Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine
Author: George Prochnik
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300255624

A thematically rich, provocative, and lyrical study of one of Germany’s most important, world-famous, and imaginative writers Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was a virtuoso German poet, satirist, and visionary humanist whose dynamic life story and strikingly original writing are ripe for rediscovery. In this vividly imagined exploration of Heine’s life and work, George Prochnik contextualizes Heine’s biography within the different revolutionary political, literary, and philosophical movements of his age. He also explores the insights Heine offers contemporary readers into issues of social justice, exile, and the role of art in nurturing a more equitable society. Heine wrote that in his youth he resembled “a large newspaper of which the upper half contained the present, each day with its news and debates, while in the lower half, in a succession of dreams, the poetic past was recorded fantastically like a series of feuilletons.” This book explores the many dualities of Heine’s nature, bringing to life a fully dimensional character while also casting into sharp relief the reasons his writing and personal story matter urgently today.

The Origins of the Modern Jew

The Origins of the Modern Jew
Author: Michael A. Meyer
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1972-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814337546

An excellent overview of the intellectual history of important figures in German Jewry. Until the 18th century Jews lived in Christian Europe, spiritually and often physically removed form the stream of European culture. During the Enlightenment intellectual Europe accepted a philosophy which, by the universality of its ideals, reached out to embrace the Jew within the greater community of man. The Jew began to feel European, and his traditional identity became a problem for the first time. the response of the Jewish intellectual leadership in Germany to this crisis is the subject of this book. Chief among those men who struggled with the problems of Jewish consciousness were Moses Mendelssohn, David Friedlander, Leopold Zunz, Eduard Gans, and Heinrich Heine. By 1824, liberal Judaism had not yet produced a vision of it future as a separate entity within European society, but it had been exposed to and grappled with all the significant problems that still confront the Jew in the West.

Hebrew Melodies

Hebrew Melodies
Author: Heinrich Heine
Publisher: Dimyonot
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780271084800

A collection of poetry by 19th-century author Heinrich Heine, focusing on a return to a preoccupation with his Jewish roots, with new English translations alongside the original German.

A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine

A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine
Author: Roger F. Cook
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781571132079

As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension generated by the Jewish assimilation to German culture in a time marked by a growing emphasis on the shared ancestry of the German Volk. As both an ingenious composer of Romantic verse and the originator of modernist German prose, he defied nationalist-Romantic concepts of creative genius that grounded German greatness in an idealist tradition of Dichter und Denker. And as a brash, often reckless champion of freedom and social justice, he challenged not only the reactionary ruling powers of Restoration Germany but also the incipient nationalist ideology that would have fateful consequences for the new Germany--consequences he often portended with a prophetic vision born of his own experience. Reaching to the heart of the `German question,' the controversies surrounding Heine have been as intense since his death as they were in his own lifetime, often serving as an acid test for important questions of national and social consciousness. This new volume of essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and the United States offers new critical insights on key recurring issues in his work: the symbiosis of German and Jewish culture; emerging nationalism among the European peoples; critical views of Romanticism and modern philosophy; European culture on the threshold to modernity; irony, wit, and self-critique as requisite elements of a modern aesthetic; changing views on teleology and the dialectics of history; and final thoughts and reconsiderations from his last, prolonged years in a sickbed. Contributors: Michael Perraudin, Paul Peters, Roger F. Cook, Willi Goetschel, Gerhard Höhn, Paul Reitter, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Anthony Phelan, Joseph A. Kruse, and George F. Peters. Roger F. Cook is professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Heine and Critical Theory

Heine and Critical Theory
Author: Willi Goetschel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350087297

Heinrich Heine's role in the formation of Critical Theory has been systematically overlooked in the course of the successful appropriation of his thought by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the legacy they left, in particular for Adorno, Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. This book examines the critical connections that led Adorno to call for a “reappraisal” of Heine in a 1948 essay that, published posthumously, remains under-examined. Tracing Heine's Jewish difference and its liberating comedy of irreverence in the thought of the Frankfurt School, the book situates the project of Critical Theory in the tradition of a praxis of critique, which Heine elevates to the art of public controversy. Heine's bold linking of aesthetics and political concerns anticipates the critical paradigm assumed by Benjamin and Adorno. Reading Critical Theory with Heine recovers a forgotten voice that has theoretically critical significance for the formation of the Frankfurt School. With Heine, the project of Critical Theory can be understood as the sustained effort to advance the emancipation of the affects and the senses, at the heart of a theoretical vision that recognizes pleasure as the liberating force in the fight for freedom.

A Knight at the Opera

A Knight at the Opera
Author: Leah Garrett
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1557536015

A Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannh user played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism. Readers will see how Tannh user evolves from a medieval knight to Peretz's pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. The book also discusses how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was so inspired by Wagner's opera that he wrote The Jewish State while attending performances of it. A Knight at the Opera uses Tannh user as a way to examine the changing relationship between Jews and the broader world during the advent of the modern era, and to question if any art, even that of a prominent anti-Semite, should be considered taboo.

Ludwig Börne

Ludwig Börne
Author: Heinrich Heine
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781571133427

First English translation of Heine's controversial though masterful polemic, with introduction and commentary.In 1840, Heinrich Heine, the major German poet of Jewish origin of the age, published a book on Ludwig Börne, the major German political writer of Jewish origin of the period, who had died three years before. Regarded by Heine andothers as his best-written book, it was also his most disastrously conceived. Intended to recover the high ground of revolutionary principle and philosophy against the attacks mounted on him by Börne and his supporters, the bookwas instead met by a storm of outrage from which it seemed Heine's reputation might never recover. In the course of time, the evaluation was reversed; Heine was increasingly celebrated as a true herald of revolution. His vocabulary of Hellenism and Nazarenism, employed for the first time in Börne, was transmitted into English usage by Matthew Arnold. But Börne itself is Heine's only major work that has never been fully translated into English. The commentary to the edition clarifies the conflict between the two most prominent German-Jewish public intellectuals of their time, corrects the misapprehensions constantly in circulation about their relationship and the book,and reveals the many peculiarities of the text. Jeffrey L. Sammons is Leavenworth Professor of German Emeritus at Yale University and the author of four books on Heine.commentary to the edition clarifies the conflict between the two most prominent German-Jewish public intellectuals of their time, corrects the misapprehensions constantly in circulation about their relationship and the book,and reveals the many peculiarities of the text. Jeffrey L. Sammons is Leavenworth Professor of German Emeritus at Yale University and the author of four books on Heine.commentary to the edition clarifies the conflict between the two most prominent German-Jewish public intellectuals of their time, corrects the misapprehensions constantly in circulation about their relationship and the book,and reveals the many peculiarities of the text. Jeffrey L. Sammons is Leavenworth Professor of German Emeritus at Yale University and the author of four books on Heine.commentary to the edition clarifies the conflict between the two most prominent German-Jewish public intellectuals of their time, corrects the misapprehensions constantly in circulation about their relationship and the book,and reveals the many peculiarities of the text. Jeffrey L. Sammons is Leavenworth Professor of German Emeritus at Yale University and the author of four books on Heine.

The Impossible Exile

The Impossible Exile
Author: George Prochnik
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2014-05-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590516133

An original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was also an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler’s rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile—from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis—where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself. The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig’s extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era—the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.

In Pursuit of Silence

In Pursuit of Silence
Author: George Prochnik
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2010-04-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0385533268

An "elegant and eloquent" (New York Times) exploration of the frontiers of noise and silence, and the growing war between them. Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. Traveling across the country and meeting and listening to a host of incredible characters, including doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so loud as a society, and what it is that gets lost when we can no longer find quiet.