DIE ‘GOTTESRECHTE DES MENSCHEN’: HUMAN RIGHTS AS SECULARISED RIGHTS IN HEINRICH HEINE'S ESSAYS

Abstract

Heinrich Heine shows in his essays on France and Germany that human rights have a religious prehistory. For him, ‘Menschheitsrechte’ are not merely secular rights but secularised rights. The human rights proclaimed in the American and French Revolutions are the secularised historical form in which the fundamental ‘Urrechte der Menschheit’ manifest themselves. This article takes as its starting point the observation that, for Heine, religions have a political dimension and political movements a religious dimension. His history of primal rights or human rights begins with Judaism and Christianity and  leads via the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the revolutions of the eighteenth century to Saint-Simonism and pantheism. The article focuses on Heine's texts of the 1830s, when he envisages Saint-Simonism and pantheism as the new religions of his time that bring about the emancipation of the spirit and the body, whose rights had been neglected until then.