Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67850-6 - Heinrich Heine: On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings Edited by Terry Pinkard and Translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate Frontmatter More information CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY HEINRICH HEINE On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67850-6 - Heinrich Heine: On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings Edited by Terry Pinkard and Translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate Frontmatter More information CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Series editors KARL AMERIKS Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame DESMOND M. CLARKE Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork The main objective of Cambridge Textsin the History of Philosophy is to expand the range, variety and quality of texts in the history of philosophy which are available in English. The series includes texts by familiar names (such as Descartes and Kant) and also by less well-known authors. Wherever possible, texts are published in complete and unabridged form, and translations are specially commissioned for the series. Each volume contains a critical introduction together with a guide to further reading and any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. The volumes are designed for student use at undergraduate and postgraduate level and will be of interest not only to students of philosophy, but also to a wider audience of readers in the history of science, the history of theology and the history of ideas. For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of book. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67850-6 - Heinrich Heine: On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings Edited by Terry Pinkard and Translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate Frontmatter More information HEINRICH HEINE On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings edited by TERRY PINKARD Georgetown University translated by HOWARD POLLACK-MILGATE DePauw University © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67850-6 - Heinrich Heine: On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings Edited by Terry Pinkard and Translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate Frontmatter More information University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521678506 © Cambridge University Press 2007 Th is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2007, 2011 Second Edition 2012 Reprinted 2013 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-0-521-86129-8 Hardback isbn 978-0-521-67850-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67850-6 - Heinrich Heine: On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings Edited by Terry Pinkard and Translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate Frontmatter More information Contents Introduction page vii Chronology xxxiii Further reading xxxviii Translator’s note xl On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany Preface to the first edition 3 Preface to the second edition 4 Book One 9 Book Two 42 Book Three 76 Other writings From a letter to Moses Moser in Berlin, May 23, 1823 121 From The Songbook (1827), “Return home” 122 From The Songbook (1827), “North sea: second cycle” 124 From Lucca, the City (in Travel Pictures, Part IV, 1831) 127 From the Introduction to “Kahldorf on the Nobility in Letters to Count M. von Moltke” (1831) 130 From The Romantic School (1835) 136 From New Poems (1844), “Poems of the Times,” “Doctrine” 196 From the Letters about Germany (1844) 197 From the “Afterword” to Romanzero (1851) 198 From Confessions (1854) 203 Index 216 v © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67850-6 - Heinrich Heine: On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings Edited by Terry Pinkard and Translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67850-6 - Heinrich Heine: On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings Edited by Terry Pinkard and Translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate Frontmatter More information Introduction At his death in 1856, Heinrich Heine was the most widely read poet in Europe. He was also a prolific essayist and critic, and his poems have been set to music more often than those of any other poet. Both in his own time and in ours, he has been known as a “political poet” since he championed the cause of the oppressed, and as a friend of sorts of Karl Marx, he was regarded as a “socialist” poet for many years, even though he himself was as wary of Marx’s communism as he was distrustful of the emerging commercial and industrial society around him. Heine was also not merely a German poet, but a German Jewish poet (who for a while had rather pro forma converted to Christianity), and the anti-Semites in Germany did their best to make sure nobody forgot the “Jewish” part. If anything Heine seemed to regard himself as a German European;in1822 while still in Berlin he himself noted, “I love Germany and the Germans; but I love no less the inhabitants of the rest of this earth, whose number is forty times greater – and it is surely love which gives a man his true value. I am therefore – thank God – worth forty times more than those who cannot pull themselves out of the swamp of national egotism and who love none but Germany and the Germans.”1 But when, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia and then a few years later in Waterloo, the various governments of the German principalities began their authoritarian crackdown on “demagogues” (the term of art used for alleged “subversives”), not unsurprisingly anti-Semitism began to increase. In 1831, Heine had decided that for the time being, Paris would 1 Cited by S. S. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 57–58; Heinrich Heine, S¨amtliche Werke in vier B¨anden (Dusseldorf:¨ Artemis und Winkler, 2001), vol. II, p. 467. vii © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67850-6 - Heinrich Heine: On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings Edited by Terry Pinkard and Translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate Frontmatter More information On the history of religion and philosophy in Germany and other writings be a safer home for him than Berlin or Gottingen;¨ however, his tempo- rary exile became permanent after 1835, when the Prussian government banned publication of his work and then the German Bundesversammlung issued a decree forbidding publication of many authors including him. His exile was sealed in 1844 when the Prussian government issued an order for Heine’s arrest if he were ever to set foot on Prussian soil. But if their goal was to silence Heine or diminish his popularity, they failed utterly.Heine continued to weave his magic with the German public until his death, although he always remained a controversial figure. As Heine’s biographer, Jeffrey L. Sammons, has noted, it is very hard to pin down Heine on virtually anything, since he early on created a per- sona for himself that he himself continually shifted around; as Sammons remarks, “Heinrich Heine” is “a central, commanding, fictional figure in the works of Heinrich Heine.”2 Even his birth date is relatively hard to fix, since Heine himself regularly entered very different dates and years on various official and unofficial papers. In that light, it is not surprising that the twenty-five-year-old Heine himself noted in his 1822 Letters from Berlin that as far as he was concerned, the highest freedom comes at a masked ball: What does it matter who is beneath the mask? The quest is enjoy- ment, and for that one only needs human beings. Nowhere can one be a human being more fully than at a masked ball, where the waxen mask hides our usual mask of flesh, where a simple Du [the famil- iar form of address in German] restores the primordial sociality of familiarity, where a Venetian cloak (Domino) covers all pretensions and brings about the most beautiful equality and the most beautiful freedom – the freedom conferred by masks, Maskenfreiheit.3 Infact,hisname,“Heinrich,”onlycamelater;hewasbornHarryHeine in Dusseldorf¨ (apparently on December 13, 1797). His father, Samson Heine, was a middle-class cloth merchant. His uncle, Salomon Heine (his father’s brother), became an immensely wealthy banker in Hamburg and exercised a formidable influence on Heinrich for most of his life. Heine never quite got over the idea that his uncle could make him rich overnight with a large gift of money that his uncle would in fact never miss; but the 2 Jeffery L.