READING HEINRICH HEINE

The biographical imperative: Karl Kraus 17
intellectualism which has no sense of pathos. Yet neither of these impulses
can sustain real imaginative power because the texts in which they are
generated constantly fall apart.
This unachieved nature of Heine’s wit leads Kraus to a broad statement
of his own view of what can only be called the ‘precession of thought’.
This is the transcendental doctrine that the creative personality is only a
‘chosen vessel’ for ideas and indeed poems which pre-date their historical
articulation. True thought is immediate, like a ‘miasma’, a direct infection
carried by the air, while opinion (‘Meinung’) is contagious and only mediated
by aesthetic or intellectual contact. Because of the immediacy of true
inspiration, the historical paradox I have already noted becomes possible: a
creative mind can conceive an idea ‘originally’ which, in crudely chronological
terms, lesser spirits have already imitated. So, for Kraus, Heine merely
imitated Nietzsche’s notion of the Nazarenic, and all he can truly be said
to have anticipated is Maximilian Harden’s homophobic prudery.
Once again, in connecting Heine’s notorious attack on August von
Platen’s sexual proclivities in Die Bäder von Lucca (The Baths at Lucca) with
his own polemics against anti-homosexual legislation and mores, Kraus sees
Heine as a still contemporary foe. His intolerance towards Platen is party to
an unholy alliance with the worst excesses of sensationalist journalism. In
such company Heine’s word-play is understood as superficial, fragmentary
and unintegrated. What is true of Heine’s puns is equally true of his other
great polemic, the memoir of Ludwig Börne:
The parts without order, the whole without composition, that short windedness
that has to start afresh in every paragraph, as if he had to say over and over again:
right, and now we’ll speak of something else. 28
In word-play, rhetorical syntax, and overall structure, Heine’s work is criticized
for its inability to integrate parts within a whole.
In a brief return to economic metaphor, Kraus identifies this failure
with a lack of ethical resources. Although the late verse is excluded from
this general condemnation, Kraus quotes Heine’s remark shortly before his
death (‘dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier’) to confirm his obsession
with trade! From here it is a short step back to the metaphors of production
and reproduction I have considered. The invention of the ‘feuilleton style’
is now attributed to Heine, but those who fear their work may be revealed
as an imitation need only transform themselves into forgers to go into
mass-production under his name, without fear of discovery.
In the last resort there is some uncertainty of judgement in ‘Heine
and the Consequences’. While Kraus concedes major and catastrophic