READING HEINRICH HEINE

The tribe of Harry: Heine and contemporary poetry 255
The Loreley lets down her hair
Just next to the polluted Rhine
Ihover with grace in mortal danger
Right between Old Jack and Old Harry.
Rühmkorf’s poem ‘Hochseil’ (‘High Wire’) from his collected poems of
1975, WerLyrik schreibt ist verrückt (Anyone Who Writes Poetry Is Mad) is
one of two texts that declare an interest in Heine’s continuing significance:
the other is explicitly entitled ‘Heinrich-Heine-Gedenklied’ (‘Memorial
song for Heinrich Heine’). 18 We should first note a broader sense in which
for Rühmkorf, as for Biermann, Heine is exemplary. Heine’s oeuvre as a
whole is a model for the characteristic range of work which many leading
writers of this generation have undertaken. In Rühmkorf’s case it comprises
poetry, polemical essays, political fairy-tales (Märchen), autobiography, the
pursuit of popular forms and the revival of folk-legend. Nor would it be
difficult to recognize in this pattern and variety of writing the work of Hans
Magnus Enzensberger.
In Rühmkorf’s case, Heine also stands for the split personality that
expresses itself through what he and his friend Werner Riegel defined as
‘schizography’: the simultaneous commitment to ‘the soul of the poet’ and
‘the soul of political community’ (‘des politischen Gemeinschaftswesens’);
to sensuous individualism and to collective engagement. Asked in an interview
whether this was an original position, Rühmkorf replied:
No, it’s an old contradiction – in these climes it was particularly brought to notice by
Heinrich Heine. The poet thirsts for unlimited freedom of individual development,
and the communal political man preaches equality and justice. 19
This productive tension has driven Rühmkorf’s work from early in his
career; but his recently published diaries develop another relation to Heine.
Among the fragments of poems in progress or in statu nascendi which
run through the diary entries and which Rühmkorf calls ‘Leuchtquanten’
(‘Light-quanta’), the following lines appear on 23 December 1989:
Weil, du weißt in der Eile doch gar nicht,
was du der Menschheit noch mit auf dem Weg geben sollst –
Eine Handvoll Erde? 20
Because in your haste you just don’t know
What you should send mankind on its way with –
a handful of earth?
We are back with the ‘Lazarus’ poem ‘Laß die heilgen Parabolen’; but
it is not merely a moral position which is offered. The diary records a
meeting with Professor Manfred Schneider from Essen ‘who has written