German Literature

by Nicholas Boyle

  continuing battle with the towns. For if the princes could cast ature er themselves as the guardians of the modern urban and commercial sense of individual identity, expressed in the new Lutheran piety, the towns could be weaned away from their dependence on the German Lit

  Empire, which had originally given them their rights, and they would eventually fi nd their home with their local overlords.

  Supporting these powerful forces was a dangerous game. Unlike Lutherans, Calvinists and Anabaptists believed in a right of resistance to sinful civil authority, and a bloody struggle between the various political and religious interests continued until the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Luther had refused to compromise at Worms, but at Augsburg Lutheranism was more accommodating.

  The settlement was the basis of Germany’s constitution for the next 250 years: the Empire was further weakened by the admission of a variety of confessions; the power of the princes was further enhanced by the right to determine the religion of their domains; and the freedom of the new Christian individuals was pared down to a right to emigrate to a territory of their own denomination.

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  The full historical drama of the Reformation, of its breach with the past in the interests of the individual soul and its satisfactions, was given symbolic, even mythical, form in an anonymous work of genius written for the new market created by the new technology of printing, the History of Dr John Faust ( Historia von D. Johann Fausten) published in Frankfurt in 1587. There was a real Dr Faust, a rather unsuccessful astrologer and alchemist who came to an obscurely unnatural end around 1540, and the originality of the Frankfurt ‘ Volksbuch’ (chap-book), as it is usually called, lies primarily in its presenting itself as a piece of news – a ‘novel’

  in the etymological sense – a story of and for its own time, not a retelling of a traditional tale nor even a traditional collection of comic episodes, though that is its superfi cial structure. Its hero, The la

  or villain, takes to a radical extreme the 16th century’s rejection of tradition by abandoning established learning for magic and ying of the f

  selling his soul to the enemy of religion in exchange for 24 years of pleasure, culminating in the resurrection of Helen of Troy to o

  be his mistress. (By a quirk of literary fate, travelling English undations (t

  actors soon brought to Germany a dramatic version of the life of Dr Faust which Christopher Marlowe had prepared on the basis of the original chap-book, or its English translation, and o 1781)

  which, in popularized and decreasingly recognizable adaptations for amateur productions or puppet plays, diffused the story through the whole of the non-literate German-speaking world.) A deep anxiety about the possible ultimate implications of the individualism on which Luther’s revolt was based underlies both the transgressive thrill of the narration of Faust’s excesses and the moralizing retreat at the end, after the devil has claimed his own, into the collective security of orthodox (Lutheran) church life. Just as Lutheranism compromised politically, accepting subordination to state authority in order to survive as a vehicle for personal salvation, so it compromised spiritually, imposing on itself a hierarchy and formulaic dogmatism as strict as Rome’s, for fear of its own revolutionary, perhaps even self-destructive, potential. The towns in which the Reformation had been born 33

  had lost interest in innovation, whether in business or in religion.

  Instead, Lutheranism acquired a parallel history of mystics, eccentrics, and ultimately Pietists, who developed its original inspiration outside its established institutions. Many of them drew on the works of Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), a self-educated shoemaker from Görlitz, who sought to unify theology and natural philosophy by postulating triadic relations between positive and negative principles described in language as creative and neologistic as Meister Eckhart’s, and partly derived from alchemy.

  Under the name of ‘Behmen’ he became known and infl uential in England, where his readers eventually included Newton and Blake.

  After the great catastrophe of the Thirty Years War princely power was fi nally consolidated as the distinguishing feature of German political and cultural development in the modern era.

  The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 was little more than a secular ature er extension of the Peace of Augsburg of a century before: the hour of absolutism and its culture had come. In Germany even Lutheran or Reformed monarchs had a clear interest in suppressing the German Lit

  independent spirit of Protestant towns. In the literary response to these profound changes an important role was played by Silesia (now southern Poland) where, after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, the victorious Hapsburgs, acting in their own domains as princes rather than emperors, reasserted central authority and pursued a vigorous policy of recatholicization. The predominantly Protestant German-speaking bourgeois of Silesia found themselves therefore on the fault-line between the opposing forces of the age, both in religion and in politics, between Catholic and Protestant, between the urban past and the absolutist future, and they fi rst pointed out the path that German literature was to follow for the next three centuries. Martin Opitz (1597–1639), a man of few personal beliefs, toyed in public with the possibility of conversion to Catholicism, and, born the son of a master-butcher, became a distinguished diplomat in the service of various princes to whom he dedicated his books. He is usually regarded as the 34

  reformer who made modern German literature possible, on the strength of his Book of German Poesy ( Buch von der deutschen Poeterey, 1624) which determined that German versifi cation is based on stress, not the number or length of syllables, established the French alexandrine as the standard German metre, and laid down rules for rhymes and such forms as the ode and the sonnet.

