PART III CONTEMPORARY HISTORIES (ZEITGESCHICHTEN)
Heine’s 1840 book Heinrich Heine über Ludwig Börne (Heinrich Heine on Ludwig Börne), published three years after Börne’s untimely death, provides an account of his two encounters with Börne, first in Frankfurt in the 1820s and again in Paris in the fall of 1831. More than a mere portrait of his friend and rival, Heine’s memoir characterizes the turbulent times in which his generation came into its own. It includes an account of his initial enthusiastic response to the July Revolution of 1830 in the form of a series of letters dating from that summer. Supposedly written from the resort island of Heligoland off the northern coast of Germany, the letters show how Heine first learns of the events in France in early August, more than a week after the “three glorious days” of late July. Immersing himself in the history of late antiquity and the Bible, with “the holy prehistorical world roving like long caravan processions through [his] mind,”1 Heine relates how the arrival of a packet of newspapers interrupts his studies: “I was reading this story … when the fat packet of newspapers with warm, glowing hot news arrived from the mainland. They were sunbeams wrapped in printing paper, and they inflamed my soul into the wildest blaze.”2 This exposure to the latest news leads Heine to cut short his trip to the North Sea and set off to see the revolution with his own eyes. Ephemeral print converts him (at least initially) to a belief in progress and a commitment to the revolution.
This series of letters (fictionalized, as we now know3) captures the intensity of his initial enthusiasm for what became the defining political event for the many liberal thinkers of the day. The letters also stage the confrontation between different kinds of writing, different kinds of print, and different kinds of history writing, with the papers’ accounts of the flow of revolutionaries on the streets of Paris supplanting biblical accounts of processions of ancient peoples. They capture the excitement of the moment, yet their belated publication relativizes the immediacy of Heine’s enthusiasm. This episode also sets two medially conditioned delays in motion, including the delay in the papers reaching him, underlining Heine’s remote location, and the delay in the letters’ finally reaching the public nine years after their (supposed) initial composition. Delay characterizes the position of the German observer of the revolution and also the position of historical reflection, as he casts his thoughts and feelings from 1830 in new light. Heine writes himself into history, placing his own activities of reading and writing into a position of historical remove and entering into a historical relationship to himself. He writes a dual present, that of 1830 and of 1840, as he reflects on the events following 1830 in the remainder of his memoir.
Heine’s stylized account of his awakening as a writer engaged with the present day reflects several key themes of this third part of the book. The years leading up to and after the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 continue to be an era of temporal uncertainty, as the European old order seeks to stem the tide of the revolution, censorship regimes tighten, and partial revolutions reverberate in fits and starts across the continent. The 1830s see a blossoming of the periodical press and of cultural journalism, another key period after the 1790s.4 Writing for journals and newspapers is one of the most important forms of expression and means of survival for liberal writers such as Börne and Heine: both attempt to found journals, and both are correspondents for the Morgenblatt and other publications, including Cotta’s Augsburg-based Allgemeine Zeitung, the most important political newspaper of the time in Germany. With other means of institutional and political activity largely inaccessible due to their political commitments and Jewish family backgrounds, Börne and Heine choose journalism and cultural criticism as their primary mode of countering the repressive governments of German-speaking lands; as Heine puts it, “journals are our fortifications.”5 Both writers grapple with how to have a concrete effect on the world through journalistic writing. In asserting the ability of journals to shape the course of the present day, Börne programmatically self-identifies as a Zeitschriftsteller, a term that suggests a “writer” about “time,” in the service of the “times,” as well as a writer for periodicals.6
Heine’s demonstrative gesture of setting off to the French capital in his Heligoland letters is based in biographical fact, but the gesture also carries broader symbolic weight. Heine and Börne both come into their own as exiles writing from Paris, sending their reports back to Germany along the same distribution routes by which the news of July 1830 originally reached Heine. Paris is by all accounts the center of Europe at the time: “Trips to Paris are trips to the historical present,” as Oesterle puts it, and the period prompts newly urgent reflections on the temporal category of the present.7 Like other German exiles, Heine and Börne mediate between Germany and France, using commentary on French affairs as a way to educate German readers about the political and cultural trends underway since 1789 and exposing French readers to German letters and society. Both writers are frequently translated into French and attempt to found journals in French. In addition to being an epicenter for world-historical events, Paris is also a hotbed of the most up-to-date historical studies, academic or otherwise, and Heine and Börne comment on and review the latest histories as they come out. They entertain the idea of writing a conventional history of the revolution yet end up rejecting forms and conventions of academic history writing—including the scene of the lectures and large, comprehensive histories of specific epochs—and embrace more journalistic modes. In contrast to Prussian historians such as Ranke, who adopt positions of quasi-official state historians, or French liberal historians such as Thiers, Michelet, and Mignet, who play leading roles in political and academic offices, Heine and Börne adopt the position of cosmopolitan observers addressing broader publics.
In studying their experiments in serial writing, I build on long-standing scholarly discussions about the role of journalistic publication (Publizistik) in the Vormärz.8 But why do these figures warrant reconsideration now? For one, it is important to pay closer attention to their deliberate use of specific print formats, something often overlooked by more traditional intellectual-historical scholarship. Both figures’ writings are characterized by a high level of self-awareness about the implications of different serial formats, and their writings shape their authorial self-understandings accordingly. I also consider anew how Börne and Heine are involved in various kinds of history writing based specifically in serial form. Both engage in projects of contemporary history writing, or what Heine calls “writing the history of the present” (Geschichtsschreibung der Gegenwart). Writing both in dialogue with and in opposition to academic historians and philosophers such as Ranke or Hegel, Heine and Börne chart new paths for the writing of history at the intersections of cultural journalism, literary fiction, and philosophical reflection. Though the question of Heine’s relationship to the idealist philosophy of history has been well explored in the secondary literature, reframing these discussions via the question of serial form sheds new light on the historiographical accomplishments of both figures.
Both figures follow the lead of Jean Paul in embracing miscellaneous modes of writing at the intersection of fiction, satire, and journalism. Börne models his writing on contemporary Parisian journals: “That would be entirely my genre. Everything short, jumping from one thing to the other.”9 Heine likewise adopts long-standing and, at first glance, pejorative designations of journalism when he deems his correspondence reports for the Allgemeine Zeitung “fleeting pages” (flüchtige Blätter).10 Both embrace modes of writing based in the serial succession of small forms, including the letter, the review, the sketch, the tableau, and more. These mixed forms are tied to the format of the periodical, but they also parallel the structure and temporality of the revolution itself: as Heine puts it in his memoir on Börne, “that political earthquake, the July Revolution, exploded relationships in all spheres of life to such an extent and threw together the most dissimilar phenomena, that the Parisian correspondent of the revolution only needed to report faithfully what he saw and heard to automatically achieve the highest level of humor.”11 The realization that the revolution is structured serially and brings forth a proliferation of serial forms is thus at the heart of Heine’s and Börne’s literary and historiographical project.12
The witty juxtapositional style that these figures inherit from Jean Paul likewise draws explicitly on visual logics, with the titles of Börne’s 1822 to 1824 Schilderungen aus Paris (Scenes from Paris) and Heine’s Reisebilder (Travel pictures) (1826–1831) effectively setting new standards for the already quite popular German literature of the urban tableau and travelogue.13 Börne and Heine position the serial modes of the urban tableau, portrait, and caricature against older media such as historical books, rhetoric, and portraiture, embracing small forms as windows onto the present and its multiple historical refractions. Of course, criticisms of the literary merits of cultural journalism are all too common in the period; Georg Büchner, an important contemporary, rejects the conviction that writing for journals (die Tagesliteratur) might directly lead to restructuring societal relations.14 Writing in periodicals is commonly dismissed for its frivolous miscellaneity; a contemporary critic called Börne’s Briefe Aus Paris (Letters from Paris) “empty, boring coffeehouse- and newspaper-chatter, observations gathered from the surface, just like those that thousands of impudent reasoning ‘critics’ make on a daily basis.”15 Later in the twentieth century, Karl Kraus (himself a journal editor) would lay the blame for journals’ and newspapers’ banalization of language at Heine’s feet, dismissing anthology collections such as the Reisebilder as “making bread out of bread crumbs.”16 We are well served to remind ourselves of the precarious status of Heine’s and Börne’s conscious embrace of small occasional forms, both in the contemporary literary scene and at later historical junctures.
Both figures also embrace the literary-aesthetic (and financial) potential of republishing works in single-author serial anthology editions. The transition to book form establishes a stronger authorial voice, preempts unauthorized anthologizing, and places articles into new textual relationships, including via new transitions, beginnings, and ends. Republication also serves as a form of reverse remediation that incorporates the logic of the periodical into the collected works edition, as we have already seen in the case of Jean Paul. As we will see, Heine’s and Börne’s republication experiments work with temporal structures of historical delay and anticipation that are materialized through the details and format conditions of print publication. Both authors stage the scene of revisiting older materials, emphasizing the potential for reappraisal of the past as a basic feature of temporal and historical awareness. Heine calls his writings “historical files” on which future historians will rely, but he himself treats them in this very manner. Attending to the publication details of these works allows us new insight into how material formats shape temporal awareness, a feature of their work that subsequent critical editions often overlook.
This brings us to the historiographical stakes of their writings. Like Jean Paul, both write time according to the unruly temporalities of the periodical, yet they are more invested in explicitly historical discourse than Jean Paul. Part of this is simply because a wide range of new sites and styles of history writings emerge in the 1820s and 1830s in tandem with a wide range of new historical developments. For the generation of figures following on Goethe and Jean Paul, the July Revolution gives new meaning to the idea that the revolution is ongoing and can be reactualized. The prospect of the revolution repeating itself (whether as tragedy or farce, in Marx’s famous misquote of Hegel) and continuing into the present and future lends new urgency to the question of the history of the revolution, as new models for the progression and “scripting” of revolution emerge.17 The academic discipline of history is also still in formation in the first half of the nineteenth century. Prior to the nineteenth century, the term Zeitgeschichte had been understood as applying to all history writing, but in the early nineteenth century it increasingly comes to be associated with the present and very recent past.18 As Koselleck and Oesterle have shown, writing ongoing, open-ended contemporary histories increasingly falls out of the standard professional practice of the historical sciences, while writing the present increasingly becomes the purview of literary writing and criticism, as historians opt to describe historical events in the past that are “finished” from the perspective of historical overview.19 Serial forms—the lecture, journal, and book and anthology series—are both timely and untimely: they propel developments in the processing of the recent past, and yet they are disparaged and rejected by the gatekeepers of historical knowledge production.
