HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Citizen of the World
pamphleteer, was invoked in support now of the
Democratic position and now of the Communist
position.
The Communist attitude towards this warrior of
the pen had been formulated in Moscow as early
as 1937 by Georg Lucacz, the Hungarian exile
whose pronouncements on German hterature carried
great weight in radical circles. Lucacz published
his essay on Heine in two issues of the
periodical Internationale Literatur. He stressed the
revolutionary greatness of the poet. Compared to
Heine, non-revolutionary lyricists like Morike were
but nice pygmies. No poet since Goethe could
rank as his equal. His devastating irony against
pseudo-medievalism might be even more fatal for
the Third Reich than for the Prussia of the midnineteenth
century. The Nazis sensed his power
and, therefore, burned his books and took energetic
steps to eradicate his influence from the consciousness
of the enslaved German people. Heine's name
would nevertheless be hnked forever with the names
of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and the victorious
German revolutionary regime that was
bound to succeed Hitlerism would erect a suitable
monument to this early fighter against the
scum of Fascism.^
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