The statue of a poet
May 26, 2019 Leave a comment
Third in a series of three
During World War One Kaiser Wilhelm II stood before the statue in the Corfu gardens and with spite, he asked, What is this bloke doing here? Once again, there was the threat of destruction.
The Kaiser said of Heine that he was “the worst bastard of the German poets”, especially too, because the poet was of Jewish descent, whose work had been banned in Germany since 1843. Sadistically, the Kaiser remarked: “It is necessary to forgive my enemies, but not before they are hanged.”
The statue was removed from Corfu. With the ever-present threat of destruction, it was taken into private ownership by Julius Campe, the publisher of Heine’s work. In the years of the 1920s he offered the statue to Hamburg. A public debate followed. It was led by Adolf Barteis, a writer who, in the next decade when National Socialism reigned, would serve that cause well. The statue was once again decried for Heine’s “anti-patriotic attitude”. Campe received threats about the statue. The urgency to get the statue out of Germany grew.
The solution came from Olga, Campe’s daughter, who had married a rich man in Paris, Edmond Bouchard, director of theatres, including the Folies Bergère. Coming from Toulon, Bouchard had a property there.
Toulon now became the destination of Heine’s statue. In 1939, the statue was taken by boat from Hamburg to Marseilles. On arrival, it was transported by truck to Toulon.
During the German occupation in the Second World War, the statue was carefully hidden. There it stayed until the Germans were defeated by the Allies. In 1956, the town councillers of Toulon agreed that the statue of the German poet should be installed in the Jardin d’Acclimatation.
The Gzrimek bronze of Heine in Berlin
German writers, historians and those concerned pleaded with Toulon in 1997, the two-hundredth centenary of Heine’s birth, for the statue to be returned to Germany. In 1954 they had already erected two statues to Heine, one in Berlin and one in Bremen. The sculptor was Grzimet. His work was not without controversy as the matter of Heinrich Heine had become most sensitive in post-war Germany, after more than a century of persecution. The university at Düsseldorf was named after Heine, together with streets and parks throughout Germany.
The statue of Heinrich Heine, Toulon
The statue has remained in Toulon. He sits there in a brown study under the trees of the botanical garden, his hair tousled. With his right hand, I’m told, he points to the future. On his lap there is a manuscript and we can’t really read anything of it. It could be a love poem; it could be a tract on equality.
He has a neighbour — a memorial relief of Frédéric Mistral, the Provencal poet who received the Nobel prize in 1905. I believe that the people of Toulon will look after their German, especially in the current climate of anti-semitism in France (February, 2019), but also because the words of a poet know no national boundaries.
© Will van der Walt
www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com
Les Semboules, Antibes
May, 2019
Sources
La Statue du poète Heine « Réfugiée » à Toulon, by André Peyrègne. Nous, Nice-Matin. 16th February, 2019
Images
Wikipedia – Kaiser Wilhelm, Heinrich Heine
“The highest conception of the lyric poet was given to me by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of millennia for an equally sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection… And how he employs German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language.” – Friedrich Nietzche, Ecce Homo, quoted from Wikipedia
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