NO NEW THING

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 77, Issue 83, 9 April 1934, Page 5

NO NEW THING

DRIVE AGAINST JEWS GERMANY A CENTURY AGO. PERSECUTION THEN. One tiling stands out clear in Ludwig Marcuse’s book, ‘’Heine,” that the Germans, as a nation, have always evinced a cordial dislike of the Jew, says Public Opinion. Heinrich Heine experienced this a century ago; indeed, the words written by Ludwig Marcuse of those days might well apply to 1934. Writing of the early twenties of last century when Heine, the poet, was a young man, Ludwig Marcuse says: — 4 1 The Jews were at this time ridiculed on the stage in plays like ‘The School for Jews/ and ‘Our Trade.’ The famous aetor, Wurm, mimicked the Jewish dialect to enraptured audiences. Russ, a professor of history at Berlin University, inaugurated a series of anti-Semitic pamphlets with a discourse upon ‘The claims of the Jews to German nationality.’ He demanded that Jews should be compelled to wear conspicuously a ‘racial rosette,’ the good old yellow badge of the Middle Ages. The vulgar anti-Semitism of the streets pushed its way into literature. In a pamphlet called ‘The Mirror of the Jews,’ that appeared towards the end of 1819, the noble author declared that though he considered ‘the killing of a Jew to be neither a sin nor a crime but merely a case for the police,’ he had, as a matter of fact, a better recipe against the plague—that ‘ as many Jews as possible should be sold to England, who might use them on their Indian plantations instead of negroes.’ Avowal of Judaism. “In August, 1822, Heine joined the Society for Jewish Culture and Scholarship—an open avowal of Judaism in those days of pogroms and conversions to Christendom. At this time when the Jewish faith was being emas-

eulated by the suppression of Hebrew in the public prayers, by the admission of puerile sermons and hymns, of choral singing and organ playing, he professed himself a Polish Jew in an account he gave at that time of a journey to Poland —‘in spite of the barbarian fur cap that covers, and the still more barbarian ideas that fill, their heads.’ He preferred the Polish Jew to many a German Jew, ‘who carries his Bolivar upon his head and his Jean Paul inside it.’ He found originality and resolution in the Eastern J ew, while the Western was nothing but a feeble hybrid; he still prefeired the Polish Jew in spite of his dirty furs, his populous beard, his smell of garlic, and his Yiddish tongue, to many a Western Jew in all the glory of wealth and emancipation. Heine used the full power of his satirical imagination in contending against the sterile cross between Teutonism and Judaism ” This biography of Heine is by far the best which ftas yet appeared. Ludwig Marcuse shows that, although Heine was to all intents and purposes exiled from Germany when living in Prance, yet he would not abandon his citizenship of Germany. Apart from the political side, the biographer interprets the poet, and he gives a masterly study and criticism of the gifts which made Heine second only to Goethe. “If he is ever to have a memorial,” says Ludwig Marcuse of Heine, “that is not only in the heads and hearts of individuals, but is the recognition of a community—then let it be on the day when France and Germany abandon their centuries-old enmity. And let it not be in Dussel dorf that is ashamed of him, nor in Hamburg where his only pleasure lay in thinking himself superior to everyone else —but somewhere along the frontier between France and Germany, where the nightingales sing and the air is fragrant with the scent of flowers.” Sarcastic Essay. The story of Heine’s youth is not only interesting but at times there are flashes of humour. This story of a school report, is typical:— “He had obtained no certificate upon leaving school, so was obliged

to matriculate later. He scraped up just enough marks to let him through, and the report ran as follows; ‘He knows no Greek. His Latin is weak, and he has had too little practice in writing, for which reason he has not submitted a prose. He refused to sit for the examination in mathematics. He is not without some knowledge of history. The German composition, though curiously expressed, shows promise.’ “The subject set was: ‘What would you regard as the essential considerations in deciding upon any particular calling?’ And Heine wrote: ‘For the instruction given in those lecture-rooms the first essential is desks; for they are the supports, the props, and the ground-work for the wisdom which comes forth from the mouths of the teachers and which is noted down by careful students. Desks arc, moreover, as it wore, memorial tablets for our names, which we carve thereon with' our penknives so as to leave a record for future generations.’ “The chairman of the examining board claimed to have ascertained two undeniable facts from this essay—first, that Heine had ‘departed seriously from the subject that had been set; and, secondly, that ho. had ‘a notable tendency to satire.’ ”

In these days a biography of this Great German Jew is of more than topical interest; it is a parable of bygone days—and to-day.