Heinrich Heine: The Romantic School

Abstract

After a generation had passed since Mme. de Staël’s Germany, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), a German poet in exile in Paris, concluded that Frenchmen needed again to be acquainted, now more accurately, with the character of his native land. So he wrote The Romantic School (1836) and Religion and Philosophy in Germany, which reveal so well his mixed feelings about his Germany and its intellectual currents. He was born in the Rhineland while it was under French rule; in that part of Germany the Napoleonic Code was in force, and things French were much admired. He attended the University of Bonn, where A. W. von Schlegel was teaching, and came to know the promoter of the Romantic school first-hand. His early life was unsettled; he depended upon his uncle, a banker, for income while he turned his talents to poetry. He left Germany for Paris in 1831. Three years later he was implicated (without much foundation) in the Young Germany movement and formally exiled from his native land.