SOURCE: Seeba, Hinrich C. “‘Keine Systematie’: Heine in Berlin and the Origin of the Urban Gaze.” In Heinrich Heine's Contested Identities: Politics, Religion, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub, pp. 89-108. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

In the following essay, Seeba credits Heine with a crucial role in developing the “urban gaze” that would emerge in later literature.

Few critics commenting on contested identities and the modern crisis of identity formation can avoid quoting Heinrich Heine's ironically pompous dictum in The Baths of Lucca (1829) that “the great schism of the world” (“der große Weltriß”) runs through the middle of his heart (2: 405). Claiming to be the center of the world and therefore more torn apart than anybody, Heine paradoxically restored the post-romantic craze of subjectivity, being torn (“Zerrissenheit”), to the more objective realm of contradiction (“Widerspruch”), which to him means both the...