Authors

German · 1797–1856

Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine was the greatest German lyric poet after Goethe — his Buch der Lieder (1827) was set by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Mahler to become the most musically influential poetry collection in German — and one of the century's sharpest satirical essayists. Of Jewish background, he converted to Christianity ('the entrance ticket to European civilization,' he called it, bitterly) but remained an outsider everywhere. He spent the last twenty-five years of his life in Paris, a committed satirist of German nationalism and Prussian militarism. He died after eight years bedridden from a spinal disease, still writing.