It has been raining continuously for three days. I cannot go out and I am
not inclined to work.... In the bookshop window there are two volumes of
Heine’s _Correspondence_; here is salvation. I take them and proceed to
read them till the sky clears again.
Much water has flowed away since Heine was writing to Moser, Immermann,
Varnhagen.
It is a strange thing: since 1848 we have all faltered and stepped
back, we have thrown everything overboard and shrunk into ourselves,
and yet something has been done and everything has gradually changed.
We are nearer to the earth, we stand on a lower, that is a firmer,
level, the plough cuts more deeply, our work is not so attractive,
it is rougher—perhaps because it really is work. The Don Quixotes of
the reaction have burst many of our balloons, the smoky gases have
evaporated, the aeronauts have come down, and we no longer float like the
spirit of God over the waters with chants and prophetic songs, but catch
at the trees, the roofs, and damp Mother Earth.
Where are those days when ‘Young Germany’ in its spiritual heights
theoretically set the Fatherland free, and in the spheres of Pure
Reason and Art made an end of the world of tradition and superstition?
Heine hated the highly enlightened frosty heights upon which Goethe
majestically slumbered in his old age, dreaming the clever but not quite
coherent phantasies of the second part of _Faust_. But even Heine never
sank below the level of the bookshop, even with him it was still the
academic precinct, the literary circle, the journalistic clique with
its gossip and its babble, with its bookish Shylocks in the form of
Cotta,[48] Hoffmann,[49] and Campe,[50] with its Göttingen high priests
of philology and its bishops of jurisprudence in Halle or Bonn. Neither
Heine nor his circle knew the people, and the people did not know them.
The sorrows and the joys of the lowly plains did not rise up to those
heights; to understand the moan of humanity in the bogs of to-day they
had to translate it into Latin and to arrive at their thoughts through
the Gracchi and the proletariate of Rome.
The graduates of a _sublimated_ world, they sometimes emerged into life,
beginning like Faust with the beer-shop and always, like him, with a
spirit of scholastic scepticism, which with its reflections hindered
them as it did Faust from simply looking and seeing. That is why they
immediately hastened back from living sources to the sources of history;
there they felt more at home. Their pursuits, it is particularly worth
noting, were not only not _work_, but were not _science_ either, but, so
to speak, erudition, and above all, literature.
Heine at times revolted against the scholastic atmosphere and the
passion for analysis, he wanted something different, but his letters
are typically German letters of that period, on the first page of which
stands Bettina the child and on the last Rahel the Jewess. We breathe
more freely when we meet in his letters passionate outbursts of Judaism,
then Heine is genuinely carried away; but he quickly lost his warmth and
turned cold to Judaism, and was angry with it for his own by no means
disinterested faithlessness.
The revolution of 1830 and Heine’s moving afterwards to Paris did much
for his progress. _Der Pan ist gestorben!_ he says with enthusiasm, and
hastens to the city to which I once hastened with the same feverish
eagerness—to Paris; he wanted to see the ‘great people’ and ‘grey-headed
Lafayette’ riding about on his grey horse. But literature soon gets the
upper hand again; his letters are filled in and out with literary gossip,
personalities, interspersed with complaints of destiny, of health, of
nerves, of depressed spirits, through which an immense revolting vanity
is apparent. And then Heine takes a false note. His coldly inflated
rhetorical Buonapartism grows as detestable as the squeamish horror of
the well-washed Hamburg Jew at the tribunes of the people when he meets
them not in books but in real life. He could not stomach the fact that
the workmen’s meetings were not staged in the frigidly decorous setting
of the study and salon of Varnhagen, ‘the fine-china’ Varnhagen von Ense,
as he himself calls him.
His feeling of personal dignity, however, did not go beyond having clean
hands and being free from the smell of tobacco. It is hard to blame him
for that. That feeling is not a German nor a Jewish one, and unhappily
not a Russian one either.
Heine coquettes with the Prussian Government, seeks its favour through
the ambassador and through Varnhagen, and then abuses it.[51] He
coquetted with the King of Bavaria and pelted him with sarcasms; he more
than coquetted with the German Diet, and tried to atone for his abject
behaviour with biting taunts.
Does not all this explain why the scholastically revolutionary flare-up
in Germany so quickly came to grief in 1848? It too was merely a literary
effort, and it vanished like a rocket: its leaders were professors and
its generals came from the Faculty of Philology; its rank and file in
high boots and _bérets_ were students who deserted the revolutionary
cause as soon as it passed from metaphysical audacity and literary
recklessness into the market-place. Apart from a few stray workmen, the
people did not follow these pale _Führer_, they simply held aloof from
them.
‘How can you put up with all Bismarck’s insults?’ I asked a year before
the war of a deputy of the Left from Berlin at the time when the former
was practising violent methods, and more successfully than Grabow and
Company.
‘We have done everything we could, _innerhalb_ the constitution.’
‘Well, then, you should follow the example of the Government and try
_ausserhalb_.’
‘How do you mean? Make an appeal to the people, stop paying taxes?...
That’s a dream.... Not a single man would follow us or would make a move
to support us.... And we should only provide a fresh triumph for Bismarck
by ourselves proving our weakness.’
‘Well, then, I can only say like your President at every fresh blow:
“Shout three times _Es lebe der König_ and go home peaceably!”’
5