Heine as Weltburger? A Skeptical Inquiry

The topic of this essay was not chosen by me but was originally commissioned by the Leo Baeck Institute for the opening of an exhibition in its New York center on November 1, 1981, sponsored by the Goethe Institute, to mark the 125th anniversary of Heinrich Heine's death. Asked to speak were the outstanding Heine critic from Oxford University, S. S. Prawer, on Heine as a Jew,' the distinguished Heine expert from Dusseldorf, Joseph A. Kruse, on Heine as a German, and, to round out the cosmopolitan range of the occasion, myself on Heine as Weltbiirger. This apparently obvious and unstressful assignment caused me no little perplexity, and it reminded me once again how much an American-born and bred Germanist can remain an outsider grounded pretty thoroughly in a historically and ideologically conditioned American consciousness. This is a standpoint that has advantages as well as disadvantages, though in respect to the already highly conflicted topic of Heinrich Heine it adds to the abrasions. I realize even more in retrospect than I did at the time that a celebratory oration was wanted, and I am afraid I disappointed the audience (and even one of my colleagues) to some extent, for my foreignness to

Epistemology · Skepticism · German Literature and Culture Studies · Literature and Cultural Memory · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy

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