Platen affair
The Platen affair , a public dispute between the poets Heinrich Heine and August Graf von Platen , was one of the most violent controversies in German literary history.
The trigger for the affair were xenias by the poet Carl Leberecht Immermann , in which he mocked oriental fashion in poetry and Heinrich Heine's 1827 appendix to his travel pictures. Second part published
“ Eastern poets.
It is now big 'mérite to cure Saadi 's way, but it
seems to me whether we are wrong east or west.
Sonsten sang, by the moonlight, Nightingale seu Philomele ;
When Bülbül flutes now , it seems to me to be the same throat.
Old poet, you remind me like Hameln's pied piper ;
Whistle for tomorrow and all the lovely little singers will follow.
For convenience they adore the cows of pious Indians,
That they like Olympus in every cowshed.
Of the fruits that they from the garden grove of Shiraz steal,
they eat too much, the poor, and vomiren then ghazals . "
Platen, who had already turned to that oriental form of poetry in his early works and had published a volume of Ghaselen in 1821 and Neue Ghaselen in 1823 , referred to this criticism and resented the publication of the epigrams. In his comedy The romantic Oedipus (1828), as an allusion to Heine's friend Immermann, he had a character named Nevermann appear and attacked Heine with reference to his Jewish origin. He described it as "the wonderful Petrark of the Lauberhüttenfest " (Immermann compared Heine with Petrarca in a review ), attributed it to "synagogue pride " and, using anti-Semitic clichés, associated it with the "smell of garlic".
Heine had been baptized as a Protestant in 1825 in order to be able to enter the civil service. He was trying to get a professorship at Munich University when Platen's comedy appeared. So he saw in the attacks an intrigue against his plans. He later wrote to his friend Varnhagen von Ense: When the priests in Munich first attacked me, and brought the Jews up on me, I laughed - I thought it was mere stupidity. But when I smelled the system, when I saw the ridiculous ghost image gradually becoming a threatening vampire , when I saw through the intentions of the Platan satyrs , [...] I girded my loin and hit as hard as possible, as quickly as possible.
The blow came in the third volume of the travel pictures published in 1830 . In the last chapter of the Lukka baths , Heine called the count, whose homosexuality he was familiar with, a “poet and warm friend” and did not skimp on derogatory remarks: Platen, who “never touched a woman”, was “more of a man of rump as a man of the head ”, a“ male tribade ”; The Count was praised for his "courtesy towards younger people, with whom he had been the modesty himself, asking with the loveliest humility their permission to come to their room now and then". Other homosexual artists, such as “the ghoulish Iffland ”, are also mentioned.
Heine's application for the professorship finally failed because of these personal attacks on Platen. The "war of annihilation", as he once called the controversy, also influenced his decision to move to Paris in 1831 . The dispute showed that even at this time baptism did not offer the hoped-for protection against hostility and discrimination and that it was not an “entry billet to European culture”, as Heine had once called it.
Contemporaries resented Heine's derogatory remarks about Platen's homosexuality. On the other hand, the literary critic Karl Herloßsohn judged in 1830: "The way in which Heine was attacked by von Platen was also the way in which he had to defend himself." According to this, Heine only used the same weapons with which he was attacked.
As a result of the affair, Graf Platen also chose voluntary exile. From Italy, where he had been since 1826, he did not return permanently to Germany, where he saw himself made impossible by Heine.
Remarks
- ↑ What is meant is Goethe.
- ^ Extract from the play
- ↑ Heinrich Heine Secular Edition (HSA), Vol. 20, p. 385
Texts
- Heinrich Heine: travel pictures . Special edition Pawlak, Herrsching 1985, ISBN 3-8224-1148-5 (2 volumes).
literature
- Hans Mayer : The dispute between Heine and Platen . In: ders .: outsider . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 1981, ISBN 3-518-37236-X , pp. 207-223.
- Christopher Keppel and Joachim Bartholomae (eds.): "Schlaffe Ghaselen" and "Garlic smell". Platen, Immermann and Heine argue about cheeky Jews, warm brothers and true poetry , Männerschwarm Verlag, Hamburg 2012