READING HEINRICH HEINE

238 Reading Heinrich Heine
continue to write and his audience to read. His guarantor for this conviction
is Swedenborg. The point of this reference to Swedenborg might
be understood as part and parcel of Heine’s return to belief in a personal
God; however quizzical his poetic investigations of the figures of Lazarus
and Job may be, the evocation of the Prodigal Son returning to the Father
after ‘a long time tending swine with the Hegelians’ (B 6/1, 182; D695)
carries conviction. 38 There are also strong signs, however, that Swedenborg
serves a different purpose in a context that is at least light-hearted and even
anti-theological.
Heine’s attention appears to have been drawn to Swedenborg by Eduard
von Fichte, who understood his appearance in the ‘Postscript’ as evidence
of Heine’s determination to rid himself of philosophical arguments for the
survival of the soul. Heine’s own letter to I. H. Fichte about the ‘Postscript’
gives the same impression. His appropriation of Swedenborg smacks of
opportunism: ‘In a book I am publishing at this very moment in Hamburg
I could turn what you said about Swedenborg to very good account.’ 39
Beyond any personal theological quest, Heine’s account of his revised religious
understanding is presented as a negotiation of social and political
debates. His need for a divinity with the intentional and even physical
attributes of a personal God is dated to 1848. According to the ‘Postscript’,
the failure of Heine’s health (and wealth) occasioning the revision of his
religious scepticism happened in May, while in his autobiography, the
Geständnisse (B 6/1, 475), the date is February. This discrepancy is instructive.
The promise of an afterlife emerges in the historical moment of a
workers’ revolt, the ludicrous hesitations of the Provisional Government
of 1848; 40 and the ‘after’ of this afterlife clearly points towards the failure
of the June Days and the suppression of revolt by a bourgeois republican
regime. Against this ‘atheist’ bourgeois republic (itself shortly to become
Louis Bonaparte’s Second Empire), Heine reasserts his democratic credentials,
his belief in a personal God, and even a continued devotion to the
pagan gods of his earlier work.
All this needs to be borne in mind if Heine’s use of Swedenborg is to be
understood. The failure of the ancient gods, figured as the amputation of
the Venus de Milo, bonds them to Heine’s own physical debility: though he
must bid Venus farewell, he has foresworn nothing; and, as we have seen,
the secularization and even judaization of Apollo in his exile from Greece
makes his condition coincide with Heine’s own. The experience of present
reality is suffused with the transmission of the past, and in an imaginative
leap tradition is enlivened at the very moment of its destruction. This had
been the fundamental structure of Romanzero. Heine’s most immediate