Various Conceptions of History

Scholars have repeatedly drawn attention to the interrelation of Heine’s mode of writing and his concept of history: his “performative” approach to history writing generates a “plurality of narratives” and constellates multiple competing conceptions of history, favoring ironic juxtaposition over unambiguous resolution.¹⁵ Rather than developing a single, unified historiographical narrative, he pursues a variety of inroads to historical representation, constantly interrupting himself and redirecting readers. The French Revolution is a particularly salient subject for this form of history writing because of its multivalent temporal filiations across past, present, and future. The writer of history seeks to understand the effects of past events on the present, but he or she also seeks to understand how the concerns of the present and the anticipation of the future alike shape the view of the past. Heine dramatizes these kinds of temporal vectors in article VI in Französische Zustände. At first, he demonstratively turns his sights to the past, construing the noise and chatter of the present as a potential distraction but also as a riddle to be deciphered: “I wish to contribute as much as possible … to the understanding of the present and look for the key to the noisy enigma of today in the past. The salons lie and the graves are true.”¹⁶ This is one of several pithy, protodialectical formulations that Heine uses to parse the ambiguous status of the past in the present.¹⁷ In stating that the salons lie and the graves are true, Heine asks how the 1789 revolution continues to influence events forty years later. However, he then goes on to state his desire to reveal “how the past first becomes understandable through the present, and how every new day sheds new light upon the past, something of which our previous writers of historical handbooks had no idea.”¹⁸ This second statement shifts attention to how present concerns alter our understanding of the past, a feature of historical understanding that historians commonly seek to neutralize.

Here Heine straddles two models of engaging with the past. Reinhart Koselleck has shown how the late eighteenth-century understanding of history breaks with the traditional topos of history as the teacher of life (historia magistra vitae), which assumes that past events repeat themselves and serve as normative models for understanding the present and future.¹⁹ Traditional history writing is a mimetic mode based in the classicizing concept of imitating great men and their deeds.²⁰ It is above all the French Revolution that undermines the idea that the past instructs the present, for the revolution is perceived to be unprecedentedly new. As Koselleck argues, postrevolutionary historical consciousness comes to assume a teleological notion of progress, justifying past and present actions from the perspective of a future goal rather than a repeatable past. Heine approaches this tension between differing approaches to the past in an unpublished fragment titled “Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung” (Various conceptions of history) written at about the same time as his 1831–1832 articles for the Allgemeine Zeitung. For Heine, the traditional approach amounts to an “indifferent” outlook that sees history as a realm of bleak cyclical repetition (trostlosen Kreislauf).²¹ Ranke and other conservative academic historians exemplify this model as they remain indifferent to the future because they see it as in no way diverging from the past and present.²² The second, “providential” model is expressed most fully by the “philosophical school,” that is, Hegel and his followers, which sees a future of rational progress and the betterment of the human condition. Heine views this model more positively, but he remains skeptical of the “fanaticism of those promising future happiness” (Schwärmerei der Zukunftbeglücker), for the progressive philosophy of history justifies the present as a means to the end of realizing the future: “We also demand that the living present be valued as it deserves, and not serve merely as a means to an end in the service of the future.”²³

This fragment is an often-cited example of Heine’s particular combination of rejecting nonteleological views of history while remaining committed to the ideals of the revolution.²⁴ For Heine, the present is justified in its own right via the principle of life rather than that of a progressive, rational future: “Life is neither [a] means nor [an] end. Life is a right. Life desires to validate this right against the claims of petrifying death, against the past, and this act of validating life is the revolution … ‘le pain est le droit du peuple,’ said Saint-Just, and this is the greatest word spoken in the entire revolution.”²⁵ In being equated with “petrifying death,” the past seems as far removed from instructing life as possible, yet Heine does not bestow this pedagogical function on the future either. He attempts to do justice to the suffering and struggles of the present on its own terms; indeed, linking life and the present in this way was common in the liberal writings of the Vormärz.²⁶ It would almost seem that here Heine reverses his own pithy statement that “the salons lie, the graves are true”: truth as well as moral and historical “greatness” are on the side of life’s self-assertion over and against the past.

In “Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung,” Heine uses life as a conceptual lever to open up the problem of treating historical situations, constellations, or actors as autonomous entities in their own right. He writes with polemical, almost activist conviction, from the perspective of “our liveliest feelings of life” (unseren lebendigsten Lebensgefühlen), and yet in this fragment he never returns to the problem of an overarching historical Zusammenhang or to the problem of identifying connections between different self-standing historical entities: What links the self-assertion of life at one historical moment to that of a previous or future moment? Indeed, we might conjecture that the difficulty of placing different actions into historically coherent relationships to one another—an epistemological as well as historiographical difficulty—prevented Heine from finishing these reflections or led him to attempt to solve it through other conceptual or textual means. In Französische Zustände, Heine comes to a somewhat different conclusion as to the specifically historical manifestations of the present. There Heine shifts questions of life and death, of before and after, onto the publication conditions of print. Both in topic and format, Heine explores notions of before and after that go beyond a simple equation of the present with life.

Interrupting the History of the Revolution

Französische Zustände is one of many contemporaneous texts reporting to German readers about the aftermath of the July Revolution, texts which also include Börne’s Briefe aus Paris (1832–1834). Heine wrote for Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände in the 1820s and began working in 1831 as a Parisian correspondent for Cotta’s more news-oriented Augsburg-based Allgemeine Zeitung, which was the most important German-language daily newspaper in the period. Almost every issue of the Allgemeine Zeitung in the early 1830s contained reports from Paris, and Cotta had six correspondents there at the time.²⁷ Heine’s articles from the early 1830s and early 1840s mixed commentary on current events with historical reflection, and they presumed readers’ acquaintance with important news items, parliamentary speeches, and more from elsewhere in the paper or from other sources.²⁸ This dynamic is reflected in the articles’ placement in the “Außerordentliche Beylage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung” (Extraordinary supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung), a section of the paper that is a further, additional supplement to the “regular” “Beylage.” Though the Allgemeine Zeitung did not have a feuilleton section per se, these supplements serve a similar function, combining cultural commentary and theater and literary reviews and operating as a counterpart to more factual journalistic reporting through both content and format.²⁹

The book version of Französische Zustände contains nine longer numbered and dated articles first published from December of 1831 to June of 1832, “Daily Reports” about the failed June Rebellion of 1832 (the first major public insurrection that Heine witnessed firsthand and an event immortalized in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables), and a short series of pieces titled “From Normandy” (Aus der Normandie). Französische Zustände is a companion, and even a rival piece, to Börne’s Briefe aus Paris (1832–1834).³⁰ Heine viewed the article anthology as a somewhat unconventional, “rarely used form”³¹ of contemporary history, though it bears certain similarities in form and approach to contemporary travel writing and foreign reporting. Heine’s longer articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung, titled “Französische Zustände,” appear in serialized installments over several issues of the Allgemeine Zeitung, and are signed, while the shorter articles are often published anonymously. The book version is organized by the formal conceit of collecting varied articles by a familiar author, with Heine describing the project in the following manner:

I am offering here a series of articles and daily reports that I wrote for the AZ [Allgemeine Zeitung] according to the desires of the moment, in stormy relations of all different sorts. I will now publish these anonymous, fleeting pages under my name as a solid book, so that no one else will arrange [zusammenstellt] them according to their own whims.³²

Republication preempts unauthorized reprinting and rearrangement, and it also allows Heine to reintegrate material cut by the censors; books longer than twenty sheets or Bogen were not subject to the same prepublication censorship as newspapers and journals, though this didn’t stop Heine’s preface—a text with its own complex publication and reception history—from being heavily censored.³³ He would have been quite familiar with the conventions of republication, for many of his articles were excerpted in other German papers and journals soon after appearing in the Allgemeine Zeitung; in such cases, book republication would have been the third or fourth printing of a given article.³⁴ Of course, there were financial advantages to republication, with Heine getting paid both from Cotta and Campe for journal and book versions respectively.³⁵ One might also conclude that Heine includes the additional material over and above the main nine articles simply to reach the page threshold necessary to avoid pre-censorship, though, as we will see, he uses the juxtaposition of longer and shorter articles in the book version as an important compositional effect.³⁶ Through a series of supplements, notes, and addenda, Heine performatively opens his editorial workshop up to readers, signaling where he has reintegrated censored passages and unpublished or incomplete material.³⁷ In the process, the book version presents readers with a complex series of texts which in their temporal pacing and documentary conceit both correspond to and diverge from the pacing of the newspaper in which these articles first appeared.

Article VI of Französische Zustände is a key testing ground for Heine’s “preparatory studies for the history of the present.” He begins both newspaper and book versions with the promise of an extended series of articles about the relationship between past and present, presenting the general historical remarks sketched above (“the salons lie …”) as their first installment. His initial goal is to define the time of the revolution and its status as ongoing as a way to ascertain the continuity of historical events, actions, and agents (again, a question not positively addressed by “Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung”). In the midst of these historiographical and indeed philosophical-historical remarks, Heine performatively interrupts himself with an extended report of the cholera outbreak. He thereby relegates these historical reflections to the status of an all-too-preliminary preview (Bevorwortung) of a future article: this is a “preview of an article, which seeks to deal with reflections on the past. But in this moment the present is the more important, and the topic that it presents to me for discussion is of a sort that all continued writing depends upon it.”³⁸ Heine highlights his own inability to continue to write anything at all (including reflective history), but he does in fact present readers with writing of a different kind. Heine positions reflections about the past, what came “before,” in advance of his intervening subarticle about cholera, yet, in its entirety, this reflection is deferred to a later point in time. In effect, Heine enacts his own historiographical dictum that the present alters our awareness of the past and that any continued historical reflection remains dependent on the shifting present.

By inserting the account of the cholera outbreak, Heine stages a scene in which rapid-response reportage breaks into historical metanarrative. “The following communication has perhaps the benefit of being something of a bulletin written on—and during—the battlefield itself, and thus bears the color of the moment in an undistorted way [unverfälscht].”³⁹ To the extent that interruption shapes the awareness and representation of time and history, it is a central feature of the revolution and the newspaper alike, which both break in on the old and bring the new (a central idea in Heine’s Heligoland letters). The advent of the latest news is also a feature of military reporting, a realm that Heine clearly associates his articles with as “bulletins” written “during the battle.” As a textual effect, interruption can be disorientating, but such juxtaposition is also one of the basic format conditions of newspapers and other serial print products, and Heine asks readers to recreate the experience of orientating themselves to a rapidly shifting state of affairs. Heine treats the cholera outbreak as an echo of the street-level violence and uncertainty of the revolutionary break with the past—a less directly political echo, perhaps, yet one equally disruptive of the status quo.⁴⁰

Yet readers expecting a continuation of Heine’s historical retrospective in the subsequent article might have ended up disappointed, as he postpones it yet again: “The historical retrospectives announced by the previous article have to be postponed. The present made itself so harshly relevant that one is hardly able to contemplate the past.”⁴¹ At first glance, Heine’s history writing seems to stage the inability to write history, making the idea that it is historically necessary to consider the present in light of the past a literal afterthought. But perhaps republication allows Heine to attain proper historical distance. The book version of Französische Zustände does in fact include the more extensive historical remarks promised in the articles, situating these remarks as supplemental material near the end of the book, in effect migrating his historical reflections from the “Extraordinary Supplement” of the paper to the appendix of the book. However, despite finding a home for this material in the format of collected articles, he is obliged to put off a full exploration of these historical questions to his next hypothetical book: “I want to present a fragment of the article that is announced here in the supplement. In a subsequent book the added material that I wrote later will follow. I was frequently disturbed during this work, mostly through the gruesome cries of my neighbor who died of cholera.”⁴² The cries of his neighbor serve as a figure for the transitory present, for the ever-present possibility that the life (and the death) of the moment might disrupt more general historical retrospection. The documentation of these cries of a dying man is perhaps also a tragic echo of the passage in “Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung” where Heine justifies the present moment through life’s self-assertion. Postponing the piece to the next article, then to the next book: in both cases, Heine works with a serial logic of before and after and of preview and postscript. This format relies on performative gestures of self-interruptions and continuations and on the (re)arrangement of various kinds of text into different sequences. If there is a homology between the continuation of historical time—the continuation of the revolution—and writing about it, it must be in terms of structures of stops and starts, and interruptions and disturbances. Seriality promises that more is to come, but what if more comes in a different way than initially promised?

It is instructive here to take a closer look at the specific location of this mere “Fragment” in the book version, for its placement raises as many questions as it answers. Curiously, Heine does not place it in the chronologically arranged nine articles comprising the bulk of the book. He instead nestles it into the “Daily Reports” (Tagesberichte) section following them, which comprises shorter reports dealing with the failed June Rebellion of 1832 published in the Allgemeine Zeitung. Heine introduces them in the following manner:

The following daily reports, written in light of the events, in the din of the partisan battle, and always right before the departure of the mail, as quickly as possible so that the correspondents of the victorious Juste-Milieu would not gain the advantage—these fleeting pages I am communicating here, unaltered, to the extent that they have any bearing on the insurrection of June 5th. The history writer [der Geschichtsschreiber] may all the more conscionably be able to make use of them, for he is at least able to be certain that they were not composed on the basis of later interests.⁴³

These are flüchtige Blätter, passed on “unaltered” (unverändert), except that the fragmentary Beylage is inserted after this editorial introduction and before the first Tagesbericht. Again, the auditory realm and the accelerated pace of these pieces are metaphors for the fleeting present and its revolutionary potential; these Tagesberichte are intended for future historians (a prediction borne out by the fact that historians of the period continue to rely on them⁴⁴). And yet these reports are the textual environment for the historiographical supplement, which is far removed from the article that it ostensibly continues.⁴⁵ Furthermore, the placement of this “Fragment” in the original book version runs counter to his own editorial assertion that what follows is entirely characterized by the media time of journalistic snapshots of the present. Heine’s introductory remarks thematize his lack of time for extended historical reflection, yet he curiously goes on to insert precisely such reflections in advance of the daily reports, reversing from the cholera episode the order of what kind of text does the interrupting.

The anthology format of Französische Zustände underlines Heine’s point that the present and historical awareness are always breaking into and recasting one another. His framing work foregrounds the external factors that force him into certain editorial decisions and that limit the potential for deliberate authorial composition. In a way, Heine performatively affirms the proposition that an understanding of the present must pass through the understanding of the past, yet he stages this proposition through a stance of coming after, both coming after as a stance toward the historical past and to a set of texts written at a different present moment. One might well be inspired to deconstruct Heine’s various dichotomies—past/present, fleeting/permanent, journalistic/philosophical, impartial/partisan, and so on—but it seems clear that Heine uses the anthology format to destabilize these categories. That said, in subsequent twentieth-century critical editions of Französische Zustände, we can find a countervailing impulse to impose narrative continuity onto these articles and to soften the compositional effects of self-interruption and delay. In a perhaps minor yet nonetheless remarkable editorial overreach, the editors of the authoritative Düsseldorf Heineausgabe put the fragmentary Beylage in between articles VI and VII, stating that it was “senselessly” (unsinnigerweise) placed amid the Tagesberichte.⁴⁶ The editor of the 1961 Aufbau edition places it directly after Article IX rather than after the prefatory remarks introducing the daily reports, doing so “in the interest of the clearness and readability of the texts” (im Interesse der Übersichtlichkeit und Lesbarkeit der Texte).⁴⁷ While seemingly benign, such interventions distort the problem of coming after and of the afterlife of given articles and introduce ideals of “overview” and “readability” that Heine performatively undermines.

Heine writes the history of the revolution and its aftermath through an ensemble of more or less dissimilar texts. This constructive approach to the writing of historical time is articulated primarily through media-based effects rather than through the work of the philosophical concept or through the sense that history has an organic logic akin to biological life cycles or the lives of imitable, great actors. Heine models the time of the revolution on the basis of serialized textual operations that depart from the narrative logic of a cohesive, linear, epic plot. His serial histories proceed fitfully, in stops and starts, promising all the while that more is to come, both more disruption of the status quo and more opportunity for fragmented critical reflection.

Heine’s Anti-Portraiture

I’d like to turn to a second feature of Heine’s engagement with serial forms, namely his representation of historical figures, an important subgenre of his overall presentation of his writings as a series of images. He made a name for himself as a prose author with his four-volume Reisebilder anthology (1826–1831) containing texts originally published in periodicals; his four-volume anthology titled Der Salon (1834–1840) similarly gathers disparate writings for journals. In both anthology series, Heine uses the conceit of a collection of multiple images to play off different representational media against one another, including academic painting (as in his reviews of the Paris Academy exhibitions for the Morgenblatt collected in Der Salon), caricature, public oratory and scholarly lecturing, and early photography.⁴⁸ Building on the conventions of travel writing and the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century urban tableau tradition (the title of the French translation of the Reisebilder is Tableaux de voyage), Heine also engages with the multiple genres tasked with representing specific historical persons. It was quite common to present histories of the present and recent past as portrait galleries, characteristics, physiognomies, or character sketches, and Heine himself promised his editor that “many portraits” would be mixed into Lutezia.⁴⁹ Seen in terms of his entire oeuvre, Heine’s writings take on a certain recursive quality, as he returns in multiple texts to previous personalities (Napoleon, Lafayette, and Robespierre), artists, or even specific caricatures or paintings such as Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. The layering of these references generates a cumulative archive of images, metaphors, and scenes that readers come to associate with his authorial voice.

In the hands of a perennially ironic writer such as Heine, though, the more serious, official side of portraiture quickly comes under scrutiny, as he casts doubt on the value of writing history solely through the representation of individual actors. As he states in Französische Zustände: “In these pages … [readers] may find many contradictory assertions, but they never concern things, only persons. Our judgment must stand firm on the first, while it may change daily on the latter.”⁵⁰ Heine argues that history is shaped by “things”—Dinge, or les choses—rather than people, with things here understood as structures, forces, institutions, or transnational processes and constellations: “conditions,” as in the title. This is part of Heine’s broader conviction that in a post-heroic age, writing history must focus on collectives (parties, the people, the masses) as heroes of the modern age rather than individual persons.⁵¹ In addition to the challenges Heine faces of writing history in fragmentary serial forms, of depicting ongoing events such as the revolution, I would add a third: he sets out to write the history of impersonal transnational political and cultural structures in part through personal portraits.⁵² Portraiture allows him to envision the cumulative effect of multiple, conflicting images of historical actors. Rather than becoming absorbed in a single image, Heine’s portraits of the same figures allow him to track the ongoing unfolding of time through compositional effects of before and after.

The full title of Lutezia is Lutezia: Berichte Über Politik, Kunst und Volksleben (Lutezia: Reports about politics, art, and popular life), and it anthologizes a series of articles he wrote for the Allgemeine Zeitung in the 1840s. Like Französische Zustände, the book version (published in German in 1854 and in French in 1855) contains a group of numbered main articles of various lengths followed by an appendix containing other tangential articles written about the same time and published in various other papers. They are published as part of a three-part series of “Mixed Writings” (Vermischte Schriften) (1854) that includes his late autobiographical Geständnisse (Confessions). At first glance, there is something Hegelian about Heine’s project, as he tracks the conflicts between different societal and ideological forces, including the liberal elites, the conservative aristocracy, and the more radical socialist and communist movement, a conflict that Heine describes as the central topic of Lutezia in his 1854 introduction; this was characteristic of a certain protosociological strand of journalistic Zeitgeschichte at the time.⁵³ That said, Heine is also interested in the interplay—the “artistic arrangement” (künstlerische Zusammenstellung) as he put it in the German dedicatory preface—of different textual units as a compositional and conceptual matrix that move in tandem with historical developments, as well as with the ebb and flow of the media landscape. As in Französische Zustände, Heine is interested in representing the revolution’s persistence and potential for repetition, this time in the tumultuous era of the 1840s and refracted through the remove of the 1850s. In the process, he revises and reorganizes more pieces than in Französische Zustände and tends to make his reports more satirical and critical.

Heine positively associates his articles in Lutezia with modern media, in particular with caricature and early photography. Caricature is a subversive alternative to historical portraiture.⁵⁴ Caricatures often distort the appearance of important contemporaries (in Französische Zustände, for example, Heine discusses the famous satirical images of the French king as a pear), but they also shed light on broader social and political trends by not accepting self-serious representation at face value. Heine’s work with caricature is part of his broader engagement with small forms such as physiognomies, urban sketches, and political chansons that engage in the partisan skirmishes of the day and that are closely linked to the rhythms of serial formats, including the illustrated press, which rose to prominence in the 1830s. Caricature depends on the witty, disjointed succession of images, it favors recursive mutation over iconic representation, and it is permanently banished to the base of the hierarchy of academic art forms, atop which historical portraiture continued to stand tall at this time.⁵⁵ Heine’s commitment to caricature as serial form is on display in what is perhaps the most well-known and enigmatic section of the German dedicatory preface to Lutezia, where he casts the book as a gallery of photographic images, taking up once more the tension between people and things:

To lighten up the doleful reports I wove in sketches from the realms of art and science, from the dance halls of good and bad society, and if I … sometimes drew all-too-foolish caricatures of virtuosi [Virtuosenfratze], it was done … to give a picture of the time in its most minute nuances. A truthful daguerreotype must truly reproduce a fly as accurately as the proudest horse, and my reports are a daguerreotypic history book, in which every day depicts itself [literally “counterfeits itself”], and through the arrangement of these pictures together [durch die Zusammenstellung der Bilder], the order-giving spirit of the artist has contributed a work in which what is represented authentically documents its fidelity through itself.⁵⁶

On the one hand, Heine suggests that his caricature-like sketches of figures from the arts and sciences are to provide a diversion from his more serious political prognoses, yet these “all-too-foolish caricatures of virtuosi” have a serious core, delivering a “picture of the time in its most minute nuances.” If in Französische Zustände the auditory realm—the “noise of the partisan struggle” or the cries of his dying neighbor—served as a figure for the present moment in all its transience, then here Heine invokes the newly invented daguerreotype to authenticate the snapshots of the present that he seeks to capture. Human portraiture is one of early photography’s most important and lucrative functions, but Heine states here that his own articles depict individual “days” rather than individual persons: it is each day that depicts itself or copies itself: sich abconterfeit.⁵⁷ As a noun, Konterfei means portrait and has retained this meaning in contemporary usage, but, as in the English, Konterfeien suggests both an authentic and a false (“counterfeit”) image, both portrait and caricature passing as portraiture. Heine’s articles collect images of the times or of “days” into a gallery of sorts or an “arrangement of such pictures”—in effect, a gallery of distorted portraits where the day, the time, and the times shine through. In Heine’s (anti-)portraiture, the person depicted is never fully there. There is no relic of the representative function of portraiture where the portrait was vicariously used to “represent the subject as actually present.”⁵⁸

Heine has conflicting things to say about photography. For example, he criticizes early photography for its deficient, overly mimetic realism along the lines of early nineteenth-century critiques of naturalism, yet he also associates photography more positively with artful caricature.⁵⁹ If we grant Heine a commitment to truthful representation and caricature alike, one initial takeaway from this passage might be that the caricature of a person reveals the truth of (the) time and even of time itself. Paradoxically, these images attain their documentary “fidelity” and force by being placed into relation with other images. It is the effect of snapshots of the day following each other—and the “order-giving spirit of the artist”—that lends individual images their authenticity, not their stand-alone simulation (or distortion) of presence or of the presence of the present moment. Time and the times cannot be adequately depicted through a stand-alone image.

Rhetoric after the Revolution

Heine’s accounts of the lectures of leading French historians serve as a foil for his own mode of history writing. He depicts the lecturers as engaged in historical characterization, and he pits his writings for newspapers and journals against the scene of oral speech and its privileging of embodied presence. Even though he is more favorably disposed to French academic historians than to German ones, he still criticizes the French in terms of their approach to the artificial resolution of the historical past and their choice of rhetorical and publication modes that elide the complexity of the present. Heine’s interest in these figures is therefore also allied with his concern for the proper mode of historical representation, an interest he shares with Marx, who likewise addresses French liberal historians in his reckoning with the 1848 revolution in Der achtzehnte Brumaire von Louis Bonaparte. In particular, Heine is all too aware that lectures are a key site where the cultural politics of the day are enacted. In a sense, his accounts of lecturing historians are a form of second-order observation, as he writes about historical actors discussing revolution era historical actors. Reporting on political and scholarly speeches was a standard feature of contemporary cultural journalism and a staple of Heine’s writings from the start of his career.⁶⁰ His commentaries tap into the all-too-standard mode of history writing through the portraiture of great orators (e.g., Thucydides on Pericles). His Parisian writings discuss parliamentary and academic addresses by leading politicians such as Adolphe Thiers and François Guizot; both wrote and lectured on the history of the revolution, as did other historians such as Jules Michelet, François Mignet, and Victor Cousin. These figures represented a liberal power block between the aristocracy and clergy on the right and the social movement on the left, and they were more or less kindred spirits to Heine: he admired and corresponded with them, he drew on their work (especially that of Thiers and Mignet), and, for a while, Thiers and Heine overlapped as correspondents for the Allgemeine Zeitung.⁶¹ However, even people to whom Heine was well disposed had trouble evading his satirical gaze.

Over the course of Lutezia, Heine attended three different ceremonial speeches at the Académie Française by Mignet, the head of the academy at the time and the secretary for life, or secrétaire perpetuel; Heine knew him well and corresponded with him, even sending him first versions of the articles about these addresses in the 1840s. Like Thiers, Mignet was both a statesman and historian, and he rose to public prominence as both a journalist and the author of an important history of the revolution.⁶² Heine reported positively on these meetings in various articles and drafts in the 1840s: in Mignet’s voice, one hears the “voice of the history writer, the true head [Chef] of Clio’s archives,”⁶³ and he has command of the topic of the revolution,⁶⁴ but Heine also suggests that Mignet remains very much the academic.⁶⁵ The final article in the book version’s main article series is a reworked version of several of these earlier pieces, and it is a culminating moment, both of Heine’s reports from the Académie Française and of the main body of the book. As in Mignet’s previous speeches reported on by Heine, the topic of this lecture is a recently deceased revolutionary era statesman and historian, in this case, a figure named Pierre Daunou. In the reworked book version, Heine is quick to pounce on Mignet’s title, suggesting parallels between his youthful appearance and the permanence of his position. As he remarks in a passage added to the book version, Mignet shares the “eternity” of his office with King Louis Philippe.⁶⁶ Mignet’s office is perhaps a relic of an earlier pre-revolutionary epoch, but, in contrast to the king, who is “unfortunately already very advanced in age,” Mignet

is still young, or what is better, he is the epitome of youth itself, he is spared by the hand of Time, who paints the rest of our hair white if he does not pull it out altogether, and wrinkles up our brows in many a hateful fold; the beautiful Mignet still bears his gold-locked frisur as he did twelve years ago, and his face is always as fresh as that of the Olympians.… In these moments he looks to me like a shepherd who reviews his sheep. They all belong to him, to him, the perpetual one [der Perpetuelle]—who will outlive them all and dissect and embalm them all in his Précis Historiques.⁶⁷

Mignet’s hair is a sign that he will outlive and eulogize his contemporaries as he does Daunou and perhaps even that he will outlive the king, who would die in 1850. Heine retroactively inserts the 1848 collapse of the July Monarchy—its eventual lack of “eternal” permanence—and the subsequent death of the king into the reworked account of this scene from 1843. The trope of eternal youthfulness is decidedly ambivalent, associated with the perpetuation of the ideals of the revolution and of pre-revolutionary institutions such as the Académie Française. Heine uses the sketch of Mignet to juxtapose temporal tropes that access broader historical developments and that pertain to the “things” and conditions of French society more than to specific individuals.

Relatedly, Heine finds traces of rhetorical conventions from the pre-revolutionary era in Mignet’s historical discourse: “Even though Mignet calls his speeches précis historiques, they are still just the same old éloges, and they are still the same compliments from the time of Louis XIV, except that now they are not set in full-bottomed wigs but instead have modern haircuts.”⁶⁸ Mignet’s historical method creates the effect of the past becoming present through the evocation of past personalities, drawing on earlier genres of scholarly commemoration based in the mimetic ideal of history as the teacher of life.⁶⁹ The continuity of scholarly self-valorization across historical epochs—a continuity bordering on the timelessness aspired to by the humanistic ideal of the eloquent scholar—almost becomes a limitation, for it neutralizes the disruptive power of the revolution, despite the very topic of the lecture.

Heine continues his riff on wigs and hairstyles and on youth and age as he construes the eulogy as a way of preserving influential historical persons for posterity, both by figurally bringing them back to life and embalming them:

The current secrétaire perpetuel of the Academy is one of the greatest friseurs of our time and has the right chicque for this noble trade. Even when there is not a good hair on a man, he knows how to curl a few locks of praise on to him and how to hide his bald head under a toupee of phrases. How happy are these French Academicians! There they sit in the sweetest peace of soul on their safe benches, and they can die in peace, for they know that however dubious their deeds may have been in life, the good Mignet will laud and praise them after death. Under the palm trees of his words, which are evergreen as his uniform, lulled by the plashing of his oratorical antitheses, they rest in the Academy as in a cool oasis. The caravan of humanity passes by them ever and anon, without their noting it, or anything save the ringing of the camels’ bells.⁷⁰

Heine casts historical characterization as a kind of work on the appearance of the face and head: once more we are in striking distance of the portrait, profile, and daguerreotype. But the metaphor then shifts from hairdresser to undertaker, as the historian prepares the bodies of the dead. Heine imagines the audience members (of which he is a part) almost dead, emerging back from the grave through the historian’s words. This passage encapsulates both Heine’s slightly envious fascination with academic historians and his antipathy toward them. The revival of the rhetoric of the ancien regime and the traditionalist timelessness of reliving the deeds of the past becomes a strike against Mignet and stands in contrast to the world outside. Whether the members of the academy perceive it or not, the events outside on the boulevards explode the rhetoricians’ self-satisfied self-embalming as a viable historical model. Perpetuity flips into its opposite: by seeking immortality, the scholarly eulogy takes on a fleeting quality; it is a historiographical activity with no real staying power; it is the sign of a particular historical constellation that will end in death, that will be aufgehoben (sublated), to speak, with Hegel. Heine does the historical work of understanding the ephemerality of this scene, work that Mignet cannot do.

Heine thereby positions himself at the threshold between inside and outside, between timelessness and eventfulness. While Mignet’s “orational antitheses” simply lull his listeners to sleep or even into a sweet, dreamlike death, the antitheses created by Heine’s serial, temporal modes of writing have the opposite effect, creating an awareness of time that can help readers resist the temptation to reduce the present moment and world history alike to the repetitive, empty tinkling of bells. Heine’s commentary on personal presence explores how multiple temporalities are refracted through given events rather than how such temporalities construct any notion of charismatic personality. And yet he faces the paradoxical challenge of telling history through individual persons who are not themselves the primary subjects of history. This is where his ironic critiques of historical portraiture and of the rhetorical model of the embodied speaker converge. Just as the rhetorical model of recurrent, repeatable historical topoi dissolved in the wake of the French Revolution, so, too, does Heine here dissolve the rhetorical model of embodied personality, not least by investing certain tropes—life and death, and dynamism and stasis—with contradictory meanings. Nonetheless, the scene of rhetorical performance remains instructive as a site both to register broader historical forces and to model varied encounters with multiple historical temporalities.

