Heinrich Heine and the Death of God

The Silesian Weavers

Heinrich Heine

In gloomy eyes there wells no tear.
Grinding their teeth, they are sitting here:
Germany, your shroud's on our loom;
And in it we weave the threefold doom.
We weave; we weave.

Doomed be the God who was deaf to our prayer
In Winter's cold and hunger's despair.
All in vain we hoped and bided;
He only mocked us, hoaxed, derided.
We weave; we weave.

Doomed be the king, the rich man's king,
Who would not be moved by our suffering,
Who tore the last coin out of our hands,
And let us be shot by his blood-thirsty bands.
We weave; we weave.

Doomed be the fatherland, false name,
Where nothing thrives but disgrace and shame,
Where flowers are crushed before they unfold,
Where the worm is quickened by rot and mold.
We weave; we weave.

The loom is creaking, the shuttle flies;
Nor night nor day do we close our eyes.
Old Germany, your shroud's on our loom,
And in it we weave the threefold doom;
We weave; we weave!
Aaron Kramer translation

               I was taking a walk with my friend Dennis, who until his retirement taught German literature, and said to him that the major German poet I had never come to terms with, or even read very much – not knowing where to begin – was Heinrich Heine.    Dennis is a very generous man: Three hours later he called me to say that he had checked out of UVM’s library a book of Heine poems, in German with facing English translations—and would bring it over to my house.  Which he did. 

               I read many of the poems that evening. It is not something I do often, read poems, even though I write these letters about them and have come to realize that in many ways poems are at the very center of my life.  But read them I did, one of my occasional bursts of reading poetry.

               The poems were mostly not, though I would like to claim this if I could, spectacular.  They were, to the contrary, effusions on love and life and the world: They seemed to be ‘ordinary’ musings. t is a  tribute to Heine as a ‘maker’ of poems that they seem like things one might encounter in the speech of everyday   life, rather than as poetic ‘effusions’  (I remembered a Heine poem which had long entranced me, one which ends more spectacularly than any poem I can think of.   An exception perhaps, since it certainly is spectacular.  Called “Morphine” [it was not in the collection] it recounts two twins, morphine [which Heine used especially in the last ten years of his life when he was in great pain, confined mostly to his bed, owing to a serious disease he had been infected by earlier in his life], and death.  Here is the ending, in Robert Lowell’s translation:

                              There’s no way out
unless the other turn about
and, pale distinguished, perfect, drop his torch.
He [morphine, the drug] and I stand alerted for life’s Doric, drilled, withdrawing march:
sleep is lovely, death is better still,
not to have been born is of course the miracle.

 Astonishing.  These final two lines are the most chillingly pessimistic view of human existence I have ever read – and at the same time, they are very, very beautiful.)

             As I read Heine poems, I was deeply struck by a satirical poem, “Das Fraulein stand am Meere”.  I could write at length about the poem, about the sentimental urge to romanticize endings and the cold realization that what ends begins again.       

 Upon the shore, a maiden
Sighs with a troubled frown;
She seems so sorrow-laden
To see the sun go down.

Don't let the old thing grieve you,
Look up and smile, my dear;
For, though in front he may leave you,
He'll rise again in the rear.

 But although I read and reread that poem, it is not the one I want to write about, but rather “The Silesian Weavers.”

               “The Silesian Weavers” has a distinguished heritage.  It was first published in a journal edited by Karl Marx, and first translated into English by Friedrich Engels.  A short history of its ‘subject’ will indicate why.

              In 1844, weavers in Silesia (in the northeast of Germany, now a part of Poland) rebelled against the parlous economic situation they were in.  They wove cloth on handlooms; like tenant farmers in the United States who raised crops with borrowed money and sold the crops to large entities which controlled the prices paid for those crops, they bought their raw materials from large entities and then sold their finished goods to textile firms which controlled the prices they paid for the cloth.  As textile manufacture in England became increasingly mechanized and efficient, the weavers were paid less and less for what they made.  Eventually, they could not earn enough to subsist. 

            Pushed to the limits, not able to buy food with the meager revenue they received for their hand work, the weavers of Silesia rebelled against one of the merchants who bought their cloth.   One weaver was arrested. The community of weavers protested.    At first, they in their collective numbers resisted the police who arrived to back up the merchant.   In ensuing days, troops arrived and the weavers were fired upon: Eleven were killed, and more were injured.   The protests continued even as even more troops arrived.  Eventually, the power of the [military] state took control, and the rebellion against the wealthy merchants ended.  (In an after-echo of this event in 1844, in 1892 at the Homestead steel works near Pittsburgh, PA, steel workers planned a strike, only to be locked out by Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick.   Frick hired Pinkerton [detective] agents to face off against the steel workers.   After several days of struggle between the two sides, the Pinkertons withdrew.  But the governor of Pennsylvania sent in 4000 troops, and by military force the strikers were defeated.    The steel plant re-opened, with non-union workers making the steel.  The pattern – exploitation of workers, worker rebellion, initial success but defeat by military intervention—was set in 1844.)

