SOURCE: Del Caro, Adrian. “Sendung, Blendung, Nichtvollendung: Heine on Romantic Historiography.” Heine-Jahrbuch 36 (1997): 124-33.

In the following essay, Del Caro examines Heine's stances on some tenets of Romanticism.

Possessing what was arguably Europe's worst digestion and worst pair of eyes, the physical and soon to be mental wreck Friedrich Nietzsche quipped in »Ecce homo«: »Der deutsche Geist ist eine Indigestion, er wird mit Nichts fertig.«¹ Under this precarious omen we are now prepared to explore three of Heine's favorite ideas as they typify romantic historiography; I have provided the second idea, namely Blendung, as the bridge between Sendung and Nichtvollendung.

The renewed sense of mission common to both theoretical and patriotic Romanticism is expressed in a longing for cultural unity, inasmuch as thinkers considered Germany, truncated in the flesh but united in the spirit, to be ripe for a new task. This thinking was shared by the Schlegels, Novalis...