This brings us back to the question of format and republication: this article’s placement is significant, for it functions both as a conclusion and a transition onto a subsequent set of texts. In a collection so concerned with ends and beginnings, this is the final article in the main section of Lutezia. Following this final passage culminating in the “ringing of the camels’ bells” is an extensive appendix containing other articles not included in the main article series for the Allgemeine Zeitung. This appendix opens with a longer article titled “Communism, Philosophy, and Clergy” (Communismus, Philosophie, und Clerisey), which distills the main political ideologies of the day, including the radical social movement, the bourgeois liberalism of the academy, and the conservative religious reaction. This latter article is largely based on a piece that was first published in installments in Die Zeitung für die elegante Welt after having been turned down by the editors of the Allgemeine Zeitung as being too political, and in its original form it included some of the material on Mignet’s eulogy of Daunou incorporated into the book version of article LXI. In the original article for the Zeitung für die elegante Welt as well as in the book version, Heine considers communism as a central societal force. As he notes in his prefaces to the German and French book versions, he was forced to remain oblique about the social movement in the original articles for the Allgemeine Zeitung, even though his conviction that the future belongs above all to the “socialists, or to give the monster its correct name, the communists” runs as a red thread throughout the articles.⁷¹ In effect, Heine’s inclusion of this piece at this key moment of transition, after the reworked account of Mignet, is an implicit provocation: What are the academicians missing when they mistake the din outside the lecture hall for tinkling bells? The very first word of the supplemental article’s title gives the answer: “communism.” Book publication allows Heine to stage the continuation of the article series that breaks off with the portrait of Mignet. The very format of the book constructs an outside to the lecture hall. Heine writes the after that Mignet cannot see; he writes a future of possible communist revolution in the form of a prophetic prediction but also in the form of a textual effect that once more conditions the media-based logics of portraiture and of oral eulogy. In 1854, Heine offers readers a continuation of his sketch of the Académie Française that departs from the institutional logic of the lecture and that presents an altogether different historical takeaway regarding the past, present, and future of the revolution.

Seriality functions as a central formal condition of these pieces both in their original article format and under the new medial and historical circumstances of the book version. The project of republishing these previous articles is in its own right a “historiographically ambitious undertaking,” as Ethel Matala de Mazza rightly puts it, and it also is an intervention with strong medial implications, as Heine embraces the constraints as well as the potential of serial formats to model how the revolution can break into and interrupt the present.⁷² Through serial form, Heine models the abstract truth and logic of seriality that unexpected things come “after,” and he uses print media to model this coming after rather than solely tracking the necessary movement of the concept or by engaging in a materialist analysis of social conflict. Even if Heine might share a certain belief in the necessity of a coming revolution with the likes of Marx, he writes the revolution’s future through media times of before and after and through an ever-shifting series of events, actors, and medial representations.

After 1848: Literary Afterlives and the Death of the Author

I’d like to close this chapter by continuing to think about what comes after, both in terms of coming revolution and of the afterlives of Heine’s writings. We have seen how Börne and Heine use remediation—putting journal articles into book form—to envision historical writings’ potential for continuation and revaluation. Heine’s propensity to curate his works and configure afterlives of earlier, ephemeral writings finds particular expression in Lutezia, not least because it is a late work from the end of his life after years of infirmity.⁷³ Heine uses German and French versions of Lutezia (1854 and 1855 respectively) to ironically deploy tropes of authorial immortality and future reception. Questions of format migration, recirculation, and textual (and historical) befores and afters are all pertinent to how Heine distinguishes his work from a reductive view of historical time in which past events are complete and have a stable, unchanging meaning. In the same way that the juxtaposition of articles can have a predictive, productive character, Heine uses the preface of both the German and French versions to open up new horizons of meaning and reception. Here we return to questions of literary afterlives that we addressed in chapter 4 via Jean Paul. Of course, Heine is concerned with getting his works in order so as to prevent misuse after his death, but he also reflects ironically on this future reception with different French and German audiences. As with Jean Paul, the trope of the author’s death helps Heine imagine future reencounters and reactualizations in a broader media environment saturated with serial forms and ephemeral interventions.

The most notable “after” to Heine’s articles from the early 1840s was of course the violent end of the July Monarchy in 1848. We get a retroactive intimation of this in the juxtaposition of Louis-Philippe and Mignet added in 1854 as well as in the complex interplay of main articles and later addenda. In the German dedicatory preface, Heine addresses the fact that he does not include articles that directly thematize the 1848 revolution, “the catastrophe of February 24,” although he certainly could have, having written articles in various papers about the event as it was unfolding at the time. However, as Heine jokes, his book was like the Iliad in this respect: like the sacking of Troy, 1848 is not depicted in the book proper, but it remains omnipresent, both anticipatorily in the 1840s and retrospectively, from the present.⁷⁴ But Heine also uses the prefaces to preview scenes of more distant future reception. The French language preface is more explicit about Heine’s premonitions of the revolution and the rise of the socialist and communist movements, a feature of his crafting of the end of the book version considered earlier. He assures his French-language readers that this conviction remains a red thread, even in the articles’ original form. Heine does not make this “confession” (Bekenntnis) lightly, as he envisions a future “when these dark iconoclasts will rise to power: with their crude hands they will then utterly shatter all the marble statues of my beloved world of art; they will smash all of those fantastic knick-knacks that were so dear to the poet’s heart.”⁷⁵ Donning for a moment the hat of the Romantic poet, Heine expresses concern for the preservation of a life based in aesthetic appreciation, a life based in “the entire old Romantic world order” (der ganzen alten romantischen Weltordnung). At first glance, it would seem that Heine stakes out an aesthetic position not far from the one that Börne and others accused him of, that is, of not being politically committed enough in his art.⁷⁶

Heine’s vision of an iconoclastic future goes hand in hand with the prophecy of the decomposition his own oeuvre and of his books in material form: “Alas! The grocer will use my Book of Songs as little paper bags in which to pour coffee or snuff for the little old ladies of the future. Alas! I can foresee it all.”⁷⁷ In the time to come, the cornerstone of Heine’s reputation as a poet would be torn asunder, with individual pages being used as scrap paper. It is striking here that Heine takes the occasion of collecting scattered articles to envision the disarticulation, or even obliteration, of his works. The integrative force of authorial Geist at work in collecting previously anonymous pieces meets its match in peoples’ basic daily needs. There is a certain tinge of false modesty here, but Heine also articulates a vision of the end of art, the future end and hence the ultimate transience of a literary aesthetics that misguidedly aspires to permanence. Part of Heine laments this coming demise, though another part of him affirms it; as he writes, he is haunted by and cannot dispute the logic of the proposition “that all humans have the right to eat,” concluding, “Blessed be the grocer who will someday make little paper bags from my poems.”⁷⁸ Playing dread and anticipation for a more comprehensive revolutionary moment off each other, Heine gives one further ironic twist to the question of how his histories of the present might be received at different historical junctures: if his prophetic history of the present is right—if the future belongs to communism—then the rending of his books will be decisive proof of his status as a historical visionary. The multivalent association of his pieces with ephemerality once more guarantees the truthfulness of the history of the present.

