READING HEINRICH HEINE

Ventriloquism in Ludwig Börne: eine Denkschrift 173
Börne, Heine recalls, takes the well known anecdote (from Thiers’s Histoire
de la révolution française)ofNapoleon smashing a piece of porcelain (in his
impatience at the snail’s pace maintained by Austrian diplomats). 49 This
story becomes an occasion to ruminate on the danger of domestication
presented, for radical politicians, by fragile material possessions:
You have no notion, dearest Heine, how one is kept in check by the possession
of beautiful porcelain. You see me for example. Once I was so wild when I had
little baggage and no porcelain at all. With possessions, particularly with fragile
possessions, come fear and servitude. (B 4, 15)
However, these reflections are in turn derived from an autobiographical
passage from the paralipomena to Heine’s Die Bäder von Lucca. 50 The fact
that the text from the Italian Reisebild was suppressed means that this ventriloquism
was, at best, a private joke rather than a polemical move. Yet the
pattern of citation involved reflects Heine’s consistent practice of recycling
material as well as his constant reworking of individual passages or even
phrases, and indicates the recurrent structure of the Denkschrift.Indeed, an
even more complicated process of textual origination has been suggested, for
it may be that the Denkschrift here reflects the text of Heine’s unpublished
memoirs of their earliest meetings in Frankfurt, when Börne did perhaps
say something of this sort – which Heine subsequently appropriated for
Die Bäder von Lucca in 1828/9 (see B 4, 778). Hence, the words attributed to
Börne’s reading of Thiers’s history in fact draw on an unpublished passage
from Die Bäder von Lucca, which may in turn reflect an original exchange
between the two men. How is this ‘mingling and inter-involvement of the
two positions’, which is indeed ‘one of the oddities of the work’, to be
understood? 51
The Cuxhafen letter presents a model for the uncertainty of such a
writing-process via the ventriloquism of Jonah. This model is given its
most substantial realization in the pattern of quotation that appears in
the last three books of the Denkschrift. Book 3 is historically very precise.
Heine repeatedly dates his encounters with Börne and his work: ‘in the
autumn of 1831’, ‘Börne wrote this on 20 March 1831’(B4, 61, 77;cf.80–1,
where Heine is quick to specify the original reference of Börne’s remarks).
Heine’s detailed chronology clearly confirms the derivation of the Börne
material from some earlier memoir; more importantly it bears out Heine’s
own claims with regard to his method:
As I have already said, I am delivering neither an apologia nor a critique of the
man with whom these pages are concerned. I am drawing his picture with a precise
indication of the place and time he sat for me. (B 4, 128)