SOURCE: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. “The Poet on the Margin and in the Center: Heinrich Heine and the German Condition.” Michigan Germanic Studies 20, no. 1 (spring 1994): 18-32.

In the following essay, Hoffmeister discusses Heine's marginalized place in German letters.

Like an inverted Don Quixote, Heine rode onto the stage of European letters and politics driven by his “crazy” desire to instill “die Zukunft allzu frühzeitig in die Gegenwart,”¹ a thankless task that earned him nothing but rejection, ostracism and severe pain. No wonder that, according to Theodor Adorno, Heine suffered from a “Wunde” partly self-inflicted, partly a symptom of his time and still festering in twentieth century Germany.²

I will try to show in this essay how Heine was marginalized by society, in other words, how and why he was compelled to live on the brink where racial, religious, poetic and political faultlines crossed, turning him into a paradigmatic figure...