Page 192 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

may have feared that science may lose something of its value
otherwise. Of course the thought occurs to him that Kant's thought-
process demands a measured language, but no, Kant was a
"philistine". "Only a genius has a new language for a new thought,
but Immanuel Kant was no genius".
That genius consists above all else in creative thought seems
also not to occur to Heine, for him genius and external slickness are
equivalent. There is not much to add to this view, such a genius as
Heine imagines would not have allowed Kant to do any serious
work.
That Kant had proved and demonstrated the indemonstrable
nature of god, that the theoretical reason must be limited to the field
of exact science alone, that the belief in god is determined only
through inner experience, in that Heine sees a "farce". "I must give
up knowledge to make place for faith", said Kant.
And this pure, un-Jewish and ahistorical faith, born of inner
experience, that was what Kant aimed at. That Heine did not
understand Kant is no shame, it has happened to those greater than
he, but how he misunderstood him and how he dared, without any
deep scholarly basis, to express himself, to indulge above all in
witticisms, that is what appears characteristic.
We cannot go closer into it here, once made aware of it one
comes across "philosophical cosmopolitanism", as Heine calls it,
superficiality, technical slickness and effect- seeking representations,
as we could call it, everywhere. The same spirit blows even in the
"Buch der Lieder" and "Romanzero" 413 pampered by our boudoir
ladies. A gushing sentimentality coupled with obscene humour, a
portrayal related only to himself, a constant attempt to represent
himself as highly as possible.
If one has understood this spirit, one will not allow oneself
to be dazzled by the dozen formally successful poems. Heine's
imitations of Goethe's and German folksongs would perhaps have
been forgotten if one of the greatest artists, Robert Schumann, had
not breathed an immortal soul into the empty scaffolding.
As regards the beloved "Lorelei", it should be observed

4,3
[This was his third and last collection of poems published in 1 851.]
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