Throughout his life Heine liked to identify himself as the ‘author of the Reisebilder’, those ‘travel pictures’ that brought him his first public success, whether as fame or as notoriety – cardinally through the cheeky combination of wit and sentiment in his Harzreise. While it is possible to identify models for Heine's prose methods, both in the rationalistic, political travel writing of Georg Forster's Ansichten vom Niederrhein (Views of the Lower Rhine, 1791–94) and in the divagatory style of Laurence Sterne in A Sentimental Journey, Heine constantly develops his allusive methods independently and, in this way, generates a unique vehicle for cultural, social, and political critique. The pictures of travel Heine wrote between 1825 and 1830, and among which he subsequently included some earlier texts on Berlin, combine the freedoms of a fictionalized autobiography, the critical aims of the essay proper, and the cultural and topographical description of the places he visits. Here I consider, particularly in the works dealing with cities, the ways in which Heine's innovative style responds to aspects of the transition to modernity under conditions of censorship. If, on the one hand, the censor makes any form of direct political engagement difficult, Heine recognizes that other factors – economic and cultural changes – also play a part. The Reisebilder deal tactically and thematically with these conditions.