SOURCE: "Rediscovering Heinrich Heine," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XCVII, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 123-38.

In the following essay, Kuehn offers his impressions of Heine and his poetry.

As with most of the German poems I still know by heart, nearly forty years after I had left Germany, it was my father's voice that first conjured up in my young and receptive soul the images of Heine's poetry, the bewitching images of a world in which joy and sadness, scorn and trust, hope and despair, candor and irony, dream and reality seem, incredibly, to fuse into an awesome and irresistibly attractive symphony. It was not a wholesome world for a child whose inner vision should have been formed by images inspiring love and trust. I never found out whether my mother, being Jewish, was secretly pleased with my early exposure to a Jewish poet, or whether she was troubled...