  But his real achievement was to reconcile literature to the new political realities, ‘for it is the greatest reward that poets can expect,’ he wrote, ‘that they fi nd a place in the rooms of kings and princes’ and his programme of regularization gave German verse a new prestige as a courtly art. His disciples included another Silesian, Andreas Gryphius (1616–64), author of tragedies and of some of the fi nest German sonnets. In both genres Gryphius The la

  embodied the Lutheran confl ict of loyalties in a tension between powerful passions and the constraints of Opitzian form – as if ying of the f

  the towns that had given Germany both material wealth and the Lutheran conscience were protesting at their slow and violent o

  subjection to princely authority.

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  The greatest German writer of the 17th century, however, had no time for anyone’s rules. Johann (‘Hans’) Jakob Christoffel von o 1781)

  Grimmelshausen (1621 or 1622–76) came not from Silesia but from Gelnhausen near Frankfurt. When he was 12, his Protestant home town was sacked and burned and he became a soldier.

  After changing allegiance and religion, and fi nishing the war as secretary of an Imperial regiment, he eventually settled down as a land-agent for the Bishop of Strasbourg in a village in the Black Forest and adopted, with rather tenuous justifi cation, a title of nobility. In his picaresque and partly autobiographical novel, Adventures of the German Simplicissimus ( Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, 1668 and 1671), we hear for the last time for many years the voice of a free and venturesome middle class, confi dent that it knows the facts of life as well as anyone, that though our ultimate destiny may not be in our own hands, it is not in anyone else’s, and that it is up to us to make of it what we can. Scenes of war, grisly and comic, of urban, rural, and 35

  commercial life, of sexual intrigue in high and low places, of sheer supernatural fantasy, and one of Europe’s fi rst tales of shipwreck on a desert island, are combined, through the retrospective narration of the principal fi gure, now a hermit, into a complex moral fable of rise, fall, and redemption. Simplicissimus sold as no book of quality did in Germany for another hundred years and Grimmelshausen followed it up with a number of parallel stories from the s
ame milieu. Notable among them are the memoirs of the female vagabond and camp-follower Courasche (‘courage’ – the name she gives to the pudenda by which she makes a living), whose childlessness only increases her sexual appetite and whose tales of warring and whoring, brutality and deceit, are uncompromised by any of Simplicissimus’ moral and religious refl ections. Her story stops, but does not end: Grimmelshausen was a realist and knew that a world without redemption does not admit of conclusions.

  ature er In the literature of the post-war period realism was in short supply. Outside the courts and the schools secular literature was a minority interest – in 1650 it made up only around 5% of all books German Lit

  published in Germany, while popular theology accounted for four times as many titles. Printed literature, volume produced for a market, the one form of cultural expression that is by its origins bourgeois and by its nature commercial, was fi rmly in the hands of state institutions, the church and the university. Though these fi gures changed hardly at all over the next 90 years, a movement in the atmosphere is detectable around 1680. In 1681, for the fi rst time more books were published in German than in Latin, and in the 1670s, with the foundation of the fi rst Pietist educational and charitable institutions in Frankfurt and Halle, Lutheranism began a revivalist mission to the world outside the ranks of the clergy and the universities. The original Lutheran focus on the inner life was rediscovered and a resource that had once been exclusive to mystics was redirected into more generally accessible channels. The middle classes were beginning to identify their souls as a place of freedom and were accepting their subordinate, 36

  but effective, role in a greater scheme of things. The new attitude was perfectly and profoundly expressed in the philosophy of Germany’s outstanding intellectual genius of the time, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), for whom the universe is a completely rational system, though its rationality is manifest only to those positioned on its higher levels, such as monarchs, and ultimately only to God. But every one of the units out of which the system is constructed is a soul completely secure in its own identity (a ‘monad’), invulnerable to external events, and with a perspective on the whole which, though limited, is perfect in its own way and so a unique expression of the Divine wisdom. ‘Know your place’ is Leibniz’ metaphysics and ethics in a nutshell, and they accorded well with the position of most German writers and The la

  thinkers in the age of absolutism.

  ying of the f

  (ii) Between France and England (1720–81)

  Everyone knows that the 18th century was the century of oundations (t

  Enlightenment. But there were (at least) two Enlightenments for by 1700 there were two distinct constituencies with an interest in criticizing what remained of Europe’s feudal institutions. On the o 1781)

  one hand, there was the bourgeois Enlightenment, characteristic of England and Scotland, but with some support in France, which criticized the established property owners, fi rst the Church and then the nobility, in the interests of the free movement of capital, and in the name of the free individual. In philosophy the bourgeois Enlightenment – represented, for example, by Locke, Mandeville, and Newton – tended to empiricism, to giving the evidence of the senses priority over the speculations of reason, and ultimately to materialism. But, on the other hand, there was also what can be called an offi cial, bureaucratic, or monarchical, Enlightenment which criticized the relics of feudalism, whether the Church and the nobility or the guilds and the Imperial Free Cities, in the name of collective order and in the interests of a single, central administrative will. The bureaucratic Enlightenment – represented, for example, by Descartes, 37

