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HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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Bard of Democracy<br />

rejected as a confession of weakness. Marcuse's biography<br />

has therefore less value as a statement of<br />

facts than as a collection of insights and intuitive<br />

flashes and as a seismograph of the German state<br />

of mind during the dying days of the Weimar Republic.<br />

Heine is shown as a bourgeois revolutionary<br />

and as a discomfited pagan — traits equally characteristic<br />

of his biographer. Much is made of his<br />

role as a link between Germany and France —<br />

again an ideal of his biographer, then also on the<br />

verge of exile. The fact that Germany tolerated<br />

no memorial to Heine leads Marcuse to the following<br />

interesting conclusion: "He has a memorial in<br />

every soul that understands his songs. He has a<br />

memorial in every mind that realizes his — our —<br />

situation between unbehef and the soul's nostalgia,<br />

between bourgeois culture and a post-bourgeois social<br />

order. But if he is ever to have a memorial that<br />

is not only in the heads and hearts of individuals<br />

but is the recognition of a community — then let<br />

it be on the day when France and Germany abandon<br />

their centuries' old enmity. And let it not be<br />

in Diisseldorf that is ashamed of him, nor in Hamburg<br />

where his only pleasure lay in thinking himself<br />

superior to everyone else — but somewhere<br />

along the frontier between France and Germany,<br />

[159]

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