1094 Reviews thirtypages the interested reader can learn more about Italy in the German literary imagination than from the 200 pages of Hachmeister's book. LOUGHBOROUGHUNIVERSITY CHRISTINA UjMA Heinrich Heine. By Bernd Kortlander. (Reclam UB 17638) Stuttgart: Reclam. 2003. 367 pp. ?8.80. ISBN 3-15-017638-7 (pbk). Bernd Kortlander's new book on Heine is a pleasure. Written forReclam's recently es? tablished series of survey monographs on major writers, this 90,000-word paperback is at the same time a culmination of three decades' work by the author. As Deputy Di? rector ofthe Dusseldorf Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Kortlander has been involved both with the now complete Historisch-kritische Ausgabe and, extensively, with the HeineJahrbuch , as well as editing numerous collections ofHeine's verse and some important volumes of critical essays, and publishing innumerable articles. It is clear how this experience has fed through into the new book. Above all, it gives a sense that no pre? vious interconnected account of Heine's work has achieved of the precise interactions between his texts and their contexts: of the ways in which each work was conditioned by the poet's personal environment and situation, by the demands of his publishers, editors, and diverse markets, by political pressures (in particular, the censorship), by other publications, and by current events. One is struck by how much the Diisseldorfer Heine-Ausgabe and other projects around the Heine-Institut have advanced under? standing ofthe author, but have also complicated it. Kortlander's accounts of genesis and editorial history,of textual interference and authorial cut-and-paste, are intricate and a little disturbing, but also undeniably enlightening and persuasive. The way Kortlander's book is constructed reflects what are presumably Reclam's series guidelines. It ends with an extensive, subdivided bibliography of secondary as well as primary works, and lists of the most significant items also appear in the main body of the book, at the end of each subsection. The book begins with seventy pages of biography; then, in the text-focused chapters that follow, all Heine's writings are covered, with summaries of their content and character accompanying the analysis. A degree of competition with the Metzler Handbucher (in this case, with Gerhard Hohn's deservedly we\\-regardedHeine-Handbuch, 2nd edn Stuttgart, 1997) is implicit. The sequence in which the works are discussed combines the chro? nological and the generic: 'Lyrik', 'Dramen', 'Reisebilder', 'Erzahlerische Prosa', 'Deutschland-Schriften', 'Frankreich-Schriften', and so on. Occasionally there are repetitions, which are evidently deemed preferable to cross-referencing. Thus the book has aspects both ofa reference guide and ofan introduction to lifeand work, and is certainly serviceable as both. However, it also presents a coherent, subtle, and up-to-the-minute interpretation of the author. We see a holistic Heine, all of whose work, from lyricpoetry to political journalism, expresses the same deep (emancipatory ) impulses; a Utopian and optimistic Heine, whose faith in human fulfilment did not fundamentally change through the course of his career; a Heine whose view of committed authorship pointed forward to the literature of the twentieth century; Heine the stylist,whose belief in art and genius and their transfiguringpower was corroborated by his own expressive skill, and who, in the imaginative flux of his writing, conveyed 'Beweglichkeit' as both the essence of modernity and the appropriate way to render it; a non-postmodem Heine, however, so not an infinitelyelusive ironist and relativist, but a man of beliefs; a rationalistic Heine; an earnest and honourable Heine. There are elements of this that one might dissent from. 'Modern but not post? modern' is faintly unhelpful: certainly Heine was new, but not all that was novel about him anticipated the writing of the next century; and the evasive-ironic Heine MLRy 99.4, 2004 1095 is not wholly to be denied. Heine the Utopian does not tell the whole story: there is a depressive and despairing side to him, from the nihilism of the Traumbilder to the Job-like poems of the mattress grave, which is perhaps underestimated here. The implication that his intellectual life was without fundamental caesurae is at least disputable . For some reason, too, perhaps connected with the book's primary view...