  Leibniz, and Leibniz’ infl uential disciple Christian August Wolff (1679–1754) – was usually associated with philosophical rationalism – with a tendency to give rational principles priority over the unreliable evidence of the individual’s senses – and with the cultural authority of France, since France had become Europe’s most powerful centralized monarchy. The rationalist Enlightenment of state offi cials was particularly strong in 18th-century Germany as local monarchs sought to tighten their grip, consolidating their territories and unifying their administration. A single transparent system was to rule in society as in thought, and the pupils of Wolff, whose system provided a rational argument from fi rst principles for anything from the existence of God to the importance of coffee-shops, had a virtual monopoly on university appointments in philosophy throughout the middle years of the century. French, the international language of Enlightened monarchs, was the language of the German courts: the nobility conversed and corresponded in French, read ature er French books, and at the court theatres often enough watched French plays. By contrast, until the mid-18th century, English had no international standing and the empiricist Enlightenment German Lit

  of the Anglo-Scottish bourgeoisie had few followers in German philosophy, its infl uence being felt more in the natural sciences and later in the study of history (particularly at the new university of Göttingen, founded in 1737 by the English King, George II, for the benefi t of his German subjects in the Electorate of Hanover).

  English literary infl uence was at its strongest in the northern ports of Hamburg and Bremen, which led an independent existence in semi-detachment from the rest of the Empire. The true bourgeois culture that maintained itself here produced the fi rst German translation of Robinson Crusoe, in 1720, and the fi rst German imitations of the supreme vehicles of middle-class enlightenment in England, the ‘moral weeklies’, such as Addison’s Spectator.

  A cheerful sensualism, confi dent of the value of the material world, prevailed in the local literature, in the often humorous love poetry of the merchant Friedrich von Hagedorn (1708–54) 38

  or the voluminous meditations on fl owers, insects, and other natural phenomena of the city-father Barthold Hinrich Brockes (1680–1747). But it was diffi cult to integrate this essentially exotic empiricism with the systematic rationalism that was emerging as the intellectual orthodoxy of princely Germany. An unwittingly, if disarmingly, comic element enters Brockes’ verse when his conscientiously minute empirical observations ride up against the Wolffi anism that assures him everything has a purpose in the Divine plan, and he concludes, for example, that the ultimate perfection of the chamois is that its horns can be made into handles for walking-sticks. The future of German literature had to lie in somewhere less marginal than Hamburg, somewhere where the challenge of the Enlightened absolutist state would be more The la

  directly felt and met – somewhere such as Leipzig. Leipzig was the largest city in Electoral Saxony and the home of a trade fair which, ying of the f

  together with its counterpart in Frankfurt, had been a pillar of the German publishing industry since the 16th century, but it was o

  neither a Free City nor a centre of government. (The Elector and undations (t

  his court resided at Dresden, 70 miles away.) The majority of its citizens were as bourgeois as Hamburg’s but they did not manage their own affairs. Leipzig, however, differed from the Imperial o 1781)

  Free Cities in a further crucial respect: it had a university. Some of the most active members of Germany’s subject middle class here lived alongside the most distinctive cultural institution of Protestant absolutism. In the second quarter of the 18th century, Leipzig was the centre of a powerful campaign to make literature in German the preferred means of cultural self-expression for a middle class, whether commercial or offi cial, united in its acceptance of subordination to princely authority. The campaign was consciously modelled on that of Opitz, but it was in the hands, not of a diplomat and intimate of rulers, seeking a hearing for poetry in the chambers of the great, but of a professor of poetry (unpaid) and logic (paid). Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) was the author of a two-volume compendium of the Leibniz-Wolffi an philosophy and, in the spirit of that philosophy, he tried to show, in his Essay towards a Critical Art of Poetry 39

  for the Germans ( Versu
ch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen, 1730), how literature could and should be based on a few simple, rational principles, systematically applied, so that the same works could be enjoyed by the bourgeoisie and by university-educated civil servants. He concentrated therefore, not on the novel, the new genre developed during his lifetime by Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson for mass circulation among the English middle classes, and translated for the German market in suspiciously Anglophile Hamburg and Göttingen, but on the drama. Unlike the novel, the drama had a good classical and academic pedigree, and a central role in the culture of the courts, yet it still provided a measure of general entertainment. Gottsched opened up the drama as a channel of cultural communication between rulers and ruled in absolutist Germany. He insisted on the use of the German language, established personal links with such touring theatre companies as survived, and in collaboration with his wife wrote, collected, and translated model plays for ature er them. But he also demanded that plays be rationally constructed and observe the unities and proprieties of the French drama of the age of Louis XIV, so making a play in German a conceivable German Lit

  alternative, in a court theatre, to a tragedy by Racine or an opera in Italian. Gottsched created a powerful idea, which continued to dominate the discussion long after his own applications of it had become ridiculous. But the novel, or rather, the developing book market which fed the demand for the novel, could not be ignored, and Gottsched did more by publishing plays, and collections of plays, as books to be read than by all his prescriptions for theatrical writing and performance.