Seemingly effortlessly, Heinrich Heine reconciles the Enlightenment mandate with popular poetic media. He presents himself as a modern writer while also being someone who, in his childhood and youth, preferred to immerse himself in the antiquated atmosphere of an oral tradition. Heine's imaginative modernization and politicization of popular poetic traditions is a grand and highly political attempt to contest them against the right-wing project of modernity. For the right-wing project began at that time to modernize and politicize this tradition in its own way; a strategically far-sighted ideological investment that would ultimately pay off in fascism. Against the backdrop of this disaster, Heine's - often ironically and satirically fractured - connection to a popular poetic tradition emerges as his true essence.