Poet and essayist, born in Düsseldorf, W Germany, of Jewish parentage. He studied banking and law, and in 1821 began to publish poetry, establishing his reputation with his four-volume Reisebilder (18267, 18301, Pictures of Travel) and Das Buch der Lieder (1827, The Book of Songs). In 1825 he became a Christian to secure rights of German citizenship, but this alienated his own people, and his revolutionary opinions made him unemployable in Germany. Going into voluntary exile in Paris after the 1830 revolution, he turned from poetry to politics, and became leader of the cosmopolitan democratic movement, writing widely on French and German culture. Schubert and Schumann set many of his poems to music.
Life
Heine was born into an acculturated Jewish family in Düsseldorf, Germany, which was a part of Prussia at the time. After Heine's business career failed he turned to the study of law at the universities of Göttingen, Bonn and Berlin, but found that he was more interested in literature than law, although he eventually took a degree in law in 1825, at the same time he had decided to convert from Judaism to Protestantism. As Heine said in self-justification, his conversion was "the ticket of admission into European culture", although it proved to be nothing of the sort - and many others, for example his cousin and benefactor the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, found no need to convert to enjoy such benefits.
Heine is best known for his lyric poetry, much of which (especially from his earlier works) was set to music by lieder composers, most notably by Robert Schumann.
As a poet Heine made his debut with Gedichte ("Poems") in 1821.
Heine left Germany for Paris, France in 1831.
Heine continued, however, to comment on German politics and society from a distance. Heine also satirized the utopian politics of those opponents of the regime still in Germany in Atta Troll: Ein Sommernachtstraum ("Atta Troll: A Midsummer Night's Dream") in 1847.
Heine wrote movingly of the experience of exile in his poem In der Fremde ("Abroad"):
Heine suffered from ailments that kept him bedridden for the last eight years of his life (some have suggested he suffered from multiple sclerosis or syphilis).
Among the books known to have been burned on Berlin's Opernplatz in 1933, after the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, were the works of Heine - as a result, one of his most famous lines, "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too" (Almansor, 1821), is now engraved on the ground at the site.
Though these lines are often quoted, it is only rarely mentioned that Heine originally wrote them in reference to the burning of the Koran by the Spanish Inquisition, in an effort to eradicate Islam in the Iberian Peninsula which had been a major center of Medieval Islamic culture.
Controversy in Israel
In Israel, the attitude to Heine has long been the subject of debate between secularists, who number him among the most prominent figures of Jewish history, and the religious who consider his conversion to Christiantity to be an unforgivable act of betrayal. Due to such debates, the city of Tel-Aviv was very late in naming a street for Heine, and the street finally chosen to bear his name is located in a rather desolate industrial zone rather than in the vicinity of Tel-Aviv University. A sarcastic comment in Ha'ir (a left-leaning local Tel-Aviv magazine) suggested that "The Exiling of Heine Street" symbolically re-enacted the course of Heine's own life.
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