by Steven Moore
Grimmelshausen returns to form in The Life of Courage (Die Landstörtzerin Courasche, 1670).69 Near the end of Simplicissimus, our protagonist had boasted of seducing and dumping a beatiful lady, a “man-trap” whose “easy virtue soon disgusted him” (5.6); nine months later, she leaves a baby on his doorstep, who Simplicius reluctantly makes his son and heir. Audaciously blurring the distinction between fiction and reality, Grimmelshausen states in a headnote that this unnamed woman read Simplicissimus and was so insulted at her portrayal therein that she decided to avenge herself by telling the story of her life, revealing that the woman he took for an aristocrat was actually a promiscuous adventuress infected with syphilis—which raises an intriguing possibility: Did Simplicius contract the disease from her? Untreated, it can cause insanity, which would explain the underwater sylphic adventure later in book 5 and the talking toilet paper. Indeed, the entire bizarre Continuation can be read as a neurosyphilitic hallucination. If nothing else, it stinks up the odor of sanctity with which Simplicissimus ends.
Just as the Continuation anticipates Robinson Crusoe, this short novel anticipates Defoe’s Moll Flanders, but with no apology at the end for the life she’s led. (Grimmelshausen, however, tacks on a homiletic warning against following her example.) Inspired by a German translation of Lopez de Úbeda’s Justina, Grimmelshausen backtracks to the very beginning of the Thirty Years’ War. Born in Bohemia, 13-year-old Libuschka disguises herself as a boy to avoid rape from invading soldiers and joins the army: “I made a great effort to get rid of all my woman’s habits and acquire man’s. I took great pains to learn to swear like a trooper and drink like a fish . . . so that no one should suspect there was something I had not been endowed with at birth” (2). When it’s revealed during a fight she lacks that certain something, she defiantly calls her vulva Courage, which becomes her girl-power nom de guerre in her fight against male prejudice as well as opposing armies.70 Over the next dozen years, she is repeatedly married to soldiers, repeatedly raped by other other soldiers, then becomes a prostitute, then a black marketeer, doing whatever it takes to survive the war, and marrying whoever promises shelter from the storm. (Through no fault of her own, her husbands usually perish before their first anniversary.) She’s smart, as courageous as her name implies, and fiercely independent; she doesn’t really descend into criminal behavior until later in life, when she joins a band of Gypsies. And that child she left on Simplicius’s doorstep? Not hers, but her slutty maid’s. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Courage takes self-incriminating delight in telling Simplex (as she calls him) how wrong he was about everything.
Like Simplicissimus, Courage is graphically realistic but includes a few magical elements. The Spanish Justina tried to dodge sexual encounters, but Courage welcomes them: she’s a novelty in novels of this period, a sexually active woman who doesn’t feel guilty about scratching her itch (as puts it). While we have to remember that a man is writing this, Grimmelshausen was a worldly one and knew that women have sexual desires too, which you wouldn’t guess from most novels published before the 20th century. Like Simplicius, Courage occasionally reads courtly romance novels, but only to pick up “pretty turns of phrase from” for the purposes of seduction (5; cf. Simplicissimus 3.18: “these books taught me how to lure the female sex”). Rebelling against the polite romance tradition, Grimmelshausen opposes his hard-core realism to their unrealistic fantasies; like his model Charles Sorel, he was out to destroy the mainstream novel, and Courage is an earthy and bracing alternative to most 17th-century fiction.
One of Courage’s longer-term relationships was with a lackey/paramour she nicknamed Tearaway, from the time she told him, “Tear yourself away from that cart and go and fetch the dappled grey from the grazing” (16). After she dumped him for drunkenness and domestic violence, this rascal became one of Simplicius’s gang during his Hunter of Soest period. He tells his story in Tearaway (Der seltzame Springinsfeld, 1670), which begins when the young scribe Courage had hired to write down her memoir runs into Simplicius, lately returned from Australia, and his old servant Tearaway at an inn.71 The scribe tells them what Courage dictated to him—Simplicius interrupts to admit he was also banging Courage’s maid, so that baby is his son after all—and also of her life with the Gypsies. (Grimmelshausen may be the first to write about them in fiction.) We learn that Simplicius, as pious as ever, is annoyed that readers are treating his Simplicissimus merely as a jestbook like Till Eulenspiegel instead of the Christian allegory he intended. Incongruously, he is now making a living as a traveling salesman peddling an elixir that improves wine, using a magic book as part of his spiel—another occasion Grimmelshausen uses, like the dirty inkwell, for a tribute to the power of imaginative writing—and after nine chapters of metafictional scene-setting, Tearaway tells how he spent the war.
Like much of Simplicissimus, Tearaway is a grim, grunt’s-eye view of war, where greed for booty trumps patriotic duty, and which brings out the worst in everyone. Tearaway admits “Soldiers are there to persecute the peasants and any that leave them in peace aren’t doing their job properly,” but also notes “some peasants were worse than the good soldiers themselves. They not only murder soldiers, innocent and guilty, whenever they managed to get hold of them, when they had the chance, they stole from their neighbours, even from their own friends and relations” (13). This section is sketchy, obviously worked up not from firsthand experience but from the same war chronicle Grimmelshausen used for Courage, Eberhard von Wassenberg’s Erneuerter Teutscher Florus (1647). After the war is over, Tearaway marries a widow and becomes a crooked innkeeper, abandons both, then marries a hurdy-gurdy player and scrapes out a living accompanying her on the fiddle as wandering musicians. This colorful, realistic account of tramping morphs into a fairy tale in which his wife discovers a magical bird’s nest that confers invisibility on its owner; Tearaway’s too cowardly to use it for gain—she isn’t, and winds up being burned as a witch as a result—and the tatterdemalion is still playing for pfennigs when he runs in to his old master. Simplicius tries to recall him to Christian principles, which Tearaway initially dismisses as “a load of monkish tripe” (27), though he repents just before he dies.
“The Miraculous Bird’s Nest” (Das wunderbarliche Vogelnest, 1672 [part 1] and 1675 [part 2]) is the title of the last two sections of what Grimmelshausen eventually called the Simplician Cycle. In part 1, a do-gooder named Michael uses the cloaking device to obstruct various misdeeds while searching for an honorable way to make money; in part 2, an unnamed merchant, less scrupulous than Michael (and more like Tearaway’s wife), takes advantage of invisibility to commit various acts of greed, lust, and sorcery. The miraculous bird’s nest functions as a “lens through which the bearer perceives reality” (Negus, 124), another analog for one of fiction’s purposes. Simplicius’s son appears in one episode in part 1, but otherwise the 2-part novel is only thematically related to the preceding novels, emphasizing once again the inconstancy of fortune, the prevalence of evil, and the consequent necessity of adhering to Christian principles. Books 1 through 8 of the Simplician Cycle depicted a world at war, but in these final two books Grimmelshausen argues that the world at peace is just as dangerous. They sound mildly entertaining, but as they’ve not been translated, I can only direct the interested reader elsewhere for more on the conclusion to Grimmelshausen’s 10-part, 800-page meganovel.72
Unlike part 2 of Don Quixote, the second half of the Simplician Cycle isn’t as impressive as the first half (i.e., Simplicissimus), but that doesn’t prevent Grimmelshausen from occupying the same lofty position in early German literature, and his influence on later German writers is profound. He impressed Ludwig Tieck and other German Romantics, the Grimm brothers and Goethe, and his work played a patriotic part in the unification of Germany in the 19th century. Most major German novelists of the 20th century have paid tribute to him: Thomas Mann borrowed from his work for his Felix Krull and Doctor Faust, and in his introduction to a Swedish translation
of Simplicissimus, he wrote: “It is the rarest kind of monument to life and literature, for it has survived almost three centuries and will survive many more. It is a story of the most basic kind of grandeur—gaudy, wild, raw, amusing, rollicking and ragged, boiling with life, on intimate terms with death and the devil—but in the end, contrite and fully tired of a world wasting itself in blood, pillage and lust, but immortal in the miserable splendor of its sins.”73 Hesse greatly admired Grimmelshausen, and from him Bertolt Brecht conceived the idea for his play Mother Courage and Her Children (1949). Grimmelshausen’s earthy, erudite, punning language was an inspirational starting point for Arno Schmidt’s even more outlandish diction. I implied earlier that the young Simplicius has something in common with Oskar Matzerath in Günter Grass’s Tin Drum (1959), and Grimmelshausen steals the show in Grass’s erudite critifiction The Meeting at Telgte (1979), an imaginary conference of several German authors in 1647, in which Grass affectionately roasts the old inkslinger:
In his green doublet and plumed hat he looked like something out of a storybook. . . . [After he] had offered his services in a long-winded speech well larded with tropes, Harsdörffer took Dach aside. True, he said, the fellow prates like an itinerant astrologer—he had introduced himself to the assemblage as Jupiter’s favorite, whom, as they could see, Venus had punished in France—but he had wit, and was better read than his clowning might lead one to suspect. . . . His lies, said Harsdörffer, are as inspired as any romances; his eloquence reduces the very Jesuits to silence; not just the church fathers, but all the gods and their planets are at his fingertips; he is familiar with the seamy side of life, and wherever he goes, in Cologne, in Recklinghausen, in Soest, he knows his way about. . . . Hofmannswaldau stood dumbfounded; hadn’t the fellow just quoted a passage from Opitz’s translation of the Arcadia? . . . His words seemed as trustworthy as the sheen of the double row of buttons on his green doublet. (6–7)
In this novel Grimmelshausen is still in his mid-twenties, but someday, the narrator predicts, “he would let every foul smell out of the bag; a chronicler, he would bring back the long war as a word-butchery, let loose gruesome laughter, and give the [German] language license to be what it is: crude and soft-spoken, whole and stricken, here Frenchified, there melancolicky, but always drawn from the casks of life. Yes, he would write! By Jupiter, Mercury, and Apollo, he would!” (112–13).
One of the first to imitate Grimmelshausen was an Austrian musician named Johann Beer (1655–1700), whose “Simplician Observer of the World” (Der Symplicianische Weltkucker) appeared in installments from 1677 to 1679 and features a plaything of fortune much like Simplicius, though the novel is set on the battlefields of Venus rather than those of Mars (as Grimmelshausen would say). Already evident in this early work is Beer’s “lively, exuberant, animated style—which often uses musical terms with humorous effect—a profligate, Rabelaisian heaping of words,” writes Beer enthusiast James Hardin, who goes on to describe “other aspects of Beer’s style and manner that recur in virtually all of his later novels: his frequent humorous use of student Latin, a macaronic mixture of German and Latin, comic neologisms, rich use of slang, the pun, dialect, coarse language, and peculiarities of speech” (29). This Rabelaisian style enlivens the only two of Beer’s 20 or so novels to be translated into English so far—and the best two, according to most critics—German Winter Nights (Die teutschen Winter-Nächte, 1682) and Summer Tales (Die kurtzweiligen Sommer-Täge, 1683), a riotous diptych of social satire.
Like Grimmelshausen, Beer was influenced by Spanish picaresques but especially by Sorel’s Francion, which begins in medias res with a bizarre situation that is partly explained shortly after, to be clarified further by other characters much later.74 It’s storytelling in reverse. Winter Nights concerns a wandering student named Zendorio—just escaped from his mysterious imprisonment in a castle—and the crazy events of one winter in upper Austria as he mingles with and marries into the rural nobility, a party-loving, adulterous crowd that is fond of stories and pranks. The stories they tell to while away the winter nights are often brutal or bawdy, the pranks usually loutish and unfunny, which the author narrates with great gusto even as he criticizes his “arch-gallants” for wasting their lives on such shenanigans. At the same time, he constantly pulls pranks on the reader: characters are reported dead who are actually alive; we’re led to believe a bride leaves her groom at the altar, only to learn she’s pretending to be his servant; a character despairs of marrying an aristocrat and settles for marrying a peasant, then discovers she’s the aristocrat in disguise; a wandering tramp turns out to be a member of the nobility; a minor character in one prank becomes the major character in another story, and so on. Beer dramatizes his dual theme of the deceptiveness of appearances and the uncertainties of fortune by filling his novel with narrative sleights-of-hand involving mistaken identities, disguises, wild coincidences, bedtricks, and unexpected revelations, all contrived with great ingenuity. It may be the most unpredictable novel I’ve ever read, and never have I more enjoyed having the rug pulled out from under me over and over again.