In contrast to the commonplace that history progresses linearly and necessarily on the basis of the movement of the concept (as in Hegel’s idealism), the material conditions of economic production (as Marx would later elaborate), or the Heraclitan flow from one internally coherent historical epoch to another (as nineteenth-century historicism teaches), Börne and Heine explore deliberately provisional modes of history writing, showing both how present-day constellations cast an ever-shifting light on the past and how the past comes to be revalued and reappropriated in new situations.20 They ask readers to understand historical time as an unruly mixture of old and new, to consider how different aspects of the past can continue to have effects in the present, and to understand the revolution as a continuing process, one that is unpredictable and based in multiple contingencies rather than “a historico-philosophical concept based on a perspective which displayed a constant and steady direction toward the future,” as Koselleck puts it in regard to the philosophy of history.21 Even if both figures are ever oriented to the possibility of future revolution, both are ambivalent about shapes of monodirectional historical time, and both engage with serial form in order to undercut naive notions of progress and of the unprecedented newness of the present. Their contemporary histories are not “completed” historical narratives that deliver the final word about a given historical period. Rather, they give indeterminacy and contingency provisional shape via specific constellations of text and image.
1. Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne: A Memorial, trans. Jeffrey L. Sammons (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), 32. Translation altered.
2. Heine, Ludwig Börne, 40.
3. Jeffrey L. Sammons calls these texts a retrospectively written “phantom text” with no firm basis in actual letters. Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Introduction,” in Heine, Ludwig Börne, xxxii.
4. Schmid calls the Vormärz “the true Gründerzeit” of the German press. Ulrich Schmid, “Buchmarkt und Literaturvermittlung,” in Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, Hanser Socialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 5, ed. Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid (Munich: Hanser, 1998), 70.
5. Heinrich Heine to Gustav Kolb, November 11, 1828. HSA, 20, 350.
6. The term was already in use in the late eighteenth century, though Börne is often erroneously credited with coining it. D’Aprile, Die Erfindung der Zeitgeschichte.
7. Ingrid Oesterle, “Der ‘Führungswechsel der Zeithorizonte’ in der deutschen Literatur. Korrespondenzen aus Paris, der Hauptstadt der Menschheitsgeschichte, und die Ausbildung der geschichtlichen Zeit ‘Gegenwart,’ ” in Studien zur Ästhetik und Literatur der Kunstperiode, ed. Dirk Grathoff (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985), 15.
8. See Wolfgang Preisendanz, “Der Funktionsübergang von Dichtung und Publizistik bei Heine,” in Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, ed. Hans Robert Jauss (Munich: Fink, 1968), 343–74.
9 . “Das wäre so ganz mein Genre. Alles kurz, von einem zum andern springend.” Börne, Briefe aus Paris. GS, IV, 637.
10. Heine, Fränzösische Zustände, vi.
11. Heine, Ludwig Börne, 88.
12. The serial structure of the 1848 revolutions in particular is the topic of Clare Pettitt, Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
13. The French title of the Reisebilder is Tableaux de voyage.
14. “For my own part I do not in any way belong to the so-called Junges Deutschland, the literary faction of Gutzkow and Heine. Only a complete misrecognition of our social conditions [Nur ein völliges Mißkennen unserer gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse] could make people believe that the daily writing for journals could make possible the complete transformation of our religious and social ideas.” Georg Büchner, Werke und Briefe (Munich: Hanser, 1980), 279.
15. Börne cites this critique by Eduard Meyer in his Letters from Paris. SS, III, 362.
16. Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 55.
17. See Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, “Introduction,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 1–24, 4.
18. See Koselleck, “Constancy and Change,” 100–17, 110–11.
19. Oesterle, “Der ‘Führungswechsel der Zeithorizonte,’ ” 20.
20. “The historicist is the Heraclitean of the human world: everything is in flux; no one steps twice into the river of history.” Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.
21. Reinhart Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 51. An irony of Koselleck’s treatment of nineteenth-century figures is that, even while writing against the modern philosophy of history that emerges in the period, Koselleck lumps liberal authors such as Heine and Börne into a larger perspective of a linear vision of history and historical progress toward the revolution. For example, he situates Heine among other democrats of the 1830s and 1840s who shared a vision of an ongoing, permanent progressive revolution. See Reinhart Koselleck et al., “Revolution, Rebellion, Aufruhr, Bürgerkrieg,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), 762.