"He Was Not Respectful of Other Nations"

DW-WORLD: Why should people read Heine today?

Jeffrey L. Sammons: He's one of the great poets and writers of world literature. He is an exceptionally resourceful, original writer, motivated by incompatible imperatives that lead to an enormous tension within his writing. Because they remain so unresolved, they make him a witness to the anxieties and difficulties of his own time and perhaps even of ours.

Why do you think that he is more popular in some countries than in Germany?

You can hardly say that this neglect has carried into the presence, but the difficulties began during the period of modernism. Many German writers and intellectuals felt they had to distance themselves from Heine and his pattern of poetry that's associated with the "Buch der Lieder" (Book of Songs). There was a feeling in the age of (Stefan) George, (Rainer Maria) Rilke and (Hugo von) Hofmannsthal that he could no longer be taken seriously, leading to a strong decline in his reputation among the definers of the culture. That, I believe, carried over in the period after (World War II). In West Germany, it was a little harder to recover his importance, whereas East Germans took the initiative in propagating Heine.

Heine is often described as a cosmopolitan and a European. Is this appropriate?

I think Heine was an outstanding example of a counter-figure within German culture. I feel that in many ways, Heine has been rewritten to serve certain contemporary German needs -- to find a writer who can counter the patterns and clichés that were associated with German nationalism in the past. I think that Goethe is also a poet for this purpose. If you sat and read what he had to write about other nations and people, it was almost universally unfriendly. He was not respectful of other nations. He saw Europe as a German-French condominium, in which other nations would be insignificant or disappear.

What would Heine think of Europe today?

He might actually have been somewhat happier in the Adenauer/de Gaulle days, when there really was a kind of feeling of rescuing Europe by a French-German alliance -- a bond of German philosophy and French revolutionary élan emancipating and freeing Europe. This is what drove his commentary on public affairs.

Jeffrey L. Sammons is professor emeritus of Germanic language and literature at Yale University. He is author of many books, including four on Heine. "Heinrich Heine: Alternative Perspectives," a collection of his German and English essays on Heine will be published in Germany this year.