READING HEINRICH HEINE

210 Reading Heinrich Heine
Mit chinesisch eleganten
Arabesken, wie die hübschen
Bonbonnieren von Marquis
Im Passage Panorama.
(B 6/1, 149) 4
And Jehuda ben Halevy,
In her view, would have been honoured
Quite enough by being kept in
Any pretty box of cardboard
With some very swanky Chinese
Arabesques to decorate it,
Like a bonbon box from Marquis
In the Passage Panorama.
(D 671)
Benjamin’s reply is both excited and curiously aggrieved. Adorno would
never have found these lines, he suggests, had he not been guided by Benjamin’s
work on the Paris arcades and (we might further conjecture) by
the themes of his 1935 sketch. 5 For itisnot only Heine’s familiarity with
the Passage des panoramas which is important here, but also the sweet-box
from Marquis’s shop in that arcade which might appropriately hold Halevi’s
poems. 6 In ‘Jehuda ben Halevy’ Heine’s wife complains that the jewel box
which had contained the gems and pearls of King Darius and which, when
it passed into his possession, Alexander had used to hold manuscripts of
Homer, should be sold for cash if it ever came into Heine’s possession. As
far as she is concerned, an ornate cardboard box, like Marquis’s, would be
good enough for Halevi’s works. These lines take on a peculiar resonance
in the light of Benjamin’s remarks on ‘Louis Philippe or the Interior’. 7 As
will become clear, the reduction of art to the status of a modern commodity
in the course of its historical reception is among the central concerns
of Heine’s late verse. The chinoiserie of Marquis’s sweet-box traces out the
lineaments of Halevi’s poetry seen, through Mathilde’s modern eyes, as no
more than a piece of oriental exoticism.
tradition and modernity
Heine’s later poetry has been widely recognized as innovatory and at times
strange and incommensurable. 8 Romanzero, the collection which Heine
believed would form the third great pillar of his reputation, is divided into
three unequal parts: ‘Historien’ (‘Tales’), ‘Lamentationen’ (‘Lamentations’),
and ‘Hebräische Melodien’ (‘Hebrew Melodies’). ‘Jehuda ben Halevy’ is the