The Lyrical "I" in Heine's Heimkehr and Lazarus Poems

Abstract

The thesis examines Heine's use of the poetic "I" first in the Heimkehr section of Buch der Lieder, in which the poetic persona is "ein deutscher Dichter, bekannt im deutschen Land," and then considers Heine's use of the poetic narrator "Lazarus" to govern his late poems written from the mattress grave. While the Heimkehr poems bring the poetic persona's disappointment in love together with the poet's own misery at his lack of a place in German literary and political society, Heine's later use of the figure of Lazarus permits a prophetic representation of a particularly modern homelessness: the dissolution of local community and the redefinition of dwelling, which Heidegger calls the basic human act, in terms of ever more technological, disembodied abstraction. In a final step, the later poems, marked by the poet's increased turn toward a second-person interlocutor and enriched by the figure of Lazarus and his literary burden of poverty, are shown to elucidate the most universal human condition of contingency and mortality. The thesis has recourse to literary criticism of other epic poets' use of personal poetic personae and provides close readings of the selected poems while drawing on several Heine scholars to explicate the significance of the poetic narrators of each sequence.