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The Kraus Project
Jonathan Franzen
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.In THE KRAUS PROJECT, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus’s often dense arguments.While Kraus lampoons the iconic German writer Heinrich Heine and celebrates his own literary heroes, Franzen’s annotations soar over today’s cultural landscape and then dive down into a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus.Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, THE KRAUS PROJECT is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.
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Copyright (#)
4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013
Simultaneously published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Franzen
Footnotes by Paul Reitter copyright © 2013 by Paul Reitter Footnotes by Daniel Kehlmann copyright © 2013 by Daniel Kehlmann
Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral
Jacket art by Matt Buck, after the cover for the first issue of Die Fackel
Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
The original essays and afterwords in this volume are from Karl Kraus's collection Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). "Man frage nicht…" appeared in Die Fackel no. 888, October 1933.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007517435
Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007517459 Version: 2017-03-28
Praise (#u063d2b6d-6FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
From the reviews of The Kraus Project:
Financial Times Book of the Year
‘An experimental collage of texts, and all the better for it … The Kraus Project is tremendously readable and is refreshingly skeptical of the cult of digital cool. Franzen’s prose has an appealing briskness and a polemical force’
Jason Cowley, Financial Times
‘Engrossing, highly original … Franzen finds in the unduly neglected Kraus a model of how to provoke readers while at the same time getting them to do some work’
Edmund Fawcett, New York Times Book Review
‘It IS worth it, despite, as well as because of, the difficulties, so congratulations all round … thanks to Franzen, more people will remember him’
Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard
‘A passionate and concerned work … You can understand why Franzen likes him, and sees a dearth of such elegance today’
Jonathan Dean, Sunday Times
TO
DORIS AVERY
AND IN MEMORY OF
GEORGE AVERY
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE (#u063d2b6d-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
COPYRIGHT (#)
PRAISE
DEDICATION (#)
HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES (1910) (#)
NESTROY AND POSTERITY (1912) (#)
AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES” (1911) (#)
BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE: FINAL WORD (1917) (#)
LET NO ONE ASK … (1933) (#)
NOTES (#)
HEING UND DIE FOLGEN (#)
NESTROY UND DIE NACHWELT (#)
NACHWORT ZU „HEINE UND DIE FOLGEN“ (#)
ZWISCHEN DEN LEBENSRICHTUNGEN (#)
MAN FRAGE NICHT … (#)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JONATHAN FRANZEN
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES (#)1 (#)
Two strains of intellectual vulgarity: defenselessness against content and defenselessness against form. The one experiences only the material side of art. It is of German origin. The other experiences even the rawest of materials artistically. It is of Romance origin. To the one, art is an instrument; to the other, life is an ornament. In which hell would the artist prefer to fry? He’d surely still rather live among the Germans. For although they’ve strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they’ve also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren window frames.2 (#) Just spare me the pretty ribbons! Spare me this good taste that over there and down there delights the eye and irritates the imagination. Spare me this melody of life that disturbs my own music, which comes into its own only in the roaring of the German workday.3 (#) Spare me this universal higher level of refinement from which it’s so easy to observe that the newspaper seller in Paris has more charm than the Prussian publisher. Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads.4 (#) And spare me this mediocre chicanery in place of one’s own stupidity! Spare me the picturesque moil on the rind of an old Gorgonzola in place of the dependable white monotony of cream cheese! Life is hard to digest both here and there. But the Romance diet beautifies the spoilage; you swallow the bait and go belly-up. The German regimen spoils beauty and puts us to the test: how do we re-create it? Romance culture makes every man a poet. Art’s a piece of cake there. And Heaven a hell.5 (#)
Heinrich Heine, however, has brought the Germans tidings of this Heaven, to which their heart is drawn with a longing that has to rhyme someplace and that leads in subterranean passages directly from the countinghouse to the Blue Grotto. And, on a byway that German men avoid: from chopped liver to the blue flower.6 (#) It was inevitable that the one with their longing and the other with their longings would consider Heinrich Heine the Fulfiller. Tuned by a culture for which the mere material of daily life suffices as a complete artistic experience, Heine provides mood music for a culture whose experience of art begins and ends with the attractions of its content.7 (#) His writing works from the Romance feel for life into the German conception of art.8 (#) In this configuration it offers the utile dulci, it ornaments German functionality with French spirit.9 (#) And so, in this easy-to-read juxtaposition of form and content, in which there is no