Heine and Critical Theory

Willi Goetschel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350087279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Esthétique en philosophie

Heinrich Heine's role in the formation of Critical Theory has been systematically overlooked in the course of the successful appropriation of his thought by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the legacy they left, in particular for Adorno, Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. This book examines the critical connections that led Adorno to call for a "reappraisal" of Heine in a 1948 essay that, published posthumously, remains under-examined. Tracing Heine's Jewish difference and its liberating comedy of irreverence in the thought of the Frankfurt School, the book situates the project of Critical Theory in the tradition of a praxis of critique, which Heine elevates to the art of public controversy. Heine's bold linking of aesthetics and political concerns anticipates the critical paradigm assumed by Benjamin and Adorno. Reading Critical Theory with Heine recovers a forgotten voice that has theoretically critical significance for the formation of the Frankfurt School. With Heine, the project of Critical Theory can be understood as the sustained effort to advance the emancipation of the affects and the senses, at the heart of a theoretical vision that recognizes pleasure as the liberating force in the fight for freedom.

1

Displacement, Relocation, and the Dialectic of a Constellation: Heine, Critical Theory, and the New York Intellectuals

In 1908, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, a young Russian revolutionary who had a few years earlier assumed the name Trotsky, opened his article on the occasion of Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday with the following comment:

Tolstoy has passed his eightieth birthday and now stands before us like an enormous jagged cliff, moss-covered and from a different historical World.

A remarkable thing! Not alone Karl Marx but, to cite a name from a field closer to Tolstoy’s, Heinrich Heine as well appear to be contemporaries of ours.¹

Trotsky’s remark reflects the sentiment of generations of literary critics, intellectuals, revolutionary visionaries, and activists for whom Heine was still a contemporary whose striking literary voice continued to thrill with the same liberating thrust that had charmed his first contemporaries, from Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn to Marx and Engels, and unsettled admiring readers like Metternich.² But Heine’s intellectual and literary presence has endured and developed a posthumous life of its own as his distinct voice continues to critically inform the literary, intellectual, and political discourse up to the present. It is not just that Heine’s language, diction, and thinking have shaped contemporary linguistic sensitivities; he has also become a powerfully enduring presence in modern German culture and thought. Remarkably, Heine’s impact was so profound and wide-reaching that it went well beyond the boundaries of linguistic spheres of influence. Around 1900, Alfred Schumacher noted in the Manchester Quarterly that no German poet, not even Goethe, had in that year an equally wide circle of readers throughout the globe.³ By 1948, Heine was seen as a “citizen of the world”—at least as far as the anglophone world was concerned.⁴

In 1954, at the moment when the Cold War overshadowed debates about the course culture and politics were to take and the cultural identity of postwar America was being renegotiated, Sol Liptzin programmatically noted in the introduction to his book The English Legend of Heine:

The English legend of Heine, from its origin in pre-Victorian days to its present configuration, is markedly different from the German legend and sheds light upon Heine and upon the English-speaking world which has assimilated him into its cultural pattern.

Our Heine, citizen of the world, bears the contours of our day, contours that are no less valid or fascinating than those etched by our forebears in the many decades since he first appeared upon the literary horizon. Our Heine, as reshaped by us, may be exerting a significant influence upon the thinking and dreaming of the Occident in the years to come, even as the Heine of our fathers has influenced us in our eventful years. It is, therefore, of value to us to know that ever changing legend of Heinrich Heine.⁵

As we will see, this programmatic note was not as illusory as it might seem to today’s readers. Indeed, the first decade after the end of Second World War saw an often intense engagement with Heine and his legacy that addressed the future cultural makeup of the postwar public sphere. This was a debate in which exponents of the Frankfurt School and New York Intellectuals met over a shared concern about the place and function of Jewish identity in modernity. If this encounter was brief, the shared concern reflected a remarkable convergence between American and German Jews at the juncture where Heine assumed paradigmatic significance for Americans and exiles who were negotiating Jewish identity as a part of the transnational identity they envisioned in a newly reconfigured world.

