from In the Mattress-Grave

For the last eight years of his life (from 1848 to 1856) Heine was painfully and increasingly paralysed by a disease of the spinal cord which confined him to what he referred to in his writings as his ‘Matratzengruft’ (mattress-grave). The illness may have been acute intermittent porphyria or it may have been venereal in origin – no one really knows. He suffered badly from cramps, bed-sores and sleeplessness as well as from the ravages of his illness. He was also chronically short of money, having lived for virtually his entire working life from his writings.  Born and brought up as a Jew, in 1825 he converted to Lutheranism in the hope of improving his career prospects. They were not improved and he changed his plans in any case. However, apostacy remained one of his recurring themes… In 1848 he spent from February to April in a hospital. After mid-May he was never to walk again. The paralysis would affect sometimes one part of his body, sometimes another: ‘My lips are lamed like my feet, my eating tools are lamed, as well as my excretory organs.  I can neither chew nor crap; I am fed like a bird. This non-life is not to be borne.’  But bear it he did, with a stoicism which surprised even himself, and with practically no reduction in his creative output…


Weltlauf

The way of the world is such that those
Who’ve got shall get (and why should they give?),
...