New
Year's night, 1800, more exact investigation has nevertheless shown
that truth is here sacrificed to a witticism. Heine is still a child of
the eighteenth century, by whose most predominant thoughts his work too
is influenced, and with whose European coryphaeus, Voltaire, he has an
undeniable relationship. He was born, as Strodtmann proves, on the 13th
of December, 1799, in Duesseldorf, His father was a plain cloth-merchant;
his mother, of the family Von Geldern, the daughter of a physician of
repute. The opinion, however, that Heine was the fruit of a
Jewish-Christian marriage, is erroneous. The family Von Geldern belonged
to the orthodox Jewish confession. One of its early members, according
to family tradition, although he was a Jew, had received the patent of
nobility from one of the prince electors of Juelich-Kleve-Berg, on
account of a service accorded him. As, moreover, Schiller's and Goethe's
mothers worked upon their sons an appreciable educational influence, so
was this also the case with Heine's mother, who is described as a pupil
of Rousseau and an adorer of Goethe's elegies, and thus reached far out
beyond the measure of the bourgeois conditions in which she lived....

That which however worked upon his youthful spirit, upon his whole
poetical manner, was the French sovereignty in the Rhine-lands at the
time of his childhood and youth. The Grand Duchy of Berg, to which
Duesseldorf belonged, was ruled in the French manner; a manner which,
apart from the violent conscriptions, when compared with the Roman
imperial periwig style had great advantages, and in particular granted
to Jews complete equal rights with Christians, since the revolutionary
principle of equality had outlived the destruction of freedom. Thus the
Jews in Duesseldorf in their greater part were French sympathizers, and
Heine's father too was an ardent adherent of the new regime. This as a
matter of course could not remain without influence upon the son, so
much the less as he had French instruction at the lyceum. A vein of the
lively French blood is unmistakable in his works. It drew him later on
to Paris, where he made the martyr stations of his last years. And of
all recent German poets, Heinrich Heine is the best known in France,
better known even than our classic poets; for the French feel this vein
of related blood....

From his youth springs, too, Heine's enthusiasm for the great Napoleon,
which however he has never transmitted to