Heinrich Heine

Born in Düsseldorf on December 13, 1797, Heinrich Heine became one of the most influential German writers of the 19th century. He studied law in Bonn, Göttingen, and Berlin, but literature drew him much more strongly, and his early poems later made up Buch der Lieder (The Book of Songs), the work that brought him lasting fame.

Heine is especially remembered for lyric poems that composers such as Schubert and Schumann set to music, helping his writing travel far beyond the page. But he was more than a poet of love and longing: he was also a journalist, essayist, and literary critic whose writing could be elegant, ironic, and politically daring.

After leaving Germany, he spent much of his later life in Paris, where he wrote about European politics, culture, and ideas with unusual clarity and bite. His final years were marked by severe illness, yet he continued to produce memorable work until his death in Paris on February 17, 1856.