HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
ter, and godlessness? "Wild gloomy times are booming
anear and the prophet who undertakes to write
a new apocalypse will have to invent new monsters
and indeed such terrible monsters that the old symbolic
beasts of the Apostle John appear in comparison
as mere doves and amorettes."
For the generation of the Nineteen-Forties,
therefore, Heine lost none of the vividness and immediacy
which he possessed for previous generations.
In Germany his reputation ever ebbed and
flowed. In England his position remained secure.
In Germany the "Heine-controversy" raged for
over a century and the excommunication of 1835
was repeated in 1933. In England there was no
Heine controversy ever since his fame reached its
crest in the mid-Victorian era but only varying
friendly interpretations of the quality of his genius.
His hold upon the English imagination was never
really shaken and he was at no time without sincere
admirers. In the land of his birth, his praises
could not be sung as long as the racial doctrines
of the Third Reich held sway. The official Nazi
literary historian Adolf Bartels went so far as to
deny him the right to his own name and suggested,
even before the adoption of the Nuremberg racial
laws, that the poet be hereafter dubbed Chaim
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