Heine's exile made him Europe's witty liberal symbol
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), born Harry into a Düsseldorf Jewish family, became Germany's sharpest lyric ironist. Early Romantic songs made him famous abroad; later satire got his books banned. Paris exile turned him into a press icon of cosmopolitan liberalism.
Heine grew up in Düsseldorf, a town of about 16,000 that passed from French occupation to Bavaria and then to Napoleon, who made it capital of the Grand Duchy of Berg. Those French years left him a lifelong admirer of Napoleon, jury trials and the Napoleonic Code, and he skated over the heavy taxes and blockade slump that may have helped bankrupt his father, a textile merchant. His parents were not devout: after a little Hebrew at a Jewish school he went to Catholic schools, picked up French with a German accent and fell for Rhenish folklore. He was also a distant cousin of Karl Marx.
His rich uncle Salomon, a Hamburg banker, tried him as an apprentice in 1816; the nephew showed no head for money and pined hopelessly for Salomon's daughter Amalie. Law school followed. At Bonn he marched in defiance of Metternich's Carlsbad Decrees and heard August Wilhelm Schlegel lecture on Romanticism; at Göttingen he met aristocratic snobbery, was thrown out of a fraternity through antisemitism and challenged a fellow student to a duel. Berlin, a city of some 200,000, brought lectures by Hegel and a first volume of poems in December 1821.
In 1825, freshly a doctor of law, he was baptised a Lutheran, because Prussia had barred Jews from academic posts since 1822; he called conversion his entry ticket to European culture. Earning a living by the pen proved hard. In January 1826 he met Julius Campe, his publisher for life in a relationship likened to a stormy marriage. Campe exploited a rule that spared books over 320 pages from pre-censorship. The first Travel Pictures volume, with its satirical Harz journey, appeared that year, and the Book of Songs of 1827 turned, against all expectation, into a perennial bestseller of German poetry.
Composers including Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn set his early lyrics as art songs. German authorities banned much of his radical later work, which only enlarged his fame, and he lived his final 25 years in Paris. His warning that burning books leads to burning people proved grimly prophetic.
Source: Heinrich Heine
