Authors: Karl Kraus
Ultimately, all amalgamation of the intellectual with the informational, this axiom of journalism, this pretext for its plans, this excuse for its dangers, is and was thoroughly Heinean—be it now also, thanks to the more recent Frenchmen and to the friendly agency of Herr Bahr, somewhat psychologically inclined and garnished with yet a bit more “meditativeness.”
37
Only once was there a pause in this development—its name was Ludwig Speidel.
38
In him, the art of language was a guest at the greasiest dives of the Mind.
The press may feel that Speidel’s life was an episode that cut disruptively into the game begun by Heine.
And yet he seemed to side with the incarnate spirit of language, summoning it on holidays to the filthiest entertainment places, so that it could see the goings-on.
Never was a colleague more dubious than this one.
They could parade the living man around, all right.
But how long they resisted giving the dead man the honor of a book!
How they sensed that a complete edition here could bring that humiliation which they once imbibed by the spoonful as pride.
When they finally decided to let the “associate” into literature, Herr Schmock had the cheek to undertake the commentary, and the hand of the editor, making things cute and topical, saved for the Viennese viewpoint as much as could be saved by a grouping of Speidelian prose around the Viennese viewpoint.
39
An artist wrote these feuilletons, a feuilletonist compiled these works of art—the distance between Mind and press becomes doubly appreciable thereby.
The journalists were right to hesitate so long.
They weren’t idle in the meantime.
People yearned for Speidel’s books—the journalists invoked his modesty and gave us their own books.
40
For it is the evil mark of this crisis: journalism, which drives great minds into its stable, is meanwhile overrunning their pasture.
It has plundered literature—it is generous and gives its own literature to literature.
There appear feuilleton collections about which there’s nothing so remarkable as that the work hasn’t fallen apart in the bookbinder’s hands.
Bread is being made out of bread crumbs.
What is it that continues to give them hope?
The continuing interest in the subjects they select.
If one of them chatters about eternity, shouldn’t he be heard for as long as eternity lasts?
Journalism lives on this fallacy.
It always has the grandest themes, and in its hands eternity can become timely; but it gets old just as easily.
The artist gives form to the day, the hour, the minute.
No matter how limited and conditional in time and location his inspiration may have been, his work grows the more limitlessly and freely the further it’s removed from its inspiration.
It goes confidently out of date in a heartbeat: it grows fresh again over decades.
What lives on material dies before it does.
What lives in language lives on with it.
41
How easy it was to read the chitchat every Sunday, and now that we can check it out of the library we can barely get through it.
How hard it was to read the sentences in
Die Fackel
, even when we were helped by the incident they referred to.
42
No,
because
we were helped by it!
The further we’re removed from the incident, the better we understand what was said about it.
How does this happen?
The incident was close and the perspective was broad.
It was all forewritten.
It was veiled so that the inquisitive day couldn’t get at it.
Now the veils are rising …
43
But Heinrich Heine—even the aesthetes who are rescuing his immortality in an island publishing house
44
(these gloriously impractical minds whose cerebral wrinkles trail away into ornament) have nothing more impressive to say about him than that his reports from Paris “have become the still-vital masterwork of modern journalism”; and these Robinsons of literary seclusion take Heine’s artistic word for it that his articles “would be very useful in developing a style for popular themes.”
Here again you can sense the kinship of those who reside equally far from the Mind: those who live in form and those who live in content; who think in the line and who think in the surface; the aesthetes and the journalists.
In the problem of Heine they collide.
They live on off him and he in them.
So it’s by no means urgent to talk about his work.
What is increasingly urgent is to talk about his influence, and about the fact that his work isn’t capable of bearing up under an influence that German intellectual life will little by little cast off as unbearable.
This is the way it will play out: each follower of Heine takes one tile from the mosaic of his work until no more remain.
The original fades because the repellent glare of the copy opens our eyes.
Here’s an original that loses what it lends to others.
And can you even call something an original when its imitators are better?
Naturally, to appreciate an invention that has since perfected itself into a modern machine, you have to apply historical justice.
But in making an absolute judgment, don’t you have to concede that Heinrich Heine’s prose has now been surpassed by the observationally inclined technicians, the style boys, and the swindlers of charm?
That this prose, which signifies wit without perspective and perspectives without wit, was quite certainly surpassed by those feuilletonists who not only read Heine but took extra pains to go to the source of sources—to Paris?
And that there have since appeared imitators of his poetry who manage the feelings and the newsman’s wrinkle of disdain no less glibly, and who in particular are no less deft in making the little joke of the little melancholy, which the hurdy-gurdy verse helps so nimbly to its feet.
Because, after all, nothing is easier to outfit with every modern convenience than a lyrical arrangement.
It’s true that nobody would dare compare himself to Heine in the extent of his output and the scope of his intellectual interests.
But today every Itzak Wisecrack
45
can probably outdo him when it comes to making an aesthetic anesthetic
46
and using rhyme and rhythm to turn candied husks of thought into cherry bombs.
Heinrich Heine the poet lives only as a canned youthful sweetheart.
None is in greater need of reassessment than this one.
Youth soaks up everything, and it’s cruel to take many things away from it later.
How easily the soul of youth is impregnated, how easily things that are easy and slack attach themselves to it: how worthless a thing has to be for its memory not to be made precious by the time and circumstances of its acquisition!
You’re not critical, you’re pious when you love Heine.
You’re not critical, you’re blasphemous when you try to talk somebody who grew up with Heine out of his Heine.
An assault on Heine is an invasion of the everyman’s private life.
It injures reverence for youth, respect for boyhood, veneration of childhood.
To presume to judge firstborn impressions according to their merit is worse than presumptuous.
And Heine had a talent for being embraced by young souls and thus associated with young experiences.
47
Like rating the melody of a hurdy-gurdy, to which I was unstoppably drawn, above Beethoven’s Ninth, owing to a subjective urge.
This is why grown-ups don’t have to put up with anyone who wants to dispute their belief that Heine is a greater poet than Goethe.
Yes, it’s on the luck of association that Heinrich Heine lives.
Am I so relentlessly objective as to say to someone: go, look, the peach tree in the garden of your childhood is quite a bit smaller than it used to be.
He had the measles, he had Heine, and he gets hot in recollecting every fever of youth.
Criticism should stay quiet here.
No author needs reassessment as badly as Heine, no one bears up under it so poorly, no one is so protected from it by every fond illusion.
But I have the courage to recommend it only because I’m hardly in need of it myself, because I failed to experience Heine at a time when I would have had to overrate him.
There comes a day where it’s no concern of mine that a gentleman who has long since become a banker once crept to his beloved under the strains of “You have diamonds and pearls.”
48
And where you become rude at the sight of old brains still being affected by the charm with which this tearful materiality once captivated young hearts, and the syrup of sentimental moods adheres to literary judgments.
When you get right down to it, the hankerings of youth could have been satisfied even by Herr Hugo Salus.
49
I don’t fancy myself guiltless of giving a bit of culture the benefit of the situation in which I experienced it, or of confusing it with the attendant mood.
I retain a warm glow from Heine’s Berlin letters, for example, because the melody “We wind for you a bridal wreath,” which Heine makes fun of there, is congenial to me.
But only in my nerves.
In my judgment, I am mature and willing to distinguish merits.
The memory of how the garden smelled when your first love walked through it is of general concern to the culture only if you’re a poet.
You’re free to overvalue the occasion if you’re capable of making a poem out of it.
When, once, in a booth at the Prater,
50
I saw a lady in tights floating in the air (which I now know was done with mirrors), and a hurdy-gurdy was accompanying her with “Last Rose,” my eyes were opened to beauty and my ears to music, and I would have ripped to shreds the man who told me that the lady was waltzing around on a plank and the tune was by Flotow.
51
In criticism, though, unless you’re speaking to children, you have to be allowed to call Heine by his true name.
His charm, according to his grown-up defenders, is a musical one.
To which I reply: to be responsive to literature, you cannot be responsive to music, otherwise the melody and rhythm of music will suffice to create a mood.
52
I don’t need a mood when I’m doing literary work; I create a mood in myself by working.
To get the juices flowing, I use a tone from a miniature spinet that is actually a cigar box and which, if pressed on, emits a few old Viennese notes that have been locked inside it for a hundred years.
I’m not musical; Wagner would disturb me in this situation.
53
And if I sought the same kitschy stimulus of melody in literature, I could produce no literature on such a night.
