Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution

by George Prochnik

Overview

A thematically rich, provocative, and lyrical study of one of Germany’s most important, world-famous, and imaginative writers

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was a virtuoso German poet, satirist, and visionary humanist whose dynamic life story and strikingly original writing are ripe for rediscovery.
 
In this vividly imagined exploration of Heine’s life and work, George Prochnik contextualizes Heine’s biography within the different revolutionary political, literary, and philosophical movements of his age. He also explores the insights Heine offers contemporary readers into issues of social justice, exile, and the role of art in nurturing a more equitable society.
 
Heine wrote that in his youth he resembled “a large newspaper of which the upper half contained the present, each day with its news and debates, while in the lower half, in a succession of dreams, the poetic past was recorded fantastically like a series of feuilletons.”
 
This book explores the many dualities of Heine’s nature, bringing to life a fully dimensional character while also casting into sharp relief the reasons his writing and personal story matter urgently today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300255621
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	11/24/2020
Series:	Jewish Lives
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

George Prochnik is the author of Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem. His previous book, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, received the 2014 National Jewish Book Award for Biography/Memoir.

Editorial Reviews

A portrait of the poet as a crusader for truth and beauty in a world where both were in short supply.”—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal

“Prochnik provides a jaunty narrative of Heine’s schooldays in Bonn and Göttingen, journalistic career in Berlin, and twenty-five-year exile in Paris, detailing his literary feuds, scraps with censors, and unwavering belief in political liberty.”—New Yorker

“A vibrant new biography.”—Alex Ross, New Yorker

“George Prochnik has done a splendid job of capturing the many contradictions and complexities in Heine’s biography and oeuvre. . . . Prochnik possesses an uncanny knack for inhabiting the mind of his subject. This is not biography at an ivory-tower remove, but rather an attempt to discover, using his subject’s own writing, what made him tick. . . . A high-octane account of Heine’s life in what seems convincingly the way he himself experienced it.”—David Biale, Marginalia Review of Books

“What makes Prochnik’s narrative so vigorously engaging is the sense that he gets Heine and perhaps identifies with the aspirations and griefs of the outsider.”—Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“A concise, fast-paced biography of the German poet, critic, and essayist. . . . A discerning portrait of the writer and his times.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A welcome addition to the noteworthy Jewish Lives series.”—Choice

“George Prochnik draws the historical background of Heine’s life with care and powerfully evokes a Jewish life in 19th century Germany with all its complexities, frustrations, and contradictions. Prochnik’s scrupulous analysis of the artist’s prose and poems allows for a deep understanding of this brilliant and tormented man.”—Anka Muhlstein, author of The Pen and the Brush

From the Publisher

2020-09-08
A concise, fast-paced biography of the German poet, critic, and essayist.

As part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series, Prochnik, whose previous subjects include Stefan Zweig and Gershom Scholem, takes a sympathetic look at the life and work of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Born in Düsseldorf and having grown up under French rule, Heine developed a devotion to Napoleon that never waned. Under French occupation, Jews were granted civil rights, and Heine’s ambitious mother hoped her son would rise in the French bureaucracy. In 1814, however, when anti-Semitism once again pervaded post-Napoleonic Germany, Heine’s mother revised her goals: Heinrich should become a financier or lawyer, professions in which the young man had no interest. At universities in Bonn, Göttingen, and Berlin, although enrolled in law classes, Heine pursued a literary career, publishing poetry and a series of letters in which he vented his critique of growing German nationalism and narrow-mindedness. Although the letters attracted public attention, they also provoked derision that, Prochnik notes, “exacerbated his sense of persecution.” He was drawn into membership in the short-lived Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews, whose mission was to raise the image of Jews through education. Later, hoping to promote his professional chances, he converted to Protestantism, a futile gesture, he discovered: “Jews saw him as a traitor, while Christians viewed him as corrupting their faith from within.” Prochnik recounts significant connections: to Hegel, “Heine’s first great man of ideas”; Goethe, who gave him an “icy reception” when they met; and Karl Marx, who became a close friend in Paris, where the gregarious Heine also counted among his friends George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Frederic Chopin, and Gérard Nerval. Heine championed liberalism, justice, and art just as he disparaged nationalistic tribalism and the anti-Jewish sentiment that dogged him throughout his life.

A discerning portrait of the writer and his times.

Kirkus Reviews