Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
German literature
Table of Contents
Introduction
Origins and Middle Ages
Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance
The 18th century
The 19th century
The 20th century
German literature, German literature comprises the written works of the German-speaking peoples of central Europe. It has shared the fate of German politics and history: fragmentation and discontinuity. Germany did not become a modern nation-state until 1871, and the prior history of the various German states is marked by warfare, religious turmoil, and periods of economic decline. This fragmented development sets German literature apart from the national literatures of France and England, for instance, which enjoyed uninterrupted brilliance from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Nevertheless, German literature has experienced three periods of established greatness: the high Middle Ages (c. 1160–c. 1230), the turn of the 18th to the 19th century (the “age of Goethe”), and the turn of the 19th to the 20th.
This article provides a concise historical survey of German literature. Its major periods, movements, works, and themes are discussed and set into their political and cultural context. The aim is to characterize major and representative works and ideas and not to attempt a complete or even thorough survey of authors and the literary scene. Origins and Middle Ages Pre-Christian and early Christian periods
The Germanic tribes immigrating to mainland Europe from Scandinavia from the 1st century bc onward brought with them a rich culture. Since its language-related heritage was orally transmitted and its recipients saw no need to replace the physical presence of the singer of tales with written texts, most of it is lost. The rich mythology and epic-heroic poetry are partly recoverable from later written sources, all from the 13th century and beyond—the Old Norse Eddic poems, the German Nibelungenlied, and various poems about the hero Dietrich von Bern/Theodoric. Only broken bits of this culture remain: runic inscriptions, mythological motifs on gold amulets, a few magic incantations (the “Merseburger Zaubersprüche” [“Merseburg charms”], preserved in the Merseburg library, which reveal pre-Christian origins), and a 67-line fragment of a heroic song depicting a tragic clash between the warrior Hildebrand and his own son (Hildebrandslied [c. 800; “Hildebrand’s Song,” Eng. trans. The Hildebrandslied]). The imagination of this nomadic warrior culture envisioned human destiny as being inescapably tragic. In Norse mythology, even the gods themselves fall prey to malice and revenge and are swallowed up in the cataclysm known as Ragnarǫk, the “Doom of the Gods.”
The society’s heroic pessimism and inability to free itself from revenge cycles made it ripe for a religion of reconciliation and atonement. The conversion of the Germans to Christianity (largely accomplished by the end of the 5th century) thus presented a great challenge: that of reeducating an entire people and of adapting and translating the literature of Christianity into a language that had no written tradition. The earliest known effort to this end is the remarkable late-4th-century Gothic Bible translation of Bishop Ulfilas. (In order to execute it, Ulfilas seems to have developed the Gothic alphabet.) Educational reforms instituted in the age of Charlemagne (768–814) brought scattered religious texts in one or another of the dialects of Old High German (for instance, Otfried of Weissenberg’s Evangelienbuch [c. 870, “Gospel Book”], a rhymed version of the Gospels). In the late 11th and throughout the 12th century, religious literature in early Middle High German proliferated. These works warn of the sinfulness and perils of earthly life, painting it as an illusion and a net of the Devil to trap unwary fools. Their texts, which have no literary significance, dwell on the theme memento mori: think only of death and dying and live life as a preparation for its end. They arose out of conflict between church and state, the so-called Investiture Controversy (a power struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire), and they served the interests of reactionary, ascetic movements toward monastic and church reform. They aimed at providing religious instruction for the laity—and were therefore written in the vernacular—but they were also a kind of propaganda rejecting the worldliness of secular rule and the subordination of the church to the state that occurred increasingly in the course of various imperial dynasties: Carolingian (750–887), Ottonian (936–1002), and Salian (1024–1125). It is a peculiar feature of German literary history that the first abundant texts in the German language reflect not mainstream culture and its secular manifestations but the conservative religious reaction against it. High courtly literature: Middle High German Classicism
Cultural trends and mores unquestionably emanated from the German empire and the royal-imperial court, which from the 8th to the 13th century developed a rich and influential culture. Its literature was almost exclusively in the Latin language. The humanistic imperial culture and its politics were nourished from the idea of Classical revival. The motto renovatio imperii Romanorum (“renewal of the Roman Empire”) appears on German royal seals from the reign of Otto III on. The legitimacy of German rule rested on its derivation from Roman rule. Ideals of dress, behaviour, and speech were adapted from the Roman Empire’s ideals of the statesman and orator.
The values of the imperial courts were eagerly adopted by courts of dukes and counts. Beginning in the 12th century, these lesser feudal courts, first in France and Norman England, then in Germany, together produced one of the most brilliant bodies of literature in the West.
The literature of courtly society documents a civilizing process. It both represents and creates one of the most significant transformations of ethics and values experienced in the post-Roman West: the transformation from the rough-cut, brutal warrior values of early medieval Europe to courtly society’s ideals of restraint, humanity, elegance, and refined love. The lyric poetry of courtly love
In a period of some 20 years, about 1160 to 1180, German emerged as a literary language. It was a remarkable transformation. By the end of the Classical period, c. 1230, courtly society had produced a radiant literary flowering where apparently nothing (at least nothing written) had existed before.
“Courtly love” (the Provençal troubadours’ fin’amors, the Middle High German hôhe minne) is the central theme of aristocratic lyric poetry from the 12th century to the end of the Middle Ages. A common stance of the courtly lover is long-suffering endurance of the coldness of an unapproachable, unyielding high noble lady whom he serves in the vain hope of some day winning her love. Love is suffering, sickness, and a magic spell that imposes patience and endurance on the lover. Hôhe minne is less an erotic experience than a process of ethical formation and of courtly education. The lover, held at bay by his lady, is made to polish his speech, his manners, and his virtues to a high standard of courtly excellence. He is denied her love until he passes her tests.
This typical posture of the courtly lover is found, for instance, in the verse of Reinmar von Hagenau and Heinrich von Morungen. The idea of yoking the erotic to a program of education is foreign to modern sensibilities but consistent with a long tradition (Greek and Roman) of the disciplining of desire to create self-control and a mature, civil character.
But the 12th century, the great divide between the ancient and the modern world, also raised individual experience of love to the level of an ideal for the first time in the West, and tensions between the artifice of love pedagogy and the experience of passion are everywhere evident in courtly literature. Walther von der Vogelweide, the greatest of the German courtly poets, commemorated, in his poem “Unter der Linden” (“Under the Linden Tree”), a love meeting that was mutual, intense, and passionate, in which the woman delights in uninhibitedly yielding to her lover. The poem is a challenge to the poetry of hôhe minne, high courtly love, and its chaste eroticism. It represents a kind of love that Walther called playfully “low love” (niedere minne) but valued the more highly for its naturalness and spontaneity. This conception was probably favoured by the philosopher-teacher Peter Abelard and his learned student and lover, Héloïse, in their tragic relationship. Courtly romance