              Karl Marx saw the Silesian weavers’ rebellion as the first instance of the modern struggle between workers and capitalism, though he ignored the feudal dimensions of the Silesian protest.  Whether his analysis was right or wrong is beside the point, perhaps; the conflict, and the victory by owners over workers by means of government force, was central to both Marx and to Heine. (In 1893 the great German artist Kathe Kollwitz did a cycle of six lithographs/etchings called “A Weavers’ Revolt,” commemorating the Silesian Weavers by portraying their struggle in contemporary setting and contemporary dress.  A later etching, “The Downtrodden,” portrays two of the weavers. you can view it by typing “Zertretene National Gallery of Art” on a web browser.  It shows a man and woman mourning a dead child.  This etching, by chance – it has no relation to my choice to write about this poem – hangs on the wall of my living room.)

             The poem has five stanzas, each ending with the refrain, “We weave, we weave.”  The first and last are the frame.  The middle three stanzas play off the loyalty oath required of Prussian soldiers, allegiance to God, King, and Fatherland.  (Those stanzas refer, successively, to that triumvirate.)

               Before we embark on a reading of the poem, let us reflect on how remarkable is its topicality.  The weavers’ ‘revolt’ was in 1844; Heine wrote the poem in 1844.  He was, in plain terms, making a political statement about a political rebellion at the moment of its happening.  He saw an event of his own time both for itself, as itself, and as a part of a larger historical pattern.  I kept returning to this fact as I read and reread the poem: This was not what Wordworth counselled in his famous dictum about poems, ‘emotion recollected in tranquility,’ but a poem contemporaneous with the political event it was recounting.  I still marvel at the fact: Heine wrote the poem at the same time as the weavers were rebelling.

               I’m not sure we know that contemporaneity from the first stanza, which takes a long view.  These are dark times, with the weavers transposed into the Fates, who weave the nation’s destiny.   What they are weaving is a shroud, a funeral covering: An age is dying, and will be buried in what the weavers have wrought.    That “threefold doom” is the Prussian allegiance: God, King, Country.  Soon to be dead and buried.

            Let me skip the next stanza, to which I shall return. It is the strongest statement in the poem, and stuns me every time I read it.  Here is stanza three:

Doomed be the king, the rich man's king,
Who would not be moved by our suffering,
Who tore the last coin out of our hands,
And let us be shot by his blood-thirsty bands.
We weave; we weave.

 We note the obvious structuring of the poem, here: each of the three central stanzas begin with the same words, “Doomed be,” and each stanza ends as every one of the poem’s stanzas end, with the ongoing activity of the impoverished and rebellious Silesian weavers (with an overlay of the Fates, three goddesses who weave and cut the tapestry of human destiny) weaving the shroud: “We weave, we weave.”  In this stanza, what is doomed is the corrupt king, “the rich man’s king.”  There is no empathy here, for he is “not moved by our suffering.”  The original German in this stanza is stronger than the translation because it is more direct: “Der den letzten Groschen von uns erpreßt,/Und uns wie Hunde erschießen läßt!“  “The last penny pried from us/and leave us to be shot like dogs.”  Greedy?  He “tore the last coin out of our hands” and then sends in the troops to shoot all who resist.  (It is hard, and pardon me for a political intrusion about our own age here, not to think of Donald Trump, decidedly un-empathetic, in pursuit of riches, willing to use the military to achieve the power and wealth he so desires.)  Ah, but the Fates are weaving the destiny of the kingdom, and as readers we understand that destiny will overcome that heedless greed, soon to be buried, wrapped in the shroud the weavers are weaving. 

              The fourth stanza concerns the nation:

Doomed be the fatherland, false name,
Where nothing thrives but disgrace and shame,
Where flowers are crushed before they unfold,
Where the worm is quickened by rot and mold.
We weave; we weave. 

It too begins with “Doomed be” and ends with “we weave, we weave.”  I think the translator’s “false name” for Fatherland is a reasonably good fit, but the line Heine wrote has a double meaning.  “Dem falschen Vaterlande” says that the ‘Fatherland’ tells us false stories.  But it also says that the very notion of “Fatherland,’ or nation, is false: it assumes a role that is not proper to the state, which is not our parent but a construct that we treat as if it has parental power.  The falseness pervades the contemporary nation, which is the home not of patriotic pride but of “disgrace and shame” and a locus where nothing blooms, nothing comes to fruition.   Those metaphors – crushed flowers, rot and mold, a worm reating away from within – are deeply powerful.  The conjure up a place of “rot and mold” where worms consume everything, even the wholesome and supposedly healthy.   One thinks of William Blake’s poem, “the Sick Rose:”

O Rose thou art sick. 
The invisible worm, 
That flies in the night 
In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

 As for the social decay, one thinks of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” written seventy-five years later:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tied is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned. 

