Heinrich Heine

Born in Düsseldorf on December 13, 1797, Heinrich Heine became one of the most influential German-language writers of the 19th century. He is especially known for his early lyric poetry, later collected in Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), whose musical language led many composers—including Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Schubert—to set his poems as lieder.

Heine studied law in Bonn, Göttingen, and Berlin, but literature and journalism drew him more strongly than legal work. His writing moved between poetry, travel writing, criticism, and satire, and it often mixed beauty with irony. He was born into a Jewish family and later converted to Protestantism, a step tied to the social limits of his time rather than a simple change of conviction.

From the 1830s onward he lived mostly in Paris, where he wrote about politics, culture, and German intellectual life with unusual liveliness and independence. In his final years, while struggling with severe illness, he continued to write some of his darkest and most powerful work before his death in Paris on February 17, 1856.