The Political Power of Stone: Statues in Heinrich Heine’s Oeuvre

Sophie Boyer

In his 1835 essay on the literary production of his time, The Romantic School, Heinrich Heine expresses boundless admiration for the great Goethe and his masterworks, comparing the latter to the beautiful statues exhibited in the Louvre. However, in a narrative twist typical of Heine’s ironic mode, this comparison simultaneously reveals Goethe’s main flaw: just as statues are barren creatures, Goethe’s aesthetically perfect works do not bring forth deeds and are thus condemned to literally remain lettre morte. As an art form that imprisons movement, sculpture easily lends itself here to a metaphor for immobility, passivity and ultimately, political indifference – the true cause of Heine’s resentment towards Goethe. Paradoxically, however, Heine’s frequent recourse to statues in his own oeuvre symbolizes the exact opposite, namely revolution on hold or – to speak in Benjaminian terms – “petrified unrest”.

This paper will expose the political agenda hidden behind the literary motif of the statue in Heine’s writings, from the early poetry of The Book of Songs to his prose works Florentine Nights and Gods in Exile to his late poetry written from his “mattress grave”. Far from representing perfection, Heine’s statues often take the form of ruins; the bodies of stone are often subjected to ideological violence, a violence to which they threaten to respond with their potential for vital energy that, when unleashed, can in turn lead to chaos and upheaval. As such, the motif of the statue can be interpreted as instrumental in Heine’s lifelong project of the “rehabilitation of the flesh”, a sensualist philosophy inspired by Saint-Simonian thought, the subversive aim of which was to confer upon humans the dignity of gods.