Baroque Literature in Germany

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Baroque Literature in Germany

Political and Religious Conflict.

Unlike France and England, which were unified states ruled by monarchs, Germany remained a loose confederation of more than 300 semi-autonomous states in the early-modern era. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation had cut deep fissures into the political system of the region during the sixteenth century, and controversies over religion persisted in the early seventeenth century. Both Protestants and Catholics longed for a day in which a single, unitary faith might be reestablished in the country, and the tensions that competition between these confessions produced eventually boiled over in the dismal conflict known as the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). That clash, waged in several major stages during its seemingly unending history, ultimately did little to resolve the longstanding problems that had made religion the central issue in German society since the 1520s. At its conclusion, Calvinism, once an illegal religion in the country, was permitted, but the principle cujus regio, eiuis religio or "he who rules, his religion," was upheld, leaving the rulers of Germany's individual states free to determine the religions of their subjects. The war thus helped to confirm the political disunity of the Germanies until the nineteenth century, and its legal formulations enhanced the tendency already present in politics for territorial rulers to become more and more like absolutist princes. In the generations following its conclusion, many German rulers looked westward toward France, and the cultural brilliance of Versailles provided a consistent source for their emulation. At the same time the outcome of the Thirty Years' War also strengthened the positions of the largest states in the empire—Austria, Brandenburg, the Rhineland Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg, and Bavaria—over and against the smaller ones. Although the number of Germany's independent territories remained large throughout the period, the individual policies of many states now came to be overshadowed by the political aims and maneuvers of the most powerful territories in the region, a situation that anticipated the great dominance that Prussia and Austria achieved in German politics during the eighteenth century. In England, these religious tensions, and eventual civil war, had done little to dampen the development of vigorous literary debates. So, too, in Germany, the seventeenth century produced a wealth of new religious literature, poetry, and fiction. But while some of these writings spoke to the dismal political and religious realities of the period, others were relatively unaffected by the problems of the age. And despite the Thirty Years' War's devastations, Germany's national literature continued to develop apace throughout the century.

German Language.

Against the backdrop of political squabbling, Germany's language was also undergoing many significant changes. Linguistic diversity had always been a major fact of German life, with many different dialects being spoken throughout the country. At the end of the Middle Ages, several attempts had been made to foster a more unified written language, first at the court of Charles IV in Prague during the so-called "Golden Age" in the mid-fourteenth century, and later under the Habsburg emperors of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when a chancery or legal form of the language had been developed and its use pioneered throughout the country. These literary forms of German were distinctly different from the modes of expression that the country's sixteenth-century religious reformers and religious pamphleteers used in the Reformation, even as the Middle English of Chaucer is distinctly foreign when compared against the language used in Elizabethan times. The quest for a common literary form of German continued throughout the sixteenth century, but it came increasingly to be dominated, not by the flow of religious polemic, but by the course of discussion in the country's universities. By the end of the sixteenth century Germany's intellectuals continued to be trained in Latin-speaking universities, although the Latin they used had itself undergone great transformations in the course of the sixteenth century. Throughout the Middle Ages the Latin used in the church and universities had been transformed, so that by 1400 it had become a distinctly different language from that which had been spoken and written in ancient Rome. In the course of the fifteenth century, Italian humanists had revived the language's ancient grammatical structures and style, and this Neo-Latin eventually spread throughout Europe. In the sixteenth century great Neo-Latin stylists like Desiderius Erasmus and Michel de Montaigne were able to speak and write a form of the language that mirrored the ancient language, and their efforts were widely imitated among later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century intellectuals. In Germany, those who received a university education continued to produce poetry and prose in Latin, rather than in their native languages in the seventeenth century. Yet their very experiments with the study of Neo-Latin helped to enrich the usages and style of German. As many began to compose in their native tongue, they decried the paucity of vocabulary and literary devices to convey their subtle arguments. And so, in the course of the seventeenth century, Germany's greatest literary figures set themselves to the task of developing a native literary mode of expression that could rival the sophistication they sensed existed in the Neo-Latin idiom.

