Content area
Full Text
I. Phantom Wounds
None of Heinrich Heine's (1797-1856) manuscripts suffered as much speculation or provoked as much anticipation during his lifetime as his projected memoirs, which he pursued over many decades. Indeed, already in 1823 the young Berlin law student who attended Hegel's lectures was eager to apply these lessons to a vision of his own life. In those years, Heine describes his life as "tumultuous" on the outside and "dark" and dreamlike on the inside. He writes to his Jewish friend Immanuel Wohlwill,
Yes, amice, I had great luck; just as I left the philosophical lecture hall, and entered the circus of worldly affairs, I could construct my life philosophically, and I can look at it objectively now-even though I lack that higher calm and contemplation that would be necessary for a clear rendering of a large theater of life.1
Heine calls this project his Bekenntnisse 2 in an allusion to Rousseau's Confessions, but quickly abandons the title for the sake of other alternatives. Years later Heine takes up the concept of confessions again and this time translates it into the more legal term Geständnisse.3 The Geständnisse, authored in the 1850s, were to preface his observations on Germany and were intended to counter Mme. de Stael's De l'Allemagne, as well as celebrate his own arrival in Paris two decades earlier.4 But these Geständnisse would also speak of the distance Heine had traveled from his early discipleship of Hegel to embrace a less "abstract" philosophy and affirm a newly regained sense of religion.
In 1823, however, Heine's Bekenntnisse had not yet taken that turn. Instead, he was eager to remove from them any personal considerations and to turn them into a picture of his times; he intended to include portraits of relatives and friends. Thus, Heine soon uses the term Memoiren5 and claims to have begun a work that would not only counter Rousseau's famous confessions but also Goethe's autobiography. Heine wanted not only to write about his times, but to invent a new genre of life-writing that would be appropriate for a new age. Memories, not confessions, were called for, that is, a picture of the times, not just the inner life of an individual. This genre would also imply the introduction of a...