HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
of a Teutonic return to Paganism, to the ancestral
religion of blood and iron.
During the turbulent war-years England often
recalled Heine's devotion to the cause of liberty, his
crusade against German tyrannies, his championship
of the oppressed in every land. It glossed over his
disparaging remarks concerning English characteristics,
since, after all, these remarks referred to a
generation of long ago, the pre-Victorian ancestors
who were not so remarkably progressive from the
viewpoint of their twentieth-century descendants.
There was hence general disapproval of a proposal,
in 1917, to remove the Heine-tablet from 32 Craven
Street in London, a tablet commemorating Heine's
stay there in 1827. Letters to the London Times on
March 1, 1917, complained that such a proposal
could only be the result of profound ignorance of
all that Heine stood for. One of the correspondents,
C. E. Stockton, asked whether the English wished
to imitate the action of their foe. Kaiser Wilhelm II,
who on buying the estate of the Empress of Austria
in Corfu caused the Heine statue on the grounds of
the Achilleion to be removed.
The tablet was not destroyed. Heine continued
to be read during the War and the postwar years,
and, despite his diatribes on Britain, the British
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