SOURCE: Holub, Robert C. “Heinrich Heine on the Slave Trade: Cultural Repression and the Persistence of History.” The German Quarterly 65, no. 3-4 (summer-fall 1992): 328-39.

In the following essay, Holub discusses Heine's denunciation of the slave trade in his poem “Das Sklavenschiff.”

On 3 August 1492 Christopher Columbus, born Cristoforo Colombo, set sail from Spain on a voyage he presumed would take him to the coast of Asia. Since at that time the Julian calendar was in use, the actual date of the voyage was 24 July 1492, almost exactly five hundred years prior to the AATG convention that commemorated this event by making its theme European-American relations.¹ When, a little over two months later, Columbus set foot on an island in the Bahamas, probably San Salvador or Watlings, he inaugurated a connection between Europe and the so-called New World that would have profound effects on world history. In the Western World, particularly...