Heine und die Weltliteratur

Abstract

Reed, T. J., and Alexander Stillmark, eds. Heine and die Weltliteratur. Oxford: European Humanities Research Center, 2000. 232 pp. 27.50 ($49.50 US) paperback. The bicentennial of birth in 1997 was the occasion for numerous conferences and diverse papers on important aspects of life and works. Heine and die Weltliteratur is a product of the activities of that year, and although it appears three years after the celebratory event, it contains enough interesting material to make the wait worthwhile. The thirteen essays constituting this volume were originally presentations at a 1997 London Heine Conference, which was one of the earliest commemorative events in the calender of the bicentenary year. They offer a broad array of perspectives and insights into Heine, but especially into the connections between writings and literature from various parts of the world, as well as reception. The collection is divided into four unequal parts. The first and longest section, Heine's Intertextual Muse, examines the multifarious and often intricate ways in which Heine related his work to other literary texts and traditions. Joseph A. Kruse, the longtime director of the Heine Institute in DUsseldorf, appropriately opens the collection with reflections on relationship to the great works and authors of the western tradition: the Bible, Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. The themes of the remaining essays in this section are a bit more circumscribed, dealing with individual writings or authors. Nigel Reeves offers a carefully wrought study of the sources for Almansor and their significance for the drama. Reeves argues that the Moors were not simply a cipher for the Jews of own times, and that intense study of Islamic civilization in fifteenthcentury Spain predisposed him to the Hegelian dialectic and to utopian thought in general. Roger Paulin's essay on Shakespeares Madchen and Frauen situates the work in the late 1830s as a Young German contribution to the wider debate on the English playwright. In an illuminating examination of the romantic and classical epic traditions that influenced Atta Troll, Ritchie Robertson comes to the conclusion that work revises the expectations of the genre by disparaging heroic protagonists and rejecting the hitherto preferred model of an external, non-European antagonist. Hubert Lengauer provides a detailed and nuanced view of the troubled relationship between Heine and Moritz Hartmann. Concluding this section are Hans Holler's observations on Grillparzer and Heine: although the Austrian playwright differs significantly from the German poet, especially with regard to political proclivities, they found common ground in their mutual reverence for genuine artistry. …