Since 1916, when Randolph Bourne published his article “The Jew and Trans-National America” in the December 1916 issue of Menorah, a journal published by the association of Jewish ivy league students of the same name, discussion concerning the promise of Jewish identity in enabling and enriching the concept of a transnational American identity had developed into a key concern, and it was no coincidence that Heine gained paradigmatic significance in this discussion as early as 1920.⁶ This transnational context is key if we are to understand the fuller significance of Heine’s role in the discussion of Jewish identity and modernity. The philosophically charged and theoretically sophisticated thrust of the Jewish negotiations of Heine emerges in this context as neither a European fixation nor an American invention but rather as a transatlantic project. Reflecting the displacement and relocation of Jewish lives in transit between the old and the new world, the discourse on Heine becomes a transnational affair that enables reflection on Jewish identity in a newly global perspective. This disconnect with the more nationally oriented project of German canon-building philology presents a creative friction in whose force field Heine assumes a differentially motivated liberating force.

This is the juncture at which Critical Theory emerges, itself a transatlantic formation whose European leg has for too long been overemphasized at the expense of acknowledging the critical importance of its other, “exilic” moment. It is not only that some of its most momentous contributions were worked out and written in exile in an American context, but that the experience of displacement and relocation plays a substantial role in the formation of Critical Theory itself, and not just in the way Heine figures in this formation process.

Examination of Heine’s reception between the First World War and the early Cold War must therefore no longer limit its purview to Germany or to Europe, but must include a more global approach if it is to capture the larger picture of the role Heine played in the twentieth century. But entering the twentieth century, Heine faced the challenge of a fierce tug-of-war between a diverse array of audiences, from simple consumers to sophisticated connoisseurs, from literary critics on the left to state-salaried, tenured scholars on the right whose literary appreciation was determined by the agenda of the national canon-building project over which they presided. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a rigid dichotomy had split Heine asunder into a political and a lyrical voice. By pitting prose against poetry, subversive political writing against mellifluous and seemingly innocuous verse, the reception at the turn of the century had succeeded in neutralizing the critical impulse of what Heine’s writing stood for: a continuous reminder of the deep link between aesthetics and politics.

The separation of the literary from the political, and the German from the Jewish aspect of Heine—as if such a separation were possible—rooted itself so deeply in the cultural unconscious that resistance to this great divide seemed to have become a lost cause. At the end of the nineteenth century, Heine had become popular as the foremost lyrical voice for romantic music. At the same time, he enjoyed notoriety as a critic whose mastery of subversive writing inspired the leftist intelligentsia. This split into a binary reception forced Heine into emigration from the canon of German literature as the literary scholars and historians who sought to enshrine him as a canonical figure succumbed to the Lorelei-like lure that assimilated Heine to the commitments of Goethe-centric philology. This move alienated the young, Jewish leftist intelligentsia from a Heine assimilated to a nationalist cultural politics that threatened to drown their revolutionary aspirations. This splitting of Heine into the sublime romantic on the one hand, and the subversive critic on the other, thus reflected the pressures that defined the cultural, social, and political situation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At the same time, the explosive force of Heine’s emancipatory impulse was absorbed into the language and texture of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Heine, in other words, was treated as if he had become an empty poetic shell whose living voice had to be hidden away as a transplant in order to live on.

Michael Löwy has argued that the generation of central European Jewish intellectuals from Martin Buber to Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and George Lukács—and that would also include, among many others, Franz Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Löwenthal, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno—shared a profound sense of elective affinity with a unique mix of German romanticism and revolutionary messianism.⁷ Gershom Scholem’s entries in his diaries during the First World War reflect this affinity and the often conflicted ambivalence that came with it in a paradigmatic manner. In his “95 Theses on Judaism and Zionism,” Scholem noted this conflicted relationship, enigmatically asserting:

41)Jewish Romanticism means an illicit border transgression.

42)Romanticism is the only intellectual movement in history that has limited Judaism. The fact that it was unaware of this makes it demonic.

41)Jüdische Romantik bedeutet eine unerlaubte Grenzüberschreitung.

42)Die Romantik ist die einzige geistige Bewegung der Geschichte, die das Judentum limitiert hat. Daß sie dies nicht wußte, macht sie dämonisch.⁸

In a telling comment, Scholem states the same year: “Romanticism is a deducible constellation of the Messianic.” (“Die Romantik ist eine deduzierbare Konstellation des Messianischen.”)⁹ Scholem’s emphatic claim expresses this generation’s shared sentiment that romanticism was not alien to Jewish thought and tradition but was, in fact, profoundly connected to it. While deeply connected to their unique version of romantic or, more precisely, post-romantic currents, Heine, the paramount figure who broke the ground for and modeled this constellation, remained curiously unacknowledged or, more precisely in the case of Scholem, resolutely ignored. But it was Heine’s transformative engagement with romanticism that played a critical role in recovering the progressive and emancipatory potential hidden behind romanticism’s conservative religious veneer. Not only this generation’s language, diction, dreams, and aspirations, but also their particular form of articulating their conceptual and theoretical sensibilities will remain incomprehensible as long as Heine’s critical role in setting the post-romantic agenda remains ignored; his intervention not only had a fundamental impact on the Central European Jewish generation at the turn of the century, it also played a seminal role in the formation of the turn-of-the-century generation of American Jewish intellectuals.

Leo Löwenthal, Max Horkheimer, and Heine in the Bronx

While tracing the various inflections of Heine’s reception by this generation is a variegated proposition, we can distinguish a basic typology for the group of intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School. Leo Löwenthal, for instance, argued in an essay that Jewish concerns were not only defining for Heine, but that it was these very aspects of his work that made Heine so significant for German culture, securing his universal relevance. As early as the 1920s, as he was going through a phase of strong Jewish self-identification, Löwenthal noted that for Heine, Judaism had become the symbol of liberation.¹⁰ Two decades later, Löwenthal would repeat this point in the English translation of this Heine essay. Published in 1947 in Commentary, a journal that was at that time the progressive voice of the Jewish New York intellectuals, Löwenthal gave the English translation of his essay the striking title “Heine’s Religion: The Messianic Ideals of the Poet.” It concluded with the following statement, reflecting the degree to which the challenge presented by Heine remained for Löwenthal a conflict yet to be worked through:

He [i.e. Heine] was a critic of capitalism, but he criticized it on spiritual rather than economic grounds. Judaism was for him a symbol of liberation. He was allowed to return to the symbol, but not to the reality the symbol stood for. He loved the symbol, though it made him suffer. He saw a sickness in Judaism, but he approved the sickness.¹¹

As Martin Jay noted in a recent essay, Löwenthal remained convinced that “Heine’s Jewish identity was central to his cosmopolitan, redemptive project.”¹² The essay represents, as Thomas Wheatland points out in his account of the American period of the Institute for Social Research, “a powerfully crafted example of the kind of Jewish exploration that Elliot Cohen and the rest of the editorial board of Commentary were encouraging. The figure of Heinrich Heine functioned for Lowenthal as a symbol for the problems faced by the entire N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Heine’s Jewish Difference and the Project of Critical Theory
• 1 Displacement, Relocation, and the Dialectic of a Constellation: Heine, Critical Theory, and the New York Intellectuals
• 2 Heine’s Readers: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud
• 3 Heine’s Dissonant Aesthetics
• 4 The Signifying Lizard: Language, Sign, and Play
• 5 Messiah in Golden Chains: Deferred Action and the Concept of History
• 6 The Comedy of Body and Mind: Emancipation and the Power of the Affects
• 7 Myths of Enlightenment: Heine’s Secularization Narratives
• 8 Another Abraham, Another Sarah: Heine’s Frankfurt Shul in The Rabbi of Bacherach
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page