Heine posed this question in March of 1848 after witnessing a victorious revolution in Paris. For a good one and a half decades he had predicted that what had begun in 1789 and continued in 1830 would soon be brought to a close. All the more paradoxical then, that such a question should haunt one who had never tired of ascertaining the reasonable course of the “affairs of this world,” of interpreting the omens of future progress for the German public, and of branding them into its consciousness. In fact, Heine had initially sought to accelerate the flow of events and, being for the most part furnished with a normative, Enlightenment conception of history spiced with the ideals of the French Revolution, was superbly equipped for such a mission.

The skeptical approach Heine took from 1848 onwards seems incongruous when one considers that he was a former student of Hegel and that his writings as a journalist and historian had paved the way toward a new understanding of French social as well as German intellectual history. Particularly his philosophical treatise of 1834, a brilliant elucidation and defense of the formidable dialectics of history proposed by his Berlin mentor, had successfully traced the development of the German mind from the Reformation to the present day as a revolutionary process in three phases that would necessarily lead from religious upheaval via philosophical revolt to culminate eventually in the “political revolution” that Heine was witnessing in his own time. In conjunction with Saint-Simonian aspirations toward an imminent reconciliation of these historical antagonisms, this vision harbored an almost solemn faith in scientific and technological progress and in a universal liberation of humanity that would even encompass human sensuality. But only fourteen years later confessions such as “ich glaube an den Fortschritt, ich glaube, die Menschheit ist zur Glückseligkeit bestimmt” (B 3: 519) were overshadowed by the impression that the “affairs of this world” inevitably veered toward unhappiness.

Observing the Revolution from the Margins

For Heine the year 1848 was as eminently symbolic as it was tragic. The long-awaited revolution failed and he himself was vanquished, as his body disintegrated.