87 Facts About Heinrich Heine

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was a German poet, writer and literary critic.

Heinrich Heine is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder by composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert.

Heinrich Heine is considered a member of the Young Germany movement.

Heinrich Heine spent the last 25 years of his life as an expatriate in Paris.

Heinrich Heine was called "Harry" in childhood but became known as "Heinrich" after his conversion to Lutheranism in 1825.

Heinrich Heine had a sister, Charlotte, and two brothers, Gustav, and Maximilian, who became a physician in Saint Petersburg.

Heinrich Heine was a third cousin once removed of philosopher and economist Karl Marx, born to a German Jewish family in the Rhineland, with whom he became a frequent correspondent in later life.

Heinrich Heine glossed over the negative aspects of French rule in Berg: heavy taxation, conscription, and economic depression brought about by the Continental Blockade.

Heinrich Heine greatly admired Napoleon as the promoter of revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality and loathed the political atmosphere in Germany after Napoleon's defeat, marked by the conservative policies of Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich, who attempted to reverse the effects of the French Revolution.

In 1814 Heinrich Heine went to a business school in Dusseldorf where he learned to read English, the commercial language of the time.

The most successful member of the Heinrich Heine family was his uncle Salomon Heinrich Heine, a millionaire banker in Hamburg.

Heinrich Heine learned to hate Hamburg, with its commercial ethos, but it would become one of the poles of his life alongside Paris.

Salomon realised that his nephew had no talent for trade, and it was decided that Heinrich Heine should enter law.

So, in 1819, Heinrich Heine went to the University of Bonn.

Heinrich Heine was a radical liberal and one of the first things he did after his arrival was to take part in a parade which violated the Carlsbad Decrees, a series of measures introduced by Metternich to suppress liberal political activity.

Heinrich Heine was more interested in studying history and literature than law.

Heinrich Heine began to acquire a reputation as a poet at Bonn.

Heinrich Heine wrote two tragedies, Almansor and William Ratcliff, but they had little success in the theatre.

Heinrich Heine hated law as the Historical School of law he had to study was used to bolster the reactionary form of government he opposed.

When Heinrich Heine challenged another student, Wiebel, to a duel, the authorities stepped in and he was suspended from the university for six months.

Heinrich Heine probably gave Heine and other young students the idea that history had a meaning which could be seen as progressive.

Since Heinrich Heine was not very religious in outlook he soon lost interest, but he began to investigate Jewish history.

Heinrich Heine was particularly drawn to the Spanish Jews of the Middle Ages.

In 1824 Heinrich Heine began a historical novel, Der Rabbi von Bacherach, which he never managed to finish.

In May 1823 Heinrich Heine left Berlin for good and joined his family at their new home in Luneburg.

Heinrich Heine returned to Gottingen where he was again bored by the law.

In 1822 it introduced a law excluding Jews from academic posts and Heinrich Heine had ambitions for a university career.

Heinrich Heine was only really suited to writing but it was extremely difficult to be a professional writer in Germany.

Heinrich Heine was incapable of doing this so he never had enough money to cover his expenses.

In Hamburg one evening in January 1826 Heinrich Heine met Julius Campe, who would be his chief publisher for the rest of his life.

Heinrich Heine had developed various techniques for evading the authorities.

Heinrich Heine resisted all censorship; this issue became a bone of contention between the two.

Heinrich Heine became increasingly critical of despotism and reactionary chauvinism in Germany, of nobility and clerics but of the narrow-mindedness of ordinary people and of the rising German form of nationalism, especially in contrast to the French and the revolution.

Heinrich Heine went to England to avoid what he predicted would be controversy over the publication of this work.

Heinrich Heine was unimpressed by the English: he found them commercial and prosaic, and still blamed them for the defeat of Napoleon.

Heinrich Heine did not find work on the newspaper congenial, and instead tried to obtain a professorship at Munich University, with no success.

Heinrich Heine counter-attacked by writing a play, Der romantische Odipus, which included anti-Semitic jibes about Heine.

Heinrich Heine was stung and responded by mocking Platen's homosexuality in Die Bader von Lucca.

Heinrich Heine left Germany for France in 1831, settling in Paris for the remainder of his life.

Heinrich Heine's move was prompted by the July Revolution of 1830 that had made Louis-Philippe the "Citizen King" of the French.

Heinrich Heine shared liberal enthusiasm for the revolution, which he felt had the potential to overturn the conservative political order in Europe.

Heinrich Heine was attracted by the prospect of freedom from German censorship and was interested in the new French utopian political doctrine of Saint-Simonianism.

Heinrich Heine made many famous acquaintances but he always remained something of an outsider.

Heinrich Heine had little interest in French literature and wrote everything in German, subsequently translating it into French with the help of a collaborator.

In Paris, Heinrich Heine earned money working as the French correspondent for one of Cotta's newspapers, the Allgemeine Zeitung.

Heinrich Heine's articles were eventually collected in a volume entitled Franzosische Zustande.

Heinrich Heine saw himself as a mediator between Germany and France.

Heinrich Heine was deliberately attacking Madame de Stael's book De l'Allemagne which he viewed as reactionary, Romantic and obscurantist.

Heinrich Heine felt de Stael had portrayed a Germany of "poets and thinkers", dreamy, religious, introverted and cut off from the revolutionary currents of the modern world.

Heinrich Heine thought that such an image suited the oppressive German authorities.

Heinrich Heine had an Enlightenment view of the past, seeing it as mired in superstition and atrocities.

Heinrich Heine predicted that German thought would prove a more explosive force than the French Revolution.

Heinrich Heine had had few serious love affairs, but in late 1834 he made the acquaintance of a 19-year-old Paris shopgirl, Crescence Eugenie Mirat, whom he nicknamed "Mathilde".

Heinrich Heine was illiterate, knew no German, and had no interest in cultural or intellectual matters.

Heinrich Heine continued to comment on German politics and society from a distance.

Heinrich Heine's publisher was able to find some ways of getting around the censors and he was still free, of course, to publish in France.

Heinrich Heine regarded Borne, with his admiration for Robespierre, as a puritanical neo-Jacobin and remained aloof from him in Paris, which upset Borne, who began to criticise him.

When Heinrich Heine heard that Gutzkow was writing a biography of Borne, he began work on his own, severely critical "memorial" of the man.

Heinrich Heine had made personal attacks on Borne's closest friend Jeanette Wohl so Jeannette's husband challenged Heinrich Heine to a duel.

Heinrich Heine continued to write reports for Cotta's Allgemeine Zeitung.

For Heinrich Heine, this was a reversal of values: reactionary Austria standing up for the Jews while France temporised.

Heinrich Heine responded by dusting off and publishing his unfinished novel about the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages, Der Rabbi von Bacherach.

Heinrich Heine's mode was satirical attack: against the Kings of Bavaria and Prussia ; against the political torpor of the German people; and against the greed and cruelty of the ruling class.

Heinrich Heine published several poems, including Die schlesischen Weber, in Marx's new journal Vorwarts.

Heinrich Heine could not be expelled from the country because he had the right of residence in France, having been born under French occupation.

Heinrich Heine believed its radicalism and materialism would destroy much of the European culture that he loved and admired.

Heinrich Heine was reconciled with the publisher who agreed to provide Mathilde with an annuity for the rest of her life after Heine's death.

Atta Troll mocks the literary failings Heinrich Heine saw in the radical poets, particularly Freiligrath.

Atta Troll was not published until 1847, but Deutschland appeared in 1844 as part of a collection Neue Gedichte, which gathered all the verse Heinrich Heine had written since 1831.

Heinrich Heine was furious; he had expected much more from the will and his campaign to make Carl revise its terms occupied him for the next two years.

In 1844, Heinrich Heine wrote series of musical feuilletons over several different music seasons discussing the music of the day.

However, Heinrich Heine was not always honorable in his musical criticism.

In May 1848, Heinrich Heine, who had not been well, suddenly fell paralyzed and had to be confined to bed.

Heinrich Heine bore his sufferings stoically and he won much public sympathy for his plight.

Heinrich Heine's illness meant he paid less attention than he might otherwise have done to the revolutions which broke out in France and Germany in 1848.

Heinrich Heine was sceptical about the Frankfurt Assembly and continued to attack the King of Prussia.

Heinrich Heine continued to work from his sickbed: on the collections of poems Romanzero and Gedichte, on the journalism collected in Lutezia, and on his unfinished memoirs.

Heinrich Heine died on 17 February 1856 and was interred in the Paris Cimetiere de Montmartre.

Heinrich Heine's tomb was designed by Danish sculptor Louis Hasselriis.

Heinrich Heine possessed that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection.

In 1835,98 years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in Germany, Heinrich Heine wrote in his essay "The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany":.

Heinrich Heine's writings were abhorred by the Nazis and one of their political mouthpieces, the Volkischer Beobachter, made noteworthy efforts to attack him.

Editors for the Volkischer Beobachter referred to Heinrich Heine's writing as degenerate on multiple occasions as did Alfred Rosenberg.

Correspondingly, as part of the effort to dismiss and hide Jewish contribution to German art and culture, all Heinrich Heine monuments were removed or destroyed during Nazi Germany and Heinrich Heine's books were suppressed and, from 1940 on, banned.

The popularity of many songs to Heinrich Heine's lyrics represented a problem for the policy of silencing and proposals such as bans or rewriting the lyrics were discussed.

I'd read his journals, where he tells of Chopin, going for a drive, the poet Heinrich Heine dropping in, a refugee from Germany.

In Israel, the attitude to Heinrich 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 Christianity to be an unforgivable act of betrayal.