Heine’s Aristophanes Complex and the Ambivalence of Deutschland : Ein Wintermärchen

HEINE'S ARISTOPHANES COMPLEX AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF DEUTSCHLAND: EIN WINTERMARCHEN Heine's respect for his great precursors in the tradition of comic and satirical writing is well known. Cervantes receives a tribute in his 'Einleitung' to Don Quixote of 1837, which incorporates some material from Die Stadt Lucca of 1831. Laurence Sterne, an important model for the prose Reisebilder, receives praise in Die romantische Schule, as does Moliere. Heine's strongest identifica? tion with an earlier writer, however, comes in the last canto of Deutschland: Ein Winter marchen, where he identifies himself as the son of Aristophanes. This tribute is both general and specific: on the one hand, his lyre is that of the great Athenian; on the other, in the foregoing fantasy description of his marriage to Hammonia, Heine writes that he had been trying to imitate the marriage of Peisetaerus1 to Basileia (i.e. Princess), which forms the climax of Aristophanes' comedy The Birds: Es ist dieselbe Leyer, die einst Mein Vater lieB ertonen, Der selige Herr Aristophanes, Der Liebling der Kamonen. Es ist die Leyer, worauf er einst Den Paisteteros besungen, Der um die Basilea gefreyt, Mit ihr sich emporgeschwungen. Im letzten Capitel hab' ich versucht Ein bischen nachzuahmen Den SchluB der 'Vogel', die sind gewiB Das beste von Vaters Dramen.2 In a deft transition, Heine next mentions that the same author's The Frogs is currently being performed in Berlin to the approval of the Prussian king, whom, in a bravura demonstration of the power of poetry, he threatens with eternal damnation in a Dantesque inferno. Heine's admiration for Aristophanes was not of recent standing, and, in order to gain some context for this reference and what it implies for the meaning of This articleis an expanded version of a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian AssociationofUniversity Teachers ofGermaninHalifax,Nova Scotia on 28 May 2003. I received valuable impulses fromtwo articlesfromthe 1970s: Ross Atkinson,'Irony and Commitment in Heine's Deutschland.Ein Wintermarchen\ GermanicReview, 50 (1975), 184-202, and Jost Schillemeit,'Das Grauenhafte imlachendenSpiegel des Witzes:Zum historischen Kontexteiner asthetischen"Idee" in Heines Buch Le Grand',Jahrbuch desFreienDeutschen Hochstifts (1975), 324-45. RafaelNewman's interesting article'Heine's Aristophanes:CompromiseFormationsand theAmbivalencesof Carnival', ComparativeLiterature, 49 (1997), 227-40, seeks to identify the respectsinwhichtheWintermdrchen and othersofHeine's worksfallintotheBakhtinian category ofthecarnivalesque. 1 This spellingis used in the recenteditionand translation byJeffrey Henderson in the Loeb Classical Library:Aristophanes, vol. in (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press,2000). 2 Quoted fromHeinrichHeine, SamtlicheWerke, DusseldorferAusgabe,ed. byManfredWindfuhr ,16 vols (Hamburg: Hoffmannund Campe, 1973-97), iv, 155-56. QuotationsfromHeine's workswillhenceforth be identified in thetextbyvolumeand page references to thisedition. 666 Heine's Aristophanes Complex the poem as a whole, we must embark on a survey of Heine's statements about him. In October 1825, nearly nineteen years before the composition ofthe Wintermdrchen , he wrote a lengthy tribute to Aristophanes, combined with a very personal interpretation of The Birds, in a letter to Friederike Robert, the wife of Rahel Varnhagen's brother Ludwig Robert; the letter was presumably intended for the eyes of Ludwig Robert as well.3 Heine has just read the latter's comedy Der Paradiesvogel, which has displeased him for reasons that he states are idio? syncratic to himself. As he writes, he has just made the acquaintance of 'ganz andere Vogel [...], nemlich die Vogel von Aristophanes'. (His reference soon after to 'die plump-vossische Uebersetzung' tells us that he was using the translated edition of Aristophanes by Johann Heinrich Voss, which had appeared in three volumes in 1821.) Heine first castigates August Wilhelm von Schlegel for his superficial judgement that the foundation of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land in this play merely represents 'einen lustigen barocken SpaB', then proceeds to spell out his own esoteric view that the play embodies 'eine ungeheuere Weltanschauung': ich sehe darinn den gottertrotzenden Wahnsinn der Menschen, eine achte Tragodie, um so tragischer da jener Wahnsinn am Ende siegt, und glucklich beharrt in dem Wahne daB seine Luftstadt wirklich existire und daB er die Gotter bezwungen und alles erlangt habe, selbst den Besitz der allgewaltig herrlichen Basilea. In the next paragraph, Heine criticizes the inadequacy of Voss's translation, 'denn kein Mensch vermag jene unendlich...

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