by Will Durant
As for adults, the preachers described them as quarrelsome hypocrites, gluttons, drunkards, and adulterers.25 Pastor Johann Kuno complained in 1579, “Vice of all sorts is now so common that it is committed without shame, nay, people even boast of it in sodomitish fashion; the coarsest, the most indecent sins have become virtues…. Who regards common whoredom any longer as a sin?”26 Pastor Bartholomaus Ringwalt thought in 1585 that those were “the last and worst times which have come upon the world.”27 Profanity was almost universal among the men, regardless of creed.28 Calumny had a festival. “My superintendent,” wrote the Count of Oldenburg in 1594, “has complained to me of the manner in which Dr. Pezel, at Bremen, has abused and slandered him in one of his books, making out that he spent his days in gluttony, drunkenness and debauchery, that he … was a sheep-devouring wolf, a serpent, a he-goat, an abortion, … and that he must be gotten rid of either by hanging, drowning, or imprisonment, by the wheel or by the sword.” The court preacher of the Elector of Saxony found that “almost throughout the length and breadth of Germany it has been falsely reported that I earn large gilded goblets in drinking matches, that … I so fill myself with wine that … I have to be propped up and laid on a wagon and carted off like a drunken calf or sow.”29
Eating and drinking were major industries. Half the day of a well-to-do German was consumed in passing edibles from one end of his anatomy to the other. Burghers were proud of their appetites, which, like the dress of their women, served as heralds of their prosperity. A circus performer earned national fame by eating at one meal a pound of cheese, thirty eggs, and a large loaf of bread—after which stint he fell dead. Dinners lasting seven hours, with fourteen toasts, were not unusual. Weddings were in many cases riots of gourmandizing and intoxication. A jovial prince signed his letters “Valete et inebriamini” (Be well and get drunk). Elector Christian II of Saxony drank himself to death at the age of twenty-seven. A temperance society struggled against the evil, but its first president died of drink.30 It was asserted that gluttony was shortening the tenure of life. Said Erasmus Winter in 1599: “Owing to immoderate eating and drinking there are now few old people, and we seldom see a man of thirty or forty who is not affected by some sort of disease, either stone, gout, cough, consumption, or what not.”31
We must not take these contemporary complaints too seriously. Probably the majority of the people were hard-working, long-suffering, and literally God-fearing folk; but in history, as in journalism, virtue makes no news—which proves it usual. The wives of the burghers lived in a modest domestic privacy, absorbed in a hundred duties that left no time for greater sins than gossip; and many women of the upper classes, like Anna, wife of Elector Augustus I of Saxony, were models of conscientious devotion to their families. There were some pleasant aspects in that turbulent Germany: love of children and home, generous hospitality, gay dancing and good music, jolly games and festivals. The first Christmas tree in recorded history was part of a celebration in Germany in 1605; it was the Germans who surrounded the Feast of the Nativity with picturesque relics of their pagan past.
Dances and folk songs were begetting forms of instrumental music, and hymns were growing into massive chorales. Organs became monuments of architecture; harpsichords, lutes, and other instruments were themselves products of loving art; hymnbooks, especially in Bohemia, were sometimes gorgeously adorned. Protestant hymns were often didactic or polemical, sacrificing the tenderness of medieval sacred song, but the Protestant chorales were already pointing to Johann Sebastian Bach. Musical instruction was compulsory in the schools of all the creeds; the “cantor”—i.e., the professor of music—ranked only after the rector or principal in the scholastic hierarchy. Organists were as famous then as pianists now; Jakob Handl held high repute in Prague, and the Hassler brothers—Hans, Kaspar, and Jakob—thrilled congregations, often with their own compositions, in Dresden, Nuremberg, and Prague. Musical ability tended to run in families, not through any mystical heredity, but through the contagion of the home; so a veritable host of Schultzes took the name Praetorius. Michael Praetorius composed not only tomes of music, but also, in his Syntagma musicum (1615–20), a thorough and scholarly encyclopedia of musical history, instruments, and forms.
The great name in this age and field was Heinrich Schütz, unanimously honored as the father of modern German music. Born to a Saxon family in 1585, exactly a century before Bach and Handel, he established the musical forms and spirit that these men brought to perfection. At twenty-four he went to Venice, where he studied under Giovanni Gabrieli. Returning to Germany, he hesitated between music and law, but finally settled down as director of music at the Dresden court of John George, Elector of Saxony. From 1618 onward he poured forth choral compositions which, in their manipulation and contrast of choirs, solo voices, and instruments, fully prepared for the many Bachs. Now for the first time heavy German choral counterpoint was fused and lightened with the more melodious “concerted” style, which combined voices and instruments. To celebrate the marriage of the Elector’s daughter (1627), Schütz composed the first German opera, Dafne, based upon Peri’s opera of the same name performed in Florence thirty-three years before. A second trip to Italy influenced Schütz to give further prominence to solos and instruments in his Symphoniae sacrae (1629), setting to music Latin texts from the Psalms and the Song of Songs. In 1631 Saxony became an active theater of war, and Schütz wandered from court to court, even to Denmark, seeking choirs and bread; not till 1645 was he re-established in Dresden. In that year he created the style of German Passion music with an oratorio, The Seven Words from the Cross; here he set the example of giving the words of a single character to the same single voice, and of preceding or following the voice with the same strains in the instruments; Bach adopted this method in The St. Matthew Passion. Again opening up new paths, Schütz published in 1657 Deutsche Concerten—cantatas that place him with Carissimi as joint founder of the dramatic oratorio. His Christmas Oratorio (1664) set another mark for Bach to aim at. A year later he reached his zenith with The Passion and Death of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, sternly scored for voices alone and unrelieved with arias. Soon thereafter he lost his hearing. He retired to the solitude of his home, and died at eighty-seven after putting to music a passage from the 119th Psalm: “Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.”
IV. LETTERS AND ARTS
The outstanding literary productions of the Empire in this age were the translation of the Bible by the Bohemian Brethren (1588), and the Hungarian epic Zrinyiasz (1644), by Miklós Zrinyi. Germany, and particularly Frankfurt am Main, now (c. 1600) succeeded Italy as the busiest publisher of books. The Frankfurt book fair began in 1598 to issue semiannually a catalogue of publications. Literary societies encouraged poetry and drama, but literature was stifled by civil and ecclesiastical censorship. Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic leaders agreed that works considered injurious to the government, the official faith, or public morals should be forbidden; and, strange to say, the total number of books prohibited by Protestant authorities exceeded the total of those condemned by the Roman Church.32
Scholarship declined as controversy mangled truth. Matthias Flacius Illyricus and his aides compiled in thirteen folio volumes a history of the Christian church; but The Magdeburg Centuries, as their Historia ecclesiae Christi (1559–74) came to be called from its place of composition and its division by centuries, was as one-sided as the Catholic histories of that age, when every book was a weapon; so Gregory VII, to these centurions, was “the most monstrous of all monsters born,” who had compassed the death of several popes before mounting the “Chair of Pestilence.”33 The finest German historiography of its time was Johannes Sleidanus’ story of the Reformation, De statu religionis et reipublicae Carolo V Caesare (1555), so impartial that not even Melanchthon could forgive him.
Next to invective, the most popular literary form was the drama. Both Protestants and Catholics used the stage for propaganda; Protestant plays made much f
un of the pope, and usually ended by conducting him to hell. The Catholic cantors of Switzerland produced Passion, Easter, and Last Judgment plays from 1549, in one case with 290 actors. The Passion Play of Oberammergau was first presented in 1634 as the fulfillment of a vow during the plague of 1633, and was repeated every tenth year, lasting from 8:30 A.M. to 6 P.M., with a two-hour intermission at midday. Italian actors entered Germany in 1568, and were followed by Dutch, French, and English. These troupes soon replaced private with professional performances, and they evoked many complaints by their remunerative obscenity.
Even more popular was the virile and versatile Alsatian satirist Johann Fischart. Falling gaily into the spirit of the age, he issued a series of anti-Catholic travesties so cleverly devastating that he was soon the most widely read writer in Germany. His Bienenkorb des heiligen romischen Immensschivarms (1579) attacked with passionate caricature the history, doctrine, ceremonies, and clergy of the Church; all Catholic convents were hothouses of debauchery and abortion; the Church had decreed that priests “might have free use of other people’s wives”; six thousand infant heads had been found in a pond near a nunnery; and so on.34 Another satire, Jesuitenhütlein, ridiculed the four-cornered hat of the Jesuits and denounced all their ways and ideas. In 1575, under a rollicking eight-line title, Fischart published a pretended translation, actually an imitation and proliferation, of Rabelais’ Gargantua; here he derided all aspects of German life—the oppression of the poor, the maltreatment of pupils, the gluttony and drunkenness, the fornication and adultery—in a jumble of style and Alsatian dialect, seasoned with obscenity and wit. Fischart died at forty-three, having exhausted his vocabulary.
Almost as lively, and dying in the same year, 1590, at the same age, Nikodemus Frischlin ran through a dozen lives in one. At twenty he was professor of history and poetry at Tübingen; he wrote Latin verse with quasi-Horatian finesse, and scholarly commentaries on Virgil. At thirty-five he was dismissed for satirizing the nobility. Thereafter he lived with rollicking recklessness; he drank heavily, for wine, he said, was necessary to genius, and the verses of teetotalers were worthlessly watery; he was accused of ruining one girl and poisoning another; threatened with criminal prosecution for immorality, he fled from city to city; he dedicated a published lecture to eleven different notables, geographically distributed to provide him asylum anywhere; but he died from a fall when he had still not fully expressed his opinion of his enemies. They called him, in the manner of the time, “a stinking, mangy poet … a lying, roguish abortion of the Devil”;35 but he was the best poet that Germany could produce in that unhappy age.
Art suffered from the Protestant aversion to images, the decline of the Church as patron, the corruption of native styles by uncongenial Italian influence, the deterioration of taste by coarse morals and violent controversy, and, later, the consuming fire of war. The marvel of it is that despite these discouragements German craftsmanship produced, in the six decades before the war, several lordly palaces and stately town halls, a good painter, and some precious minor art. The collections of Emperor Rudolf II and Duke Albert V of Bavaria formed the nuclei of the famous Alte Pinakothek of Munich. Albert himself was a German Medici, making his court a haven for artists, beautifying his capital with architecture, and gathering sculpture into the imposing AntiquariumII—the first museum of ancient statuary north of the Alps.
In 1611–19 a Dutch architect built for Duke Maximilian I at Munich the Residenz,* which for centuries served as the home of Bavaria’s dukes, electors, and kings. Gustavus Adolphus lamented that he could not remove to Stockholm this favorite example of the German late Renaissance. The Jesuits, in their own ornate version of baroque, raised fine churches at Coblenz and Dillingen, and the massive Hofkirche (St. Michael’s)* in Munich. In a plainer and statelier style Santino Solari designed the Salzburg cathedral just a few years before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War.
As the princes had appropriated most ecclesiastical wealth in Protestant Germany, architecture there ceased to be ecclesiastical and became civic, sometimes palatial. Immense castles were built: the Schloss Heiligenberg at Baden, famous for the ceiling of carved linden wood in its Rittersaal, or Hall of Knights; Aschaffenburg Castle* on the Main; Heidelberg Castle, still one of the major sights of Germany. A sumptuous Rathaus, or town hall, rose to house municipal administration in Lübeck,* Paderborn,* Bremen, Rothenburg, Augsburg,* Nuremberg,* Graz. The textile merchants of Augsburg engaged the city’s leading architect, Elias Holl, to build their Zeughaus, or Cloth Hall. Bremen provided a Kornhaus and Frankfurt a Salzhaus for dealers in grain and salt respectively; but who would have expected vinegar to enshrine itself so tastefully as in Bremen’s Essighaus?
Now, and in the next 150 years, palaces rose everywhere in Germany to shelter the triumphant princes in gay and curlicued baroque. The Margrave of Ansbach-Bayreuth spent 237,000 florins ($30,000,000?) on his Plassenburg Palace, in one of the poorest principalities in the Empire. In better taste was the electoral palace provided for the archbishops of Mainz. The domestic architecture of the period appears fascinatingly picturesque in tradition and illustration, but an angry physician described German houses in 1610 as composed of dark, smelly, filthy rooms seldom breathing fresh air.36 Nevertheless the interior of the burgher’s dwelling was the real home of Germany’s minor arts, rich with adornments made by skilled handicraft: carved panels and ceilings, strong furniture carved and inlaid, railings of wrought iron, locks and bars cast in grandiose forms, figurines of ivory, goblets of silver or gold. The German burgher never had enough of decoration in his home.
Engraving, especially on copper, flourished in Germany even through the wars. Lukas Kilian and his brother Wolfgang began, about 1600, a remarkable dynasty of engravers which continued through the seventeenth century with Wolfgang’s sons Philipp and Bartholomaus, and with Philipp’s great-grandsons till 1781. German sculpture, however, suffered from attempts to imitate classic forms alien to the German mold and mood. When native carvers let themselves go they turned out first-class work, like the central and side altars cut in wood by Hans Degler for the Ulrichskirche in Augsburg, or the seventy figures carved by Michael Hönel for the cathedral of Gurk in Austria. A special feature of the age was the wonderful fountains, inspired by Italian exemplars: the Wittelsbacher Fountain before the Residenz at Munich, and the Tugendbrunnen, or Fountain of Virtue, before the Lorenzkirche in Nuremberg.
When Rubens heard that Adam Elsheimer had just died (1610) at thirty-two, he said, “Such a loss should plunge all our profession into deep mourning. It will not be easy to replace him, and in my opinion he can never be equaled in [painting] small figures, landscapes, and many other things.”37 Born in Frankfurt, Adam left for Italy at twenty and, after a stay in Venice, spent the rest of his life in Rome. Rubens prayed God “to pardon Adam his sin of laziness,” but we do not know if it was laziness that made Elsheimer confine his work to small paintings on copper plates. It could hardly be laziness that made him give to his landscapes such minute finish as in The Flight into Egypt,38 or such unique representations of light and air as made him, on his modest scale, a Rembrandt before Rembrandt. He seems to have been well paid for his work, but not sufficiently to meet his needs and tastes. He became bankrupt, was imprisoned for debt, and died shortly after his release.
Painting on glass was a favorite art in this age, first at Zurich and Basel, then in Munich, Augsburg, and Nuremberg; windows in convents and homes became as colorful as in a medieval church. The carving of glass appeared early in the seventeenth century in Nuremberg and Prague. The Hirschvogel family in Nuremberg was famous for artistic glass and pottery. Cologne and Siegburg warmed the German heart with stone jugs and mugs elegantly carved, and stoves were often housed in color-glazed earthenware. In the working of wood, ivory, iron, gems, and precious metals, the Germans were unsurpassed. Cabinetmakers were so highly esteemed that when one of them was condemned to be hanged for theft he was pardoned because he was so good an “art carpenter.
” The iron railing around the tomb of Emperor Maximilian I at Innsbruck is superb. Anton Eisenhut executed in 1588 liturgical vessels in such delicately designed and richly embellished silver that they still stand at the top of their kind. German goldsmiths were sought for everywhere, and their products readily found a European market. Drinking cups, goblets, and jugs of silver were made in a hundred humorous forms; Germans could drink themselves tipsy out of windmills, lanterns, apples, monkeys, horses, pigs, monks, and nuns. Even in their cups they waged the theological war.
V. THE HOSTILE CREEDS
The Diet of Augsburg (1555) had brought the religious strife to a geographical truce on the principle Cuius regio eius religio, “Whose region, his religion”—i.e., in each state the religion of the ruler was to be made the religion of his subjects; dissidents were to leave. The agreement represented a mite of progress, since it substituted emigration for execution; but it was restricted to Lutheranism and Catholicism, and the painful uprooting of many families added to the chaos and bitterness in Germany. When a ruler of one creed was succeeded by another of another, the population was expected to change its faith accordingly. Religion became the tool and victim of politics and war.
So divided in theology, Germany before the Thirty Years’ War presented no simple religious map. By and large the north was Protestant, the south and the Rhineland were Catholic; but, as the Augsburg principle could not be thoroughly or hastily enforced, there were many Protestants in Catholic areas and many Catholics in Protestant lands. The Catholics had the advantages of tradition and unity; the Protestants enjoyed more liberty of belief, and they divided into Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Unitarians; even among the Lutherans there was a war of creeds between the followers and the opponents of the liberal Melanchthon. In 1577 the Lutherans formulated their faith in the Book of Concord, and thereafter Calvinists were expelled from Lutheran states. In the Palatinate, Elector Frederick III favored Calvinism and made the University of Heidelberg a seminary for Calvinist youth. There, in 1563, Calvinist theologians drew up the Heidelberg Catechism, which shocked both Catholics and Lutherans by rejecting the Real Presence of Christ in the wine and bread of the Eucharist. Catholics were tolerated in the Palatinate if they confined their worship to their homes; Unitarians were forcibly suppressed. In 1570 two men who questioned or limited the divinity of Christ were put to death at the insistence of Calvinist professors in the University of Heidelberg. Frederick’s son, Elector Lewis, preferred and enforced Lutheranism; Lewis’ brother John Casimir, as regent (1583–92), preferred and enforced Calvinism; and Elector Frederick IV (1592–1610) confirmed that policy. His son Frederick V (1610–23) married Elizabeth Stuart (daughter of James I of England), claimed the throne of Bohemia, and precipitated the Thirty Years’ War.