discord and no unity, it becomes the great legacy from which journalism continues to live to this very day, a dangerous mediator between art and life, a parasite on both, a singer where it should only be a messenger, filing reports where a song would be in order, its eye too fixed on its goal to see the burning color, blinded to all goals by its pleasure in the picturesque, the bane of literary utility, the spirit of utiliterature.10 (#) Instrument made into ornament, and so badly degenerated that even the current mania for decorating consumer goods can scarcely keep up with the progress of applied art in the daily press; because at least we have yet to hear that the Wiener Werkstätte is manufacturing burglary tools.11 (#) And even in the style of the most up-to-the-minute impressionistic journalism the Heinean model does not disavow itself. Without Heine, no feuilleton.12 (#) This is the French disease he smuggled in to us.13 (#) How easy it is to get sick in Paris! How lax the morality of the German feel for language becomes! The French language lets every filou have his way with her. You have to prove yourself a man in full before the German language will give you the time of day, and that’s only the beginning of the trouble you’re in for. With French, though, everything goes smoothly, with that perfect lack of inhibition which is perfection in a woman and a lack in a language. And the Jacob’s ladder that leads to her is a climax you’ll find in the German dictionary: Geschmeichel, Geschmeide, Geschmeidig, Geschmeiß.14 (#) Anybody and everybody can procure her services for the feuilleton. She’s a lazy Susan of the mind. The most well-grounded head isn’t safe from flashes of inspiration when it deals with her. We get everything from languages, because they contain everything that can become thought. Language arouses and stimulates, like a woman, brings joy and, with it, thought.15 (#) The German language, however, is a companion who will think and make poetry only for the man who can give her children. You wouldn’t want to be married like this to any German housewife. And yet the woman of Paris need say nothing except, at the crucial moment, très jolie, and you’ll believe anything of her. Her mind is in her face. And if her partner had beauty in his brain as well, Romance life would not be merely très jolie but fecund, ringed not by bibelots and dainties, but by deeds and monuments.16 (#)
If they say of a German author that he must have learned a lot from the French, this is the highest praise only if it isn’t true. For it means: he’s indebted to the German language for what the French gives to everybody. People here are still being linguistically creative when people over there are already playing with the children, who came blowing in, nobody knows how. But ever since Heinrich Heine imported the trick, it’s been purely an exercise in diligence if a German feuilletonist goes to Paris to fetch himself some talent.17 (#) If somebody nowadays actually goes to Rhodes because people dance better there, he is truly an excessively conscientious swindler. That was still necessary in Heine’s day. You’d been to Rhodes, and back here people believed that you could dance.18 (#) Today they’ll believe that a cripple who has never left Vienna can dance the cancan, and many a person who never had a single good finger now plays the viola.19 (#) The profitable return on distance from the reader should never be underestimated, and foreign milieus continue to be what gets taken for art. People are very talented in the jungle, and talent begins in the East around the time you reach Bucharest.20 (#) The writer who knocks the dust off foreign costumes is getting at the fascination of the material in the most convenient way imaginable. And so a reader with a brain has the strongest distrust imaginable of storytellers who knock about in foreign milieus. The best-case scenario continues to be that they weren’t there; but most of them are unfortunately so constituted that they actually have to take a trip in order to tell a story. Of course, to have spent two years in Paris isn’t merely the advantage of such Habakkuks, it’s their definition.21 (#) They strew the drifting sand of French, which finds its way into the pockets of every dolt, into the eyes of German readers. And let the inverse of an epigram of Nestroy,22 (#) this true satirical thinker, apply to them: things go well enough from Paris to St. Pölten, but from there to Vienna the road gets very long!23 (#) (If the local swindlers don’t make a killing of their own along this stretch.)24 (#) Now, with Paris, not only the content was acquired but the form as well. The form, though—this form that is only an envelope for the content, not the content itself; that is merely dress for the body, not flesh to the spirit—this form only had to be discovered once for it to be there for all time. Heinrich Heine took care of that, and thanks to him our gentlemen no longer need betake themselves to Paris. You can write feuilletons today without having personally sniffed your way to the Champs Élysées. The great trick of linguistic fraud, which in Germany pays far better than the greatest achievement of linguistic creativity, keeps working in generation after generation of newspapers, furnishing casual readers everywhere with the most agreeable of excuses for avoiding literature.25 (#) Talent flutters aimlessly in the world and gives sweet nourishment to the philistine’s hatred of genius. Writing feuilletons means twining curls on a bald head; but these curls please the public better than a lion’s mane of thoughts. Esprit and charm, which presumably were necessary in developing the trick and becoming adept at it, are now passed on by it automatically. With an easy hand, Heine pushed open the door to this dreadful development, and the magician who brought talent within reach of the unendowed surely himself doesn’t stand all that far above the development.26 (#)
The trick keeps working. Paralleling the kitschification of practical life via ornament, as traced by the good American Adolf Loos, is an interlarding of journalism with intellectual elements, but here the resulting confusion is even more catastrophic.27 (#) Instead of draining the press intellectually and restoring to literature the juices that were “extracted” from it—extorted from it—the progressive world proceeds ever afresh with the renovation of its intellectual decorations. The literary ornament doesn’t get demolished, it gets modernized in the Wiener Werkstätten of the mind. Feuilleton, mood reporting, fluff pieces—the motto “Feather Thy Nest”28 (#) brings the poetic flourish, too, into the homes of the masses. And nothing is more important to journalism than restoring the gloss, again and again, to the glaze of corruption. The more it adds to the profiteer’s intellectual and material wealth, the greater its need to cloak its ill intentions pleasingly. In this, the Mind itself lends a hand, sacrificing itself, as does the spirit that was stolen from the Mind. A Sunday edition’s catch can no longer take place without dangling the highest of literary values as bait, the Economist no longer goes in for robbery unless the surviving representatives of culture act as fences.29 (#) But far more disgraceful than literature’s marching in the triumph of this pillage, far more dangerous than this attachement of intellectual authority to the villainy, is the villainy’s interlarding, its gilding, with the Mind, which it has siphoned off from literature and which it drags along through the local pages and all the other latrines of public opinion. The press as a social institution—since it’s simply unavoidable that the dearth of imagination get filled up with facts—would have its place in the progressive order. But what does the news that it rained in Hong Kong have to do with the Mind? And why does an arranged stock-market catastrophe or a small extortion or even just the unpaid suppression of a fact demand the entire grand apparatus, in which academics don’t shy from collaborating and for which even aesthetes will hustle so hard that their feet sweat? That train stations or public toilets, works of utility and necessity, are cluttered up with decorative junk is tolerable. But why are thieves’ dens fitted out by van de Velde?30 (#) Only because their purpose would otherwise be obvious at a glance, and passersby would not willingly have their pockets turned inside out twice a day.31 (#) Curiosity is always stronger than caution, and so the chicanery dolls itself up in tassels and lace.
It owes its best advantage to that Heinrich Heine who so loosened the corset on the German language that today every salesclerk can finger her breasts. What’s ghastly about the spectacle is the sameness of these talents, which are all as alike as rotten eggs. Today’s impressionistic errand boys no longer report the breaking of a leg without the mood and no burning of a building without the personal note that they all have in common. When the one describes the German kaiser, he does it exactly the same way the other describes the mayor of Vienna, and the other can’t think of anything to say about wrestlers except what the one has to say about swimming in a river. Everything suits everything always,32 (#) and the inability to find old words counts as subtlety when the new words already suit everything. This type is either an observer who in opulent adjectives amply compensates for what Nature denied him in nouns, or an aesthete who makes himself conspicuous with his love of color and his sense of nuance and still manages to perceive things in the world around him as deeply as dirt goes under a fingernail.33 (#) And they all have a tone of discovery, as if the world had only just now been created, when God made the Sunday feuilleton and saw that it was good.34 (#) The first time these young people go to a public bath is when they’re sent in as reporters. This may be an experience. But they generalize it. The method for depicting a Livingston in darkest Leopoldstadt35 (#) is obviously of great help to the impoverished Viennese imagination. For it cannot imagine the breaking of a leg unless the leg is described to it. In Berlin, despite foul ambitions, the situation is not so grave. If a streetcar accident occurs there, the Berlin reporters describe the accident. They single out what is exceptional about this streetcar accident and spare the reader what is common to all streetcar accidents. If a streetcar mishap occurs in Vienna, the gentlemen write about the nature of streetcars, about the nature of streetcar mishaps, and about the nature of mishaps in general, with the perspective: What is man?… As to the number killed, which might possibly still interest us, opinions differ unless a news agency settles the question. But the mood—all of them capture the mood; and the reporter, who could make himself useful as a rubbish collector for the world of facts, always comes running with a shred of poesy that he grabbed somewhere in the crowd. This one sees green, that one sees yellow—every one of them sees color.36 (#)
