{"id":3778,"date":"2017-01-22T15:34:25","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T23:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=3778"},"modified":"2017-01-22T15:34:25","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T23:34:25","slug":"heinrich-heine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=3778","title":{"rendered":"Heinrich Heine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back home. Yes, it is home,\u00a0it feels that way. Marveling at the pink-hat masses who stood in the way of alternative facts<\/em>\u00a0yesterday. Recovering from being body frisked, twice, once at each airport on the way home. In a cabin, having to open my clothes. Must be emanating danger vibes – my thoughts perhaps, creating the view into the oval office with its new golden curtains.<\/p>\n

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These very thoughts right now swirl around Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856), the question of memory, the idea of resistance. You know him as a German poet immortalized by Schubert’s music; his\u00a0works were burnt by the Nazis, his\u00a0memorial\u00a0melted down by them. He considered himself a freedom fighter and his barbed wit and subversive thinking made him a danger to authoritarians of any\u00a0age.<\/p>\n

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It took until 1982 to unveil a new statue\u00a0in his city of Hamburg, financed mostly by private citizen, with a courageous senator of culture fighting for a prominent location in front of the town hall. Heine’s prediction that “where they burn books they will soon burn citizens” had been prescient.<\/p>\n

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The new memorial shows the poet, on a base that reminds of the book burnings; wouldn’t you know it, I saw “Mein Kampf” scratched into on of the books; since it was misspelled I assume it was not done by the sculptor, Waldemar Otto.<\/p>\n

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I chose some verses to remind us about what is happening here, and now, and in so many populist movements we are currently witnessing.<\/p>\n

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They are from\u00a0Germany. A Winter’s Tale. (Section Caput I.)<\/em><\/p>\n

He talks about a young woman who is singing us to sleep, and how he will tell a different story in his travel report (the German title is really “A Winter Journey.”)<\/p>\n

She sang the heavenly lullaby,<\/em>
\n The old song of abnegation,<\/em>
\n By which the people, this giant fool,<\/em>
\n Is lulled from its lamentation.<\/em><\/p>\n

I know the tune, I know the words,<\/em>
\n I also know every author;<\/em>
\n I know they secretly drank wine,<\/em>
\n While publicly preaching water.<\/em><\/p>\n

Still checking if he also wrote about “alternative facts.”<\/p>\n

Here are his words to music:<\/p>\n