Book of Songs by Heinrich Heine
"Book of Songs" (1827) by Heinrich Heine is a seminal collection of poetry that encapsulates the core of his lyrical output up to the age of twenty-six. This work played a pivotal role in establishing Heine's reputation, gaining widespread popularity and undergoing numerous editions over decades. The poetry within blends elements of German folk song with Romantic sensibilities, reflecting Heine's complex relationship with his German identity and cultural influences, especially during his formative years in a Rhineland largely under French rule. His verses often explore themes of love, loss, and the German national character, while also incorporating his characteristic irony and satire.
Heine's style is noted for its musicality and emotional depth, employing vivid imagery and playful language. The collection is structured into sections, including "Junge Leiden" (Sorrows of Youth), which reveals his earlier Sturm und Drang influences, alongside more mature reflections in later cycles. Noteworthy poems, such as "The Lorelei," exemplify the balance Heine strikes between lightness and profound sentiment. His poetry navigates the Romantic landscape while simultaneously critiquing it, marking a significant transition toward Symbolism in German literature. "Book of Songs" continues to be a vital work for understanding the evolution of 19th-century poetry and the complexities of Heine's artistic and cultural identity.
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Book of Songs by Heinrich Heine
First published:Buch der Lieder, 1827 (English translation, 1856)
Type of work: Poetry
The Work:
Although it is generally conceded that Heinrich Heine’s finest poetry was not written until his last years, the Book of Songs, which assembles his entire lyrical output to the age of twenty-six, remains the core of his poetic work. The book gained immediate popularity and appeared in a new edition every other year for decades. German critical opinion of the period cited Heine for writing in the spirit and with the simple accents of German folk song, but he soon became a controversial figure. His merits are still fiercely disputed in German territories, much of the controversy centering on his later prose writings, in which the unquenchably poetic nature of his approach to religion and political philosophy yielded, along with chilling prophetic insights, considerable rhetorical muddle.
His own feelings toward Germany were intensely ambiguous. He later became, through his Paris exile, “a link that spanned the Rhine”; but the French influences that surrounded him in his first sixteen years (during which time the Rhineland was mostly under French military occupation or French civil rule) apparently had little effect. In his memoirs, he said that early school experiences imbued him with a permanent prejudice against French literature, and he went through a phase of nationalistic fervor that ended only when he discovered that he breathed more freely under the French than the Prussian regime; ultimately he denounced Gallophobia and German national egotism. “The Grenadiers,” one of his earliest poems, expresses his boyish admiration for Napoleon—typically an admiration not for the deeds but only for the genius of the man. When Heine lived among the French, however, his admiration was chiefly directed toward their freedom from the idealism, prudery, and sentimentality that he deplored in the German philistines, at whose expense his satirical wit waxed especially brilliant.
In the North Sea cycle that closes his Book of Songs, Heine describes his deep love of Germany, a love that flourished in spite of the fact that Germany’s “pleasant soil” was “encumbered with madness, hussars, and wretched verses.” There are passages, especially in the early poems, in which he expresses identification with the German character, either lamenting the passing of old Germany’s nobility and virtues or praising the oak that stands for the essential hardihood and “holiness” of the fatherland. There is, however, something in his love for Germany that resembles his commitment to the lost beloved, the false fair, the maiden with flowering beauty and decaying heart, and this constitutes his poetic stock in trade and is, in fact, almost his whole Nibelungenhort. Nevertheless, he considered himself from first to last a German, and his poetry is deeply rooted in the German Romantic movement. He liked to refer to himself as the last of the Romantics, marking the close of the old lyric school of the Germans, but he attacked the political, realist, engagé “Young Germany” group with much the same exuberance as he did the old “poesy” and regressive spiritualism.
Heine, experimenting in most of the modes of Romanticism but ultimately taking from the movement only what suited him, provided finally one of the paths by which the Romantic spirit was deflected toward Symbolism. Individual lyrics of the Book of Songs sometimes suffer from a facile outpouring of stock diction and sentiment, but here is poetry that from the beginning avoids either the heights or the depths of the abysmal absolute. Its dealings with the absolute are rather directed at maintaining a perilous equilibrium, buoyed by Heine’s fresh, vigorous idiom, his delicate music, with its constant play of assonance, and his frequent ironic twists. Reacting to the artifice of eighteenth century diction, Heine sympathized with the Romantic interests in a return to the German folk tradition and a poetic approximation to the supposedly purer aesthetic impact of music. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that some of his ballads (“The Lorelei,” for example) were actually admitted into the canon of German folk song, Heine himself insisted of his poetry that it was only the form that was somewhat akin to the folk song; the subject matter was that of conventional society. Perhaps more important to Heine’s poetry than the Romantic exaltation of the Volk was the concern, distinctive to the German Romantic school, with developing a rationale of the comic. This concern provided a sympathetic climate for Heine’s particular form of mockery, itself partially a product of the satirical wit native to his Jewish cultural inheritance.
The Romantic movement was later to provide one of the most obvious targets for Heine’s irony, and the lyrical preface to the third edition of the Book of Songs contains an implicit comment on that subject. It was Heine who once defined the German Romantic school as a return to the medieval poetry that sprang from the Catholicism in which men derived voluptuous pleasure from pain. The prefacing verses satirically summarize that pleasure as it finds expression in his own lyrics. It is the “old enchanted wood” through which the poet wanders, listening to the nightingale singing “of love and the keen ache of love.” He comes to a gloomy castle before which lies a marble sphinx, half lion, half woman, which the song of the nightingale prompts him to kiss. The kiss awakens the statue, who proceeds to embrace him rapturously in return at the same time that she sinks her claws into him, kissing and rending simultaneously. As the poet submits to this “exquisite torture,” the nightingale sings, “O wondrous sphinx, O love,/ Why this always distressing/ Mingling of death-like agony/ With every balm and blessing?” The whole effect involves the same burlesque by exaggeration that is operative at the end of the “Lyrical Intermezzo,” in which Heine describes the enormity of the coffin that would be required for him to lower all his sorrows into the Rhine—a facetious note not entirely confined to his earliest poems. On the whole, the Book of Songs contains Heine’s exploration of the Romantic movement rather than his rejection of it, if only because it contains expressions of the sentimental attachments of various adolescent periods.
