Discovering hidden passages

is a great pleasure. I try walking everywhere instead of taking public transport, which so far has worked very well. The walk from the Canadian Cultural Centre through the Tuileries back home to the Marais took about an hour and since I regularly get lost, I discover interesting passages, like the Passage du Grand Cerf or today the Galeries Vivienne, built around 1820. Many of these covered passages, forerunners of today's soulless malls, were left in a state of bad disrepair and even shut down until their revival in the late 20th century.

Frenchification

of names does not stop at writers' names, whereas in German you would never make a Henry Miller into a Heinrich Miller, or Jean-Paul Sartre into a Johannes-Paul Sartre. But apparently it is la coutume to do this here, as can be seen on this street sign. However, the French rendition of Heinrich Heine's name may be attributed to the fact, that Heine emigrated to France because of political reasons and stayed here for the last 25 years of his life and is buried in the Montmartre cemetery. He became a Frenchman by choice although he continued to love his native tongue. Maybe it can be said that he exiled himself to France physically, but remained in the placeless space of his native language.

Anyway, as Germany is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Heine and his complicated relationship with his home country seems to be a fitting topic for today's entry.



Heine wrote, among many other things, a collection of poems, published under the title "Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen". Heine makes satirical, bitingly ironic, bitterly critical and melancholic comments about Germany, which he visited in the winter of 1843 on a rare occasion after having exiled himself to Paris.

The very beginning of the poem in 27 "songs" is quoted in translation below. A bi-lingual version can be found at Google Books here.

"In the mournful month of November t'was,
The winter days had returned,
The wind from the trees the foliage tore,
when I tow'rds Germany journied.

And when at length to the frontier I came,
I felt a mightier throbbing
Within my breast, tears fill'd my eyes,
And I wellnight broke into sobbing.

And when I the German language heard,
Strange feelings each other succeeding,
I felt precisely as though my heart
Right pleasantly were bleeding."

At school, maybe in 7th grade, we had to learn Heine's ballad "Belsazar" by heart, a powerful poem about the blasphemic arrogance of the King of Babylon and his downfall. It made a huge impression on me.