HEINRICH HEINE AND THE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE. THE IMAGE REFLECTED IN ROMANIAN CRITICAL ESSAYS
HEINRICH HEINE AND THE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE. THE IMAGE REFLECTED IN ROMANIAN CRITICAL ESSAYS

Summary/Abstract: The critical essays and the newspaper articles published in Romanian starting with the second half of the 19th century up to the present days present both Heine’s relation with his mother and with his teenage sweetheart, Josepha, also known under the name of Sefchen. Most of the biography studies published in Romania deal with the image of Heine’s ideal woman, the love of his life, his cousin, Amalia Heine, who never shared his feelings, thus tragically marking not only his entire life, but also his work and his health. Amalia is the ideal woman all Romanian critics resort to whenever they talk about Heine’s source of inspiration for his love poems included in the volume Buch der Lieder. In his monograph entitled Heinrich Heine, vestitor al timpurilor noi (Heinrich Heine, a Herald of New Times), Dumitru Hîncu points out the poet’s friendship with the German literary hostess Rahel Varnhagen, who warmly received Heine into her literary salon attended only by the enlightened Berlinese minds of that time. During that period, Heine completed his education, becoming an expert in all domains. Both this monograph and the interwar and postwar newspaper articles deal with his French wife Mathilde and “La Mouche,” the young Austrian woman-writer who managed to bring happiness into the last years of his life.

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