Homeric Laughter by the Waters of Babylon

Which contemporary of Karl Marx (1818-83) left the clearest and deepest traces in his work? None other than Heinrich Heine (17971856). Heine is omnipresent in Marx's work, from his first poetic attempts as an 18-year-old Abiturient to the drafts for Kapital that he left behind at the time of his death. His manuscripts, publications, and letters swarm with direct and indirect quotations, paraphrases, and allusions to Heine. Moreover, wherever Marx refers to Heine, explicitly or implicitly, he does so with approval and sympathy. Only to Heine did Marx grant such privileges; all other contemporaries of Marx enjoyed his favor only briefly. Marx's consistently positive reception of Heine is not at all confined to verbatim borrowings; it is expressed stylistically as well, in favored syntactical constructions, rhetorical flourishes, and intentional lapses of style. Marx also continually exploits predominantly the same mythological and literary resources as Heine, for purposes of parody, polemic, satire, or pathos: Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Prometheus, Shylock, Don Quixote, Faust. Marx uses the tradition in the fashion ot such classical writers as Lucian or such moderns as Sterne, both favorites of Heine, but he uses it most forcefully in a strategy of Veirfemdung developed by Heine. In both authors' arsenal of motifs, characters, and figures of speech, one book dominates: namely, the Book of Books, the Bible the Old Testament, as Christians call it, as well as the New Testament. It goes without saying that references are to Luther's translation of the Bible. The Bible is ultimately at the heart of the immense affinity between Marx and Heine, an affinity formed in the territory between German Judaism and German Protestantism. Jews whose mother tongue was German

Art · Laughter · Literature · German Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation