‘Jewish Dionysus’: Heinrich Heine and the Politics of Literature

Heinrich Heine’s body of work presents seeming disparities between poetry and prose, Romantic lyricism and bitter polemics, love and hate, manifesting the complexity of the author and his vision. Another fundamental yet elusive dimension of Heine’s work involves his Jewish background. Hannah Arendt provocatively described Heine as “the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew,” in part because he recognized their implicit conflict. His ambivalent attitude toward Jews and Judaism and German-Jewish identity is difficult to separate from his contentiousness and humor. Heine has not been taken seriously enough in part because of a disinclination to approach him as a thinker, including what the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk called Heine’s “satirical, polemical... holy nonseriousness.” At stake is a ‘politics of literature’ in the sense of how literature is evaluated or categorized. Our task is to locate Heine’s original voice and his historical and contemporary significance.This study addresses Heine’s work largely in relation to his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. Heine’s belated dialogue with the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe involved their shared opposition to Christianity, nationalism, and Romanticism as a literary movement, as well as their love poetry reflecting the connection between their lives and their work. Heine’s engagement with German philosophy and his “Jewish” pantheism, associated with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, anticipated Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept “God is dead.” Heine’s Ludwig Börne. A Memorial defined the late liberal, converted Jew Ludwig Börne as a Christian or Jewish, ascetic, moralistic “Nazarene,’ in contrast to Heine and Goethe as pagan, sensual, art- loving “Hellenes.” At stake in part was Heine’s modern resistance as a Jew to others’ interpretations of what is a Jew.Friedrich Nietzsche’s relation to Heine constitutes a particularly important consideration. The philosopher’s early infatuation with and later rejection of the composer Richard Wagner, announced in Nietzsche’s publication and revision of his Birth of Tragedy, can be understood as a turn back to Heine as an unacknowledged and humorous source for several of Wagner’s ideas. Nietzsche’s Dionysian outlook was anticipated by Heine’s iconoclastic response to German Hellenist interpretations of classical antiquity, although Heine combined his embrace of Dionysus with an ostensible late “conversion” to Judaism. Through his entertainingly thought- provoking art, Heine offers perhaps the definitive non-systematic thinker of profound ambivalence, internal conflicts, and radical juxtapositions of ideas, a unique ‘Jewish Dionysus.