               There is, in Heine, a strong belief that the nation, and the world, can be better than it is.  In the same year, 1844, that he wrote “The Silesian Weavers,” Heine wrote a mock-epic which is reputed to be his masterpiece, “Germany: A Winter’s Tale.”  I myself find it doubly difficult, since it is overfull of contemporary (to 1844) references, and since it is satiric.  (I have trouble with Byron, the great satirist among the English Romantic poets.)    Yet at the outset of “A Winter’s Tale,” the poet responds to a young girl who asks him to accept the promise of a better life in heaven, after death.  Heine will sing,

A new song, a better song,
My friends will be my aim!
We should, right now on earth,
A kingdom of heaven proclaim.

We wish to be happy, here on earth,
The days of need have gone;
The idle belly must not enjoy
What toiling hands have won.    
[My italics.  Translated by Joseph Massaad.]

Heine is calling for change in the real world, “right now on earth,” which is in the words of Kafka is “the only life we have…. the cares we have to struggle with every day.”  One can see why Marx and Engels responded with friendship and admiration to Heine.   Heine wrote poetry to urge on revolutionary ends.  So too, with this stanza of “The Silesian Weavers,” which calls for an end to the rottenness of the contemporary state, and urges instead the cloth of a new order where corruption is no longer the ruling principle. 

               I have skipped a stanza, the third, which is what grabbed me with immense force when I first read the poem, and continues to hold me with its revolutionary trumpet-blast.

Doomed be the God who was deaf to our prayer
In Winter's cold and hunger's despair.
All in vain we hoped and bided;
He only mocked us, hoaxed, derided.
We weave; we weave.

We recall the Prussian loyalty oath, allegiance to God, King, and Fatherland, which structures the poem.  I suppose we have grown accustomed to criticism of our leader(s), and our state.   But even those who profess atheism and agnosticism are not prepared, I think, for the severe critique present in these lines.    God does not hear our entreaties, even when we are beset by the worst of circumstances.   God doesn’t listen to us even if we are freezing to death, starving to death.  Whatever we hope for, God ignores.   Emily Dickinson was almost equally tough-minded in her poem of about 1880:

 Apparently with no surprise
To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at it’s play –
In accidental power – 
The blonde Assassin passes on –
The Sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another Day
For an Approving God – 

               Here, in this third stanza of “The Silesian Weavers,” Heine attacks ‘God’ with a ferocity that even Dickinson in the poem I have just cited does not muster.   “He only mocked us, hoaxed, derided.”  God in this line is not the distant observer, unwilling to show compassion, of Dickinson’s poem.  This is an oppressor-God, mocking our silly belief, teasing us (setting a hoax before us), putting us down for believing in Him.  This is not atheism (no God) but something harsher, critical in the extreme.  God not only doesn’t care, we are playthings to him, beneath his contempt.  He lets us suffer; we should, Heine maintains, get rid of Him.  Heine welcomes what Nietzsche foretold, the death of God. 

               The stanza affects one so strongly because it attacks the most sacred, the deepest-held, of our beliefs, that a supernatural being who is beyond us cares about us.  Wrong, says Heine.  We must get rid of this belief, as the weavers shape a new tapestry about a world “where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,” as Robert Hayden wrote in his lovely poem about Frederick Douglass. This stanza is as strong an attack on the root beliefs of our society as any I have ever read.  Even after 184 years, the stanza is still deeply disturbing.

               So we move on to the concluding stanza, very similar to the first:

The loom is creaking, the shuttle flies;
Nor night nor day do we close our eyes.
Old Germany, your shroud's on our loom,
And in it we weave the threefold doom;
We weave; we weave!

We cannot be blind to the movement of history, discarding what no longer serves the interest of the people.  “Old Germany” is dying: Its “shroud” is being woven by the weavers.  Doom:  The death of the state, of its leaders, of God itself.  A new future is before us.

               Heinrich Heine was many things.  A poet of love, a poet of destructive desire, a satirist, he is hard to categorize.  It makes him, for me, difficult to read, although I am not without admiration for the wonderful ease of his writing, for his ability to write simply yet strike deep chords beneath that simplicity.  But what pierces me most is his capacity to imagine our world with the clearest eyesight.  As Yeats wrote on his epitaph,

 Cast a cold eye 
 On life, on death.   
       Horseman, pass by!

 It was not Yeats, but Heine, who cast this cold eye, even as he was hot with revolutionary fervor.