When
I crossed from France to Germany
'Twas the mournful month and dreary
When November winds are stripping bare
The forests worn and weary.
Im
traurigen Monat November war's,
Die Tagen wurden trüber,
Der Wind riß von den Bäumen das Laub,
Da reist' ich nach Deutschland hinüber.
•November: Not
exactly. In fact, Heine takes two liberties here. Although
he spent the month of November in Germany, the journey
he describes took place in December and on the return
itinerary.
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to first text page)
2
As
we drew towards the boundary
I felt my pulses leaping
Within my bosom for delight;
I think I started weeping.
dt
text .
•
boundary: Crossing the boundary is a matter of
arbitrary pragmatic political facts, but also of values
and culture. As Heine makes clear in the Foreword,
boundaries change, and those changes should be an opportunity
for political reflection.
Thanks
to his reversal of the actual travel itinerary, Heine
re-enters his fatherland through his own region of origin,
the Rhineland, thus marking...
[-->
border changes: politics & maps]
In passing from France to Germany, Heine thus journeys
from what he constructs as the archetypical land of
freedom to the archetypical land of repression. At the
same time, like many exiles, he makes clear that his
estrangement from the state and its repression cannot
prevent his identification with the land and the people.
3
And
when I heard the German tongue,
'Twas with such curious gladness
I seemed to feel my heart's blood ebb
Without regret or sadness.
dt
text .
•
4
A
little maiden with a harp
Entuned a common ditty;
The voice was false, but the pathos true;
It touched my heart to pity.
dt
text .
•
Several things here command our attention:
(1)
Heine immediately but subtly launches into the critique
of what Marx and Engels called the "German wretchedness"
(deutsche Misere): that unique combination of
external and internalized repression leading to passivity.
(2)
It is significant that Heine in the following stanzas
identifies religion as the core of the problem. Whereas
he earlier often spoke in broad terms of the conflict
between sensualism and spiritualism, he by now increasingly
imparts a social dimension to the critique.
(3)
Rather than arrogantly condemning the girl, and by extension,
the people, Heine suggests a notion of what would come
to be called a false consciousness. In so doing, he
strategically locates himself on the inside rather than
the outside, all the more important as he is literarally
and figuratively coming from the outside—from exile.
(cf. Heine elsewhere: Ich selber bin Volk.)
Here,
as in many cases, Heine's closeness to Marx is evident,
although the influence generally ran from the former
to the latter.
5
She
sang of love and lovers' woes,
Of loss, and fates that sever,
Of meetings in a better land
Where grief is purged for ever.
dt
text .
•
6
She
sang our mortal vale of tears,
The joys that end in sadness,
The world where souls, redeemed at last,
Attain eternal gladness.
dt
text .
•
vale of tears: from the Latin, "vallis lacrimarum,"
from Psalm 84:7. The Hebrew text, whose precise meaning
here is unclear, speaks of the "Valley of Baca"
and refers in a general way to the superiority of life
in the divine presence. In
the Christian tradition, the phrase was applied to life
as a whole and came to be the archetypical metaphor
for indifference or hostility to earthly existence,
thus often seized upon by critics.
Marx, for example, writing contemporaneously with Heine,
turns the metaphor against its proponents:
"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness
of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
To call on them to give up their illusions about their
condition is to call on them to give up a condition
that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is,
therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of
tears of which religion is the halo."
—"Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher, February 1844 (written 1843-44;
English;
German)
7
She
sang the epopee of heaven,
The song of loss and sighing,
With which they lull the populace,
Big booby! when it's crying.
dt
text .
• epopee:
in this form (like the French term) or epopoeia, rather
misleadingly, meaning "epic poem." The German,
"Eiapopeia," means "hushaby" or
"lullaby," which makes the analogy to the
crying child intelligible and is in keeping with the
emphasis throughout the first half of the chapter: traditional
religion as compensatory illusion or means of cynical
manipulation. Here, as in many cases, Heine's closeness
to Marx is evident, although the influence generally
ran from the former to the latter.
One of Marx's famous formulations is of course the following:
"Religious
suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression
of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the
heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people."
—"Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher, February 1844 (written 1843-44;
English;
German)
8
I
know the song, the text, and the men
Who wrote the song, and taught her;
I know that in private they drank their wine,
And preached in public water.
