Childhood and youth Heine was born on 13 December 1797, in
Düsseldorf, in what was then the
Duchy of Berg, into a
Jewish family. He was called "Harry" in childhood but became known as "Heinrich" after his
conversion to
Lutheran Christianity in 1825. Heine's father, (1764–1828), was a textile merchant. His mother Peira,
née van Geldern (known as "Betty" or ) (1771–1859) was daughter of physician (1726–1795) and Sara van Geldern
née Bocková (?-1779). Heinrich was the eldest of four children. He had a sister, Charlotte (later ) (1800–1899), who married merchant (1790–1866), and two brothers,
Gustav (1812–1886), later Baron Heine-Geldern and publisher of the Viennese newspaper '''', and
Maximilian (1807–1879), who became a physician in
Saint Petersburg. Heine was a third cousin once removed of philosopher and economist
Karl Marx (1818–1883), also born to a German Jewish family in the
Rhineland, with whom he became a frequent correspondent in later life. Düsseldorf at the time was a town with a population of around 16,000. The
French Revolution and subsequent Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars involving Germany complicated Düsseldorf's political history during Heine's childhood. It had been the capital of the
Duchy of Jülich-Berg, but was under French occupation at the time of his birth. It then passed to the
Elector of Bavaria before being ceded to
Napoleon in 1806, who turned it into the capital of the
Grand Duchy of Berg, one of three French states he established in Germany. It was first ruled by
Joachim Murat, then by Napoleon himself. Upon Napoleon's downfall in 1815, it became part of
Prussia. Thus Heine's formative years were spent under French influence. The adult Heine would always be devoted to the French for introducing the
Napoleonic Code and trial by jury. He glossed over the negative aspects of French rule in Berg: heavy taxation, conscription, and economic depression brought about by the
Continental Blockade, which may have contributed to his father's bankruptcy. Heine greatly admired Napoleon as the promoter of revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality and loathed the political atmosphere in Germany after Napoleon's defeat, marked by the conservative policies of the Austrian chancellor
Klemens von Metternich, who attempted to reverse the effects of the French Revolution. Heine's parents were not particularly devout. They sent him as a young child to a Jewish school where he learned a smattering of
Hebrew, but thereafter he attended Catholic schools. Here he learned French, which became his second language – although he always spoke it with a German accent. He also acquired a lifelong love for Rhenish folklore. In 1814, Heine went to a business school in Düsseldorf, where he learned to read English, the commercial language of the time. The most successful member of the Heine family was his uncle
Salomon Heine, a millionaire banker in
Hamburg. In 1816, Heine moved to Hamburg to become an apprentice at Heckscher & Co, his uncle's bank, but displayed little aptitude for business. He learned to hate Hamburg, with its commercial ethos, but it would become one of the poles of his life alongside Paris. When he was 18, Heine almost certainly had an unrequited love for his cousin Amalie, Salomon's daughter. Whether he then transferred his affections, equally unsuccessfully to her sister Therese is unknown. This period in Heine's life is not clear but it seems that his father's business deteriorated, making Samson Heine effectively the ward of his brother Salomon.
