READING HEINRICH HEINE

172 Reading Heinrich Heine
and torture’ (B 4, 56). Like other parts of the Heligoland letters, this allusion
is obscure. The other persons who cause hardship and torment may
well include Börne, of course, as well as the traditional objects of Heine’s
unrequited love; but the hostility of the sea seems more immediately to
recall the anger of Poseidon and the vicissitudes of Odysseus on his journey
home. In the event, the context will itself provide an instance of Odysseus’
‘military cunning’ – and so of Heine’s strategy.
The noise of the storm becomes a cacophony of voices: ‘they howl bad,
incomprehensible verses . . . and whistle the most uncanny follies in my ear
with their stupid falsetto voices’ (B 4, 56)–until sea-sickness leads finally to
the internalization of one such voice, and Heine imagines he has become
a whale with the prophet Jonah in his belly. The Cuxhafen letter then
includes a long passage attributed to the prophet and presented as a form
of ventriloquism: ‘Thus more or less my ventriloquist preached’ (B 4, 57).
This text derives only minimally from the biblical precedent (in Jonah 3,
4) but there are arguably echoes of texts by Börne, 45 as well as more general
similarities both with the earliest of the Briefe aus Paris in which Börne
describes his journey to Paris, and with the prophetic and denunciatory
style which often supervenes in the conversational style of his letters. Later
Heine is dismissive of this manner: ‘He was as bad a prophet about others as
he was about himself’ (B 4, 77); and in the Cuxhafen letter too the prophet
is ultimately vomited up and spat out – as if the transition from the earlier
friendly relations between the two authors and their more troubled time in
Paris were marked by a physical regurgitation of what had previously been
absorbed.
The double focus permitted by the model of ventriloquism is sustained
by the close parallels which Heine projects between his own biography and
Börne’s career. 46 For instance, it has been shown that the views on love and
maturity ascribed to Börne in Book 1 (B 4, 20)are actually derived from the
autobiographical fragment by Heine known as ‘Love in Youth and in Age’
(DHA 11, 194). 47 As Koopmann remarks, in Ludwig Börne: eine Denkschrift
‘Heine puts these thoughts, as is often the case with his synthetic procedure,
into Börne’s mouth’. Heine’s assimilation of his own point of view to what
is ascribed to Börne gives a stronger sense to the need to expel this Jonah
from his belly, at the close of the ‘Letters from Heligoland’, but also plays
on the supposed identification of the two as a double-act leading the Young
Germany movement – of which we have seen him complain elsewhere. 48
The source and status of the conversations with Börne reported by Heine
have always been controversial, and earlier in Book 1 Heine has been caught
putting words into Börne’s mouth in a more extended and substantial way.