Admired by Marx, quoted by August Bebel in the Reichstag, published by Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of the Spartakist uprising, banned by the Nazis, re-written by Brecht and by Wolf Biermann, Heine's Germany: A Winter's Tale is one of the most political poems in European history. It is also one of the most entertaining, sometimes called "the wittiest feuilleton in world literature".
Published four years before the revolutions of 1848, it reflects the extent of Heine's friendship with Marx, and takes beautifully-judged satiric swipes at Prussian expansionism, German Romanticism, liberal complacency and a swarm of Heine's fellow writers. A work of sly wit, magical realism and epicurean relish, polemic and fantasy, the poem looks forward prophetically to the German future. Heine's chief concerns - exile, war and revolution, art and propaganda, political repression and cultural identity, the threat of hyper-power hegemony - are as relevant today as they were one hundred and sixty years ago.
"This poem is broad and high-minded. It sneeers at time-serving in a way most of our modern poets, in search of a ready audience, a market, daren't. Imagination, it says, is all that can save us. Behind all its clever, sharp, funy vitriol is a quiet plea: let power cede to imagination and insight and we may make a world worth living in."
John Goodby lectures in English at the University of Wales Swansea. He has written extensively on Irish poetry and is the author of Irish Poetry Since 1950: from Stillness into History (2000). He is also the editor of Irish Studies: the Essential Glossary (2004) and Dylan Thomas: A New Casebook (2002). His critical study of Dylan Thomas, Under the Spelling Wall: the Critical Fates of Dylan Thomas, is published this year. His first book of poems, A Birmingham Yank, was published by Arc in 1998.
Germany: A Winter's Tale, by Heinrich Heine
(translated by John Goodby)
ISBN 0-9548691-3-3
Price: £7.99
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