I'm afraid the English Wikipedia intimated correctly that this was not Heine's finest hour. For a lover of Heine's feuilleton writing and a student of Junges Deutschland (such as I) it barely serves as the intended helper into Junges Deutschland; one is better off reading the huge appendices in the latest edition of Gutzkow's Wally and, of course, just reading Börne's Paris Letters themselves. It's not all bad. Heine is, for better or worse, funny as hell. He shows a genuine love and admiration for Börne and Menzel (the latter whom I still need to read), and a willingness to make himself look like an idiot to stand up for his friends. His comments on the psychology of exile couldn't be improved today.
Nevertheless the reader finds oneself constantly wondering who the intended audience was for this book. To put it short, Heine spends wwaaaaaaayyyy too much time griping about his own life, organizes the five books into sometimes-incomprehensible collections of pity parties and beery recollections, and even goes out of his way about page 80 to say that in this whole book he desires not to add any critique whatever to Börne's work, but rather merely to pose the man as he remembers him. So what? Heine never answers. One gets the feeling that Heine was sick and let this thing loose to make money with a final insistence that he was a political writer worthy of note. But was he? Harzreise is political memory enough for me. Speaking of which, the moment I reopened my Harzreise, there was a quote in the very front of the thing by Börne, so Heine must feel something about his writing.
Before we learn what that was, he goes out of his way to diss Tieck (any UCSC grads in the house?? Remember Tieck??), jams paragraphs that should've been straight political analysis with his poetic goofy stuff, weighs the decisions by the "radical and authoritarian parties" to label him and his comrades as politically such and such, and generally demonstrates that he should've been happy as a poet. As a writer who himself would like to contribute to political and social thought, I found this book very cautionary.
In the end Heine makes his worst mistake, which is to put in a long citation of the Paris Letters in which Börne critiques Heine. As we read, we're reminded how much better an essayist Börne was than Heine, and we find ourselves, having survived this book, agreeing with Börne's spot-on and lyrically beautiful analogies on Heine's shortcomings.
When you read this stuff, you have to remember that this was early journalism, and free thought was made practically possible by a free press. So we're going to find all the extravagance, individual weirdness and desperate charm in this kind of writing by people who could be banned, jailed or exiled just for writing. There was a certain class with access to this technology, and we're going to get that class's perspectives. Now take that awareness and go see the rampant classism on GR!
A worthy read, but not a book for anyone near a beginner; for pros, not a great defense of Heine's writing (and character, he insists!) nor a great summary of Börne's work. Read it for the long quotes in the first two books, and hope that Börne could really talk that sexy in person. ( )