"Do you know where I should go? Straight to church." On his friends
expressing disbelief, he went on: "Certainly, to church! Where
should a man go on crutches? Naturally, if I could walk without
crutches, I should go to the laughing boulevards or the Jardin
Mabille." The story is told in England without the conclusion,
as a piece of "Christian Evidence."
But even as to his theism Heine was never more than wilfully and
poetically a believer. In 1849 we find him jesting about "God" and
"the Gods," declaring he will not offend the lieber Gott, whose
vultures he knows and respects. "Opium is also a religion," he
writes in 1850. "Christianity is useless for the healthy ... for
the sick it is a very good religion." "If the German people in
their need accept the King of Prussia, why should not I accept the
personal God?" And in speaking of the postscript to the Romancero
he writes in 1851: "Alas, I had neither time nor mood to say there
what I wanted--namely, that I die as a Poet, who needs neither
religion nor philosophy, and has nothing to do with either. The
Poet understands very well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the
abstract jargon of Philosophy; but neither the religious gentry nor
those of philosophy will ever understand the Poet." A few weeks
before his death he signs a New Year letter, "Nebuchadnezzar
II, formerly Prussian Atheist, now Lotosflower-adorer." At
this time he was taking immense doses of morphia to make his
tortures bearable. A few hours before his death a querying
pietist got from him the answer: "God will pardon me; it is his
business." The Geständnisse, written in 1854, ends in absolute
irony; and his alleged grounds for giving up atheism, sometimes
quoted seriously, are purely humorous (Werke, iv, 33). If it be
in any sense true, as he tells in the preface to the Romancero,
that "the high clerisy of atheism pronounced its anathema" over
him--that is to say, that former friends denounced him as a weak
turncoat--it needed only the publication of his Life and Letters
to enable freethinkers to take an entirely sympathetic view of his
case, which may serve as a supreme example of "the martyrdom of
man." On the whole question see Strodtmann, as cited, ii, 372 sq.,
and the Geständnisse, which should be compared with the earlier
written fragments of Briefe über Deutschland (Werke, iii, 110),
where there are some significant variations in statements of fact.
Since Heine, German belles lettres has not been a first-rate influence
in Europe; but some of the leading novelists, as Auerbach and Heyse,
are well known to have shared in the rational philosophy of their age;
and the Christianity of Wagner, whose precarious support to the cause
of faith has been welcomed chiefly by its heteroclite adherents,
counts for nothing in the critical scale. [1872]