Jews on Ships; or, How Heines Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegels Philosophy of World History

Although it is known that Heine attended Hegelʹs lectures on the philosophy of world history and became involved with the Hegelianinflected “science of Judaism” just before beginning the Reisebilder, little attention has been given to Heineʹs early engagement with Hegelian ideas in his travel writings. This essay argues that Heine transforms the travel narrative into a critique of history by taking the grand historical narrative, with its investment in the “Greek” trope of seafaring, and deconstructing its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development. Through an analysis of the North Sea poems, I show how Heine reworks both the genre of travel literature as self-discovery and Hegelʹs geographically determined movement of “World Spirit.” The result is a nonsystematic Jewish conception of historicity, which, in its embrace of particularity, subverts the absolutism of Hegelʹs philosophy of history by exposing the metaphors on which the philosophyʹs progressive development relies. (TSP)