READING HEINRICH HEINE

Ventriloquism in Ludwig Börne: eine Denkschrift 171
The context of these remarks has been identified as the series of attacks
mounted against Heine in the press by Ludwig Wihl (and Karl Gutzkow),
as a result of the Schwabenspiegel (‘Mirror for Swabians’) affair. In 1838
Heine’s intention to publish the emancipatory verse of the Verschiedene
cycles (‘Sundry Women’) was frustrated by the criticism of the Swabian
moralist poets, and by his former ally Gutzkow. 44 However, the Homeric
model is equally significant in the Denkschrift. Heine had – he hoped –
thrashed Börne by maintaining his public silence (and the participle
‘schweigend’, translated here as ‘without a word’, could be read in an instrumental
sense, to mean ‘you thrashed him by being silent’). More broadly
he claimed for himself the same mastery of the word attributed to wily
Odysseus.
This is the first appearance of a recurrent image, which associates
Odysseus’ patient endurance in suffering (‘Dulder’) with his fluent and
cunning speech. In Lutetia, itisusually King Louis-Philippe who appears
in this Homeric comparison: ‘Or is such a lust for war merely a warlike
ruse of the divine sufferer Odysseus?’ (B 5, 307) Later, the king is said to
be like Odysseus ‘the patient and inventive sufferer’ (B 5, 330) and finally,
in a variant reading of Lutetia I, article XVIII in the Augsburger Allgemeine
Zeitung,Odysseus is praised for having avoided fighting ‘if he could make
do with the diplomacy of speech’ (B 5, 1005). Odysseus is celebrated for
his ruses, for his inventiveness, and for the substitution of diplomatic talk
for direct conflict. These qualities – imagination, cunning, and diplomatic
language – all provide the strategic means by which Heine’s ‘mastery of the
word’ could resist Börne’s moral immediacy as a judge of character.
ventriloquism
Between the account in Book 1 of Heine’s encounter with Börne in Frankfurt
and the continuation of their conversations in Paris, culminating in
Heine’s comic account of Börne’s enthusiasm for the ‘Hambach Festival’,
Heine inserted as Book 2 a series of letters he claims to have written while
in Heligoland, reflecting his mood before and after news reached him of
the July Revolution in Paris. (In fact these ‘letters’ are of a later date, and are
designed to celebrate July 1830 as a renewal of the revolution and Heine’s
insight into its significance.) The Cuxhafen letter at the end of Book 2
of the Denkschrift provides a clue to the cunning of Heine’s construction
in the Börne book as a whole. The sea passage which will take Heine’s
narrative from holidaying in Heligoland to revolutionary Paris is a rough
crossing: ‘Even the sea, like other persons, rewards my love with trouble