Heine and Critical Theory. By Willi Goetschel. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. xii + 311 pages. $153.00 hardcover, $122.41 e-book.

Willi Goetschel’s aim in Heine and Critical Theory is to establish a secure connection between the two entities in his title. Goetschel recognizes that this connection has not been demonstrated in previous scholarship and that the reasons for its absence are obvious and somewhat formidable. Lacking in the writings of the Frankfurt School are extended considerations of Heine and his writings. Leo Lowenthal composed a short essay on Heine in the early 1920s when he was “going through a phase of strong Jewish self-identification” (31), but these remarks, translated into English in 1947 and published in Commentary with the title “Heine’s Religion: The Messianic Ideals of the Poet,” occur prior to Lowenthal’s integration into the core of the Frankfurt School. It is difficult to see in his discussion of Heine’s Jewish roots and predilections views that are identifiable as part of mature Critical Theory. The only other essays dealing directly with Heine and composed by a core member of the Frankfurt School were penned by Theodor Adorno. The most noted of these pieces is “Die Wunde Heine,” which appeared in the first volume of Noten zur Literatur. In 1949 Adorno had written an essay in English titled “Toward a Reappraisal of Heine,” but it remained unpublished. Although there are some differences between this essay and the German text published in 1958, it is plausible to assume that the later essay contains Adorno’s final and more seminal views on Heine.

While we can be certain that Marcuse, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and other contributors to Critical Theory were familiar with Heine and his writings, we encounter in the vast theoretical œuvre of these men and in the now enormous secondary literature on the Frankfurt School only passing references to Heine. Thus his name appears only once in Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School (1986) and not at all in Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination (1973). This absence suggests the very neglect that Goetschel seeks to correct. Even more challenging for Goetschel in making his connection between Heine and Critical Theory, however, is the content of Adorno’s essays. Although Adorno does not attack Heine as a poetaster and fraud, the tack preferred by German nationalists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Adorno does adhere closely to the views of Karl Kraus, accusing Heine of bringing German poetry into the proximity of advertising slogans and greeting cards. Adorno does evidence some appreciation for Heine’s predicament in the initial years of industrialization and the growth of capitalism, but his evaluation of Heine’s merits for German letters contains at best an ambivalence in line with his aesthetic theory and views on modernism. Since Adorno’s views are contradicted by no other member of the Frankfurt School, they may be considered as representative for Critical Theory, and Goetschel accordingly devotes more attention to Adorno and connections between Heine and Adorno than to any other theorist.

Goetschel finds the means to connect Heine with Critical Theory in their Judaism and the way it impacted their social views. Here too Goetschel is working against the grain, since the relationship to Judaism in Heine and in the Critical Theorists was not without ambivalence. Heine, as is well known, converted in the mid-1820s and did not identify himself with Judaism in his works; he did write about Jews at various points, but often his references to his former co-religionists are fraught and critical. In his early years under the influence of the “Verein für Cultur und Wissen-schaft der Juden” and in the Matratzengruft during his final years he exhibits greater appreciation for the Jewish tradition. But in the bulk of his writings we find few affirmations of Judaism and the role it plays in contemporary Europe. The same can be said for most of the Frankfurt School: Judaism does not occupy a great deal of space in the theoretical writings of the core group despite their Jewish origins. Certainly they had reason to deal with Judaism because of events and personal experiences. They were confronted with rabid anti-Semitism in Germany during the Third Reich and were observers from afar of the Holocaust; but a direct identification with Judaism is not apparent and at the very least not foregrounded in their most important works. Still, Goetschel is correct to observe that there are certain parallels between Heine and Critical Theorists with regard to their religious heritage. Judaism was a weapon that was used against them, excluding them from the mainstream of German life and eventually forcing them into exile. More importantly, one of Goetschel’s central contentions is that this marginalization, attributed mainly to their Jewish backgrounds, had a decisive influence on Heine’s theoretical outlook in the first half of the nineteenth century, and on the Frankfurt School a century or more later. “Heine’s Jewish comedy,” Goetschel asserts, “gives voice to the critical power of the dialectic of the play of difference that Critical Theory will later develop in a theoretically more sophisticated, but conceptually more rigid and therefore subdued fashion” (12). Indeed, Heine’s writings are credited with highlighting Jewish and other forms of differences that serve as critical reminders of the “nonnegotiability of the singularity of the particular, giving striking expression to its resistance to conceptualization” (13). In this interpretation Heine occupies a position anchoring the foundations of negative dialectics.

Goetschel develops his argument in eight loosely connected chapters, each of which could be considered an essay in its own right. The first reviews Heine’s fate among Jewish intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s in New York, including members of the Frankfurt School and the circles they frequented. Goetschel seeks to establish the source of the “wound” of Heine: “the forgetting of Heine and the resistance to his rediscovery” does not result mainly from his neglect, but from his earlier positive reception among progressives in the Jewish community, whose voices had been effectively erased (47). He concludes with the contention that Heine has played a powerful but subliminal role and continues to play it, “if often only as an absent presence, in Critical Theory” (48).