Ultimately, all amalgamation of the intellectual with the informational, this axiom of journalism, this pretext for its plans, this excuse for its dangers, is and was thoroughly Heinean—be it now also, thanks to the more recent Frenchmen and to the friendly agency of Herr Bahr, somewhat psychologically inclined and garnished with yet a bit more “meditativeness.”37 (#) Only once was there a pause in this development—its name was Ludwig Speidel.38 (#) In him, the art of language was a guest at the greasiest dives of the Mind. The press may feel that Speidel’s life was an episode that cut disruptively into the game begun by Heine. And yet he seemed to side with the incarnate spirit of language, summoning it on holidays to the filthiest entertainment places, so that it could see the goings-on. Never was a colleague more dubious than this one. They could parade the living man around, all right. But how long they resisted giving the dead man the honor of a book! How they sensed that a complete edition here could bring that humiliation which they once imbibed by the spoonful as pride. When they finally decided to let the “associate” into literature, Herr Schmock had the cheek to undertake the commentary, and the hand of the editor, making things cute and topical, saved for the Viennese viewpoint as much as could be saved by a grouping of Speidelian prose around the Viennese viewpoint.39 (#) An artist wrote these feuilletons, a feuilletonist compiled these works of art—the distance between Mind and press becomes doubly appreciable thereby. The journalists were right to hesitate so long. They weren’t idle in the meantime. People yearned for Speidel’s books—the journalists invoked his modesty and gave us their own books.40 (#) For it is the evil mark of this crisis: journalism, which drives great minds into its stable, is meanwhile overrunning their pasture. It has plundered literature—it is generous and gives its own literature to literature. There appear feuilleton collections about which there’s nothing so remarkable as that the work hasn’t fallen apart in the bookbinder’s hands. Bread is being made out of bread crumbs. What is it that gives them hope of enduring? The enduring interest in the subjects they select. If one of them chatters about eternity, shouldn’t he be heard for as long as eternity lasts? Journalism lives on this fallacy. It always has the grandest themes, and in its hands eternity can become timely; but it gets old just as easily. The artist gives form to the day, the hour, the minute. No matter how limited and conditional in time and location his inspiration may have been, his work grows the more limitlessly and freely the further it’s removed from its inspiration. It goes confidently out of date in a heartbeat: it grows fresh again over decades. What lives on material dies before it does. What lives in language lives on with it.41 (#) How easy it was to read the chitchat every Sunday, and now that we can check it out of the library we can barely get through it. How hard it was to read the sentences in Die Fackel, even when we were helped by the incident they referred to.42 (#) No, because we were helped by it! The further we’re removed from the incident, the better we understand what was said about it. How does this happen? The incident was close and the perspective was broad. It was all forewritten. It was veiled so that the inquisitive day couldn’t get at it. Now the veils are rising …43 (#)
But Heinrich Heine—even the aesthetes who are rescuing his immortality in an island publishing house44 (#) (these gloriously impractical minds whose cerebral wrinkles trail away into ornament) have nothing more impressive to say about him than that his reports from Paris “have become the still-vital masterwork of modern journalism”; and these Robinsons of literary seclusion take Heine’s artistic word for it that his articles “would be very useful in developing a style for popular themes.” Here again you can sense the kinship of those who reside equally far from the Mind: those who live in form and those who live in content; who think in the line and who think in the surface; the aesthetes and the journalists. In the problem of Heine they collide. They live on off him and he in them. So it’s by no means urgent to talk about his work. What is increasingly urgent is to talk about his influence, and about the fact that his work isn’t capable of bearing up under an influence that German intellectual life will little by little cast off as unbearable. This is the way it will play out: each follower of Heine takes one tile from the mosaic of his work until no more remain. The original fades because the repellent glare of the copy opens our eyes. Here’s an original that loses what it lends to others. And can you even call something an original when its imitators are better? Naturally, to appreciate an invention that has since perfected itself into a modern machine, you have to apply historical justice. But in making an absolute judgment, don’t you have to concede that Heinrich Heine’s prose has now been surpassed by the observationally inclined technicians, the style boys, and the swindlers of charm? That this prose, which signifies wit without perspective and perspectives without wit, was quite certainly surpassed by those feuilletonists who not only read Heine but took extra pains to go to the source of sources—to Paris? And that there have since appeared imitators of his poetry who manage the feelings and the newsman’s wrinkle of disdain no less glibly, and who in particular are no less deft in making the little joke of the little melancholy, which the hurdy-gurdy verse helps so nimbly to its feet. Because, after all, nothing is easier to outfit with every modern convenience than a lyrical arrangement. It’s true that nobody would dare compare himself to Heine in the extent of his output and the scope of his intellectual interests. But today every Itzak Wisecrack45 (#) can probably outdo him when it comes to making an aesthetic anesthetic46 (#) and using rhyme and rhythm to turn candied husks of thought into cherry bombs.
Heinrich Heine the poet lives only as a canned youthful sweetheart. None is in greater need of reassessment than this one. Youth soaks up everything, and it’s cruel to take many things away from it later. How easily the soul of youth is impregnated, how easily things that are easy and slack attach themselves to it: how worthless a thing has to be for its memory not to be made precious by the time and circumstances of its acquisition! You’re not critical, you’re pious when you love Heine. You’re not critical, you’re blasphemous when you try to talk somebody who grew up with Heine out of his Heine. An assault on Heine is an invasion of the everyman’s private life. It injures reverence for youth, respect for boyhood, veneration of childhood. To presume to judge firstborn impressions according to their merit is worse than presumptuous. And Heine had a talent for being embraced by young souls and thus associated with young experiences.47 (#) Like rating the melody of a hurdy-gurdy, to which I was unstoppably drawn, above Beethoven’s Ninth, owing to a subjective urge. This is why grown-ups don’t have to put up with anyone who wants to dispute their belief that Heine is a greater poet than Goethe. Yes, it’s on the luck of association that Heinrich Heine lives. Am I so relentlessly objective as to say to someone: go, look, the peach tree in the garden of your childhood is quite a bit smaller than it used to be. He had the measles, he had Heine, and he gets hot in recollecting every fever of youth. Criticism should stay quiet here. No author needs reassessment as badly as Heine, no one bears up under it so poorly, no one is so protected from it by every fond illusion. But I have the courage to recommend it only because I’m hardly in need of it myself, because I failed to experience Heine at a time when I would have had to overrate him. There comes a day where it’s no concern of mine that a gentleman who has long since become a banker once crept to his beloved under the strains of “You have diamonds and pearls.”48 (#) And where you become rude at the sight of old brains still being affected by the charm with which this tearful materiality once captivated young hearts, and the syrup of sentimental moods adheres to literary judgments. When you get right down to it, the hankerings of youth could also have been satisfied by Herr Hugo Salus.49 (#) I don’t fancy myself guiltless of giving a bit of culture the benefit of the situation in which I experienced it, or of confusing it with the attendant mood. I retain a warm glow from Heine’s Berlin letters, for example, because the melody “We wind for you a bridal wreath,” which Heine makes fun of there, is congenial to me. But only in my nerves. In my judgment, I am mature and willing to distinguish merits. The memory of how the garden smelled when your first love walked through it is of general concern to the culture only if you’re a poet. You’re free to overvalue the occasion if you’re capable of making a poem out of it. When, once, in a booth at the Prater,50 (#) I saw a lady in tights floating in the air (which I now know was done with mirrors), and a hurdy-gurdy was accompanying her with “Last Rose,” my eyes were opened to beauty and my ears to music, and I would have ripped to shreds the man who told me that the lady was writhing around on a plank and the tune was by Flotow.51 (#) In criticism, though, unless you’re speaking to children, you have to be allowed to call Heine by his true name.
