Heinrich Heine

Heine wrote German lyric poetry of such plainness that Schubert, Schumann and hundreds of others set it to music, and prose so sharp that it made his residence in Germany impossible. Born Jewish in Düsseldorf, he was baptised at twenty-seven for what he called a ticket of admission to European culture, and regretted it; neither community afterwards regarded him as entirely its own. He moved to Paris in 1831 and stayed for the remaining twenty-five years of his life, writing for German readers about France and for French readers about Germany.

The line about book-burning comes from his play Almansor of 1821, written about the burning of the Koran after the fall of Granada. It was engraved in 1985 on the square in Berlin where the Nazi student burning of 1933 took place, and where his own books went into the fire. From 1848 he was paralysed by a spinal disease and spent eight years in what he called his mattress-grave, dictating some of his best work. He asked for no religious rites and lies in Montmartre under a stone bearing a line of his own verse.