The Council of the University of Duesseldarf voted 44-41 to reject a longstanding suggestion to name the institution after the most famous son of the Rhine city, the poet Heinrich Heine.
The issue came up after years of public debate on how to honor the German poet of Jewish origin, to whom most German intellectuals have a very complex relation. In the past 20 years, several initiatives to name the university after Heine were killed by the Council. But this time observers assumed the vote could go either way because of a major lobbying effort and a tendency to recognize the importance of Heine’s poetry.
Although Heine sought to dissociate himself from his Jewish identity, he was never fully accepted by the German establishment. The narrow vote reconfirmed that situation.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
