Judith Jakob & Joachim Jezewski - Heinrich Heine - An einen politischen Dichter

Heinrich Heine was born Harry Heine in Düsseldorf in 1797 and died in exile in Paris in 1856. He is regarded as “the last poet of Romanticism” and, at the same time, as the one who transcended it. He made everyday language suitable for poetry, elevated the feature column and the travelogue to art forms, and imbued the German language with a previously unknown, elegant lightness. As a politically engaged journalist, essayist, satirist, and polemicist, he was both admired and feared.

In monarchist Germany, his works were banned starting in 1835; a hundred years later, the Nazis publicly burned “that Jewish swine Heine.” The poem about the “Loreley” was allowed to be printed and sung only with the notation “Poet unknown.”

Judith Jakob and Joachim Jezewski trace Heine’s footsteps—with the help of his poems, letters, and writings—from his childhood in Düsseldorf to his exile in Paris, where Heine finally died after a long illness, far from his beloved homeland.