His charm, according to his grown-up defenders, is a musical one. To which I reply: to be responsive to literature, you don’t need to be responsive to music; all you need from music to create a mood is the melody, the rhythm.52 (#) I don’t need a mood when I’m doing literary work; I create a mood in myself by working. To get the juices flowing, I use a tone from a miniature spinet that is actually a cigar box and which, if pressed on, emits a few old Viennese notes that have been locked inside it for a hundred years. I’m not musical; Wagner would disturb me in this situation.53 (#) And if I sought the same kitschy stimulus of melody in literature, I could produce no literature on such a night. Heine’s music may, by the same token, suffice for musicians who require more significant disclosures from their own art than his little bit of euphony affords. What, then, is poetry in the Heinean style, what is that German taste in art into whose prettinesses and wittinesses the wild hunt of Liliencron’s language burst, as the avant-gardist Gottfried August Bürger’s once had?54 (#) Heine’s poetry: it is mood or opinion with the Hark! hark! of jingling bells. This poetry is melody—so much so that it demands to be set to music. And it owes more to this music than its own for its success with the philistines. Simplicissimus once poked fun at the kind of German who crosses himself to ward off Heine, only to sing his “Lorelei” later on, blissfully drunk on emotion, “nevertheless.”55 (#) Two images: but the contrast isn’t as glaring as it may seem at first glance. For the philistines who curse Heine don’t rise to the true philistine confession until the second image, when they sing him. When a popular song is made out of a poem, is it insight into the poem’s literary value that makes the song popular?56 (#) How many German philistines would know what Heine means if Herr Silcher hadn’t set “I know not what it means”57 (#) to music? But is it an argument for the poet that this clientele would have clamored for his undifficult poetry even if it hadn’t been delivered to them on wings of song?58 (#) Oh, this narrow-minded hatred of Heine, which targets the Jew, tolerates the poet, and bleats along with a sentimental melody with or without a musician’s later help. Art brings life into disorder. The poets of humanity restore chaos again and again; the poets of society do their singing and lamenting, their blessing and cursing, within a well-ordered world. All those for whom a poem amounts to an agreement between themselves and the poet, sealed with rhyme, flee to Heine. All those who wish to join the poet in his pursuit of urbane allegories and his establishment of relations with the outside world will consider Heine a greater poet than Goethe. But those who consider a poem to be the revelation of a poet lost in his observation of Nature, not of a Nature lost in the observations of the poet, will be satisfied to reckon Heine a technician skilled at pleasure and sorrow, a speedy outfitter of stock moods. When Goethe shares in—and shares with us—the “silence on every peak,” he does it with such intensely felt kinship that the silence can be heard as an intimation.59 (#) But if a pine tree in the North stands on a barren peak and dreams of a palm tree in the Orient, it is an exceptional courtesy of Nature to oblige Heine’s yearning allegorically. Seeing an artful fake like this in the show window of a confectioner or a feuilletonist might put you in a good mood if you’re an artist yourself. But does that make its manufacturer one?60 (#) Even the plain outline of a perception of Nature, from which barely visible threads spin themselves out toward the soul, seems to me more lyrical than the dressing-up of ready-made moods, because it presupposes empathy. In this sense, Goethe’s “Stillness and Sea” is lyric poetry, as are Liliencron’s lines: “A river babbles its happy way across the land, a field of ripe rye gathers in the west, then Nature leans her head upon her hand and, weary from her work, takes rest.” Deeper moods arise from a reflecting heathscape on a summer morning than from reflective palms and pine trees; for here Nature rests her head upon her hand, while there Heinrich Heine pressed his hand to his cheek … You’re ashamed that between fears and tears there ever existed such slick intercourse that went by the name of poetry; you’re almost ashamed of the polemics. But you should open the Book of Songs and try reading the right-hand and the left-hand pages higgledy-piggledy, interchanging the lines. You won’t be disappointed, if you’re not disappointed with Heine. And those who are already disappointed will, for the first time, not be. “The little birds, they chirped so fine / Glad lovesongs did my heart entwine.” That can stand right or left. “In those darling little eyes of thine”: this need not simply rhyme with “My dear darling’s mouth as red as wine” and “blue little violets of thine eyes sublime” or, again, with “thine little red-rosy cheeks divine”; at every point the plea could stand: “Dear little darling, rest thy little hand upon this heart of mine,” and nowhere in this dear little chamber of poesy would the transposition of mine and thine be felt as a disturbance. On the other hand, Heine’s entire “Lorelei,” say, could not be substituted for Goethe’s “Fisher,” even though the only seeming difference is that the Lorelei influences the boatman from above, whereas the watery woman influences the fisher from below. Truly, Heinean verse is operetta lyrics, which even good music isn’t ruined by. Meilhac and Halévy’s lines wouldn’t be out of place in the Book of Songs:
I am thine
Thou art mine
What heavenly luck is ours
A pair of doves
So much in love
Cannot be found beneath the stars.
