The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus
Page 1
Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
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THE ADVENTURES OF SIMPLICIUS SIMPLICISSIMUS
Translated by
J. A. UNDERWOOD
with an Introduction by
KEVIN CRAMER
Contents
Introduction
Translator’s Preface
THE ADVENTURES OF SIMPLICIUS SIMPLICISSIMUS
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Book Five
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE ADVENTURES OF SIMPLICIUS SIMPLICISSIMUS
HANS JACOB CHRISTOFFEL VON GRIMMELSHAUSEN (1621–76) was born in the Wetterau town of Gelnhausen, an area devastated by the Thirty Years’ War. Late in life, Grimmelshausen wrote Simplicius Simplicissimus, which became an immediate and overwhelming success, initiating the German novel tradition. It was widely imitated and existed in many versions and languages.
Very little is known of Grimmelshausen’s life and it is hard to know how much of his novel is based on his own experiences and how much on tales he had heard of the war.
Thomas Mann wrote: ‘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 evil – but in the end, contrite and fully tired of a world wasting itself in blood, pillage and lust, but immortal in the miserable splendour of its sins.’
J. A. UNDERWOOD is a distinguished translator from German (and French). For Penguin Classics he has also translated Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Other Writings and Sigmund Freud’s Interpreting Dreams.
KEVIN CRAMER is the author of The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century. He is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.
Introduction
Two hundred years after it ended, the collective memory of the Thirty Years’ War continued to exert a strong pull on the historical imagination of Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Luise Mühlbach’s popular historical novel of the war, Die Opfer des religiösen Fanatismus (‘The Victims of Religious Fanaticism’), was breathlessly advertised in 1872 as the story of ‘an epoch of the most fanatical and savage conflict’ that raged through Germany ‘with devastation and fire for a quarter of a century … a time filled with shame and horror!’. In German folklore the second decade of the conflict, the period between 1630 and 1638 known as the ‘Swedish War’, was remembered as the ‘time of annihilation’. Farmers throughout central and southern Germany, when questioned by travellers curious about the ruins of nearby abandoned villages and manors, would recall the tales passed down through the generations into the nineteenth century and reply, ‘That happened in the Swedish War – the Swede did that!’
Even as the passage of time gradually effaced the scars the war left on the German landscape, the estimation of the extent of the civilian losses caused by Europe’s first ‘total war’ understandably fluctuated, given the lack of exact and reliable demographic data for historians to work with. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the popular belief, endorsed by many historians, was that almost 70 per cent of Germany’s pre-war population, some fifteen million people, died in the conflict. Estimates at the other end of the scale put the number of lost at anywhere between 15 and 30 per cent, that is, between three and six million dead, while claiming that some of the most devastated areas, notably the Rhine Palatinate, northern Bavaria, Bohemia, Mecklenburg and Brandenburg, were virtually depopulated by famine, disease and forced migration. Modern scholarship has arrived at a consensus that estimates that the total demographic decline amounted to about a third of the pre-war population, that is between six and six and a half million dead. But, as Peter Wilson has pointed out, even a population loss of 15 per cent would put the Thirty Years’ War at the top of the list of the most destructive of European conflicts, with the First World War (6 per cent) and the Second World War (5.5 per cent) ranking a distant second and third. Even after the wars of the twentieth century, for many Germans the Thirty Years’ War, in the scale of the suffering it had inflicted on the German nation, would be remembered as a catastrophe unique in history.1
The cruel nature of the war, and the lasting bitterness it generated, were both rooted in religious conflict. For most historically literate Germans, the Thirty Years’ War was a civil war whose origins were to be found in the ‘great schism’ of the Reformation of 1517. This collapse of the universal Catholic Church led to the division of authority among the sovereign German polities of the Holy Roman Empire between rulers who had adopted Protestantism and those who continued to adhere to the Catholic Church (and the secular authority of the Habsburg emperor in Vienna). An uneasy ‘confessional peace’ had been negotiated in 1555 between the Catholic and Lutheran princes which stipulated that subjects were to follow the confession of their ruler (‘cuius regio, eius religio’). Though few expected the settlement to be permanent, the Peace of Augsburg was largely successful in keeping the peace in Central Europe for over half a century.
This peace finally broke down in 1618 in the form of a revolt of the aristocracy in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), who asserted what they believed was their legal right to choose a Protestant ruler from one of the smaller German states. Ferdinand II, the Habsburg emperor in Vienna who had assumed the throne in 1619, viewed this as a usurpation of his authority and an impermissible Protestant infiltration of the Habsburg crown lands. With the aid of the Catholic League army under Maximilian I of Bavaria, and the financial support of Spain and the Pope, Ferdinand crushed the Bohemian rebellion, dispersed the forces of the Protestant Union that had been mobilized to support the rebels, and brutally restored his control over the renegade territory. The conflict expanded, however, as Ferdinand opportunistically used the suppression of the revolt to advance the larger cause of the Counter-Reformation and re-Catholicize the Protestant German states of the Holy Roman Empire by force. In the meantime, those powers that had supported the Protestant Union, France, the United Netherlands, Denmark and, eventually, Sweden, also came to see the conflict as an opportunity and determined to intervene in the war on the side of the German Protestant princes to acquire territory and accelerate the dissolution of Habsburg power in Europe. What had started as a localized rebellion, fuelled by religious animosities, in the Holy Roman Empire soon turned into a war for strategic dominance in Central Europe. It would drag on, waxing and waning in intensity, for another thirty years. Yet the treaty signed in 1648 that ended the war, the Peace of Westphalia, more or less confirmed the religious status quo and balance of power that had existed in 1618. How, then, to make sense of the horrific destruction the war had wreaked?
The sharp confessional divide between Protestant and Catholic Germany shaped all subsequent narratives of the war (as it shaped German politics and culture) well into the twentieth century. Germany’s Protestants recalled the war as one more chapter in Germany’s long struggle, beginning in 1517 (and culminating in German unification in 1871 under Prussian leadership), to liberate itself from foreign domination and territorial and political disunity. Catholic Germans, on the other hand, saw this Protestant narrative (primarily advanced by Prussian historians) as a calculated attempt to write them out of German history as less-than-‘authentic’ Germans whose ancestors had fought for a ‘confederal’ idea of Germany under an Imperial Catholic monarchy. Coming to grips with the meaning of the war, passionately contested in German national memory, persisted as a collective spi
ritual burden and psychological trauma because it was seen as a civil war that pitted two very different visions of ‘Germany’ against each other.2
History has shown that the wounds left by civil wars take the longest to heal. This is why the Thirty Years’ War, for many Germans, was a past that would not pass (Americans, in particular, should be able to recognize this persistence of memory). ‘Germany’s Darkest Hour’ was the title that the cultural historian Karl Biedermann chose for his influential 1862 history of the war. In it Biedermann lamented the ‘unparalleled ruin of the entire German national body’ by the war and its devastating psychological legacy, which he diagnosed as ‘the weakening of the national spirit’. Gustav Freytag’s best-selling series of popular histories, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (‘Pictures from the German Past’), which appeared in numerous editions from the 1860s on, warned readers that they were taking up a story of ‘a sad, joyless time’. Freytag introduced his history of ‘the Great War’ by describing it as a ‘terrible natural disaster … which had destroyed the strength of the German people’.
The dark maelstrom of the Thirty Years’ War, a chaotic time when the natural order of society and authority was inverted, shadowed modern Germany with multiple narratives of victimization. Prevalent anxieties about German cultural backwardness, political weakness, religious fragmentation and economic progress measured against that of rival nations found vivid expression in the nineteenth-century histories of the war. In his commemorative history marking the bicentennial of the Peace of Westphalia in 1848, Karl Schmidt wrote that the war had undermined ‘all the foundations of civil, domestic, and moral life’. Writing in the early 1830s, the historian Friedrich von Raumer lingered on the image of a world turned upside down in which ‘the maxim became all crimes were virtuous, all virtue the work of the devil’. Some two decades later, Heinrich Hecht declared that ‘cunning and deceit became universal’, while Otto Krabbe mourned that ‘the word of God was exiled from the land’. A deluxe modern edition of Freytag’s history, published in 1925 (two years after the ‘Great Disorder’ of Weimar Germany’s period of hyperinflation), was illustrated with a reproduction of a seventeenth-century series of satirical woodcuts entitled ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ that depicted, among other disquieting marvels, the master serving the servant, the blind leading the sighted, the lamb eating the wolf and the sheep shearing the shepherd.
Grimmelshausen’s novel, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, is, at its heart, a story of the pilgrim Simplicius’s journey through the inverted moral universe of the Thirty Years’ War. As a narrative of Simplicius’s progress across the battlefields of Germany, from innocence through temptation to redemption, Grimmelshausen’s novel resists easy categorization. Its title promises, at one level, a heroic picaresque romance in the metafictional mould of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (first published in 1605; Simplicissimus was written in 1668), but it also anticipates the Bildungsroman (‘novel of development’) tradition of German Romanticism, notably Wieland’s History of Agathon (1766–7) and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–6). The mystical passages of the novel’s concluding sections even suggest that Grimmelshausen, a convert to Catholicism, wanted his book, at least in part, to be read as a Christian allegory on the models of the Psychomachia (c.AD 400), Hartmann’s Der Arme Heinrich (c.1190) and Piers Plowman (c.1370–90).
But Simplicissimus perhaps holds the greatest meaning for the modern reader as a story of war in all its horror and absurdity, which is among the reasons why this new translation is so welcome. The catastrophic violence of total war, shot through with the red thread of ideological and genocidal terror that is woven into the history of the twentieth century, was prefigured in the wars of religion that racked Europe from 1517 to 1648. Like all wars fought to advance the ‘one true faith’, these were conflicts of surpassing cruelty. Grimmelshausen makes this cruelty the foundation of his story and the main force that shapes his protagonist because, as Montaigne declares in his own meditation on cruelty, ‘Virtue demands a harsh and thorny road.’ Montaigne, born a century before Grimmelshausen and whose entire adult life was lived amid the upheaval of the French wars of religion, knew well how war put reason and virtue to flight:
[O]wing to the licence of our civil wars … there is nothing to be found in ancient histories more extreme than what we witness every day … I could hardly persuade myself, before I had actual evidence, that there exist any souls so unnatural as to commit murder for the mere pleasure of doing so; as to hack and chop off men’s limbs, as to sharpen their wits for the invention of unusual tortures and new forms of death … merely for the enjoyment of the pleasing spectacle afforded by the pitiful gestures and motions, the lamentable groans and cries, of a man dying in anguish.3
In condemning the barbarism of his epoch’s holy wars, Montaigne undermined an essential myth of European civilization: the elevating conviction that the light of Christianity was guiding the world out of pagan darkness and brutality.
Yet, through the eyes of Grimmelshausen’s protagonist, we see war as it has always been and always will be: a destructive energy that is integral to all cultures and all civilizations. Grimmelshausen also understood, as perhaps Montaigne could not acknowledge (even as he understood it), that all wars are fundamentally ‘wars of God’ because those who are sent to war are initially compelled to believe that God is on their side. The books of the Old Testament, particularly the prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations, passed on to Western culture a narrative tradition that traced the history of nations in the history of war, a tradition they shared with the chroniclers of pagan antiquity. The origins of peoples, tribes and nations are inseparable from the experience of war, war that threatens the annihilation of the group and comes as the test and judgment of God. In the two books of Chronicles in the Old Testament, we read the story of the conquest of Judah by the tribes of Israel, a narrative that is intended to establish the legitimacy of the Davidic kings. I Chronicles tells the story of the war against the Hagarites by the sons of Reuben and their allies, concluding, ‘Many fell slain, because the war was of God.’ In Isaiah, God promises the chosen people of Israel: ‘I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand. Yes, all who are incensed against you shall be ashamed and disgraced; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish.’ This is the law of war for the conquest of the Promised Land proclaimed in Deuteronomy: ‘But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive.’ But should apostasy break the covenant between the chosen people and God, Jeremiah warns of His oncoming judgment in the violence of war: ‘a destroyer of nations has set out; he is gone out from his place to make your land a waste; your cities will be ruins without inhabitant’. The Book of Lamentations graphically describes this divine judgment of Israel as it encompassed the destruction of Jerusalem: ‘The young and old are lying on the ground in the streets; my young women and my young men have fallen by the sword; in the day of your anger you have killed them, slaughtering without mercy.’
In The Iliad, Homer tells how the gods sent ‘strong Hatred, defender of peoples’ into the ranks of the Achaians and the Trojans. Homer’s plot is simple: the gods pass judgment on the Achaians and the Trojans, inciting the furies of vengeance, the epic cycle of retribution, in a vast spectacle of blood and mutilation. The Achaians’ sacrifice is the more worthy: Troy is defeated. Hector assaults the fortifications around the Achaian fleet amid ‘battlements awash with blood’, severed heads spinning and bouncing like balls, eyes being gouged out and ‘entrails spurt[ing] from the bronze’. Herodotus, in The Histories, takes up the narrative of Troy in his own fashion, describing the abduction of Helen as retribution for the Greeks’ abduction of the daughter of the king of the Colchians and sets the stage for his history of the war between the Greeks and the Persians in the fifth century BC: ‘I will set my mark upon that man that I myself kn
ow began unjust acts against the Greeks, and, having so marked him, I will go forward in my account, covering alike the small and great cities of mankind.’ Retribution and the redress of injustice; Herodotus, like Homer, takes these as his themes when he writes that the oracle at Delphi demanded that the sacrifice of the Spartans at Thermopylae, and the sacking of Athens and defilement of the holy sanctuary in the Acropolis, be avenged: ‘the shrines of the gods and their images [have been] burned and destroyed; it lies upon us of necessity to avenge these to the uttermost rather than make terms with him that did these things’.
Thucydides, Herodotus’ contemporary, transforms the nature of the ‘unjust act’ that demands that our enemies be slaughtered ‘without mercy’. His History of the Peloponnesian War foreshadows the modern, secular war narrative. Nation begins to replace godhead, with Homer’s ‘Hatred, defender of peoples’ driving the cycle of retribution forwards. The Thebans demand from Sparta the right to punish the Plataeans, who were in league with Sparta: ‘our own demand for vengeance is a righteous demand … when people suffer what they deserve, as is the case with the Plataeans, their fate, far from provoking pity, is a matter for satisfaction … they must stand their trial’. Two hundred Plataeans were put to death, their women were enslaved and the city was razed to the ground. Thucydides’ history ends with the destruction of the Athenian expedition on the River Assinarus in Sicily in 413 BC: ‘the Peloponnesians came down and slaughtered them,’ Thucydides coolly records, ‘especially those who were in the river.’ He concludes his account by describing how the survivors of the massacre were imprisoned in a quarry, where ‘the bodies [were] all heaped together on top of one another of those who had died from their wounds or from the change of temperature or other such causes, so the smell was insupportable’. Here, in this bloody, stinking pit, Thucydides chose to see a glorious chapter in the history of the Greeks: ‘This was the greatest Hellenic action that took place during this war, and, in my opinion, the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history – to the victors the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats … their sufferings were on an enormous scale; their losses were, as they say, total.’ Even if we remain uncertain whether Thucydides appreciated the irony (or moral inversion) of celebrating the ‘brilliance’ of the horror that took place on the banks of the Assinarus, we can be sure that Grimmelshausen would not have missed it.