Universities Salomon realised that his nephew had no talent for trade, and it was decided that Heine should enter law. So, in 1819, Heine went to the
University of Bonn, then in Prussia. Political life in Germany was divided between conservatives and liberals. The conservatives, who were in power, wanted to restore things to the way they were before the
French Revolution. They were against German unification because they felt a united Germany might fall victim to revolutionary ideas. Most German states were
absolutist monarchies with a censored press. The opponents of the conservatives, the liberals, wanted to replace absolutism with representative, constitutional government, equality before the law, and a free press. At the
University of Bonn, liberal students were at war with the conservative authorities. Heine was a radical liberal and one of the first things he did after his arrival was to take part in a parade which violated the
Carlsbad Decrees, a series of measures introduced by Metternich to suppress liberal political activity. Heine was more interested in studying history and literature than law. The university had engaged the famous literary critic and thinker
August Wilhelm Schlegel as a lecturer, and Heine heard him talk about the and
Romanticism. Though he would later mock Schlegel, Heine found in him a sympathetic critic for his early verses. Heine began to acquire a reputation as a poet at Bonn. He also wrote two tragedies,
Almansor and
William Ratcliff, but they had little success in the theatre. After a year at Bonn, Heine left to continue his law studies at the
University of Göttingen. Heine hated the town. It was part of
Hanover, then also rulers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the power Heine blamed for bringing Napoleon down. Here, the poet experienced an aristocratic snobbery absent elsewhere. He hated law as the
Historical School of law he had to study was used to bolster the reactionary form of government he opposed. Other events conspired to make Heine loathe this period of his life: he was expelled from a
student fraternity for
anti-Semitism, and he learned that his cousin Amalie had become engaged. When Heine challenged another student, Wiebel, to a duel, the first of ten known incidents throughout his life, the authorities stepped in, and he was suspended from the university for six months. His uncle then decided to send him to the
University of Berlin. Heine arrived in Berlin in March 1821. It was the biggest, most cosmopolitan city he had ever visited, with its population of about 200,000. The university gave Heine access to notable cultural figures as lecturers: the Sanskritist
Franz Bopp and the Homer critic
F. A. Wolf, who inspired Heine's lifelong love of
Aristophanes. Most important was the philosopher
Hegel, whose influence on Heine is hard to gauge. He probably gave Heine and other young students the idea that history had a meaning which could be seen as progressive. Heine also made valuable acquaintances in Berlin, notably the liberal
Karl August Varnhagen and his Jewish wife
Rahel, who held a leading salon. Another friend was the satirist
Karl Immermann, who had praised Heine's first verse collection,
Gedichte, when it appeared in December 1821. During his time in Berlin, Heine also joined the
Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, a society which attempted to achieve a balance between the Jewish faith and modernity. Since Heine was not very religious in outlook, he soon lost interest, but he also began to investigate
Jewish history. He was particularly drawn to the
Spanish Jews of the Middle Ages. In 1824, Heine began a historical novel,
Der Rabbi von Bacherach, which he never finished. In May 1823, Heine left Berlin for good and joined his family at their new home in
Lüneburg. Here he began to write the poems of the cycle
Die Heimkehr ("The Homecoming"). He returned to Göttingen where he was again bored by the law. In September 1824, he decided to take a break and set off on a trip through the
Harz mountains. On his return, he started writing an account of it,
Die Harzreise. On 28 June 1825, after obtaining his
PhD and to heighten his chances of employment, Heine was baptized as an Evangelical Lutheran
Christian in
Heiligenstadt. The Prussian government had been gradually restoring discrimination against Jews. In 1822, it introduced a law excluding Jews from academic posts, and Heine had ambitions for a university career. As Heine said in self-justification, his conversion was "the ticket of admission into European culture". In any event, Heine's conversion, which was reluctant, never brought him any benefits in his career. A quarter of a century later, he declared: "I make no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned, because I never left it."
Julius Campe and first literary successes Heine now had to search for a job. He was only really suited to writing but it was extremely difficult to be a professional writer in Germany. The market for literary works was small and it was only possible to make a living by writing virtually non-stop. Heine was incapable of doing this so he never had enough money to cover his expenses. Before finding work, Heine visited the North Sea resort of
Norderney which inspired the
free verse poems of his cycle
Die Nordsee. In Hamburg one evening in January 1826, Heine met , who would be his chief publisher for the rest of his life. Their stormy relationship has been compared to a marriage. Campe was a liberal who published as many dissident authors as he could. He had developed various techniques for evading the authorities. The laws of the time stated that any book under 320 pages had to be submitted to censorship. The authorities thought long books would cause little trouble as they were unpopular. One way around censorship was to publish dissident works in large print to increase the number of pages beyond 320. The censorship in Hamburg was relatively lax but Campe had to worry about Prussia, the largest German state and largest market for books. It was estimated that one-third of the German readership was Prussian. Initially, any book which had passed the censor in a German state was able to be sold in any of the other states, but in 1834 this loophole was closed. Campe was reluctant to publish uncensored books as he had bad experiences with print runs being confiscated. Heine resisted all censorship; this issue became a bone of contention between the two. However, the relationship between author and publisher started well: Campe published the first volume of