The second chapter shifts focus abruptly and examines Heine’s relationship with three major theorists whose importance for Critical Theory is indisputable: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In each case, however, we confront a problem similar to establishing Heine’s influence on the Critical Theorists themselves: Heine plays no decisive role in the writings of any of these major figures, and while he was generally admired by them as a writer, there is little evidence of a lasting influence on their theoretical outlook. Heine appreciated the realm of the material and sensual, and the role of money in politics; but it is far-fetched to see him as a seminal contributor to Marx’s thought. Nietzsche praises Heine as a stylist, but he never cites him as a source for his philosophy. And Freud incorporates some of Heine’s puns and jokes into his writings, but the connection between Heine and the intellectual foundations of psychoanalysis is tenuous at best. The third chapter brings us back more directly to the Frankfurt School and to Heine’s connections with Adorno in particular. Goetschel discusses the dissonance in Heine’s aesthetics, a feature that has been widely recognized, and views it as the basis of Heine’s criticism of his own times and an important element in Adorno’s later reflections on twentieth-century phenomena. The refusal to affirm superficial harmony, the intentional production of texts that thwart the propagation of a sterile and unified worldview, and the advocacy of difference and critique are theoretical tendencies that unite Heine and Adorno in a common project. As Goetschel writes: “For both Heine and Adorno, disenchantment is the emancipatory speech act through which the word breaks up the phantasmagoric hold of enchantment” (94). This commonality sets the stage for an interesting reevaluation of Adorno’s essays on Heine in which it is less the Krausian trivializing moment that comes to the fore than the dissonance in Heine’s writings with respect to his era. Heine is judged, somewhat ambivalently still, as a writer whose poetry “owes its striking power to the unashamed enactment of its own failure” (109). This chapter presents the most persuasive link between Heine and Adorno and should be taken seriously as a provocative contribution to scholarship and a welcome correction to an overly simplistic view of Adorno’s essay on “The Wound Heine.”

The remaining chapters are somewhat different in structure and argument. They focus primarily on Heine’s relationship to modernity and contain interpretations of one or more texts or passages from texts written by Heine. Chapter Four examines Heine’s views on language and advances the claim that behind his comic veneer lies “a deeper, critical impulse that exposes the problematic implications of the expectations of the romantics and other idealists unwilling to recognize the subversive force of the free play of language at the heart of the process of signification” (116). This view of language, Goetschel claims, has implications for later theorists including Benjamin and Adorno. Chapter Five, the longest chapter in this study, turns to conceptions of history and Heine’s advocation of a materialist and self-reflexive historiography that “foreshadows the crucial elements of critique that return in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, and Foucault” (148). Heine is credited with a sensitivity toward temporal issues that produces insights into what will later become celebrated as genealogy and Nachträglichkeit in the writings of twentieth-century theorists. In Chapter Six Goetschel deals with Heine’s sensualism and the philosophical issue of the relationship of mind and body. Among the passages he selects for analysis is Heine’s discussion of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whom Heine treats with his characteristic humor; but the serious issues Heine locates in the relationship of this duo will later be “at the heart of Adorno’s project of Critical Theory,” expressed in a “theoretically stringent fashion” (215). The central figure in the Frankfurt School is thus considered someone who translates Heine’s “raucous comedy” “of the analysis of the dialectics of a dysfunctional relationship” “into the stringent language of the concept” (216).

In the seventh chapter Goetschel evaluates Heine’s views on secularization, an issue that contains both personal and theoretical dimensions. The main contention is that secularization for Heine is not a straightforward process of the decline of religion, but rather inextricably connected with religiosity. In his discussions Heine is seen as bringing “the dissonant Jewish perspective into play as a critical corrective or counterthrust that challenges all unexamined recourse to the secular as unaffected by the theological-political nexus that informs the distinction between the secular and the religious” (245). Critical theorists are regarded as performing the same sort of analysis, except that the “Jewish difference” is “curiously muted” in their writings (228); Goetschel detects a “silent recourse to Jewish tradition” in Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno, and Bloch, and something “in a more subdued fashion” operative in Marcuse and Horkheimer (245–46). The final chapter departs from this focus on modernity and provides an allegorical interpretation of Heine’s most overtly Jewish work, the fragmentary Rabbi of Bacherach. Abraham represents the legal wisdom of the Jews, while his wife Sarah embodies the non-legalistic, exegetical texts of Judaism; in short, Abraham is the Halacha, Sarah the Aggadah. This synthesis of official and non-official Judaism is furthered with the appearance of Don Isaac in the last pages of the fragment; he completes the union by supplying the requisite laughter and joy needed to complete this reimagining of the Jewish tradition. The lesson for Critical Theory is, then, that it “only has a chance where laughter born of pleasure and joy is welcomed in as the offspring that enables life” (25).

This monograph has many virtues. Among them are the penetrating interpretations of Heine texts in the various chapters. Goetschel has a comprehensive knowledge of Heine and a subtle manner of analyzing texts to support his arguments. He is also able to provide an interesting perspective on twentieth-century theory, demonstrating how dependent it was on nineteenth-century insights and previous thinkers, even when they are not fully acknowledged. On the other hand, the deficiencies in the overall thesis of this book are just as apparent. No matter how similar some of Heine’s views may appear to be to those of Critical Theorists, we still have very little hard evidence that Heine exercised any significant impact on these later writers, or that his thoughts are more decisive in the development of the Frankfurt School than the writings of other, more theoretically sophisticated authors. Indeed, a chief problem with the conjunction in the title of this volume is what it betokens: is Goetschel claiming, as some passages suggest, that there was a direct influence of Heine on Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School, or is there a mere confluence of views that requires no direct impact from Heine? As I have indicated above with a few citations, the nature of the connection is often blurry in this study. Furthermore, the reliance on the Jewish tradition as an enabling moment for Heine and Critical Theory is problematic. Certainly Heine and the Frankfurt School were outsiders to a German mainstream, but that outsider status was shared by non-Jews who were leftists or atheists or simply antagonistic to bourgeois thought and morality.

Still, despite these shortcomings Goetschel provides Heine studies with numerous trenchant and provocative commentaries, and he forces scholars of Critical Theory to reconsider its origins, its indebtedness to Jewish tradition, and its relationship to one of the greatest literary figures of the nineteenth century.