200th birthday of Heinrich Heine - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1997 - 110 Pfennig

Heinrich Heine, poet and journalist, was born on December 13, 1797 in Dusseldorf. Although he belonged to a Jewish family, he attended the Catholic Lyceum. He studied law in Bonn, Berlin and Göttingen, completed his law degree in 1825 and was baptized Protestant in the same year. Already during his studies he published his first poems and journalistic texts. Throughout his travels he wrote critically analyzing and literarily pointed reports, which were published in four volumes under the title "Reisebilder" and brought him the first literary success. At the same time his first poems appeared, collected as the "Book of Songs." Despite the literary success Heine already felt at the time that the political climate in Germany with more severe censorship, anti-Semitic exclusion and increasingly reactionary tendencies threatened to become unbearable for him, and therefore relocated in 1831 to Paris. In the sense of a cultural encounter between Germany and France, Heine endeavored from his circle of life to achieve mutual understanding; With his reports and essays he informed the German public about French culture and politics, he tried to give French readers an insight into German philosophy and literature. When the German Bundestag banned Heine's writings in 1835, the poet's return to Germany was no longer possible. Heine lived in exile in Paris, which he only left for short visits to Germany in 1843 and 1844. Since 1848 Heine was tied to his "mattress tomb" by a serious illness, he died on February 17, 1856 in Paris. (Text: Dr. Ursula Roth, Heinrich Heine Institute, Dusseldorf)