the matter. Certainly, as the years went by,
Heine increasingly suspected that Börne’s Briefe aus Paris were receiving
preferential treatment from Campe. 29
This straightforward struggle for pride of place in Campe’s enterprise is
the most direct ground for the growing conflict between the two writers.
Heine elaborates their competing claims in a number of ways. In Book 3 he
claims to desire popular influence as an orator (‘Volksredner’), like Börne,
and not as a Petrarchan poet. This admission is offered as a surprise to the
reader (‘an admission . . . that you weren’t expecting’ (B 4, 74)): after all,
the purpose of the attacks mounted on Heine by Börne and his school had
been to reduce him, precisely, to mere poetry:
...they denied me any character at all, and only allowed any validity to the poet.
Yes, I received my political discharge, so to speak, and was as it were transferred in
retirement to Parnassus. (B 4, 129)
When Heine claims to aspire to oratory, however, it is important to recognize
that the example he cites – ‘like Demosthenes I sometimes declaimed
on the solitary sea-shore when the wind and the waves roared and howled’
(B 4, 74)–conceals an allusion to the ‘Nordsee’ cycles from the end of Buch
der Lieder. Asweshall see, the fluency with which Heine cites other texts,
his own as well as Börne’s, in the course of the Denkschrift is an important
part of his strategy of indirection, of the oblique. 30 Nevertheless, he is also
able to be perfectly direct in his assessment of the conflict. In Book 4,