READING HEINRICH HEINE

chapter 2
The biographical imperative: Theodor Adorno
When Kraus speaks of a ‘form of life’, he is using a moral category. It seems
likely that Kraus himself remained blind to the full impact of the economic
metaphor underlying his polemic and only marginally aware, through his
own journalistic and publishing practices, of those fundamental changes
in cultural production which gave the true direction of his attack on the
contemporary press. His major successor in the analysis of Heine as a
cultural problem, the philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno, was acutely
aware of the questions raised by ‘political economy’ for Heine’s work and
its reception.
heine, the market, and the cold war
Adorno’s essay ‘Die Wunde Heine’ sets out to be a commemorative talk
for the one-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death in 1956. Adorno
claims that, as a result of some dialectical reversal, what had been failure
is transformed into success when after a hundred years an ‘intentionally
false folksong becomes a great poem’. 1 This suggests that Adorno is aware
of the paradoxical nature of such anniversaries. 2 For post-war readers, he
argues, Heine seems to mean something other than what he had ‘intended’
or what he had meant to his contemporaries, seen as historical readers; but
this problem for commemoration is also historically determined: ‘Heine’
is seen as an effect – as well as a symptom – of the way in which the Third
Reich had been repressed in the old Federal Republic, as much as of the
actual suppression of Heine’s works by the Third Reich. These two distinct
elements may perhaps be seen as a single, though differentiated history. But
the commemoration of Heine is crossed by history in another way, which
is also present in Adorno’s essay. As Gerhard Höhn points out, 1956 marks
a time when Heine was being appropriated energetically by scholars and
critics in the German Democratic Republic, in a specifically socialist spirit. 3
Bringing Heine home from exile involved his ‘return’ to the West German
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