Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I THE BIOGRAPHICAL IMPERATIVE
- PART II THE REAL HEINE
- 6 How to become a symbolist: Heine and the anthologies of Stefan George and Rudolf Borchardt
- 7 The real Heine: Atta Troll and allegory
- 8 Ventriloquism in Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift
- PART III PARISIAN WRITING
- PART IV EPILOGUE
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Ventriloquism in Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I THE BIOGRAPHICAL IMPERATIVE
- PART II THE REAL HEINE
- 6 How to become a symbolist: Heine and the anthologies of Stefan George and Rudolf Borchardt
- 7 The real Heine: Atta Troll and allegory
- 8 Ventriloquism in Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift
- PART III PARISIAN WRITING
- PART IV EPILOGUE
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Whether at the most intimate ‘personal’ moments … or strolling insignificantly in the street – precisely when remaining ‘what he really is’ – the author is always masked and middle, always inter and inter, mediating and vanishing, the reader launched.
AN EXEMPLARY DISAGREEMENT
What almost scuppered Heine's reputation and compromised the popularity of Atta Troll was the memoir he published about a former acquaintance and long-term adversary, Ludwig Börne. This book has retained a kind of notoriety, but it has scarcely been one of Heine's most readily accessible works. Atta Troll's playful satire on the inflexibility of radical and conservative politics seems to conceal the acrid and intimate reality of the Denkschrift, a work that takes up some of the central concerns of the satire. After a period of friendship and sympathy, however cautious, between 1827 and 1831, the relationship between Heine and Ludwig Börne, the two leading writers on the left, became increasingly strained. No one seems to have anticipated the virulence with which Heine finally settled his account with Börne in his 1840 biography. As Thomas Mann recognized, however, Ludwig Börne: eine Denkschrift was not simply a personal invective. He makes remarkable claims for Heine's achievement.
As a writer and universal psychologist he never surpassed the achievement of this book, nor was he ever more far-sighted – particularly in the interpolated Briefe aus Helgoland. His psychology of the Nazarene type anticipates Nietzsche. His profound insight into the opposition of spirit (‘Geist’) and art (and not merely of morality and art), his question whether the harmonious combination of the two elements, spiritualism and Hellenism, might not be the task of European civilization as a whole, anticipates Ibsen and more than him. […]
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- Information
- Reading Heinrich Heine , pp. 151 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007