Atta Troll

Atta Troll, title of a satirical epic written by H. Heine in 1841 after his return from a holiday in the Pyrenees and first published in part in Zeitung für die elegante Welt in 1843. It appeared in full and final form as a separate publication in 1847. It is sub-titled ‘ein Sommernachtstraum’. Written in rhymeless, trochaic, four-line stanzas and comprising 27 ‘chapters’ (Kaput), it begins with an account of the escape of Atta Troll, a dancing bear, from his owner. The crude and unkempt Atta Troll is the object of satire directed against the German radicals of the 1830s and the bear himself castigates the failings of the human race. The poem then recounts the hunt for Atta Troll, but diverges for a time into a dream vision (Sommernachtstraum), a kind of phantasmagoria, in which three forms of the femme fatale appear to the hunter. In the end Atta Troll is shot and ‘honoured’ in an epitaph that parodies the literary style of Ludwig I, König von Bayern:

Atta Troll, Tendenzbär; sittlich
Religiös; als Gatte brünstig;
Durch Verführtsein von dem Zeitgeist,
Waldursprünglich Sanskülotte;
Sehr schlecht tanzend, doch Gesinnung
Tragend in der zottgen Hochbrust;
Manchmal auch gestunken habend;
Kein Talent, doch ein Charakter!