The first section, “Junge Leiden” (“sorrows of youth”), represents roughly Heine’s Sturm und Drang period. It contains such characteristic pieces as “The Minnesingers” in which, with “word for sword,” the singers engage in a tournament whose victor is the one who enters the fray with the deadliest wound. The section is subdivided into Dream Pictures, Songs, Romances, and Sonnets; the romantic decor of the poet’s sensibility is rendered in its most studied garishness and most rollicking meter. Images include the enchanted garden and the graveyard vision; the wedding festivities and attendant corpse conjuring; the shining dream that turns to nightmare or to day-lit delusion; and Poor Peter, alias the clumsy knight, alias “King Heinrich”—a primordial Prufrock. Not all of the skeleton-rattling in this group is as delightful as that of “I came from my love’s house.” Here a minstrel sits on his crumbling tombstone and plays a delirious dance to arouse the graveyard’s other inhabitants, and each tells how he came to be there—“How he fared, and was snared in love’s mad and furious chase.”
By the time of the “Lyrical Intermezzo” and the “Homecoming” sequence, which follow “Junge Leiden,” Heine has largely abandoned his supernatural baggage in favor of a more natural imagery and a more personal, direct form of address:
God knows where I’ll find that silly
The imagery of sea, storm, seasonal change, and the like is never employed for its own richness, but for its directly evocative effect, as in the famous “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht.” Heine also proves himself capable of a restraint and lightness of touch in the most ageless tradition:
The golden flame of summer
In the “Lyrical Intermezzo,” a subtle spring to autumn progression is threaded through the whole sequence.
Max Brod noted the remarkable cohesion revealed by assembling the whole of Heine’s early poetry into a single book. The experiences of the hero of the poem sequences form a consistent whole in which the action develops with almost the progression of a verse novel. A biographical basis for these experiences is easy to establish, but it is detracting from its value to do so. Heine himself was extremely opposed to any biographical reading.
A unity less restricted to the theme of the rejected lover is attempted in the two North Sea cycles. Short, parallel sequences that exhibit a kind of symphonic development, they are often discounted as set pieces because they were written partly to escape the confines of a reputation for “lyrical, mordant, two-stanza” verse. They are not without rewarding moments, however, and their parallelism is curious and revealing. In the beginning the poet invokes the sea, the great symbol of inhuman immensity and constant change. In the poems that follow, the poet is actually at sea, witnessing and participating in various phenomena—storm, calm, seasickness, sunset, the progression of twilight, and night. There are also apostrophes to the ancient gods. Finally the poet comes to port, in the first sequence to the Peace of Christ, and in the final sequence, in a poem that parodies Christian metaphor throughout, to the haven of the wine cellar of Bremen. In a final burst of exuberance he writes, “Well, I have always declared/ That not among quite common people,/ Nay, but the best society going,/ Lived for ever the King of Heaven!”
Bibliography
Brod, Max. Heinrich Heine: The Artist in Revolt. Translated by Joseph Witriol. New York: New York University Press, 1957. An English version of Brod’s 1934 biographical study, offering a post-Holocaust historical assessment. Emphasizes Heine’s loneliness and restlessness as a Diaspora Jew, to which Brod paradoxically attributes the universality of his verse.
Perraudin, Michael. “Illusions Lost and Found: The Experiential World of Heine’s Buch der Lieder.” In A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine, edited by Roger F. Cook. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002. Perraudin’s analysis of Book of Songs is one of several essays in this collection that examine Heine’s poetry. Other essays discuss the erotic elements in his work, his conception of history, and his relation to Jewish culture.
Phelan, Anthony. “From the Private Life of Everyman: Self-Presentation and Authenticity in Buch der Lieder.” In Reading Heinrich Heine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Phelan provides detailed analyses of the Book of Songs and Heine’s other poetic works. He emphasizes Heine’s contributions to modernity.
Prawer, S. S. Heine: Buch der Leider. London: Edward Arnold, 1960. Stresses the significance of the doppelgänger motif in the Book of Songs, resulting in irony as Heine assumes various guises throughout the work. Prawer considers the collection’s influence on German literature disastrous because Heine’s imitators lacked his complexity.
Reeves, Nigel. Heinrich Heine: Poetry and Politics. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Traces the apparently contradictory elements in Heine to a transitional historical context. Concludes that Heine’s experiment with folk song failed largely because cultural refinement in Germany, with its subsequent loss of spontaneity and immediacy, was irreversible.
Sammons, Jeffrey L. Heinrich Heine: The Elusive Poet. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969. Argues that if Heine is taken seriously, the Book of Songs must not be dismissed, as many critics have done. Finds the work extraordinary in its concentration on a single theme and its revelation of the growth of a fictive persona.
Spencer, Hanna. Heinrich Heine. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Offers close analysis of most popular pieces in the Book of Songs, as well as a consideration of Heine’s organization of the whole. Identifies a sudden change of mood, or Stimmungsbrechung, as the characteristic feature of the work.
Youens, Susan. Heinrich Heine and the Lied. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Describes how nineteenth century composers, including Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, used poems from the Book of Songs and Heine’s other collections as the lyrics for their compositions. Examines the reasons for Heine’s popularity with composers and how composers fashioned his poetry into new types of songs.