A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.
Bibliographic notes: George Prochnik's Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution appears in Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series. Jefferson Chase's Inciting Laughter: The Development of "Jewish Humor" in 19th Century German Culture (De Gruyter, 2000) has an incisive analysis of the Heine-Platen affair, seen against the German publishing industry of the period. (I used Jeff's translation of "The Baths of Lucca," and he also improved my translation of Platen.) Modern writing on Platen in English is scant, a notable exception being Adrian Daub's "Platen's Retreat: On the Poetics and Ethics of Memorizing Ballads," German Quarterly 85:2 (2012), pp. 137–155. The standard work on Platen in German is Peter Bumm's August Graf von Platen: Eine Biographie (Schöningh, 1990). You can read a translation of Karl Kraus's fascinating essay "Heine and the Consequences" in Jonathan Franzen's The Kraus Project (FSG, 2013). I also consulted Jeffrey Sammons's Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton, 1979); Max Brod's Heinrich Heine (Allert de Lange, 1934); Robert C. Holub's "Heine's Sexual Assaults: Towards a Theory of the Total Polemic," Monatshefte 73:4 (1981), pp. 415–428; Jens Brüggemann's Der Kampf der Außenseiter: Die satirische Heine-Platen Kontroverse als Spiegel antijüdischer Ressentiments im Vormärz (GRIN Verlag, 2008); Thomas Mann's 1930 essay on Platen; and Hans Mayer's Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters, trans. Denis M. Sweet (MIT Press, 1982).
