On Heine

Shedding light on a wonderful and often underappreciated German poet.

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen

At time of writing, I am just under a year into my Duolingo German course on top of a prior two years of college study. I have shown a desire to push myself in previous articles like On Goethe and a similar breakdown of the Nibelungenlied, but it hasn’t been until now that I have felt comfortable enough with the language to put my practice to the test. This month marks the 200th anniversary of Heinrich Heine’s Tragödien nebst einem lyrischen Intermezzo, so I thought it would be a good idea to open a proper exploration of the language by discussing this poet. Of all of Germany’s most prestigious literary figures, Heine seems to receive the least international attention for reasons we will get into later. I think that, especially considering the state of the modern world, Heine deserves more widespread attention.

The comedian Bill Burr tells a joke on his most recent Netflix special about how he wants to learn German in order to be able to understand what Adolf Hitler could possibly be saying in such erratic and unhinged language to make so many people want to follow him. He’s hardly the first to make this observation. German is broadly considered to be an ugly and dissonant language in the modern zeitgeist. Part of this may be due to propaganda against the Nazis, but the subgenre of linguistics known as “phonaesthetics” may also have influenced the public’s ear. Some of this field may indeed be bunk anthropology, but there is precedent for the field to exist. Scholars have observed the tendency for languages that have derived from Proto Indo European to preserve a voiced labial or alveolar nasal sound (that is to say, “m” or “n”) in the objective/accusative case. Whether those aesthetics can be extruded into emotional reactions is yet to be determined. Those familiar with the 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko are already familiar with the field’s most impactful conclusion. The syllables “seh,” “lah,” and “doh” are said to be the most euphonic in any language; when combined, we are presented with the word “cellar door.” German tends to have more cacophonous and dissonant sounds; for one, unlike other European languages they roll their r’s in the back of their throats. In their orthography, they also like to stack consonants that we would consider to be similar-sounding in a row. “Pf,” “chs,” and “tsch” are found commonly throughout the language. The ability to squish two independent ideas into one compound word often clashes with this concept and authors will stick words like “Angstschweiss” in the middle of a sentence as if nobody would notice they put eight consonants in a row.¹ All these things having been said, it’s not as if German poetry is comparable to Vogon poetry.² Throughout the middle ages, the minstrels (known then as minnesingers) primarily composed in German. There is an argument to be made that at least some of this is due to the linguistic shift from Middle High German to Early New High German or further descendants, but these quibbles are far outside the scope of this article.