Reisebilder ("Travel Pictures") in May 1826. This volume included
Die Harzreise, which marked a new style of German travel-writing, mixing Romantic descriptions of nature with satire. Heine's '''' followed in 1827. This was a collection of already published poems. No one expected it to become one of the most popular books of German verse ever published, and sales were slow to start with, picking up when composers began setting Heine's poems as
Lieder. For example, the poem "Allnächtlich im Traume" was set to music by
Robert Schumann and
Felix Mendelssohn. It contains the ironic disillusionment typical of Heine: Allnächtlich im Traume seh ich dich, Und sehe dich freundlich grüßen, Und laut aufweinend stürz ich mich Zu deinen süßen Füßen. Du siehst mich an wehmütiglich, Und schüttelst das blonde Köpfchen; Aus deinen Augen schleichen sich Die Perlentränentröpfchen. Du sagst mir heimlich ein leises Wort, Und gibst mir den Strauß von Zypressen. Ich wache auf, und der Strauß ist fort, Und das Wort hab ich vergessen. Nightly I see you in dreams – you speak, With kindliness sincerest, I throw myself, weeping aloud and weak At your sweet feet, my dearest. You look at me with wistful woe, And shake your golden curls; And stealing from your eyes there flow The teardrops like to pearls. You breathe in my ear a secret word, A garland of cypress for token. I wake; it is gone; the dream is blurred, And forgotten the word that was spoken. (Poetic translation by
Hal Draper) Starting from the mid-1820s, Heine distanced himself from
Romanticism by adding irony, sarcasm, and satire into his poetry, and making fun of the sentimental-romantic awe of nature and of
figures of speech in contemporary poetry and literature. An example are these lines: Das Fräulein stand am Meere Und seufzte lang und bang. Es rührte sie so sehre der Sonnenuntergang. Mein Fräulein! Sein sie munter, Das ist ein altes Stück; Hier vorne geht sie unter Und kehrt von hinten zurück. A mistress stood by the sea sighing long and anxiously. She was so deeply stirred By the setting sun My Fräulein!, be gay, This is an old play; ahead of you it sets And from behind it returns. The
blue flower of
Novalis, "symbol for the
Romantic movement", also received withering treatment from Heine during this period, as illustrated by the following quatrains from
Lyrisches Intermezzo: Am Kreuzweg wird begraben Wer selber brachte sich um; dort wächst eine blaue Blume, Die Armesünderblum'. Am Kreuzweg stand ich und seufzte; Die Nacht war kalt und stumm. Im Mondschein bewegte sich langsam Die Armesünderblum'. At the cross-road will be buried He who killed himself; There grows a blue flower, Suicide’s flower. I stood at the cross-road and sighed The night was cold and mute. By the light of the moon moved slowly Suicide’s flower. Heine became increasingly critical of
despotism and reactionary
chauvinism in Germany, of nobility and clerics but also what he viewed as “narrow mindedness” of ordinary people and of the rising German form of
nationalism, especially in contrast to the French and the
revolution. Nevertheless, he made a point of stressing his love for his
Fatherland: Plant the
black, red, gold banner at the summit of the German idea, make it the standard of free mankind, and I will shed my dear heart's blood for it. Rest assured, I love the Fatherland just as much as you do.
Travel and the Platen affair The first volume of travel writings was such a success that Campe pressed Heine for another.
Reisebilder II appeared in April 1827. It contains the second cycle of North Sea poems, a prose essay on the North Sea as well as a new work,
Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand, which contains the following satire on German censorship: The German Censors —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— idiots —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— Heine went to England to avoid what he predicted would be controversy over the publication of this work. In
London, he cashed a cheque from his uncle for
£200 (equal to £ today), much to Salomon's chagrin. Heine was unimpressed by the English: he found them commercial and prosaic, and still blamed them for the defeat of Napoleon. On his return to Germany,
Cotta, the liberal publisher of
Goethe and
Schiller, offered Heine a job co-editing a magazine,
Politische Annalen, in
Munich. Heine did not find work on the newspaper congenial, and instead tried to obtain a professorship at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, with no success. After a few months, he took a trip to northern Italy, visiting
Lucca, Florence and Venice, but was forced to return when he received news that his father had died. This Italian journey resulted in a series of new works:
Die Reise von München nach Genua (
Journey from Munich to Genoa),
Die Bäder von Lucca (
The Baths of Lucca) and
Die Stadt Lucca (
The Town of Lucca).
Die Bäder von Lucca embroiled Heine in controversy. The aristocratic poet
August von Platen had been annoyed by some
epigrams by
Immermann which Heine had included in the second volume of
Reisebilder. He counter-attacked by writing a play,
Der romantische Ödipus, which included anti-Semitic jibes about Heine. Heine was stung and responded by mocking Platen's homosexuality in
Die Bäder von Lucca. This back-and-forth ad hominem literary polemic has become known as the . ==Paris years==