‘Jewish Dionysus’: Heinrich Heine and the Politics of Literature By Alexander G. Soros A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Martin Jay, Chair Professor Thomas Laqueur Professor Anton Kaes Spring 2018 Abstract ‘Jewish Dionysus’: Heinrich Heine and the Politics of Literature by Alexander G. Soros Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Martin Jay, Chair 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.’ 1 Dedicated to “Jewish Dionysus no. 1” i ‘Jewish Dionysus’: Heinrich Heine and the Politics of Literature Table of Contents Introduction 1-4 Prologue Heine as Contested Monument 5-10 1. Goethe’s ambivalent Doppelgänger 11-30 A. Goethe and the Consequences 12-16 B. The Bildung of the Artist: Romantic and Ironic Love 16-20 C. Heine’s Auseinandersetzung with Goethe 20-26 D. Goethe, Heine, and the Politics of Literature 26-30 2. Heine’s Jewish Pantheism 31-58 A. A “literary” History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany 32-39 B. Spinoza and Heine’s modernity 39-46 C. German-Jewish Questions 46-51 D. Heine’s ambivalent German-Jewishness 51-57 3. The Börne Identity 58-80 A. Heine on (top of) Börne 59-66 B. Germans, Jews, and “their” Literature 67-71 C. Polemics and Jewish Humor 71-76 D. Jews on Jews 76-80 4. Nietzsche contra Wagner pro Heine 81-102 A. Nietzsche’s anti-anti-Semitism, or, over-coming Wagner in oneself 82-87 B. Wagner’s anti-Semitism, or, Heine going under 87-91 C. Wagner as Heine’s un-humorous Double 91-97 D. Heine and Nietzsche contra Wagner 97-102 5. Jewish Dionysus 103-129 A. German Hellenism, or, the Tyranny of Greece over Germany 103-112 B. Heine and Classical Antiquity 113-119 C. Heine’s late “Conversion” 119-129 Epilogue Heine and Nietzsche’s Fates 130-138 Endnotes 139-185 Bibliography 186-211 ii ‘Jewish Dionysus’: Heinrich Heine and the Politics of Literature Illustrations 1. Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, Laocoön, ca. 150 CE (reign of Tiberius), Rome, Vatican, restoration of Sansovino/Montosorli ca. 1510/1535. 1a. Laocoön, Magi restoration ca. 1959 2. Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, Blinding of Polyphemus, Sperlonga Italy iii iv v vi Acknowledgments I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my loving parents, my extended family, my colleagues, and my dissertation committee: Chair Professor Martin Jay, Professor Thomas Laqueur, and Professor Anton Kaes. vii ‘Jewish Dionysus’: Heinrich Heine and the Politics of Literature At the time of his death in Parisian exile in 1856, Heinrich Heine was the most widely read German poet in Europe.1 His lyric poems or “songs” about love and grief had been set to music by the greatest German-speaking composers, including Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss.2 Heine’s prose addressed the most diverse and partly obscure topics in original ways, outside conventional literary genres, including outrageous polemics that caused scandals and provoked duels in his lifetime and animosity during his life and after. These writings are little read today in German-speaking countries and largely unknown outside them. Heine’s career and body of work thus present seeming disparities between poetry and prose, the sweetness of Romantic lyricism and bitter polemics, and evoke both love and hate in his own attitudes and his reception by others. Yet an attentive reading of Heine’s own texts—including his extensive commentary on poetry and about himself as an artist—reminds us that these extremes are inextricable. Heine’s love poems and other poetry combine sweetness with bitterness, the rose with the thorn, or in his own original formulation, “ambrosia and sauerkraut.”3 More specifically, his poems temper Romantic sensibilities with opposition to Romanticism in the form of humor, sarcasm, parody and satire. This tension is plainly evident in his single most popular poem on the Rhine river-nymph Lorelei, so well-known to every German that the Nazis, who sought to eradicate his memory, had to settle for assigning the poem to “anonymous.” 4 Heine’s work encompassed undeniably seductive and entertaining elements along with dissonance and disenchantment, testifying to the complexity and resistance of his vision regardless of the vagaries of his changing and complex reception. Heine lives precisely insofar as we are still striving to understand his art. A fundamental yet elusive dimension of Heine’s work involves his Jewish background. Against the broader background of the persecution of Jews stretching from antiquity through the medieval and modern periods, concrete instances of German hostilities against Jews in Heine’s lifetime began in the early 1820’s and continued throughout his life. Heine was educated in a during Napoleon’s occupation of the Rhineland, which resulted in the emancipation of the Jews. Yet with the return of German autonomy under Prussian rule Heine soon faced hostility both from pervasive anti-Jewish elements in German society and concrete government laws that limited the professional choices of Jews. After his move to Berlin, Heine also developed his own interest in Jewish culture and letters as a member of the newly founded “Society for the Culture and Scholarship of the Jews” [Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden]. Throughout his life Heine had diverse, complex, ambivalent attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, and Germany, particularly when it came to his own identity in the context of assimilation. These issues are difficult to separate from his polemics and humor. Peter Sloterdijk, whose Critique of Cynical Reason became the largest-selling work of philosophy in Germany since the second World War, praised Heine, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, precisely because their critiques lay outside the domains of traditional philosophy and scholarly decorum: It is no accident that the great representatives of critique—the French moralists, the Encyclopedists, the socialists, and especially Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—remain outsiders to the scholarly domain. In all of them there is a satirical, polemical component that can scarcely be hidden under the mask of scholarly respectability. These signals of a 1 holy nonseriousness, which remains one of the sure indexes of truth, can be employed as signposts to the critique of cynical reason.5 Sloterdijk singled out Heine above all these giants of modern Western thought for displaying a “knack, unsurpassed to the present day, for combining theory and satire, cognition and entertainment.”6 It would be difficult to improve on Sloterdijk’s formulation as a foundation for the present study. Taking Sloterdijk’s insight into the holy nonseriousness of non-scholarly critique to heart,