This is exactly the sort of shallowness that, in combination with Offenbach’s music, generates genuine emotive value or takes on deeper satirical significance.61 (#) Offenbach is music, but Heine is merely the words for it. And I don’t believe that a real poet wrote the lines:
And when I wailed to you about my pain,
You all just yawned in mute disdain;
Yet when I set it out in lyrical phrases,
You couldn’t wait to sing my praises.
But it’s an epigram; and it perfectly captures the mass appeal of Heine’s love poetry, in which the little songs are merely the ornament of big sorrows, not their naturally inevitable expression. The same mass appeal by which the poet Heine feels so rewarded. This is a poet who writes, in one of his prefaces, that his publishers have shown the most gratifying faith in his genius by means of the large first printings they’re wont to make of his work, and who points proudly to the account books in which the popularity of his poetry stands registered. This pride is as little surprising as that popularity. How, indeed, could lyrical work in which ideas are candied, rather than crystallized, fail to be greeted with universal satisfaction? At no point before, say, his deathbed poetry did verse become for Heine such a creative necessity that it had to be verse; and these rhymes are papillotes, not butterflies: paper ruffles often folded for no other reason than to demonstrate a fold. “I could have said all of that very well in good prose,” an amazed Heine writes after setting a preface in verse, and he continues: “But when one reads through the old poems again to polish them up with a view to republication, one is unexpectedly surprised by the jingling routine of the rhyme and meter…” It is indeed nothing but a journalism that scans: that keeps the reader minutely informed about his moods. Heine is always and overplainly informative. Sometimes he says it with blue flowers from someone else’s garden, sometimes directly. If the factual poem “The Holy Three Kings” had been written by a poet, it would be a poem. “The little ox bellowed, the little child screamed, and the three holy kings did sing.” This would be the mood of factuality. In Heine’s hands, though, it’s merely a dispatch. This becomes quite clear in a passage of the “Vitzliputzli”:62 (#)
One hundred sixty Spaniards
Met their death that day;
More than eighty others
Were taken by the Indians.
Seriously wounded, too, were many
Who only later died.
Nearly a dozen horses were lost,
Some killed, some captured.
According to our local correspondent. And, as with the factuality, so with the feeling, so with the irony: nothing immediate, everything utterly graspable with that second hand that can grasp nothing but the material. In the petting of mood, in the tickling of wit.
But the gates made my darling
Slip silent to a rendezvous;
A fool is always willing
When a foolish girl is too.
This joke isn’t made by any real cynic whose love has given him the slip. And no poet calls these words to a girl who is moved by the sunset she is watching:
My girl, now don’t you frown,
This happens all the time;
In front here it goes down
And comes back up from behind.
Not out of respect for the girl; out of respect for the sunset.63 (#) Heine’s cynicism is at the same level as the girl’s sentimentality. And as his own sentimentality. And when, greatly moved, he says of himself, “there I wove my tender Rhymes out of Balm and Moonlight,” you may well want to be as cynical as he is and ask him—Herr Heine, now, don’t you frown—whether he didn’t perhaps mean to write “there I wove my tender Rhymes for Balm & Moonlight,” and whether this might not be the very publishing house to whose account books he was just referring.64 (#) Poetry and satire—the phenomenon of their alliance becomes comprehensible: neither of them is there, they meet on the surface, not in the depths. This tear has no salt, and this salt doesn’t salt. When Heine—what is the phrase?—“punctures the mood with a joke,” I have the impression that he wants to sprinkle salt on the tail of the pretty bird: an old experiment; the bird still flutters away.65 (#) With Heine, the illusion succeeds, if not the experiment. You can prove the contrary to him; to him, but not to his credulous audience. He wasn’t simply taken along through life as an early accompanist of everyday lyrical experiences, he was also always, by virtue of his intellectualism, passed along by people’s youthful idiocy to their more enlightened selves. And they want to be enlightened about everything, just not about Heine, and even if they awaken from his dreams they still have his wit.
This wit, however, in verse and prose, is an asthmatic cur. Heine isn’t capable of driving his humor to the height of pathos and chasing it down from there. He trots it out, but he can’t make it jump. “Just Wait!” is the title of a poem.
Because I flash with such success
You think at thundering I can’t excel!
But you’re all wrong, for I possess
A talent for thundering as well.
