Gottfried Keller about Heinrich Heine (Pharmacist of Chamounix)

The article gives an idea of ambivalent relation of Swizz writer Gottfried Keller to Heinrich Heine as person and poet. The object of the analyzes is Keller’s big poem “Der Apotheker von Chamounix”, containing both parody on the habits and features of Heine’s artificial world and respect to his person and sympathy for his suffering as well. The matter of satiric derisions is in Keller’s poem the last cycle of Heine’s ballades “Romancero”, whose poetic world gave G.Keller reasons for the parody against some features of Heine’s artificial world. Keller’s satiric poem is divided into two parts with different functions and unlike plots. In the first of them is presented the love triangle between inhabitants of a Swiss settlement Chamounix, everybody of which perished in an implausible death with following transition into the life beyond the grave. The main character of the second part of Keller’s poem are the poet H.Heine himself and figures of his dead literary teachers and opponents, whom Heine encounters during his visit in the paradise. In contradiction to Heine’s antagonists Platen and Börne, both great educators Goethe and Lessing show their sympathy to “Romancero”’s author. The poet Keller mocks over Heine as a figure and the author, but sympathizes with him as a great poet and estimated person. The second part of the poem is connected with the first one only by the figure of the girl Klara from Chamounix, who became in the second part free from her lover sins and left now her place in the purgatory for the “catholic” poet H.Heine.