READING HEINRICH HEINE

166 Reading Heinrich Heine
Heine repeatedly confronts the political radicalism of his rival’s ethical
principles with the scandalous individuality of Börne’s private life, particularly
his relationship to Madame Wohl.
Madame Wohl exercised a great influence on Börne at that time, perhaps the
greatest of all. Mention has already been made of this ambiguous lady in these
pages, and one did not know what form of address her relationship to Börne
entitled her to: was she his mistress or simply his spouse? For a long time their
closest friends were firm and rigid in their assertion that Madame Wohl had been
secretly married to him, and that one fine day she would present her compliments as
Frau Doctor Börne. Others believed that only Platonic love reigned between them,
as it once did between Maestro Francesco and Madonna Laura, and they certainly
found great similarities between Petrarch’s sonnets and Börne’s Paris letters. These,
as a matter of fact, were not addressed to some airy figure of the imagination but
rather to Madame Wohl. There is no doubt that this contributed to their value,
by giving them a particular physiognomy and the element of individuality that no
amount of artifice can imitate. (B 4, 95)
This sort of writing made Ludwig Börne scandalous even to Heine’s supporters
– and indeed to Jeanette Wohl herself. Such direct and improper
suggestions insist on the individual case. Ultimately they led to Heine’s duel
with Mme Wohl’s husband, Salomon Strauß. The reference to Petrarch
returns the scandal to its other foundation, the contest between the poet of
Buch der Lieder and the popular political ‘orator’ which had been in play (in
reverse) in Book 3 (B 4, 74). Although he repeats the anecdotes with relish,
Heine’s purpose in retailing the old gossip about Börne and Jeanette Wohl
is not simply to challenge the morality of the man who had condemned
his own lack of ‘character’. Rather, he undermines the moral categories in
which such judgements are formulated, substituting instead a set of arguments
about effective style, as he does here. Personalizing the argument
breaks the rules of a political discourse which claims to be universal, and
scandal goes some way to unmasking the hypocrisy of such politics – and
perhaps the inadequacy of its cynicism.
After the departure from Paris of two fellow republican émigrés (Garnier
and Wolfrum), Börne ‘appeared immediately and in person [unmittelbar
persönlich] among the Paris revolutionaries’, Heine tells us: ‘he no longer
exercised control through the agents of his will, but in his own name’ (B
4, 93). Wolfrum, Heine has just explained, died under an assumed name
(literally, under an alien name: ‘unter fremdem Namen’) so there is a bitter
irony in his acknowledgement of Börne’s direct and personal form of
address. Yet the removal of intermediaries is the key to his behaviour. Heine
wants to show that, in the current circumstances, it is just not possible to