Gottfried’s Tristan und Isolde is an unfinished masterpiece of some 19,000 lines. Its source was the Roman de Tristan by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas. Gottfried died about 1210 without completing it. In almost every point it is the opposite of Wolfram’s work. It is a tragedy of adulterous love whose hero is fatally bound by a love potion to Isolde, the wife of King Marke of England. The work is revolutionary in many ways. It rejects a strong tendency in tales and lyrics of “courtly love” to make the woman into the man’s educator and an administrator of courtliness and virtue. The concept of love in Tristan crosses the aforementioned great divide between the ancient world (in which love was regarded as an ennobling, educating force) and the modern world (which perceived love as obsessive, a lofty but destructive passion). The tragedy of Tristan and Isolde contradicts the love pedagogy that had shaped Érec and Énite, Iwein, and Parzival into models of marital fidelity and courtly humanity. Tragic love is still ennobling, but it ennobles by glorifying suffering, melancholy, death, and the fusing of joy and sorrow in love. Gottfried dedicates his work to the elite of “noble hearts” who can appreciate the exquisite benefits of tragic passion.
The work is also revolutionary in its style and form. It is poetry of the highest order. The language of secular narrative poetry in Germany was a newborn, so to speak; at least it was no more than half a generation old. But in Tristan und Isolde the German language achieves a high point of elegance, allusiveness, and sophistication that it would not reach again until the late 18th and 19th centuries. Gottfried studied in the humanistic Latin schools of France or in those of Germany, and he brought a wealth of Classical knowledge to his composition. In Tristan the traditions of Classical Latin literature inform, deepen, and strengthen German poetry.
The hero is no longer a chivalric knight earning fame and love by combat but rather a courtier and an artist who makes his way in the life of a royal court by eloquence and talent, by his skill in music and the hunt. As in any court novel, deceit loses some of its negative moral charge and becomes a skill parallel to art and learning. Tristan and Isolde become tricksters and illusion makers in order to conceal their affair from her husband and his uncle, the cuckold King Marke.
In the work there is an idyllic “adventure” when the lovers, banished from the court, live in a magical “cave of lovers.” Their cathedral-like love temple is interpreted by the poet as an allegory of the virtues of love. Nibelungenlied
The other major epic from this remarkable decade, 1200–10, takes the reader into a social and ethical world designed as the antithesis to that of the civilized, refined courtesy of the romance. The Nibelungenlied (“Song of the Nibelungs”) is a return to a more primitive, pre-courtly, Germanic heroic world. The hero, Siegfried, arouses envy and suspicion by marrying Kriemhild, sister of King Gunther of the Burgundians. Her family, led by the dark assassin Hagen, murders him treacherously and steals the fabulous Nibelung treasure. Years later she remarries, lures her family to visit, and exacts her revenge in a disastrous battle that leaves thousands on both sides dead, including all the protagonists.
Parzival progresses from an unthinking brutality to a sensitive, compassionate humanity. Kriemhild goes in the opposite direction; she reverts from courtly modesty to mayhem and raving. Deceit, assassination, and gruesome revenge are the major elements of this work, and they unfold against the background of a thin veneer of politeness, courtesy, and courtly restraint overlying the characters’ behaviour. The work is a reactionary rejection of the civilizing trends advocated by courtly literature. It returns to the heroic Germanic past to construct a doomed world where the tragic demise of whole peoples was inevitable and glorious at the same time, courteousness was stupidity, and trust and love were childishly naive. Post-Classical Middle High German literature
The flowering of Middle High German courtly literature lasted about 60 years. In its wake literature did not subside; it mushroomed. But these latecomer authors, interesting as their works can be, are imitators, and, in the shadow of a Classical period, they sensed their own mediocrity. The major figures of this post-Classical era are Heinrich von dem Türlîn, who wrote an obscure and lengthy baroque romance of Sir Gawain called Die Krône (c. 1220–30; The Crown); Rudolf von Ems, who authored various longer epics and a chronicle of world history; and Konrad von Würzburg, a versatile stylist who continued the Classical style of Gottfried in a variety of narrative works—Partonopier und Meliur (“Partonopier and Meliur”), Der Schwanritter (“The Knight of the Swan”), and Engelhard. His magnum opus is Der Trojanerkrieg, a courtly retelling of the Trojan War in an epic poem of more than 40,000 lines (Parzival was long at about 25,000 lines).
The autumn of courtly forms corresponded to a decline in the political position of Germany brought about by the victory of the papacy in the Investiture Controversy and the consequent weakening of central political authority. The “Holy Roman Empire” proclaimed by the propaganda of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa existed mostly in name and ceremonial form. The last great emperor of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, Frederick II (1220–50), moved the imperial residence to Sicily. This period set loose on Germany the plagues that ravaged the political life of that country until its reunification in 1989–90: political fragmentation, provincialism, dependence on Italian and French culture, and a lack of confidence in its own culture that alternated with convulsive attempts to establish German culture and national identity. Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance
The late Middle Ages in Europe was a time of decadence and regeneration. A proliferation of literary forms, including didactic literature, prose renderings of classic works, and mystical tracts, was one symptom of this double tendency. The elegant Minnesang was replaced by the wooden verse of guild poetasters, the Meistersang (“mastersong”). The age’s preoccupation with death produced a macabre flowering of art: the dance of death, a large body of sermon literature on the memento mori theme, tracts on the art of dying well (ars moriendi), as well as a rich body of visual and plastic art.
A curious and remarkable work, Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (Death and the Ploughman is the colourful title of a modern translation), consists of a debate between its author, Johannes von Tepl, and the figure of Death that is in effect a confrontation between the moribund late Middle Ages and the life-affirming tendencies of a nascent Renaissance. Perched significantly on the watershed between a dying and a rising culture, Johannes von Tepl made his work, written about 1400, a monument to his young wife, Margaretha, who had recently died in childbirth. The author (the “ploughman”) raises a hue and cry against Death, who has robbed him of his wife. Death answers his complaints, and a debate follows in which Johannes defends the value of human life against its attacker, Death. God judges the debate and gives victory to Death but honour to man.
The Renaissance in Germany—rich in art, architecture, and learned humanist writings—was poor in German-language literature. Works from Italy were eagerly received and translated, especially those of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the humanist scholar Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini. Rabelais’s works found a vigorous imitator in Johann Fischart. For Germany the 16th century was an age of satire. One of its most popular works was Das Narrenschiff (1494; Ship of Fools) by Sebastian Brant, who thus inaugurated a genre of fool” literature" class="md-crosslink">“fool” literature. (The best-known representative of this body of work is probably Desiderius Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly [1509].) One of the most versatile writers of popular plays, short stories in verse, and narrative and satirical poems was the Nürnberg shoemaker and Meistersinger Hans Sachs, whose style has the simplicity and roughness of woodcuts.