“Deutschland ist noch ein kleines Kind”. Heinrich Heine e il Nibelungenlied

Abstract

In Heinrich Heine’s Reise von München nach Genua the Goethian journey, Italy and the Grand Tour’s quest for harmony are respectively transformed into a descent into history and a dissonant symphony. In this context, Verona is the city that acts as a gate to a layered and dense world, in which different peoples have mixed across the centuries, leaving their still perspicuous traces – beside the Romans, the Germans, who settled in this part of Italy and here acquired sober ways and elegant manners. Heine deploys irony, playing with the Romantic clichés in the Volkslieder collections. Among these, Clemens Brentano’s collection of songs Des Knaben Wunderhorn reflecting the German soul in its lyrical vein, while the recently rediscovered Nibelungenlied representing its epic side. Heine’s considerations on collective writing and on writing as a representation of nationhood that can develop into self- celebration as easily as into self-limitation or even self-denigration, arise from the intertwining of the two works. Heine thus moves between these poles, acting as the ‘seismograph’ of an era, as well as the herald of a new literary and historical perspective.