HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Bard of Democracy
rushed to his defense. For was he not a pioneer of
the democratic tradition for ^\ hich young Enghsh
and American idealists were dying on the battlefields
of Europe? Did he not belong to the phalanx
of men of genius, warriors of thought, whose mere
names were the rallying points of humanity? To
live the hfe that Heuie lived, despite his many errors,
required more courage and self-sacrifice than
to wear a gold chain and to be Ducal Minister at
Weimar. Goethe was solely a great poet. But Heine
had, in addition, the glory of leading and inspiring
the onward march of man and also of suffering in
that supreme cause.
Michael Monahan expressed these views in his
Heine-biography of 1923, expanding an earlier
study of 1911. He did not endorse the war propaganda
which depicted Heine as a Teutonophobe
who hated and despised everything Germanic.
The Irish biographer devoted an entire chapter to
weighty evidence that the poet loved his Fatherland
deeply and that he suffered a cruel nostalgia
during all the years of his enforced exile in France.
What Heine did hate \\'ith a bitter and truceless
hatred, according to Monahan, was the divine-right,
monarchical superstition and the hereditary noble
caste supporting it. What he did detest most vehe-
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