The German version of 1854 pursues a rather different framing gesture, presented as a “Dedicatory Letter” (Zueignungsbrief) to Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871), a popular German-language travel writer of the 1830s and 1840s.⁷⁹ As in his Börne memoir, Heine uses the characterization of the prince as a form of self-reflection and even of ironic self-characterization, and we should regard this dedication as one more exercise in (anti-)portraiture that Heine adds to his series of contemporaries from the 1840s, many of whom have now since faded from public memory. In dedicating the anthology to the prince, Heine evokes the traditional form of the dedication to an aristocratic patron, though this particular dedication occurs more under the sign of the travelogue and contemporary-historical reportage than of the rhetorical conventions of praise with which Heine was so familiar.⁸⁰ He had in fact just met Pückler-Muskau for the first time in person in 1854 when he visited Heine at his Paris home where he had been bedridden for almost six years; Heine’s resulting feelings of warmth and gratefulness to him seem genuine.⁸¹

Pückler-Muskau was the author of anonymously published popular travel writings on England, Wales, and Ireland, the Briefe eines Verstorbenen (Letters of a dead man) (1830–1831), which Heine mentions in the Reisebilder.⁸² Pückler-Muskau also wrote African and Middle Eastern travelogues in the 1840s under the pen name Semilasso. Despite differences in social standing and religious background, Heine states that he and the prince were kindred spirits—they “fit together” (zusammenpassten) because, “yes, we were both travelers on this earth, that was our earthly speciality.”⁸³ For Heine, the prince represents a particular type of authorial persona associated with the imaginary traversing of different spaces, places, and times, and he thus comes into view as one of many peripatetic figures with which Heine identified over the course of his life, including the wandering Jew and the flaneur. Pückler-Muskau was “the travel-addicted Mr. Everwhere and Nowhere” (der wandersüchtige Überall-und-Nirgends), the “romantic Anacharsis, the most fashionable of all oddballs [der fashionabelste aller Sonderlinge], Diogenes on horseback.”⁸⁴ The prince’s perpetual movement is a point of contrast to the stasis of the French academicians: indeed, Heine asks readers to conjure up an image of him riding on a camel through the Middle Eastern desert rather than reposing at some notional oasis.⁸⁵

Heine’s mention of his meeting with Pückler-Muskau recalls the many scenes in Lutezia in which he finds himself in proximity to important contemporary figures. But rather than describing the meeting in any detail, Heine notes how he commemorates the event through the act of writing, for writing and then publishing this dedication proves that he and the prince had once been together. It is a common “custom of travelers” to inscribe and date their names on trees, rocks, or walls amid the “clutter of other inscriptions” (Wust von Inschriften), an act that marks the “authentic date of our temporal convergence” (authentisches Datum unseres zeitlichen Zusammentreffens).⁸⁶ Such an inscription—here in the form of the book and its dedication—is left behind for “those who come after,” for future readers whom Heine playfully encourages to think about how exactly he and the prince might have “fit together” (zusammen passten).⁸⁷ At least on the semantic level, this convergence (Zusammentreffen) and the affinity between the two (zusammenpassen) bears some similarity to the collection, compilation, and arrangement (Zusammenstellung) of Heine’s anthology, where each article is dated and marks a specific point in time. Clustered together, the articles and preface are differently dated texts, yet nearly all have the same physical location: Paris, the city of cities, or spectral “Lutezia,” a palimpsest of the old and new. The book version adds one more ephemeral encounter with a literary luminary to those memorialized in the articles, and Heine leaves his mark on the city anew.

His demonstrative gesture of signing and dating likewise draws our attention to the peculiar format of the book version and to his deliberate gesture of signing originally anonymous articles. The travelers’ inscription marks the convergence of two people, while republication tags the articles, already dated once in the 1840s, with a second publication date, now from 1854, or 1855 for the French translation. As with the practice of leaving inscriptive markings for other travelers to chance across, Heine sends his doubly dated articles out to an indeterminate future. This preface thus uses the technique of republication to mark and remark a present that points to a time and a materiality beyond itself, to a future installment.

Heine’s marking of the time and place of their meeting is a gesture of history writing and of marking the historical moment of the present as well as the more than ten years that have intervened since the articles’ publications. Dating events also helps to anticipate the time and place of a (re)encounter: now that the book is finished, Heine is eager to provide the prince with his own copy. Delivering the epistolary dedication (along with the book) presents its own difficulties, though, and Heine closes the preface with uncertainty about where to address it: “Where is he now? In the Occident or in the Orient? In China or in England? In pants from Nanking or from Manchester? In the Middle East or in Transpomerania? Do I need to address my book to Kyritz, or to Timbuktu, poste-restante?”⁸⁸ The bodily copresence of the past meeting stands in marked contrast to Heine’s professed ignorance as to the peripatetic prince’s current location. As an addressee, the prince becomes an elusive target, and as an addressed object, Heine’s book likewise is set in motion, out for delivery to an uncertain location. The prince becomes a figure for future reception; he is one privileged future reader among many, but one whose location is indeterminate.⁸⁹ Seen in light of Heine’s poetics of (anti) portraiture, there would seem to be a certain spectral quality to the prince’s characterization. He is hard to pin down in space and time—not fully there, but also not fully “then,” if you will, and not fully at a determinate spot in time, instead straddling past, present, and future. Although the prince is quite stylish, Heine professes uncertainty as to his current appearance—is he wearing Nanking or Manchester pants? Returning to Heine’s analogy of his writing to the daguerreotype, it is almost as if the prince is nearly unphotographable, for he never sits in one place long enough to have his portrait taken.⁹⁰

Heine’s ideal of writing on the move is also informed by the semantics of life and death, as he returns to Pückler-Muskau’s most famous book, the Briefe eines Verstorbenen. Despite supposedly being dead, the prince is the “most living of all dead men,” having outlived many people who are “living in title only” (Titularlebendige).⁹¹ The prince is a relic of a different age who nonetheless is more relevant than many of the figures that Heine described in his articles for the Allgemeine Zeitung. Heine associates travel and life with a dynamic style of authorship and also with a kind of historical afterlife that straddles pre- and post-1848 periods. To be sure, informed readers would have known that he was confined to bed and flirting with death (“nailed down to his mattress,” as he put it in a letter to the prince from May of 1854⁹²). Yet despite his and the prince’s figural (and impending actual) deaths, they remain in motion. The trope of “dead, yet still moving” applies to the model of history writing at work in Lutezia more generally, with Heine sending off (and resending) ephemeral snapshots of bygone moments into unknown futures. Breaking with any naive assertion of liveliness and presence, Heine comes down as much on the side of the dead as the living, seeking to bestow on his own discourse a kind of relevance and actuality that transcends the narrow concerns of the present moment. The dead are interesting because they bring a different time with them into the present and future. This dated, signed inscription represents one further alternative to naive portraiture, for, rather than relying on a notion of the embodied copresence of the author and prince, it places their persons and their authorial voices at various kinds of temporal and historical remove. Being hard to pin down temporally and spatially helps to model future reception, even though it does not do away with the contingency associated with such reception. Heine (re)sends his ephemeral snapshots of past presents out into an unknown future, from one dead man to another. This is hardly an unironic assertion of literary immortality, but one should expect nothing of the sort from Heine. The prince is a figure for the kindred reader who truly understands the author and also for one who appreciates the contingencies of small, occasional, ephemeral forms. To the extent that Heine’s characterization of the prince and his corresponding self-characterization as fellow traveler are two further Virtuosenfratzen, Heine sends off two more caricature-like sketches as pieces of flotsam and jetsam on the sea of print—two more ironic masks, to shift the metaphor, that do anything but anchor the personalities in any kind of fixed form.

Though Heine’s “daguerrotypic” images are of past times, some of the effects of their seriality belong to the future: in the face of a future that is hard to predict, seriality persuades us that more is to come, even if we must wait an unknown amount of time. While Heine jokingly compares his articles to the Iliad, the serial juxtaposition of individual articles and tableaus presents an alternative to the linear logic of the epic in which one thing follows directly and necessarily from another; again, we encounter the fault line between travel writing and high historical narration. Heine’s history writing is premised on the difficulty, if not impossibility, of predicting what is coming next, and also on the conviction that something is coming. The knowledge about the future that Heine writes from here is perhaps more bullish than the French preface about an authorial afterlife that does not end in utter disintegration, yet the two prefaces are not incompatible, for both write the future through the fleeting materiality of contemporary histories and their precarious, uncertain journeys to future readers.

1. 1.   On this project, see the editorial apparatus to Fränzösische Zustände by Jean René Derré and Christiane Giessen. DHA, 12/2, 840.

