Christoph Friedrich Heinle
Lyrik und Prosa
[Christoph Friedrich Heinle. Poetry and Prose]

In his “Berlin Chronicle,” Walter Benjamin apodictically declared: “Fritz Heinle was a poet.” There were mixed reactions among Benjamin’s peers to his enthusiasm for the poems of his early deceased childhood friend Christoph Friedrich Heinle (1894–1914), who, at age 20, committed suicide shortly after the start of the First World War: Both Florens Christian Rang and Benjamin saw similarities between Heinle’s poems and “Hölderlin’s last ones.” Both considered them to be “decisions on the German language.” Benjamin wanted to posthumously publish Heinle’s poetry in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “New German Contributions,” yet Hofmannsthal was not able to “recognize the decisive revelation of the poetic spirit in the uniquely glorious word.” Werner Kraft, without whose contribution Heinle might have been completely forgotten, wondered whether Benjamin’s “impressive power of poetic judgment may have failed him here.” However, he refrained from answering this question: “Was he right? We do not know.” After all, only few of Heinle’s texts were published during his lifetime. Benjamin’s lifelong effort to posthumously publish Heinle’s poetry was futile. Furthermore, Benjamin’s well-kept estate of Heinle was lost during his flight from the Nazis.

Thus, Heinle remains a mystery. This volume contributes to solving that mystery. It collects Heinle’s texts kept in the estates of his friends Walter Benjamin, Herbert Blumenthal, Philipp Keller, Ernst Schoen, and Ludwig Strauß. The collected publication of this material allows us to gain a more complete picture of the young poet Heinle.

Friedrich Christoph Heinle was born in Mayen in the Eifel in 1894 and died in Berlin on August 8, 1914. He studied philology in Göttingen and in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he met Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1913. Eight days after the outbreak of the First World War, Friedrich Heinle committed suicide together with his partner Friederike Seligson.