READING HEINRICH HEINE

220 Reading Heinrich Heine
out to destroy the happy and the sensual, the witty and the frivolous that
are the poet’s privilege. The constant disturbances of tradition and cultural
transmission are hence bridged by the other history, that of authoritarian
repression. The exile of the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, in Paris and in
his protracted final illness, becomes the ultimate figure of a tradition of
dereliction and heroic survival.
The tradition, displayed in ‘Jehuda ben Halevy’ through the mythical
figures of Apollo, the Schlemihl, Jeremiah and the Babylonian exile,
ekes out a threadbare existence in modern Paris. But the verses which had
caught Adorno’s attention present a different kind of threat or attenuation.
Mathilde suggests that Darius’ plundered casket, were it to come into her
husband’s possession, had much better be sold – since a cardboard box
like Marquis’s bonbonnière will suffice to hold the works of Halevi; but the
status of the work handed on in tradition and worthy of preservation in the
casket changes radically. The chinoiserie of the ‘pretty box of cardboard’
(D 670; B6/1, 149) reveals it as the decorative and merely functional substitute
for the original casket, which might have treasured the auratic texts
of the past. We have seen that Heine’s poem struggles to recall an almost
forgotten tradition (the Jewish poets of twelfth-century Spain) in its historical
context of Courtly Love, and then relates the modern poem’s own
lament for the makers to the other tradition, of dereliction, in which Halevi
stands. In modernity the tradition runs out of steam. Its continuities have
been disrupted by the failures of pedagogy and the enervation of narrative.
Heine’s tumbling anecdotes can remember what the memory of tradition
was like, but in the modern moment of the present the form taken by a
full realization of such memory is that of exhaustion.
The vehicle for this process is the mimed form of the Spanish romance.
In the context of Romanzero,however, this form becomes more significant.
Heine says in his ‘Postscript’ that he chose the title because the tone of
the romance dominated in the poems (B 6/1, 180), but it is nevertheless
clear that the proposal for the title in fact came from Heine’s publisher.
Campe promoted the new collection with enormous energy – and great
success. Indeed, his efforts led him to a significant innovation in the history
of the book-trade: the illustrated dust-jacket in which the book was
issued; 19 the title too played a significant role in this commercial promotion
because the romance as a genre (and even the single word of the title) had
been immensely successful for publishers right across Europe ever since
the mid 1840s. 20 In this context, Mathilde’s suggestion about Marquis’s
bonbonnières seems to recognize the commercial appropriation of the poetic
tradition.