"Ho dipinto il diavolo sul muro". Il comunismo secondo H. Heine

Cultural historians and Germanists have long focused on the thirteen-month period of intense associating between Heine and Marx; however, the theoretical investigations concerning that time are few and uncertain. The first aspect to point out is that Heine was not only an ‘inspirer’, in the way a poet can ‘inspire’ a philosopher. He handled concepts with the same precision he used to sharpen his verses. His concept of communism was no exception. But as long as literary and philosophical dresses keep being separated in the ‘wardrobe of the spirit’, the results will remain inconspicuous. The point is that Heine speaks of communism every time he speaks of tragedy. Historically speaking, tragedy fades into comedy, which closes an era and opens up to another. More precisely, comedy announces the tragedy of the future that is the tragedy of communism, whose advent, however, remains being indefinitely caught up in the meshes of the liberal and liberalist ‘farce’.