Germany. A Winter's Tale

Original publication

From the onset of the (Metternich) Restoration in Germany, Heine was no longer secure from the censorship, and in 1831 he finally migrated to France as an exile. In 1835 a decree of the German Federal Convention banned his writings together with the publications of the Young Germany literary group.

At the end of 1843 Heine went back to Germany for a few weeks to visit his mother and his publisher Julius Campe in Hamburg. On the return journey the first draft of Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen took shape. The verse epic appeared in 1844 published by Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg. According to the censorship regulations of the 1819 Carlsbad Decrees, manuscripts of more than twenty folios did not fall under the scrutiny of the censor. Therefore, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen was published together with other poems in a volume called ‘New Poems’. However, on 4 October 1844 the book was banned and the stock confiscated in Prussia. On 12 December 1844, King Frederick William IV issued a warrant of arrest against Heine. In the period following the work was repeatedly banned by the censorship authorities. In other parts of Germany it was certainly issued in the form of a separate publication, also published by Hoffmann and Campe, but Heine had to shorten and rewrite it.

Ironically, censorship of Heine's works, particularly of the Winter Tale, became a major reason for Heine's raising fame.

Contents

The opening of the poem is the first journey of Heinrich Heine to Germany since his emigration to France in 1831. However it is to be understood that this is an imaginary journey, not the actual journey which Heine made but a literary tour through various provinces of Germany for the purposes of his commentary. The 'I' of the narrative is therefore the instrument of the poet's creative imagination.

Wintermärchen and Winterreise

Heinrich Heine was a master of the natural style of lyrics on the theme of love, like those in the 'Lyrisches Intermezzo' of 1822-1823 in Das Buch der Lieder (1827) which were set by Robert Schumann in his Dichterliebe. A few of his poems had been set by Franz Schubert, not least for the great posthumously-collected series of songs known as the Schwanengesang. In such works Heine assumed the manner of Wilhelm Müller, whose son Professor Max Müller later emphasized the fundamentally musical nature of these poems and the absolute congruity of Schubert's settings of them, which are fully composed duos for voice and piano rather than merely 'accompaniments' to tunes. Yet Heine's work addressed political preoccupations with a barbed and contemporary voice, whereas Müller's melancholy lyricism and nature-scenery explored more private (if equally universal) human experience. Schubert's Heine settings hardly portray the poet-philosopher's full identity.

Schubert was dead by 1828: Heine's choice of the winter journey theme certainly alludes to the Winterreise, Müller's cycle of poems about lost love, which in Schubert's song-cycle of the same name became an immortal work embodying some more final and tragic statement about the human condition. Winterreise is about the exile of the human heart, and its bitter and gloomy self-reconciliation. Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen transfers the theme to the international European political scene, his exile as a writer from his own homeland (where his heart is), and his Heimatssehnsucht or longing for the homeland. Thus Heine casts his secret and 'illegal thoughts', so that the darts of his satire and humour fly out from the tragic vortex of his own exile. The fact that Heine's poetry was itself so closely identified with Schubert was part of his armoury of 'fire and weapons' mentioned in the closing stanzas: he transformed Müller's lament into a lament for Germany.

In Section III, full of euphoria he sets foot again on German soil, with only ‘shirts, trousers and pocket handkerchiefs’ in his luggage, but in his head ‘a twittering birds’-nest/ of books liable to be confiscated’. In Aachen Heine first comes in contact again with the Prussian military:

A critic for love of the Fatherland

Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen shows Heine’s world of images and his folk-song-like poetic diction in a compact gathering, with cutting, ironic criticisms of the circumstances in his homeland. Heine puts his social vision into contrast with the grim ‘November-picture’ of the reactionary homeland which presented itself to his eyes:

A new song, a better song,

O friends, I speak to thee!

Here upon Earth we shall full soon

A heavenly realm decree.

Joyful we on earth shall be

And we shall starve no more;

The rotten belly shall not feed

On the fruits of industry.

Above all Heine criticized German militarism and reactionary chauvinism (i.e. nationalism), especially in contrast to the French, whose revolution he understood as a breaking-off into freedom. He admired Napoleon (uncritically) as the man who achieved the Revolution and made freedom a reality. He did not see himself as an enemy of Germany, but rather as a critic out of love for the 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.

(from the Foreword).

Reception

Heine’s verse-epic was much debated in Germany right down to our own times. Above all in the century to which it belonged, the work was labelled as the ‘shameful writing’ of a homeless or country-less man, a ‘betrayer of the Fatherland’, a detractor and a slanderer. This way of looking at Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen was carried, especially in the period of Nazism, into a ridiculous antisemitic caricature. Immediately after World War II a cheap edition of the poem with Heine’s Foreword and an introduction by Wolfgang Goetz was published by the Wedding-Verlag in Berlin in 1946.

Modern times see in Heine’s work – rather, the basis of a wider concern with nationalism and narrow concepts of German identity, against the backdrop of European integration – a weighty political poem in the German language: sovereign in its insight and inventive wit, stark in its images, masterly in its use of language. Heine’s figure-creations (like, for example, the ‘Liktor’) are skilful, and memorably portrayed.

A great deal of the attraction which the verse-epic holds today is grounded in this, that its message is not one-dimensional, but rather brings into expression the many-sided contradictions or contrasts in Heine’s thought. The poet shows himself as a man who loves his homeland and yet can only be a guest and visitor to it. In the same way that Antaeus needed contact with the Earth, so Heine drew his skill and the fullness of his thought only through intellectual contact with the homeland.

This exemplified the visible breach which the French July Revolution of 1830 signifies for intellectual Germany: the fresh breeze of freedom suffocated in the reactionary exertions of the Metternich Restoration, the soon-downtrodden ‘Spring’ of freedom yielded to a new winter of censorship, repression, persecution and exile; the dream of a free and democratic Germany was for a whole century dismissed from the realm of possibility.

Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen is a high-point of political poetry of the Vormärz period before the March Revolution of 1848, and in Germany is part of the official educational curriculum. The work taken for years and decades as the anti-German pamphlet of the ‘voluntary Frenchman’ Heine, today is for many people the most moving poem ever written by an emigrant.

Editions

German editions

Heinrich Heine. Historico-critical complete edition of the Works. Edited by Manfred Windfuhr. Vol. 4: Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum / Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. Revised by Winfried Woesler. (Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 1985).

H. H. Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. Edited by Joseph Kiermeier-Debre. (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1997.) (Bibliothek der Erstausgaben.) ISBN 3-423-02632-4

H. H. Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. Edited by Werner Bellmann. Revised Edition. (Reclam, Stuttgart 2001.) ISBN 3-15-002253-3

H. H. Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen. Edited by Werner Bellmann. Illustrations by Hans Traxler.(Reclam, Stuttgart 2005.) ISBN 3-15-010589-7 (Paperback: Reclam, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-020236-4)

Translations into English

Deutschland: A Not So Sentimental Journey by Heinrich Heine. Translated (into English) with an Introduction and Notes by T. J. Reed (Angel Books, London 1986). ISBN 0-946162-58-1

Germany. A Winter's Tale in: Hal Draper: The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine. A Modern English Version (Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers Boston Inc. 1982). ISBN 3-518-03062-0