The "Fruit-Bringing" Society.

The "Fruit-Bringing" Society (in German, Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft) was perhaps the most important of the many experiments in which German authors tried to create a literary form of German equal to that of other languages, particularly Neo-Latin. Founded in 1617 under the patronage of Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen, its aim was to imitate the great academies that had been founded in Florence and other Renaissance centers in the century and half before. Its membership was distinctly aristocratic from the first, and its purpose had several interrelated aims. First, the "Fruit-Bringing" Society desired to cultivate an elegant literary form of German that would make use of the best rhetorical skills. Beyond this, its members longed to purify their language of usages that were not Germanic in origin and to create a pattern of verse writing that was appropriate to the sound and syntax of their language. The efforts of the "Fruit-Bringing" Society were soon aided by the publication of the poems of Martin Opitz, the first great literary figure of the German Baroque era. In 1624, Opitz published his Book of German Poetry, a work that established standards that were to persist in German verse writing over the coming century. Opitz's poems demonstrated the great clarity that could be achieved in German poetry that relied on clear rhyme schemes. He recommended, for instance, the Alexandrine or twelve-syllable line for the writing of epics and the use of iambic pentameter for sonnets. But his work also included examples of how the best poems of writers in other languages might be successfully rendered into German, and this part of his focus soon inspired poets to undertake a host of new translations. Opitz also recommended the office of the poet to his readers as one of "divine" significance. Poetry, he argued, derived from divine inspiration, and thus it contained within its lines an encoded or "hidden" theology. It was the poet's task, therefore, not merely to represent reality, but to present an image of what might or should be. The poet, in other words, should make the beautiful appear even more so, even as he castigated ugliness in terms more grotesque than it was in actuality. For his own efforts in the art, the German emperor named him Poet Laureate in 1625, and two years later, raised Opitz and his descendants to noble status. In 1629, he was named a member of the "Fruit-Bringing Society," but by this time numerous other "literary societies" were already forming in Germany's major cities. Usually composed of members of the aristocracy, these societies pursued the same end as the original "Fruit-Bringing Society": to foster an elegant German literary style that would be the equal of other languages. In the years that followed, numerous poets throughout the German-speaking world took up the task that Martin Opitz had set down for them. They eagerly translated prose and poetic works from other languages into German, even as they experimented with applying the insights that they attained from these endeavors to fashioning a new literary idiom.

The Baroque Style Matures.

The impact of Opitz and Germany's new literary societies did not produce a single unified style in the later seventeenth century, but instead a multiplicity of paths that points to the essential creativity of the period. Generally, the forces that led to the development of a "High Baroque" literary style, though, were Protestant, and were most in evidence in the Lutheran cities of the country. One stylistic direction was taken by the Protestants Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1607–1658), Philipp von Zesen (1619–1689), and Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664). Harsdörffer was a native Nuremberger who traveled widely throughout Europe in his youth and eventually joined the "Fruit-Bringing Society." In 1644, he helped to write the Pegnitz Pastoral, a collection of poems intended to inaugurate the new "Order of the Flowers on the Pegnitz," the "Pegnitz" being the river that runs through the center of Nuremberg. That society came to be an important literary force in the second half of the seventeenth century. The fondness for an elaborate musical style was also echoed in the literary society, "The German-Minded Brotherhood," that Philipp von Zesen founded in 1643 at Hamburg. Unusual for his time, Zesen was able to support himself solely through his poetry and other literary activities. He translated French works and wrote The Adriatic Rosemund, one of the first great novels in the German language to deal with the theme of love and the role of religious differences in keeping a couple apart, soon to be a perennial theme. Like Martin Opitz, Philipp von Zesen was eventually raised to noble status for these efforts. The final figure, Andreas Gryphius, is today recognized as one of the greatest literary figures in the history of the German language. Unlike Zesen or Harsdörffer, Gryphius grew up in relative isolation from the great literary societies of the day. He was a Lutheran who was born in the east in Silesia; after studying in the Netherlands, he eventually became an attorney. Although his verse shares the same tendency toward literary flower as Zesen and Harsdörffer, it rises above the merely decorative through its persistent lament about harsh fortune. Gryphius's life was spent in the regions that were devastated by the Thirty Years' War, and in his poetry he continually expresses sentiments and themes that speak to its destruction. All life is transitory, filled with vanity. Human existence is governed by an unalterable fate, to which the only appropriate human response is to remain steadfast and courageous and to hold onto one's faith. Constancy and fortitude, two popular Baroque themes that were often personified as goddesses, constantly recur in Gryphius' somber works.

Grimmelshausen.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, Germany's vigorous literary climate, with its numerous literary societies, had produced not only a number of native poets, but many translations of prose works from French, Italian, and Spanish. One figure that was affected by this literary resurgence was Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (c. 1621–1678), an author that had an almost "larger-than-life" existence. Grimmelshausen was an outsider on the literary scene. He was not an aristocrat or a university-educated wit in the manner of many of those that participated in Germany's new literary societies. He grew up in humbler circumstances, and his literary endeavors were not recognized until centuries later because he published his greatest work, the novel The Adventures of Simplicissimus (1688–1689), anonymously. It was not until the nineteenth century that his authorship was firmly established. Born a Lutheran, he was captured at the age of fourteen in the conflicts of the Thirty Years' War. Later he served in the Catholic forces of the imperial army before becoming a caretaker for a noble. In that capacity he ran an inn, sold horses, and was even a tax collector. When it came to light that he had embezzled funds, he was forced from these positions. Later he became an assistant to a physician, helping to manage his interests, before returning to tavern keeping and even becoming a bailiff in his final years. At this time, too, he converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism. Through all these constant shifts in profession, Grimmelshausen had continued to write, and he had published several satires in the late 1650s. His great masterpiece, though, was The Adventures of Simplicissimus, a work that was widely translated and became a best-seller in many parts of Europe. Simplicissimus is modeled on the Spanish picaresque novels of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The central character of the same name is, as in those earlier works, a lowborn child who becomes a vagrant through the chaos unleashed by the Thirty Years' War. The work was filled with coarse, black humor as well as an eye for creating memorable characters. Of the many works written in seventeenth-century Germany, it is the only prose work that is still widely read today, a testimony to the universality of its author's vision and his critique of the barbarities of war.

BÖhme.

Perhaps the most influential writer of the seventeenth century in Germany was unaffected by the great debates over the direction that the language's style should take. Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), a Lutheran, had, like Andreas Gryphius, been born in the eastern empire, near the town of Görlitz. In 1594 or 1595, Böhme moved to Görlitz where he became a shoemaker, and in the months that followed his arrival he had a profound religious conversion experience, an experience prompted by the local preacher. He later reported that in the space of a few minutes he had received certainty of his salvation. These mystical experiences did not prompt a great outpouring of devotional prose at first. He produced a few minor tracts broadcasting his mystical insights, but Böhme was largely unschooled, and so he set himself to studying the "major" authors of the Christian tradition, the mystics of the German past, as well as certain sixteenth-century authors like the physician Paracelsus, whose ideas tended toward the abstruse and metaphysical. Shortly before his death, Böhme published the results of his studies in a number of works that seems to have consumed all his efforts during the last five years of his life. He may have been aided in these efforts by the gifts of friends that freed him from his occupation as a cobbler. But between 1619 and 1624 he

COMMUNION WITH GOD

introduction: The works of the German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) attracted numerous adherents, not only in Germany, but throughout Europe. They came to have a perennial appeal among German authors because of the way in which they described the soul's relationship with God. Their influence spread, too, far beyond Germany, where they came to influence later seventeenth-century religious writers like the Quaker George Fox. In Germany, too, the ideas of Böhme also influenced the literary monuments of Pietism, the great religious movement within Lutheranism that tried to deepen ordinary Christians' internal faith. Pietism came to shape the course of religious developments in eighteenth-century Germany, but, through its numerous educational institutions, it also nourished a disproportionate number of the country's authors.

When Man will go about Repentance, and with his prayers turn to God, before he begins to pray, he must consider his own mind, that it is wholly and altogether turned away from God, that it is become faithless to God, that it is only bent upon this temporal, frail, and earthly life, bearing no sincere love towards God and his neighbor, and also that it wholly lusts and walks contrary to the commandments of God, seeking itself only, in the temporal and transitory lusts of the flesh.

Secondly, he must consider that all this is an enmity against God, which Satan hath raised and stirred up in him, by his deceit in our first parents, for which abomination's sake we die the death and must undergo corruption with our bodies.

Thirdly, he must consider the three horrible chains wherewith our soul is fast bound during the time of this earthly life: the first is the severe anger of God, the abyss, and dark world, which is the center and creaturely life of the soul. The second, is the desire of the devil against the soul, whereby he continually sifts and tempts it, and without intermission strives to throw it from the truth of God into vanity, viz. into pride, covetousness, envy and anger, and with his desire blows up and kindles those evil properties in the soul, whereby the will of the soul turns away from God and enters into [it]self. The third and most hurtful chain, wherewith the poor soul is tied, is the corrupt and altogether vain, earthly and mortal flesh and blood, full of evil desires and inclinations. …

Fourthly, he must earnestly consider that wrathful death waits upon him every hour and moment, and will lay hold on him in his sins, in his garment of a swine keeper, and throw him into the pit of hell, as a forsworn person and breaker of faith, who ought to be kept in the dark dungeon of death to the judgment of God.

Fifthly, he must consider the earnest and severe judgment of God, where he shall be presented living with his abominations before the judgment; and all those whom he hath here offended and injured with words and works, and caused to do evil …

Sixthly, he must consider that the ungodly loses his noble image (God having created him for his Image) and [becomes] instead like a deformed monster, like a hellish worm or ugly beast, wherein he is God's enemy and against heaven and all holy Angels and men, and that his communion is forever with the devil's and hellish worms in the horrible darkness.

Seventhly, he must earnestly consider the eternal punishment and torment of the damned, that in eternal horror they shall suffer torments in their abominations, which they have committed here, and may never see the land of the saints in all eternity, nor get any ease or refreshment …

All this, man must earnestly and seriously consider, and remember that God that created him in such a fair and glorious image, in his own likeness in which he himself will dwell that he hath created him in his praise for man's own eternal joy and glory, viz., that he might dwell with the holy Angels, and children of God in great joy, power, and glory …

source: Jakob Böhme, The Way to Christ (London: H. Blunden, 1647): 1–5. Spelling modernized by Philip Soergel.

produced thirty tracts and books that were to have a profound effect on the generations that followed. Böhme's theology promoted God as a great abyss, a profound nothingness that was, at the same time, the ground of all being. Out of these depths, a creative force struggles to be set free, but as it does great problems arise in the world because of the human spirit's opposition to the divinity. Böhme himself claimed to be a prophet, and during his own life he attracted a following. In the decades following his death, his ideas traveled, inspiring groups of "Boehmites" in the Netherlands and other German regions. His ideas were also read in England where they affected the Quakers, even as they also were avidly read and studied by the Lutheran Pietists in the later seventeenth century in Germany. Later, Immanuel Kant and Georg William Friedrich Hegel also read his works and incorporated some of his psychological insights into their philosophies. Thereafter, the deeply mystical strains of his ideas continued to return to influence later German thinkers, among them Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Schopenhauer.