Volume 42, Number 13 · August 10, 1995
End of the Line
By Gabriele Annan
The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris
by Ernst Pawel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pp., $23.00
It took the German poet Heinrich Heine eight years to die. He began in the summer of 1847, when the German press prematurely announced his decease, but he did not draw his last breath until February 1856. He was fifty-seven or else fifty-nine—there is some doubt about his birth date. Ernst Pawel's account covers his last years, when he lay in what he called his 'mattress tomb,' unable to move his legs and sometimes his arms, and in the later stages occasionally unable to speak or see. The tomb moved from one cheap and gloomy Paris apartment to another, with a funeral cortège consisting of his shopaholic, uneducated, neglectful, and enormously fat wife and her inseparable and equally awful friend Pauline, who was supposed to be the housekeeper.
Review, 2034 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |