Index

Hitler quotes, real and bogus
Biographical summary of Heine
Heine's tensions with book-burning "Romantics"

Note -- The source for much of the following is Philip Kossoff, Valiant Heart: A Biography of Heinrich Heine, Cornwall Books, NJ and London, 1983.

Following the defeat of Napoleon (1815), nationalist German students formed the Allgemeine Deutsche Burschenschaft ("Universal German Brotherhood"), originally with a liberal coloring. The young Heinrich Heine joined at the University of Bonn in 1819. Unfortunately, however, some "Romantic" nationalists turned back to the Middle Ages for inspiration, an era that included murderous antisemitism. At first, the enthusiastic Heine was able to ignore this.

He had his first doubts, however, at a torchlight rally on top of the Kreuzberg [I believe that was outside Berlin then, but within the expanded borders of today's greater Berlin] on 18 October 1819, the fifth anniversary of the battle of Leipzig. One of the speakers, Wolfgang Menzel, called on the crowd to "apply the purifying fire to the books that offended their patriotism ... The students hurled the unpatriotic books and newspapers into a huge bonfire." [Kossoff, p. 44]

As time passed, Heine noticed fewer fellow liberals in the Burschenschaft, more national-chauvinists like Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who "extolled the superiority of the German people and praised brutality as a Teutonic virtue. He called for the regeneration of the race, to be achieved by the excision of the alien element -- the French, the Slav, and the Jew." [Kossoff, p. 45]

"Years later, in Ludwig Boerne (1840), [Heine] summed up these so-called patriots as

False revolutionaries who bawled much about love and faith but whose love was nothing but hate of everything foreign, whose faith consisted of nothing but unreason, and whose ignorance knew nothing better than to invent the burning of books. ... The words "Fatherland," "Germany," "Faith of ancestors," and so forth, will always electrify the vague masses of the people far more certainly than the words "Mankind," "World Citizenship," "Reason of the Sons," and "Truth!" ... I mean to say by this that the representatives of nationality are far more deeply rooted in the German soil that the representatives of cosmopolitanism, and that the latter will always be beaten by the former unless they swiftly forestall them."
[Kossoff, p. 49]

In the early 1820s, Heine released a play "Almansor", placed in Spain in the 1500s, as triumphant Christians conquer and forcibly convert the Moors. As one Moorish character tells in horror of a Koran being burned in the marketplace, another Moor makes the immortal quote, "the burning is but a prologue: where books are burned, people in the end are burned too." Heine was referring to the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, but he also intended his audience to draw a more modern parallel, with the exhibitionist book-burning and rabid xenophobia of many German "Romantics."

"The concluding passage of [Heine's] Religion and Philosophy in Germany [1832] is one of the most remarkable prophesies in all literature.
[...]

	Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. Zuerst in: "Revue des deux Mondes", "De L'Allemagne depuis Luther" (Première Partie: März, Deuxième Partie: November, Troisième Partie: Dezember 1834). In: Der Salon Bd. II (1835) http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/heine/religion/religion.htm
Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit -- has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. ...	Das Christentum - und das ist sein schönstes Verdienst - hat jene brutale germanische Kampflust einigermaßen besänftigt, konnte sie jedoch nicht zerstören, und wenn einst der zähmende Talisman, das Kreuz, zerbricht, dann rasselt wieder empor die Wildheit der alten Kämpfer, die unsinnige Berserkerwut, wovon die nordischen Dichter so viel singen und sagen. ...
The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals. ...	Die alten steinernen Götter erheben sich dann aus dem verschollenen Schutt, und reiben sich den tausendjährigen Staub aus den Augen, und Thor mit dem Riesenhammer springt endlich empor und zerschlägt die gotischen Dome. ...
... Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder ...	Lächelt nicht über meinen Rat, über den Rat eines Träumers, der Euch vor Kantianern, Fichteanern und Naturphilosophen warnt. Lächelt nicht über den Phantasten, der im Reiche der Erscheinungen dieselbe Revolution erwartet, die im Gebiete des Geistes stattgefunden. Der Gedanke geht der Tat voraus, wie der Blitz dem Donner. Der deutsche Donner ...
comes rolling somewhat slowly, but ... its crash ... will be unlike anything before in the history of the world. ...	kommt etwas langsam herangerollt; aber kommen wird er, und wenn Ihr es einst krachen hört, wie es noch niemals in der Weltgeschichte gekracht hat, so wißt, der deutsche Donner hat endlich sein Ziel erreicht.
At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away. ... A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.	Bei diesem Geräusche werden die Adler aus der Luft tot niederfallen, und die Löwen in der fernsten Wüste Afrikas werden die Schwänze einkneifen und sich in ihren königlichen Höhlen verkriechen. Es wird ein Stück aufgeführt werden in Deutschland, wogegen die französische Revolution nur wie eine harmlose Idylle erscheinen möchte.
[Kossoff, pp. 125-126]	Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/heine/religion/religion.htm

"The History Place" has a photo of Nazis burning books as part of this event.

Projekt Gutenberg-DE Die digitale Bibliothek ("The digital library") has complete German-language books by many authors, including Heinrich Heine.