George Prochnik.
Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. pp. 336. $26.00 (Hardcover)
Heinrich Heine was the first Jew to become a cultural icon in Germany. While Moses Mendelssohn achieved fame as a philosopher in the German Enlightenment, Heine’s poetry was beloved by a much wider circle of the culture. His “Lorelei,” an ode to the personified siren of the Rhine was so iconic that the Nazis, who burned his books, had no choice but to preserve the poem but to label its author “unknown.” While Heine converted to Christianity in 1825 (part of a wave of such conversions by the first generation of German Jews to attend university or otherwise partake in German society), he never abandoned his identity as a Jew, even as he gave it a most idiosyncratic definition.
A passionate champion of German language and legend, he was prescient about the historical nightmares to come. By Adam Kirsch Dec. 18, 2020 10:38 am ET
For Nazi censors in the 1930s, âDie Loreleiâ presented a special problem. One of the best-known German poems, it tells of a maiden who sits on a mountaintop overlooking the Rhine, combing her golden hair and singing a melody so enchanting that sailors below are transfixed and shipwrecked. âDie Loreleiâ had been sung as a folk song for a hundred years, and it could hardly be omitted from verse anthologies. But its author was Jewish, which made it impossible for him to appear in a Nazi-approved book. As a compromise, the poem was credited to âAnonymous.â