Back home. Yes, it is home, it feels that way. Marveling at the pink-hat masses who stood in the way of alternative facts yesterday. Recovering from being body frisked, twice, once at each airport on the way home. In a cabin, having to open my clothes. Must be emanating danger vibes – my thoughts perhaps, creating the view into the oval office with its new golden curtains.

These very thoughts right now swirl around Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856), the question of memory, the idea of resistance. You know him as a German poet immortalized by Schubert’s music; his works were burnt by the Nazis, his memorial melted down by them. He considered himself a freedom fighter and his barbed wit and subversive thinking made him a danger to authoritarians of any age.

 

It took until 1982 to unveil a new statue in his city of Hamburg, financed mostly by private citizen, with a courageous senator of culture fighting for a prominent location in front of the town hall. Heine’s prediction that “where they burn books they will soon burn citizens” had been prescient.

 

The new memorial shows the poet, on a base that reminds of the book burnings; wouldn’t you know it, I saw “Mein Kampf” scratched into on of the books; since it was misspelled I assume it was not done by the sculptor, Waldemar Otto.

 

 

 

 

 

I chose some verses to remind us about what is happening here, and now, and in so many populist movements we are currently witnessing.

 

They are from Germany. A Winter’s Tale. (Section Caput I.)

He talks about a young woman who is singing us to sleep, and how he will tell a different story in his travel report (the German title is really “A Winter Journey.”)

She sang the heavenly lullaby,
The old song of abnegation,
By which the people, this giant fool,
Is lulled from its lamentation.

I know the tune, I know the words,
I also know every author;
I know they secretly drank wine,
While publicly preaching water.

Still checking if he also wrote about “alternative facts.”

Here are his words to music: