Poetry: Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum

Overview
"Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum" presents a satirical epic in verse whose central figure is a dancing bear named Atta Troll. The poem treats the bear as a comic allegory for misguided political activism and intellectual pretension, using burlesque, parody and mock-heroic invention to expose contradictions in contemporary life. A playful subtitle, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", signals both theatricality and parodic dialogue with Romantic and Shakespearean modes.
Heinrich Heine mixes lyrical passages, spoken interludes and choruses to create a loose, episodic narrative that reads like stage scenes and carnival spectacle. The voice ranges from affectionate mockery to embittered irony, so that entertainment and moral sting are constantly interwoven.

Plot and Characters
A circus bear escapes its trainer and wanders into the world, where the animal becomes a symbol rather than an individual. Various human figures project hopes, ideologies and slogans onto Atta Troll; poets, revolutionaries and bourgeois citizens each attempt to claim him as their emblem. The bear's inability to comprehend these human designs reveals their emptiness and theatricality.
Dialogues and encounters alternate with songs and choruses, and the bear drifts through salons, political assemblies and public spectacles. Human characters function often as types, the hack poet, the demagogue, the sentimental lover, whose speeches collide with the bear's simple instincts, producing comic and tragic effects in equal measure.

Style and Tone
Heine blends high poetic diction with colloquial speech and witty aphorism, shifting registers to deflate excess and expose absurdity. Parody of Romanticism appears in exaggerated loverly rhetoric and pastiches of exalted verse, while burlesque scenes reduce lofty sentiment to slapstick. The theatrical frame allows sudden transitions from lyric beauty to sarcastic commentary.
Irony is the dominant tone: tenderness toward individual suffering coexists with merciless ridicule of collective self-deception. Songs and incidental choruses give the poem musicality, while rhapsodic riffs and pointed epigrams keep the narrative alert and unsettling.

Themes and Satire
The poem satirizes utopian revolutionaries who mistake slogans for substance and poets who trade authenticity for fashionable rhetoric. Atta Troll becomes a mirror in which political grandstanding and literary vanity are reflected as performative posturing rather than genuine moral action. Heine interrogates the gap between intention and effect, and between rhetoric and lived reality.
Beyond politics and poetics, the poem explores the commodification of life and the spectacle of modernity. The bear's fate questions whether emancipation for animals, people or ideas is possible in a society that transforms every living thing into an object of display. The recurring interplay of comedy and melancholy underscores a persistent tenderness for the misled and the marginalized, even as their follies are exposed.

Historical Context and Reception
Composed in a period of escalating social tension before the 1848 revolutions, the poem engages debates about reform, insurrection and the role of literature in public life. Heine's exile in Paris sharpened his ironic distance from German politics and the Romantic school, and "Atta Troll" strikes at both conservative reactionaries and naive radicals.
Initial reception was mixed: some admired the vigor and irony, others condemned the irreverence. The work intensified Heine's reputation as a trenchant critic whose humor could wound allies and opponents alike.

Legacy
"Atta Troll" endures as a distinctive example of political satire in poetic form, striking a balance between comic spectacle and moral urgency. Its blend of parody, allegory and lyric invention influenced later writers who sought to combine aesthetic play with social critique. The image of a dancing bear turned political symbol remains a potent reminder of how revolutions and fashions can turn living hopes into hollow displays.