SOURCE: "The Dance of Life and Death in Heine and Immermann," in German Life & Letters, Vol. 18, 1964-1965, pp. 130-35.

In the following essay, Jennings provides a detailed comparison of parallel scenes in Immermann's Die Epigonen and Heine's Florentinische Nachte.

As a poet, Heine is deeply concerned with a theme both profound and simple: the struggle of beauty with the forces of death and decay. As a satirical journalist he was concerned with a number of more contemporary matters which have received a good deal of critical attention and will not be discussed here. The threatened effacement of beauty, however, obviously underlies even such a seemingly innocuous poem as the familiar 'Du bist wie eine Blume', and it is probably one of the few things about which Heine is sincere beyond all question. It is also a point with respect to which both his affinity for and his departure...