B008AITH44 EBOK (62 page)

Unverfälschte
deutsche
Worte
(Pure German Words), the newspaper of the All-German Party, excoriated Heine and Heine’s admirers. “Let Jews and those who are enslaved by the Jews rave about this shameless Jew; we Germans turn from him with loathing and call out to all our racial comrades: Here you see how the Jew thinks, how all of Jewry takes his part, how they beat the drums for him and how, sadly, some Germans also march to the beat of this Jewish drum.”

Because of press censorship, the newspaper could not attack the Empress directly. It printed an editorial vituperating against the “liberal Jewish press,” for “drawing even a most highly placed lady into its agitation.” Thus, though in roundabout ways (which every newspaper reader of the day understood), Elisabeth was ranked among those “enslaved by the Jews.”
⁶⁰

Even without mentioning names, the following sentence amounted to a reprimand of the Empress. “Is there not enough hardship and misery in Vienna, in Austria, not enough people who are hungry and cold through no fault of their own, and is caring for them not our first duty as citizens?”
⁶¹

The French anti-Semite Édouard Drumont, in his
La
Fin
d’un
monde
, also attacked both Crown Prince Rudolf and Empress Elisabeth for their pro-Semitic attitude. He sharply criticized Elisabeth’s visit to Heine’s sister
in Hamburg and quoted at length Heine’s macabre satire of Marie
Antoinette,
a Habsburg. “Sovereigns and noble lords love the Jews … they have drunk of the secret love potion, they love those who mock them, defame them, and betray them, and they feel nothing but indifference for those who defend them!”
⁶²

The liberal newspapers of the monarchy (called “Jewish papers” in anti-Semitic jargon) expressed their gratification at the Empress’s allegedly pro-Semitic attitude. They praised Elisabeth in every way; the chorus included the Vienna
Tageblatt,
whose editor-in-chief, Moritz Szeps, was one of Crown Prince Rudolf’s closest friends (a fact unknown to the Empress).

But Elisabeth had no intention of actively intervening in the quarrel and joining the battle for tolerance, as Rudolf thought. She avoided all
political
partisanship, remaining untouched by both the praise and the abuse handed out by the newspapers. She simply did not care what the public thought about the Heine memorial or how her own position was judged. Her relationship to Heine, whatever its form, was a purely personal matter. “The journalists think highly of me for being an admirer of Heine,” she told Christomanos. “They are proud of the fact that I love Heine, but what I love in him is his boundless contempt for his own humanity and the sadness worldly matters inspired in him.”
⁶³

Elisabeth withdrew without a struggle. In 1889, she gave up her support of the Heine memorial in Düsseldorf and retired in disgust.

Later, the anti-Semitic newspapers claimed that a strongly worded letter from Bismarck to the Austrian foreign minister had persuaded the Empress to this step. In this letter, Bismarck was said to have pointed out, “
courteously
but nevertheless very plainly, what an unpleasant impression must have been made on the imperial family by the enthusiasm of Empress Elisabeth for a poet who never had anything but mockery, insults, and scorn for the House of Hohenzollern and the German people.”
⁶⁴
There is no proof for this statement in the diplomatic correspondence, but it does show how much Elisabeth’s private interests were given a political
interpretation.
Herter’s Heine memorial, intended for the Hofgarten in
Düsseldorf,
was subsequently erected by German-Americans in New York. It still stands in a small park at 161st Street and Mott Avenue.
⁶⁵

The Empress now ordered her own Heine memorial on Corfu, on the grounds of the Achilleion. She carefully examined all extant portraits of Heine; she also invited Heine’s nephew Gustav Heine-Geldern to visit her, so that he could advise her which of the portraits was the best likeness.
Then she decided on a statue by the Danish sculptor Hasselriis; it
represented
the ailing Heine during the last years of his life, tired, his head drooping, and his hand holding a piece of paper with the lines:

The Empress had the figure placed in a special small temple on a rise in the gardens. Even her chief chamberlain, Baron Nopcsa, was horrified. He found it unsuitable that “the poor man is dressed only in a shirt (which amuses Her Majesty greatly),” wrote Countess Festetics. Tested by
adversity,
she added, “I think that it is still better than if he were in the costume of a Greek deity—that is, naked.”
⁶⁶

When she first inspected the installation, the Empress told the sculptor, “Heine himself would be pleased with this spot…. For here is everything he loved! The beauties of nature, a laughing sky above, splendid
surroundings,
palms, cypresses, and pines. Over there, the mountains and down here, the sea he loved so much, such a singular, refreshing peace.”
⁶⁷
This was to mean primarily that the monument had been taken away from those people of whom Heine thought as little as did his disciple Elisabeth. Nature alone, distance from humanity, was the proper frame for a monument to Heine such as Elisabeth envisaged.

(The fate of this private Heine memorial after Elisabeth’s death is worthy of note. The Emperor’s older daughter, Gisela, inherited the Achilleion and sold the highly impractical castle to the Imperial Family Fund, which in 1907 sold it at far below its construction cost to Emperor Wilhelm II. The first thing Wilhelm did was to have the Heine monument removed—with the approval of the anti-Semitic press. It announced mockingly to “the Israelite people” that the “‘Man with the solitary tear’ had spent most of its time staring at the Blue Adriatic.”
⁶⁸

(The statue was offered to the city of Düsseldorf as well as to Hamburg —in vain. Finally it was acquired by a café owner, who used it to advertise his premises by placing it between the two doors of his Heine Coffeehouse. Today the statue has found a more dignified home in the Jardin de Mourillon in Toulon. The little temple, however, which Elisabeth built specifically for her “Master” Heinrich Heine, still stands on Corfu; instead of Heine, the Empress herself is now honored by a monument under the temple roof.)