Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856)
Journalist, an essayist, and one of the most significant German romantic poets.
Out of my own great woe
I make my little songs.
The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.
Where they burn books, they will also burn people.
Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.
My songs, they say, are poisoned.
How else, love, could it be?
Thou hast, with deadly magic,
Poured poison into me.
Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland.
Der Eichenbaum
Wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft.
Es war ein Traum.
Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.
Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about himself.
Oh what lies there are in kisses!
And their guile so well prepared!
Sweet the snaring is; but this is
Sweeter still, to be ensnared.
Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people.
No talent, but a character.
He who will establish himself on a certain height must yield according to circumstances, like the weather-cock on a church-spire, which, though it be made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it remained obstinately immovable, and did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind. But a great man will never so far contradict his own feelings as to see, or, it may be, increase, with cold-blooded indifference, the misfortunes of his fellow country-men.
Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.
Them that begin by burning books, end by burning men.
Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.
Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.
Where they burn books, they also burn people.
Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.