a contract with time

Heinrich Heine to Rahel Varnhagen Von Ense.

Berlin, April 12, 1823.

I am going away soon and I beg you not altogether to throw away my image into the lumber room of oblivion. I could make no reprisals, and though I were to say to myself a hundred times a day, "You will forget Frau von Varnhagen!" it could not be. Forget me not! You cannot excuse yourself on the score of bad memory, your spirit has made a contract with time, and if after some hundreds of years I have the pleasure of seeing you as the fairest and most beautiful of all the flowers in the fairest and most beautiful of all the valleys of heaven, then you will have the kindness to greet me as a holly tree (or shall I be something worse?), as an old acquaintance with your friendly glance and your soft breathing sweetness. It is sure that you will do so. You have done so in the years 1822 and 1823 when you treated me, a sick, bitter, morose, poetic, and insufferable human being, with a kindliness and goodness which I have certainly not deserved in this life, and must owe alone to tender recollections of an earlier acquaintance . . .

H. H.

[Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy - Auf Flügeln Des Gesanges, Op. 34, No. 2]

-from Heinrich Heine's Memoirs from his Works, Letters, and Conversations edited by Gustav Karpeles translated by Gilbert Cannan (London: William Heinemann, 1910) vol. 1.

some praise and bitter censure

Heinrich Heine to Ferdinand Dummler.

Berlin, Jan. 5, 1823.

Our mutual friends have praised your activity and loyalty. Because, being sharpened by experience, I do most loyally esteem these qualities in a bookseller, more than any other interest, I now make you a proposal to publish one of my books.* It contains (1) a little tragedy (some three and a half printer's sheets long), the main idea of which is to be a substitute for the usual Fate, and will certainly cause a stir in the reading world; (2) a longer dramatic poem, called "Almansor" the matter of which is religious and polemical; it is concerned with topics of the day, and will cover perhaps a little more than six sheets, and (3) a cycle of humorous poems in folk-song metre that will take up three to three and a half sheets; some of them have appeared in the journals, and by their originality have excited much interest, some praise and bitter censure. As to the little tragedy which I have designed for the stage, where it is certain to be produced, I will give you its title and contents as soon as I find that you are not averse to my proposal. I do not want it to be known here before it has begun to be printed, and only two people, Professor Gubitz and Councillor Varnhagen von Ense have seen it.

I cannot myself pass any judgment upon my own worth as a poet. I will only say that my poems have excited extraordinary attention throughout Germany, and that the very violence of the hostility with which they have been assailed here and there is itself no bad sign . . .

I do not think I am much known here in Berlin; but I am better known in my own country on the Rhine and in Westphalia, where, as I hear from all sides, there is great anticipation of the appearance of my long expected book of poems, and its greatest sale will certainly be there

*Tragödien, nebst einem lyrischen Intermezzo (Berlin: Dummler, 1823)

[Louis Spohr - Fantasy]

-from Heinrich Heine's Memoirs from his Works, Letters, and Conversations edited by Gustav Karpeles translated by Gilbert Cannan (London: William Heinemann, 1910) vol. 1.

Heinrich Heine in Italy

To Edward von Schenk*

Leghorn, August 27, 1828.

. . . In two or three weeks I shall be roaming the land of Dante, Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo. There I shall read your lines. I know you are knee-deep in business. That is why I speak only of lines. After all, it isn't necessary that people of our sort write one another long letters. Our books are long letters, intended for people like us.

Sooner or later you will read in print what I think of Italy. I am plagued by my ignorance of Italian. I do not understand the people and cannot talk to them. I see Italy, but do not hear her. Yet I am not without company. The stones here speak, and I understand their dumb language. Even they seem to feel deeply what I am thinking. A broken column of the Roman period, a crumbling Lombard tower or a weather-beaten fragment of a Gothic arch understands me well. For I am myself something of a ruin wandering among ruins. Birds of a feather. . . .Often it seems to me that the old palaces wish to whisper some secret to me, and I cannot hear them for the dull noises of the day. Then I come again at night, and the moon is an excellent interpreter who understands the language of stones and can translate it into the dialect of my heart. Yes, at night I can understand Italy perfectly, for then the young nation with its young, operatic speech is asleep and the ancients rise from their cool beds and talk to me in their best Latin. There is something ghostly in coming to a land where one does not understand the living speech of a living people, and instead knows quite well the language which flourished a thousand years ago, and is long since dead, and is spoken only by midnight spirits--a dead tongue.

However, there is one language which can be understood by at least one half of the human race in all corners of the world, the fairer half, which is called par excellence, the fair sex. This language flourishes especially in Italy. What use are words where the eloquent eyes cast radiant glances deep into the heart of a poor Tedesco, eyes more eloquent than Demosthenes and Cicero, eyes--I am not lying--which are as large as stars?

Quand on parle du loup, il est derriere nous. Even at this moment, my pretty laundress is here, and I must stop washing my own linen. Adieu, poet of Belisarius. I often think of you when I see the laurel, and the more I think of you, the more I feel compelled to love you.

Heine

*Edward von Schenk (1788-1841) Poet, dramatist, politician; author of Belisarius.

-from The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine selected and edited with an introduction by Frederic Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1948) p. 374-375.