HEINE AND MIS COUNTRYMEN.

Evening Star, Issue 14226, 27 November 1909, Page 9

HEINE AND MIS COUNTRYMEN.

Official Germany, represented on this occasion by (ho Hamburg Senate, has ones again expressed its condemnation of Heine. It will be remembered that, the Kaiser, on purchasing the palace at Corfu which’ belonged to the late Empress of Austria, removed and sold a statue of Heine. The statue was bought by Heme’s publisher and offered to Hamburg, the citv with which Heine had no many ties, but the .Senate has refused it with'more than mmpicion of curt ness. Perhaps Hamburg could not in these Byzantine days well adopt what tho Kaiser had rejected, but the ostentatious refusal of Germany to admit a public memorial to her 'greatest lyric poet, and perhaps her greatest master of prose, strikes the foreign observer as distinctly piquant. Heine’ is a German chifisic—that nobody m Germany denies—and he is one of the most widely road of German classics—that nobody in Germany can prevent—hut the official ban is on him ; his political sins outweigh his transcendent literary merits. In spirit, if not in religion, he never ceased to bo a Jew, a Gorman in the political sense he certainly never was. He is the type cf the anti-nationalist. That is his unpardonable ofieuce. Ho fought and suffered for Germany, but the “ Deutschtum ” of the Pan-Gfimuu school, the Teutonic consciousness. and the Teutonic character on sonic of its sides was tho butt of his wit and his lambent satire Tho whole stream of fashionable thought and feeling ni the Germany of Bismarck lias gone against tho man who was a Jew and a son of the Revolution, and modern German nationalism has erected into sacraments the emotions, the ideals, and the shibboleths which wore the target of an irony and a contempt as devastating and almost as irrestistible as Voltaire’s. Official Germany hates in Heine the man who desecrated and desecrates, for his power lives its holy things. That the vendetta is relentlessly pursued in spite of a literary prestige which every decade establishes more securely is the most genuine of tributes to the influence Heine wields and the rear he inspires.—Manchester ‘Guardian.’