Heine’s music may, by the same token, suffice for musicians who require more significant disclosures from their own art than his little bit of euphony affords.
What, then, is poetry in the Heinean style, what is that German taste in art into whose prettinesses and wittinesses the wild hunt of Liliencron’s language burst, as the avant-gardist Gottfried August Bürger’s once had?
54
Heine’s poetry: it is mood or opinion with the Hark!
hark!
of jingling bells.
This poetry is melody—so much so that it demands to be set to music.
And it owes more to this music than its own for its success with the philistines.
Simplicissimus
once poked fun at the kind of German who crosses himself to ward off Heine, only to sing his “Lorelei” later on, blissfully drunk on emotion, “nevertheless.”
55
Two images: but the contrast isn’t as glaring as it may seem at first glance.
For the philistines who curse Heine don’t rise to the true philistine confession until the second image, when they sing him.
When a popular song is made out of a poem, is it insight into the poem’s literary value that makes the song popular?
56
How many German philistines would know what Heine means if Herr Silcher hadn’t set “I know not what it means”
57
to music?
But is it an argument for the poet that this clientele would have clamored for his undifficult poetry even if it hadn’t been delivered to them on wings of song?
58
Oh, this narrow-minded hatred of Heine, which targets the Jew, tolerates the poet, and bleats along with a sentimental melody with or without a musician’s later help.
Art brings life into disorder.
The poets of humanity restore chaos again and again; the poets of society do their singing and lamenting, their blessing and cursing, within a well-ordered world.
All those for whom a poem amounts to an agreement between themselves and the poet, sealed with rhyme, flee to Heine.
All those who wish to join the poet in his pursuit of urbane allegories and his establishment of relations with the outside world will consider Heine a greater poet than Goethe.
But those who consider a poem to be the revelation of a poet lost in his observation of Nature, not of a Nature lost in the observations of the poet, will be satisfied to reckon Heine a technician skilled at pleasure and sorrow, a speedy outfitter of stock moods.
When Goethe shares in—and shares with us—the “silence on every peak,” he does it with such intensely felt kinship that the silence can be heard as an intimation.
59
But if a pine tree in the North stands on a barren peak and dreams of a palm tree in the Orient, it is an exceptional courtesy of Nature to oblige Heine’s yearning allegorically.
Seeing an artful fake like this in the show window of a confectioner or a feuilletonist might put you in a good mood if you’re an artist yourself.
But does that make its manufacturer one?
60
Even the plain outline of a perception of Nature, from which barely visible threads spin themselves out toward the soul, seems to me more lyrical than the dressing-up of ready-made moods, because it presupposes empathy.
In this sense, Goethe’s “Stillness and Sea” is lyric poetry, as are Liliencron’s lines: “A river babbles its happy way across the land, a field of ripe rye gathers in the west, then Nature leans her head upon her hand and, weary from her work, takes rest.”
Deeper moods arise from a reflecting heathscape on a summer morning than from reflective palms and pine trees; for here Nature rests her head upon her hand, while there Heinrich Heine pressed his hand on Nature’s cheek … You’re ashamed that between fears and tears there ever existed such slick intercourse that went by the name of poetry; you’re almost ashamed of polemics.
But you should open the
Book of Songs
and try reading the right-hand and the left-hand pages higgledy-piggledy, interchanging the lines.
You won’t be disappointed, if you’re not disappointed with Heine.
And those who are already disappointed will, for the first time, not be.
“The little birds, they chirped so fine / Glad lovesongs did my heart entwine.”
That can stand right or left.
“In those darling little eyes of thine”: this need not simply rhyme with “My dear darling’s mouth as red as wine” and “blue little violets of thine eyes sublime” or, again, with “thine little red-rosy cheeks divine”; at every point the plea could stand: “Dear little darling, rest thy little hand upon this heart of mine,” and nowhere in this dear little chamber of poesy would the transposition of mine and thine be felt as a disturbance.
On the other hand, Heine’s entire “Lorelei,” say, could not be substituted for Goethe’s “Fisher,” even though the only seeming difference is that the Lorelei influences the boatman from above, whereas the watery woman influences the fisher from below.
Truly, Heinean verse is operetta lyrics, which even good music isn’t ruined by.
Meilhac and Halévy’s lines wouldn’t be out of place in the
Book of Songs
: