Heine: Selected Prose

By Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) developed a style in a series of writings. His prose was no less celebrated than the poems which inspired Lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms. Robertson... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140445552
• ISBN13: 9780140445558
• Release Date: September 1993
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 359 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Good, timely service

This is a nice addition to the huge collected works of Heine. This book arrived in good condition and in good time. For anyone interested in the other side of Heine (not the poet) this is a good place to start.

The Harz Journey and Selected Prose

To non-Germanic readers, Heinrich Heine is predominantly known as a poet. His verse has inspired music by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms, the majority of the inspiration coming from his Book of Songs. In The Harz Journey and Selected Prose, a number of works of prose, some unfinished, some complete, have been collected to show the range, wit, satirical skill and intelligence of Heine throughout his life. Heine can be forgiven is the selection is thematically uneven, coming as they do from nearly three decades of his life. Each piece has its merits, though the whole falls shorter than sum of its parts. The book opens with The Harz Journey, a piece that was written after a three week walking tour when he was twenty-seven. The Harz Journey is by far the most immediately enjoyable of the six pieces. It is witty and insightful, with clever jokes strewn throughout the text, as well as containing sharp observations on ordinary peasant and university life. The satire is never laugh-out-loud funny, rather it is more subtle. 'I was also much displeased to see that the multiplication table, which conflicts dangerously with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, was printed on the last page of the catechism, so that children could be led at an early age into sinful doubts.' The Harz Journey is a collection of loosely stitched together observations and vignettes, with Heine himself noting towards the end that, 'The Harz Journey is and remains a fragment...Individual works may remain fragments, so long as they form a whole when put together.' Inserted within the text are a few poems, which show that in his late twenties, Heine was already skilled with the pen. Ideas: The Book of Le Grand is much less and much more cohesive. It is confusing and enthralling, a mash of concepts, fragments and ideas which seem to have little in common, though careful rereading shows strong thematic development and continuity. Though the individual snippets - and even the whole, at times - could be taken as dream-like, ephemeral, consisting of the fancies of thought rather than the concreteness of visual description and plot, there is a consistency of expression and strength of intelligence that binds the work together. Ideas can be read as autobiographical in parts, but it can easily be enjoyed as fragments of thought that come together to create a cracked portrait of a man - dare we say Heine? The references are there, of course, but to confuse content with intent would be foolish. 'In all the preceding chapters there is not a single line that is not strictly relevant; I write concisely, avoiding everything superfluous, indeed I often miss out on essential matters' - are we to take this seriously? Yes and no, for then Heine goes on to lament his horrible lack of intellectual quotations in the text, for as everyone knows, a piece is only clever if it refers to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Heine's bite is sharp. The Town of Lucca was, for me, the we