Heinrich Heine e a eternidade do instante: entre melancolia, nostalgia e ironia no romantismo alemão

Abstract

This thesis sought to explore the occurrence of melancholic and nostalgic feelings, as well as the defense mechanism and the linguistic resource of irony, which contribute to the eternity of the instant and to the value of subjective experiences exposed in the works of the nineteenth-century German writer Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). A representative of Young Germany, he is considered one of the greatest German poets, alongside Goethe and Schiller, in addition to being considered a writer who anticipated Modernity. Heine saw himself as “the last deposed legendary king” of German Romanticism. Multifaceted and paradoxical, he lived critically between values, without opting for any of them entirely. For the development of the proposed objectives of this research, there was as focus the works: Journey to the Harz and Florentine Nights which, respectively, belong to the collections of Travel Pictures and The Salonn. Melancholy, as a constitutive element of Romanticism, asserts itself in Heine in several aspects, such as, for example: regarding the impossibility of rescuing a lost unity, the mismatch between the “me” proper to each subject and the Cosmos, the state of perpetual becoming, the inquiry, the search, the struggles and the mourning. Also, many times, the narrative images originated by the melancholy propitiate the encounter with the sublime and with the contemplation. The nostalgic is evidenced, from the German vocabularies, as: Sehnsucht, Heimat, Heimweh and Fernweh, that express oppressed desires and dreams in the face of the unattainable. In Journey to the Harz, there is a wanderer seeking to know himself and the world, through interaction with people and in the face of the refuge and support provided by nature; in Florentine Nights, the narrator develops the story as an allegory about love. In both stories, melancholic, nostalgic and ironic feelings were analyzed. Irony can refer to a form of utopia, reflections, questions about the social-historical context, perceptions of a truly disenchanted world and also capable of making Heine admit the negative position in relation to time and society, by denouncing the inevitable degradation of social organization. The heinian romantic dualities multiply and unfold, whose reflection is the failure to constitute a unity or full and ideal objects, which, in turn, will produce more fragments and an eternal becoming of the subject.