The Feminine in Heine's Life and Oeuvre

Heinrich Heine's literary representations of women and interactions with women vividly demonstrate his own feminine position as a multi-marginal German-Jewish writer of the nineteenth century. Heine, like many Jews of that era, internalized the European cultural stereotype of the Jew as -woman-, that is, as essentially inferior and marginal. His feminine position underscored a shared spiritual affinity, which, despite considerable efforts at disguise, he was unable to deny."