2. 2.   “Superficial readers” might well find his articles on French affairs a “collection of petty anecdotes and the notes of a gullible fool.” Heinrich Heine, “Preface to the French Edition of Lutezia,” in The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1985), 298.

3. 3.   See Andras Sandor, “The Oak Tree and the Ax: Delaroche’s Painting and Heine’s Montage,” in Painting on the Move: Heinrich Heine and Visual Arts, ed. Susanne Zantop (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 72.

4. 4.   Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Literary Criticism in the Epoch of Liberalism,” in A History of German Literary Criticism, 1730–1980, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 228.

5. 5.   See Laurence Dickey, “Philosophizing about History in the Nineteenth Century: Zusammenhang and the ‘Progressive Method’ in German Historical Scholarship,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870), ed. Allen W. Wood and Songuk Susan Hahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 793–816.

6. 6.   In a letter to his publisher, Heine states that Lutezia has a “closed unity” (geschlossene Einheit), “despite the hectic change in topics,” and is “book of history [Geschichtsbuch] that speaks to the present day and that will live on in the future [das den heutigen Tag anspricht und in der Zukunft fortleben wird].” Heinrich Heine to Campe, April 18, 1854. HSA, 23, 320.

7. 7.   Heine, “Preface to the French Edition,” 298.

8. 8 . See Susanne Zantop, Zeitbilder. Geschichte und Literatur bei Heinrich Heine und Mariano José de Larra (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988), 107–8.

9. 9 . Heine, Französische Zustände, 146. Historians later in the nineteenth century would continue to confirm the sense that the history of the revolution is ongoing and not yet complete; see Anna Karla, “Die verschlafene Revolution von 1789,” 212.

10. 10.   As Anthony Phelan puts it, Heine recognizes that “historical or cultural moments are not fixed functions in the representation of social or political formations. Rather, they are constantly appropriated, reappropriated, and revalued.” Anthony Phelan, Reading Heinrich Heine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 182–83.

11. 11.   On state archives as historical sources, see Cornelia Vismann, Akten. Medientechnik und Recht (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), 226–66.

12. 12.   As Michael Gamper puts it, his historical projects pursue the “overt proleptically or analeptically oriented correspondence of different moments of historical eventfulness and literary creativity.” Michael Gamper, “Gegenwärtige Politik des Vergangenen. Politische Nachträglichkeit bei Heinrich Heine,” in Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen. Formen und Funktionen von Pluralität in der ästhetischen Moderne, ed. Sabine Schneider and Heinz Brüggemann (Munich: Fink, 2010), 89.

13. 13.   See Phelan, Reading Heinrich Heine, 182.

14. 14.   Willi Goetschel, Heine and Critical Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 21.

15. 15.   Goetschel, Heine and Critical Theory, 160. See also Gerhard Höhn, “Eternal Return or Indiscernible Progress? Heine’s Conception of History after 1848,” in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine, ed. Roger Cook (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 169–200.

16. 16.   Heine, article VI, Französische Zustände, 139–40.

17. 17.   On Heine’s manipulation of Hegelian categories and his “clinical description” of the “decomposition” of the philosophy of history, see Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 46–47, 53.

18. 18.   Heine, article VI, Französische Zustände, 145.

19. 19.   Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 26–42.

20. 20.   See Hell, The Conquest of Ruins, 112.

21. 21.   Heine, “Verschiedartige Geschichtsauffassung.” DHA, 10, 301. See also Fritz Mende, Heinrich Heine, Studien zu seinem Leben und Werk (Berlin: Akademie, 1983), 208–18.

22. 22.   On Heine’s engagement with Ranke, see Susanne Zantop, “Verschiedenartige Geschichtsschreibung: Heine und Ranke,” Heine Jahrbuch 23 (1984): 42–68. This cyclical view is also characteristic of certain strands of premodern Jewish conceptions of history that Heine was familiar with; see Christhard Hoffmann, “History versus Memory: Heinrich Heine and the Jewish Past,” in Heinrich Heine’s Contested Identities: Politics, Religion, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert Holub (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 25–48.

23. 23.   Heine, “Verschiedartige Geschichtsauffassung,” DHA, 10, 302; Heinrich Heine, “Various Conceptions of History,” in Hermand and Holub, The Romantic School, 259–60.

24. 24.   “Heine did not banish the hope for emancipation from his thought, but he did however reject the goddess ‘necessity,’ the idea of necessary progress in history.” Ortwin Lämke, Heines Begriff der Geschichte. Der Journalist Heinrich Heine und die Julimonarchie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 139. See also Jeffrey Grossman, “Fractured Histories: Heinrich Heine’s Responses to Violence and Revolution,” in Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture, ed. Carl Niekerk and Stefani Engelstein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 67–87.

25. 25.   Heine, “Verschiedartige Geschichtsauffassung,” DHA, 10, 302; Heine, “Various Conceptions of History,” 260.

26. 26.   “For Young Germany, the concept of the present is bound up with the concept of life.… Life appears as the basis for a progressive process in whose course conservative political and social forces are overcome.” Hohendahl, “Literary Criticism,” 202. On the semantics of life see also Wulf Wülfing, Schlagworte des Jungen Deutschland. Mit einer Einführung in die Schlagwortforschung (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1982), 159–67.

27. 27.   Booß, Ansichten der Revolution, 80.

28. 28.   On the importance for Heine of newspaper reading as he was composing these articles, see Volkmar Hansen, Heinrich Heines politische Journalistik in der Augsburger “Allgemeinen Zeitung” (Augsburg: Stadt Augsburg, 1994), 10.

29. 29.   Hansen, Heinrich Heines politische Journalistik, 44.

30. 30.   Editorial apparatus to Fränzösische Zustände, DHA, 12/2, 674–75.

31. 31.   He calls publishing of articles in this way “eine wenig gebrauchte Form” in a letter to Varnhagen; cited in editorial apparatus to Fränzösische Zustände. DHA, 12/2, 649.

32. 32.   Heine, Französische Zustände, v–vi.

33. 33.   On the publication history see the extensive editorial apparatus to Fränzösische Zustände. DHA, 12/2.

34. 34.   Editorial apparatus to Fränzösische Zustände, DHA, 12/2, 669.

35. 35.   “For Heine, the constellation Campe/Cotta represented an attractive business model. Cotta would pay him for his journal contributions, and Campe a second time for the book versions.” Rolf Hosfeld, Heinrich Heine. Die Erfindung des europäischen Intellektuellen (Munich: Siedler, 2014), 187.

36. 36.   Scholars speak in this context of the “censorship style” (Zensurstil) of Heine and his contemporaries; see Heady, Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany, 19.

37. 37.   Michael Swellander’s 2019 dissertation has an excellent discussion of these different articles and supplements as “mediating notes.” Swellander, “Understanding the Present,” 9.

38. 38.   Heine, article VI, Französische Zustände, 147.

39. 39.   Heine, article VI, Französische Zustände, 149–50.

40. 40.   On Heine’s treatment of the cholera outbreak, see Olaf Briese, “ ‘Schutzmittel ‘für’ die Cholera’: Geschichtsphilosophische und politische Cholera-Kompensation bei Heine und seinen Zeitgenossen,” Heine Jahrbuch 32 (1993): 9–26.

41. 41.   “Die geschichtlichen Rückblicke, die der vorige Artikel angekündigt, müssen vertagt werden. Die Gegenwart hat sich unterdessen so herbe geltend gemacht, daß man sich wenig mit der Vergangenheit beschäftigen konnte.” Heine, article VII, Französische Zustände, 176.

42. 42.   Heine, article VI, Französische Zustände, 147.

43. 43.   Heine, Französische Zustände, 193.

44. 44.   See Klaus Deinet, “Heinrich Heine und Frankreich—eine Neueinordnung,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 32, no. 1 (2007): 112–52, 141.

45. 45.   See Zantop, Zeitbilder, 101.

