The Silesian Weavers (1844)

This is a poem by Heinrich Heine (1797- 1856).  In that year Silesian Weavers had assembled to protest stavation wages.

Heine was born in 1797, scion of a Jewish family of merchants, bankers, and doctors.  He spent his
childhood in Düsseldorf, the capital of a small Rhenish duchy, which showed itself to be liberal and tolerant towards Jews. This tolerance was partly the result of Napoleon's progressive laws. 

Heine studied Law, and was awarded a doctorate by the University of Göttingen in 1825. The same year he had himself baptized, less as an act of conviction than expedience, as only members of a Christian church could apply for the civil services.

All the time that Heine was persuing law, he continued to pursue his interests in philosophy, history and literature and at an early age he started to publish romantic poetry, soon gaining fame as the German Byron.

His first books appeared in 1822 in Berlin, then in 1826 in Hamburg where he became closely associated with the publisher Julius Campe. His literary success, however, was in sharp contrast to his failure as an academic, both in Berlin and in Hamburg.  He made a living as a full-time writer after his breakthrough came in 1826/27 and 1830/31 with the appearance of his "Travel Pictures". Written in easy prose interlaced with poems, these pieces are a yarn spun of fact and fiction, wit and sarcasm and a heavy dose of social criticism. It was this particular style which made him the founder of the modern feuilleton.

A collection of poems published in 1827 under the name "Book of Songs" spread his fame beyond Germany's borders. Several of these poems were set to music by composers like Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert.

When in Paris Heine became a popular member of the cultural scene and joined the group of
socialist thinkers around Count Saint-Simon who propagated a Golden Age of equality in which everybody prospered, benignly governed by an elite of scholars and technocrats. He looked at his role as an intermediary between Germany and France by familiarising through his writings one country with the other. Yet, Germany still beckoned him. And a visit to Hamburg resulted in his verse-satire "Germany - A Winter Tale" (1844) which his close associate of that time, Karl Marx, published in full in his newspaper "Forwards". This sharp attack on reactionary conditions in Germany was followed by "Atta Troll. A Mid-Summer Night's Dream" (1847) in which he poked fun at the utopian political writing then prevailing in Germany.  He died in 1856 in Paris.

In gloomy eyes there wells no tear. 

Grinding their teeth, they are sitting here:

 "Germany, your shroud's on our loom;

 And in it we weave the threefold doom....We weave; we weave.

"Doomed be the God who was deaf to our prayer 

In Winter's cold and hunger's despair. 

All in vain we hoped and bided; 

He only mocked us, hoaxed, derided.....We weave; we weave.

"Doomed be the king, the rich man's king,
Who would not be moved by our suffering,
Who tore the last coin out of our hands,

And let us be shot by his blood-thirsty bands...We weave; we weave.

"Doomed be the fatherland, false name, 

Where nothing thrives but disgrace and shame, 

Where flowers are crushed before they unfold, 

Where the worm is quickened by rot and mold...We weave; we weave.

"The loom is creaking, the shuttle flies; 

Nor night nor day do we close our eyes. 

Old Germany, your shroud's on our loom, 

And in it we weave the threefold doom; ...We weave; we weave!"