Heinrich Heine was born in Düsseldorf on 13 December 1797, in the back of house number 53. Officially, though, he was born in France, because Napoleon’s troops occupied the city that year.

That technicality helped him later. Heine was a Jewish writer known for lyrical, romantic and ironic poems that Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy set to music. Considered a radical, he had to leave Germany. France could not refuse him, because his birth under French occupation had given him a French passport. He spent his last years in Paris and is buried in Montmartre.

His birthplace did not last. Bombs hit the house in September 1942, and it was torn down in the 1960s. VoiceMap’s Düsseldorf tour stops on the spot to tell the passport story and to say that the Nazis banned Heine’s work.