Description

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Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (Düsseldorf, December 13, 1797 – Paris, February 17, 1856) was a German poet of Jewish descent. He was born Harry Heine, but was baptized Lutheran in 1825 under the name Heinrich Heine. However, he did not develop a more inner connection with religion until he lay paralyzed on his sickbed in Paris at the end of his life, where he had lived in self-imposed exile since 1831. He is buried in the Montmartre cemetery. Heine belonged to the Romantic era and made many ironic and quirky poems that still appeal to people today. He sometimes collaborated with his contemporary Karl Marx. Inwardly, Heine was a contradictory person, on the one hand he felt like a German, on the other he felt a world citizen; he had the same kind of mixed feelings about Judaism and Romanticism. His statement “dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen” is famous (“where books are burned, people are eventually also burned”, which is a prophetic preview of what would later happen in Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’. A famous collection of poetry by him is Das Buch der Lieder (Het Liederenboek), which includes Die Lorelei and Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, after whom the Heinrich Heine University in his hometown Düsseldorf was named after him in 1988.

Source: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Heine