READING HEINRICH HEINE

182 Reading Heinrich Heine
Kraus thinks that the modern journalism initiated by Heine’s work
is responsible for a reduction of historical events to the lowest common
denominator of personal response; and because this generates a kind of
writing that can fit anything and everything, experience itself is rendered
interchangeable – like any other commodity on the market. The real world
becomes no more than a function of the journalist’s impressions: facts are
merely local colour. In his own retrospective commentary on Lutetia,Heine
concedes that the form of the fact is used to clothe subjective opinion; but
in other ways his whole method undermines the stability of ‘objective
facts’.
Considerations of style were particularly important when Heine returned
to the material. Between 1852 and 1854 he re-edited and in some cases
rewrote the published and unpublished texts of the 1840stoyield the sixtyone
articles in Lutetia.Hehad reworked his earlier Paris journalism for the
Französische Zustände volume in the same way. This editorial process was
conceived, in part at least, as a restitution of what had been damaged by
censorship when his work had been originally prepared for publication in
the Augsburger Allgemeine. The repeated theme of Heine’s Epistle Dedicatory
and of the preface to the French translation is the recovery of good
style and the reconstruction and clarification of his own methods. However,
the editorial construction of Lutetia also presents Heine’s writing in a
complex temporal perspective. Lutetia appeared in 1854 and in French translation,
as Lutèce, in1855. Considering the Paris texts from this point more
than a decade after their original composition, Heine is anxious to defend
his own reputation. The collected journalism is restored to his authorship
from the anonymity of its original publication in the newspaper, and Heine
puts his name to it. However, Lutetia also emerges in a changed political
context. Its reappearance in the Second Empire tacitly underlines and confirms
Heine’s uneasiness about the stability of the Orleanist settlement and
his recognition of the threat presented both by ‘communist’ movements
and by Bonapartist memories: the one spectre resolutely defeated by Louis
Napoleon’s coup d’état, the other embodied by him as Napoleon III.
Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), famously, demonstrates
that great events and characters in world history repeat themselves, so
that Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup against the Directory on 18 Brumaire of
revolutionary year VIII is recapitulated (as farce) by Louis Napoleon on 2
December 1851. 4 Heine anticipates this modern understanding of historical
imagery. Rather than defining it (as Marx does) as a compulsive conjuring
of the past, however, he recognizes that historical or cultural moments are
not fixed functions in the representation of social or political formations.