46. 46.   “In der Buchfassung ist diese Ergänzung unsinnigerweise zwischen die Tagesberichte und die zugehörige Vorbemerkung geraten. Sie wurde daher an den Artikel selbst herangezogen.” Editorial apparatus to Fränzösische Zustände. DHA 12/2, 860.

47. 47.   Heinrich Heine, Werke und Briefe, ed. Hans Kaufmann and Gotthard Erler, vol. 4 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1961), 638–39.

48. 48.   On Heine’s representation of historical figures as a kind of medial competition, see Petra McGillen, “Andauernder Effekt: Medienkonkurrenz und Rhetorik in Heinrich Heines Napoleon-Schriften,” in Zwischen Gattungsdisziplin und Gesamtkunstwerk: Literarische Intermedialität 1815–1848, ed. Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Wolf G. Schmidt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 203–22.

49. 49.   Heinrich Heine to Campe, March 7, 1854. HSA, 23, 307.

50. 50.   Heine, Französische Zustände, 290.

51. 51.   On Heine’s relativization of greatness, see Ethel Matala de Mazza, “Die fehlende Hauptsache. Exekutionen der Julimonarchie in Heines Lutezia,” in Heinrich Heine. Ein Wegbereiter der Moderne, ed. Paolo Chiarini and Walter Hinderer (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2009), 309–28; and Michael Gamper, Der große Mann: Geschichte eines politischen Phantasmas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016).

52. 52.   Even in the case of his 1840 book on Börne, with Börne’s name in the title and the many explicitly portrait-like sketches throughout, Heine states that the book is “not actually a writing about Börne, but about the epoch in which he operated [über den Zeitkreis worinn er sich zunächst bewegte].” Heine to Campe, July 24, 1840. HSA, 371. See also Jacques Voisine, “Heine als Porträtist in der Lutezia,” in Internationaler Heine-Kongreß, ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1972), 220–21.

53. 53.   Heinrich Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” in Lutezia (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1854), I, x–xi.

54. 54.   On Heine’s engagement with history panting, see Zantop, Zeitbilder, 63. On caricature, see Günter Oesterle and Ingrid Oesterle, “ ‘Gegenfüßler des Ideals’—Prozessgestalt der Kunst—‘Mémoire processive’ der Geschichte: Zur ästhetischen Fragwürdigkeit von Karikatur seit dem 18. Jahrhundert,” in “Nervöse Auffangsorgane des inneren und äußeren Lebens”: Karikaturen, ed. Klaus Herding and Günter Otto (Giessen: Anabas, 1980), 87–130.

55. 55.   “The lithographically reproduced sequence of images makes sensible, in a sequential way, the poetic procedure of metamorphosis that is at the heart of caricature.” Helmut Schanze, “Heines Medien,” in Keppler-Tasaki and Schmidt, Zwischen Gattungsdisziplin und Gesamtkunstwerk, 387.

56. 56.   Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, xiii.

57. 57.   Siegbert S. Prawer, “Heine and the Photographers,” in Zantop, Paintings on the Move, 75–90.

58. 58.   Cooper, “Portraiture,” 306.

59. 59.   See Sander L. Gilman, “Heine’s Photographs,” in Zantop, Paintings on the Move, 92–116.

60. 60.   See Helen Ferstenberg, “Heinrich Heine und George Canning,” Heine-Jahrbuch 35 (1996): 113–27.

61. 61.   Deinet calls Thiers and Mignet Heine’s “comrades in arms” and Thiers, “the greatest treasure trove for all friends of the revolution.” Deinet, “Heinrich Heine und Frankreich,” 130–31.

62. 62.   In the final installment Heine signals that this has been a recurring topic in his reports. “Each year I regularly attend the festive meeting in the rotunda of the Palais Mazarin.” Heine, article LXI, Lutezia, II, 197. On the convoluted genesis of this article, see DHA, 14/2, 932–33.

63. 63.   Heine, article XXXV, Lutezia, I, 263.

64. 64.   Heinrich Heine, “Kampf und Kämpfer,” Zeitung für die Elegante Welt 43, no. 36 (September 6, 1843): 876.

65. 65.   “The academic’s traditional obligation to praise is only ever occasionally visible in Mignet’s choice of expressions and moderating intonation.” Heine, article XXXV, Lutezia, I, 263. For background on this article, see Hansen, Heinrich Heines politische Journalistik, 75.

66. 66.   “Whose office is an eternal one, like the monarchy.” Heine, article LXI, Lutezia, II, 198.

67. 67.   Heine, article LXI, Lutezia, II, 196–97.

68. 68.   Heine, article LXI, Lutezia, II, 198.

69. 69.   On the eighteenth century éloge as model of scholarly commemoration that does not separate the “scholar” and “man,” see Georges Canguilhem, “Fontenelle, philosophe et historien des sciences,” in Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris: Libraire philosophique J. Vrin, 1968), 51–58.

70. 70.   Heine, article LXI, Lutezia, II, 202.

71. 71.   Heine, “Preface to the French Edition,” 299.

72. 72.   Matala de Mazza, “Die fehlende Hauptsache,” 310.

73. 73.   On Heine’s late style, see Roger Cook, By the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine’s Late Songs and Reflections (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998).

74. 74.   Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, xii.

75. 75.   Heine, “Preface to the French Edition,” 299.

76. 76.   This is a good example of the “double voiced mode” from the Börne memoir, “where the words and the ideas of the two writers often overlap or become difficult to distinguish from one another,” as Seyhan puts it. For a recent discussion see Azade Seyhan, Heinrich Heine and the World Literary Map: Redressing the Canon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 135.

77. 77.   Heine, “Preface to the French Edition,” 300.

78. 78.   Heine, “Preface to the French Edition,” 300.

79. 79.   The 1855 French version does contain the German dedicatory preface directly after the new French preface. The French preface is dated “Paris, March 30, 1855,” and the German dedication is dated “Paris, August 23, 1854.”

80. 80.   Heine is careful to instruct his publisher not to set the dedicatory preface in a larger font, as was conventional in previous centuries, a formatting choice that would have framed the piece as a “devoted letter to a patron” rather than as the intended “friendly, whimsical letter” (Brief kameradschaftlicher Laune). See Volkmar Hansen’s editorial apparatus to Lutezia I. DHA, 13/1, 615.

81. 81.   This visit occurred shortly before the publication of Lutezia; see Heinrich Heine’s letter to Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, May 9, 1854. HSA, 23, 333.

82. 82.   See the excellent recent English-language translation and introduction, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Letters of a Dead Man, ed. and trans. Linda B. Parshall (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016). Goethe, who was often stingy with his praise for contemporary authors, also thought well of Pückler-Muskau. See Wulf Wülfing, “Reiseliteratur und Realitäten im Vormärz. Vorüberlegungen zu Schemata und Wirklichkeitsfindung im frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Reise und soziale Realität am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger (Heidelberg: Winter, 1983), 371–94.

83. 83.   Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, iv.

84. 84.   Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, xv.

85. 85.   Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, xv.

86. 86.   Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, v.

87. 87.   “Those who come after us and see the wreath in this book through which I am weaving together our two names will at least gain an authentic date of our temporal coincidence [gewinnen wenigstens ein authentisches Datum unseres zeitlichen Zusammentreffens], and they may conjecture as they like to what extent the author of the Briefe eines Verstorbenen and the reporter [der Berichterstatter] of Lutezia fit together.” Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, vi.

88. 88.   Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, xviii.

89. 89.   On the prince as representing future readers, see also Phelan, Reading Heinrich Heine, 206–8.

90. 90.   It is common knowledge at the time that the exposure time of early photography is rather long and required the subject to sit still for long periods of time, hence Benjamin’s quip, “everything about these early images was meant to last” (Alles an diesen frühen Bildern war angelegt zu dauern). Walter Benjamin, “Eine Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), 45–64, 52.

91. 91.   Heine, “Zuneigungsbrief,” Lutezia, I, xvii.

92. 92.   Heinrich Heine to Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, May 9, 1854. HSA, 23, 333.