ABSTRACT
The verse-epic Atta Troll is, among many other things, Heine’s counterblast to the political poets who emerged around 1840. In the preface he deplores their empty bombast, their utilitarian attitude to poetry, their deadly seriousness, and their naïveté even about politics. Heine attributes these qualities also to Ludwig Börne, who tried vainly to draw Heine into his futile exile politics in Paris, and who regarded Heine, as his letters to Jeannette Wohl show, with almost obsessive irritation. To the rigidly upright Börne, Heine seemed frivolous and unprincipled; to Heine, with his gift for seeing many facets of every question, Börne seemed in exile to have lost his sense of humour and to have become narrowly single-minded and deadly serious. In Ludwig Börne: Eine Denkschrift, a text with many links to Atta Troll, Heine tells how, on their first meeting in Paris, Börne asked Heine what he had first gone to see, expecting that he would have visited the tombs of Rousseau and Voltaire and other heroes of the Enlightenment. Heine replied that instead he had gone to the Bibliothèque Royale to see the Manesse Codex, the illustrated manuscript (transferred in 1888 to the University Library at Heidelberg) which contains the texts of medieval German Minnesänger. 1 Whether this story is true, or whether Heine invented it to tease Börne or amuse the reader, it serves to typify two contrasting outlooks. Börne represents the obsessively political character, dedicated to his principles and blind to inconvenient changes in the world around him, for whom the past is merely a series of monuments, and who is therefore doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Heine represents the character of wider sympathies, who 65responds to the changing world around him while valuing the past as an independent reality from which he parts with affectionate regret. Atta Troll, the ‘Tendenzbär’ or ‘committed bear’, with his revolutionary principles and his windy rhetoric, is another representative of the outlook ascribed to Börne. Like the ageing Börne, he is humourless. He hates human beings, not only for oppressing animals, but still more for their ability to smile: Menschen, schnippische Kanaillen! Lächelt nur! Von Eurem Lächeln Wie von Eurem Joch wird endlich Uns der große Tag erlösen! (iv. 512) In making his revolutionary thus ‘tierisch ernst’, Heine was acute and prophetic. Not only is Atta Troll, like most revolutionaries, an authoritarian in the making, but revolutionaries and authoritarians are alike notoriously humourless. The philosopher of Fascism, Giovanni Gentile, said that Fascism was too serious for laughter: ‘laughter is of the devil, and true believers do not smile except in bitter sarcasm.’ 2
