Notes to Chapter 5 { 33 7and others—helped rehabilitate Heine as the leading oppositional writer after the disaster
Heine’s image had suffered in the wake of his 1840 book on Börne. See Peters, The Poet as
Provocateur, 58. In part because of Heine’s turn to more politically engaged satire, and in
part because of Ruge’s philosophical development and his own treatment at the hands of the
Prussian censors, Ruge had found a Heine he could embrace.
72. For example, Ruge, “Heinrich Heine,” 4 : 308 – 9. Heine is indeed conspicuously ab-
sent from “Protestantismus und Romantik.” Echtermeyer and Ruge’s politicized assessment
of recent German cultural history is obviously indebted to Heine’s own account of much of
the same territory in Die Romantische Schule ( 1836 ). Yet Echtermeyer and Ruge disassociate
themselves from the Heine who has clear affinities with them.
73. See Ruge, “Heinrich Heine,” 4 : 296 – 97. On the significant role that the discourse
about Jewish Witz played in the formation of nineteenth-century German cultural identity,
see Jefferson Chase, Inciting Laughter.
74. Ruge notes approvingly the continuity between Fichte (of Reden an die deutsche
Nation), the Burschenschaft movement, and the Befreiungskrieg before contrasting such
positive commitment to freedom with Heine’s negative “Freiheitssucht” (Ruge, “Heinrich
Heine,” 4 : 299 – 301 ). Ruge’s critique of Heine and romantic subjectivity is greatly indebted
to Hegel’s critique, in the introduction to Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, of Romantic irony
as empty egoism, a delusion of grandeur of sorts on the part of merely formal subjectivity
devoid of true substance.
75. Ruge, “Heinrich Heine,” 4 : 303.
76. Arnold Ruge, “Die Frivolität: Erinnerungen an Heine,” 7 : 292.
77. Sorkin notes Auerbach’s aversion to “Weltschmerz” literature in his Europa reviews
but does not remark on how, chiefly through Heine, this literature was widely regarded as
originating in Jewish subjectivity (The Transformation of German Jewry, 142 – 43 ).
78. Berthold Auerbach, review of Die Europamüden, 567 – 68.
79. Ibid., 566 and 567.
80. Ibid., 568.
81. Ibid.
82. Berthold Auerbach, review of Gedichte, 568.
83. Auerbach, “Bemerkungen über Titel und Vorreden in der neuesten schönen Litera-
tur,” 40.
84. Ibid., 38.
85. Ibid., 40.
86. Auerbach’s antipathy for Heine was abiding and did not ebb with time. He wrote to
Jakob Auerbach, his cousin, on March 2 , 1867 : “Heine, for whom everything is vendible for
a joke, is deeply abhorrent to me, and given my core being I must also be abhorrent to him”
(Briefe an Seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach, 324 ). Heine indeed expressed contempt for Auer-
bach, both privately and publicly. The entirety of Heine’s letter of April 5 , 1847 , to Heinrich
Laube reads: “Dear Laube! My condition is still the same—my head is as weak as if I were the
author of an Auerbach village story—my stomach as miserably sentimental and religiously
and morally insipid as one of those stories—still I plan to visit you around 11 o’clock. Your
sick friend H. Heine” (Säkularausgabe, 22 : 247 ). In a preface to the German translation of
Alsatian village tales by Alexandre Weill, dated Good Friday 1847 , Heine makes a point of
slighting Auerbach’s achievement in this genre by relating that “friends” had informed him