As with Grimmelshausen, there’s a startling incongruity between the author’s high moral purpose and his low subject matter: throughout there’s foul-mouthed dialogue, leering sexual innuendo, drunkenness and indecent exposure, pranks involving feces, all of which he will piously condemn before moving on to the next raucously narrated outrage to morals. He’ll let two maids curse each for half a page and describe them “tumbling so that their dresses and slips went over their heads and they quite often give us a view of their naked posteriors,” then shake his head at such behavior.75 He’ll note that during a sleighride to clear their heads after drinking, his male characters “would throw a young lady over the runners and into the snow” to get a look at her netherlands: “But some of the women were clever and put on pants beneath their skirts to preclude protracted observation” (5.8). He will sometimes cut off a bawdy scene and then taunt his readers for wanting further details, especially women, whom he frequently criticizes for pretending to be outraged at indecent tales but secretly relishing them. The effect is odd, like a preacher who shows his congregation R-rated movies only to condemn them afterward.
But while influenced by Grimmelshausen and sharing some of the same models (Francion, German translations of Spanish picaresques, Till Eulenspiegel and other jestbooks), Beer self-consciously departs from the mainstream fiction of his day and defends his use of dirty realism:
Natural affairs are not vile [a female character states]. Such stories are told so that in such situations we should look out for and protect ourselves. Earlier I read in some books a heap of high and great love stories, but those were affairs that were impossible or improbable. . . . But stories such as Monsieur Ludwig encountered in his youth happen a thousandfold and especially among our kind. Therefore, I regard the latter much more highly than the former because they can happen to us, and we thus have an opportunity to find in them such precepts as we can use profitably and apply to shunning our vices. (4.1)
The aforementioned Monsieur Ludwig, the worst of Zendorio’s prank-loving friends, bolsters Beer’s defense of fiction by insisting he learned more from reading novels than from his academic studies:
Satirical writings and other novels enlightened me most in all matters, and I regarded them as more practical and necessary for human life than logic and all the other abstract courses, since I saw that the scholars were much less in agreement than the satirists who, to a man, found no vice good and attacked the one like the other and, on the other hand, granted balanced praise to the virtues. . . .
I read through as many German texts as it was possible to get: Hercules and Herculiscum that a cleric named Buch[h]oltz in Braunschweig is said to have written [see p. 61 above]. Arcadia, Philander von Sittenwald, the Alamodische Hobel-Bank, Barcla[y]’s Argenis, the Rivalry, all the works of the ingenious Harsdörffer, Francion, Aramena, Aerumöna, most of the writings of Erasmus Franciscus, Onogambo
, Clelia, Simplicissimus in which the entire German or Thirty Years’ War is described, Stratonica, Pastor Fido, all the parts of Amadis, Lisimene and Pamilie, Jan Peru, First and Second Parts, Schweiger’s travel description and many more like it, . . .
In a word: If I were to cite all the works I read, this day alone would not suffice. But I acknowledge from them I obtained a better loquacity than I had from twelve months of my professor lecturing me about the structure of an oration. For I found in my readings all sorts of allusions to kings, to emperors, to princes, and to other, ordinary people. I also saw, almost as in a theater, how the world goes around and found it in fact no different from the way books described it. From this I became halfway knowledgeable and I encountered problems I could quickly solve, where others had to carefully grope their way through. And I’ll readily take an oath I wouldn’t have acquired such cleverness in the classroom. (4.7)
I’ve quoted these passages at length because they voice a defiant defense of fiction and its utility at a time when it was still regarded as a frivolous and even dangerous pastime. Its efficacy as a moral guide is dependent on speaking bluntly about “how the world goes around,” not by telling improbable stories of people leading impossibly moral lives, nor by following the antiquated rules for literary composition taught in schools at the time. Beer repeatedly goes after these, and the pedantry that attends them: he parodies several passages from a manual on the art of poetry filled with Latin phrases and ready-made clichés; reproduces the scholarly notes of a clerk preparing to writer a eulogy and the ludicrous poem that results, and near the end provides a few pages from a play exposing pedantic philosophers. And though there’s a narrative arc that takes our protagonist from wandering student to landed proprietor, Zendorio zigzags all over the place in between, breaking the rules of formal composition to include whatever he wants, like a long argument on the proper terminology for musicians (after Zendorio’s wife chastises him for calling them “minstrels”) or Ludwig’s remarkably surrealistic delirium: