Grimmelshausen, Hans Jacob Christoffel von

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Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

c. 1621–1676

Novelist

Early Years.

Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's early life coincided with one of Germany's most dismal epics: the Thirty Years' War. He was born to Protestant parents, but as a child he was kidnapped by invading armies and impressed into service in one of the armies that was then making its way through the country. Later, he joined the Catholic forces of the emperor before serving as an assistant to Count Reinhard von Schauenberg. When the war finally concluded, Schauenberg's family gave him a position as a caretaker on their lands. In turn, he served the family as a tax collector, innkeeper, and bailiff. When it came to light that he had been stealing from them, though, the Schauenbergs quickly dismissed him. In the next few years, Grimmelshausen became an assistant to a physician, and he also found work as a tavern keeper and again as a bailiff. Even while he was a soldier in the imperial army, though, Grimmelshausen had begun to write. In 1658 and 1660, he published his first works, two short satirical texts, but his fame rests ultimately on his great masterpiece, The Adventures of Simplicissimus, the first part of which appeared in 1668. It was followed by a second part and a continuation entitled Courage, the Adventuress one year later. It was an immediate success, one of the first bestselling pieces of fiction to appear in the German language. It brought Grimmelshausen no fame, however, since it was published anonymously, and his authorship was not established definitively until the nineteenth century.

Black Humor.

Unlike Germany's great seventeenth-century poets, Grimmelshausen had not benefited from a university education. While he was largely unfamiliar with the structures of Neo-Latin rhetoric, he still managed to spin a considerable yarn of adventure. His work is the product of a great deal of reading, particularly in the picaresque novel tradition that had developed in late sixteenth-century Spain. His hero, Simplicissimus, is a vagrant, a naive peasant that passes from one unfortunate incident to the next. In the world that Grimmelshausen creates, soldiers routinely torture, maim, and murder civilians, and although Germany's peasants often strike back, they generally are unable to stop the carnage. Many of the gruesome accounts that Grimmelshausen related were apparently autobiographical; the account of Simplicissimus's capture by forces that had plundered his village is just one of the many examples of the parallels between this fictional world and real life. While the events he relates are gruesome and often obscene, the moral of the story was no less troubling: the only solution to humankind's cruelties lay in renunciation of the world. Simplicissimus becomes, at the conclusion of the tale, a hermit, but along the way to this transformation, his actions have confounded the mighty and embarrassed the learned. The Adventures of Simplicissimus is one of the best examples of the cross fertilization that occurred between literary genres in early-modern Europe. Its inspiration was to be found in the picaresque novels of Renaissance Spain, yet transposed into a new literary environment, Grimmelshausen was able to transform that form into high art, filled with hilarity and rich observation.

Implications.

Much of the literature that survives from the seventeenth century is religious in nature. In poetics, German writers began at this time to experiment with new ways of forging lyrics that made use of the sound possibilities of the German language. In these efforts they searched through the classics and adapted the Neo-Latin rhetoric that had fascinated sixteenth-century authors. In so doing, they found new ways of elevating their language into a flexible mode of expression. The world of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, however, lay far from the elevated literary societies anxious to raise the literary standard in German. Like Shakespeare, Grimmelshausen sprang from humbler roots, although his broad reading and his life experiences marked him as someone who had a message to impart. Although great poetry and religious works appeared in Germany's cataclysmic seventeenth century, Grimmelshausen's The Adventures of Simplicissimus is today the only work that still claims a general readership from the period. Its greatness and continuing appeal arises, in large part, from the universal nature of its author's observations on human nature and its shortcomings. In this regard, its appeal spoke to the developing "bourgeois" society in Germany's societies, and although he had few imitators in the seventeenth century Grimmelshausen's work continued to produce imitators in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worlds.