Heinrich Heine Biography Quotes 35 Report mistakes

Early Life
Heinrich Heine was born in Duesseldorf in 1797 into a Jewish merchant family whose fortunes rose and fell with the upheavals of the Napoleonic era and the restoration that followed. The city had been under French administration during his childhood, and the atmosphere of civil reforms and the French language left a lasting mark on his outlook and style. Heine later recalled the tensions between local tradition and the cosmopolitan ideas that entered the Rhineland in those years, a tension that would animate his writing for decades.

Education and Formation
After schooling in Duesseldorf and a brief, half-hearted attempt to enter commerce under the guidance of his wealthy Hamburg uncle, the banker Salomon Heine, he turned to university studies. He pursued law at Bonn, Goettingen, and Berlin, while increasingly devoting himself to literature, history, and philosophy. In Bonn he attended lectures by August Wilhelm Schlegel, absorbing the legacy of Romanticism even as he learned how to question it. In Berlin he heard G. W. F. Hegel, whose sweeping vision of history and dialectic sharpened Heine's sense of irony and historical perspective. Because professional careers in law and public service were barred to Jews in many German states, Heine converted to Protestantism in 1825, the same year he earned a doctorate in law at Goettingen. The conversion solved few practical problems and complicated his identity, a conflict he transmuted into verse and prose rather than biographical confession.

Early Literary Career
Heine's first volumes, including early tragedies such as Almansor and Ratcliff, revealed both theatrical ambition and a restless, satiric intelligence. He found his authentic voice in the Reisebilder (Travel Pictures), a new kind of travel prose enlivened by lyric interludes, social observation, and sudden shifts between humor and melancholy. The Buch der Lieder (1827), issued by the Hamburg publisher Julius Campe, made him famous. Its cycles, from Junges Leiden to the sea-poems of Die Nordsee, distilled unrequited love, urban estrangement, and lyrical grace into a crystalline style. The song-like cadences of these poems, including the famous Lorelei lyric, attracted countless composers and helped shape the European Lied tradition.

Paris and the Cosmopolitan Turn
In 1831 Heine moved to Paris, drawn by the intellectual climate after the July Revolution. He wrote as a correspondent for German newspapers and immersed himself in the city's salons and concert halls. There he encountered figures such as Ludwig Boerne, with whom he later quarreled in print; the composer Ferdinand Hiller; and artists who stirred his essays on music and culture, including Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin. He also crossed paths with Karl Marx in the community of German exiles and observed the Saint-Simonian and other socialist currents with a mixture of sympathy and skepticism. The Paris years confirmed his role as a mediator between German and French cultures: he explained Germany to the French in brisk feuilletons and explained France to Germans with wit sharpened by distance.

Polemics, Criticism, and Censorship
Heine's prose of the 1830s and 1840s enlarged his audience. Works such as Die romantische Schule surveyed German literature for a French public, at once honoring and dismantling the myths of Romanticism. His reports on French conditions and his essays on religion and philosophy in Germany blended history, satire, and prophecy. In 1835 the German Confederation banned writings associated with the circle dubbed Junges Deutschland, listing Heine alongside Heinrich Laube, Karl Gutzkow, and others. The interdictions only intensified his satiric edge. Heine never forgot the perils of intolerance; Almansor contains the chilling observation that where books are burned, people will be burned, a line that would echo tragically in later German history.

Major Works of the 1840s
The long Paris exile sharpened Heine's sense of home and alienation. Atta Troll (1843), a mock-epic about a dancing bear, grins at the border of fantasy and political allegory. Deutschland. Ein Wintermaerchen (1844) takes the form of a journey into his homeland and delivers a fearless critique of censorship, militarism, and provincial complacency. Neue Gedichte collected lyrics in which the musical intimacy of the Buch der Lieder is tempered by urban irony and European perspective. His relations with contemporaries stayed heated: his book Ludwig Boerne: A Memorial combined appreciation and fierce polemic, scandalizing admirers of Boerne while illuminating fault lines in the exile community.

Personal Life in Paris
Heine married Crescence Eugenie Mirat, known as Mathilde, in Paris in 1841. Their household was modest and often financially strained, but Mathilde's presence provided a steady domestic counterpoint to his intellectual restlessness. Heine's Paris friendships spanned writers, critics, and musicians. He wrote vivid concert reviews and pen portraits of performers such as Liszt and Paganini, and his poems continued to inspire composers; Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe and songs by Franz Schubert carried Heine's verse into recital rooms across Europe.

Illness and the Matratzengruft
After 1848 Heine suffered a severe, debilitating illness that confined him for years to what he called his mattress-grave. Despite pain and near-blindness, he produced late works of startling clarity and tenderness. Romanzero (1851) sets love, mortality, and exile in fearless counterpoint, while the later poems and aphorisms polish his irony to a hard, compassionate brilliance. Friends and fellow exiles visited; correspondence with his publisher Julius Campe and others shows a writer determined to maintain his voice even as his body failed.

Death and Legacy
Heine died in Paris in 1856 and was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery. His legacy straddles Romanticism and modernity: he preserved the intimacy and melodic gift of the lyric while introducing an unmistakably modern irony, urban sensibility, and political consciousness. He bridged languages and nations, explaining Germans to the French and the French to Germans at a moment when Europe was remaking itself. Read in schools and set to music across the world, his verse remains supple enough to carry love songs and sharp enough to puncture dogma. For later generations, the poet who foresaw the bond between burning books and burning people stands as both a master of the lyric line and a warning voice against fanaticism, censorship, and the deadening comforts of self-satisfied culture.

Our collection contains 35 quotes who is written by Heinrich, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Music - Love - Meaning of Life.

Other people realated to Heinrich: Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (Poet), Theophile Gautier (Poet), Emma Lazarus (Poet), Ludwig Borne (Writer), Delphine de Girardin (Novelist)