WHAT LIES BENEATH

Portrait of Heinrich Heine by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim Oil on paper on canvas Kunstalle, Hamburg

BOUND by her father’s will, Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, could only marry the man who, choosing among three caskets, chooses the one that contains her portrait. The Rev Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch was taking no chances. He states that after his death if his much younger widow Dorothea marries Casaubon’s much younger, handsome, fair-haired, curly-headed cousin Will Ladislaw she will lose everything.

These men-controlling-women stories are made up but German poet Heinrich Heine, who died on February 17, 1856, proves, yet again, that life is stranger than fiction. When Heine died, aged 58, he left his entire estate to his wife on condition that she remarry. In his will he stipulates why: “Then there will be at least one man to regret my death.”

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, born to non-devout Jewish parents in 1797, in Dusseldorf, then under French occupation, went to a Jewish school, then Catholic schools and studied banking in Frankfurt, and law in Bonn, Berlin and Gottingen, but when his Gedichte (Poems), published when Heine was 24, was an immediate success writing became his focus. He converted to Christianity in 1827, aged 27, to secure German citizenship but his revolutionary views prevented him from being employed in Germany and he settled in Paris in 1831, the year this portrait was painted.

Numerous composers, including Schumann and Schubert, set Heine’s poems to music. His poems live on as does his revolutionary spirit. In 1933 his books were burned in Nazi Germany — an eerie event in the light of words from an 1823 work, Almansor, by Heine: “Wherever books will be burned, men also, in the end, are burned”.

There’s a white marble monument, The Lorelei Fountain, to Heinrich Heine in The Bronx.

When 34-year-old Heine sat for Moritz Daniel Oppenheim he was working as a newspaper correspondent and Oppenheim, three years younger, was already earning a reputation for his large studies of Jewish life and portraits of prominent Jewish people, including members of the Rothschild family.

Oppenheim had studied in Munich, Paris and Rome where he sketched the life of the Jewish ghetto. He settled in Frankfurt and people travelled from all over Europe to see his David Playing the Harp for Saul, painted when he was only 23. He died in 1882 and Isabel Gathof’s 2017 film, The First Jewish Painter, celebrates his life.

In this portrait, Heinrich Heine sits sideways in his blue-black coat. The expression is relaxed, gentle, youthful. A nondescript, abstract, light-and-shadow background allows the confident, intelligent face to shine.

Three years after this portrait was painted Heine met a 19-year-old, illiterate shopgirl Eugenie Mirat, whom he called Mathilde and who didn’t speak German and had no interest in culture or intellectual life. They moved in together in 1836, and in 1841 they married. By 1848 Heine was paralysed, suffered from a spinal disease, now thought to have been caused by lead poisoning, and he spent the last eight years of his life on what he called his mattress grave.

Heinrich Heine’s parting words were: “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est Son metier (God will pardon me, it is His trade).”

But whether the man who married his widow ever did, we don’t know.