Among the abundant popular literary digests known as Volksbücher (“folk books,” popular prose narratives), one that deserves mention—because of its resonance in a time of renewed enthusiasm for learning and because of its grand future—is the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587). This story of a doctor whose thirst for knowledge leads him to make a pact with the Devil was to supply Goethe with the outline of his drama Faust. Reformation
The culture of Germany in the 16th century stood in the shadow of the Protestant Reformation, which was initiated by the German monk Martin Luther in 1517. Luther contributed to the development of the German language in his translation of the Bible, one of the vital forces creating a standard language in a Germany whose culture was essentially regional and whose language was essentially a collection of local dialects. The century’s literary culture produced few classic works but many instruments of religious propaganda, which now reached comparatively large audiences because of new media developed since the 14th century—the woodcut and the printing press. An extensive body of polemical literature served the causes of the parties to the religious schism initiated by Luther. Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515–17; The Letters of Obscure Men), a witty satire written in large part by the humanists Crotus Rubeanus (Johannes Jäger) and Ulrich von Hutten against the anti-Semitic and antihumanistic forces at work in the German universities, opened a gap between humanists and conservative scholastic intellectuals that would favour the move of the humanists into the Lutheran camp, where they became part of an important intellectual coalition against the Roman Catholic party. The satiric mode of literature set the tone for popular polemics such as the “fool” satires of Thomas Murner, a Catholic adversary of Martin Luther: Die Geuchmat (1519; “Field of Fools”) and Von dem grossen Lutherischen Narren (1522; “Concerning the Great Lutheran Fool”).
The 16th century, although poor in great works of literature, was an immensely vital period that produced extraordinary characters such as the revolutionary humanist Ulrich von Hutten, the Nürnberg artist Albrecht Dürer, the Reformer Luther, and the doctor-scientist-charlatan Paracelsus. In the early modern period, as in various periods before and after, Germany was subject to division and party wrangling. The Baroque
The political and social consequences of the Reformation reached with devastating effect into the 17th and early 18th centuries. German literature of the Baroque period (c. 1600–1720) suffers equally from the miseries of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), in which the various tensions set in place by the religious divisions were fought out, and from Germany’s dependence on foreign cultural models—particularly on the French model.
It was an age of contradictions and extremes: A wealthy, sophisticated, overly ornate court society coexisted with political chaos and destructive warfare. A courtly literature of sublime, chivalric ideals and romances that were played out in utopian landscapes thrived opposite a court drama obsessed with violence, intrigue, murder, and betrayal. Sensual lyric poetry with Petrarchan-Platonic strains of ideal love was matched by poems exhibiting a preoccupation with death, mutability, the corruption of the flesh, and the illusory nature of life (“Life is a dream” was a prominent motif of Baroque literature). Extremes of worldliness met extremes of religiosity.
The period produced one major work that quintessentially expressed the chaotic extravagance and deep wretchedness of life in Germany in the 17th century: the novel Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669; The Adventurous Simplicissimus) by Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen. It is a bildungsroman, or “novel of education,” with many parallels to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. After his putative father disappears in a marauding episode of the Thirty Years’ War, the young hero sets out into the world as a simple fool, knowing nothing yet often wiser than the experienced fools he encounters. His crazy-quilt career takes him through one role after another: a fool, a woman, an officer’s adjutant, a Robin Hood-like highwayman, an army officer, a prisoner of war, a pilgrim, a nobleman, and a snake-oil salesman. Erotic adventures in Paris leave him with a disfiguring disease. He makes visits to utopian communities. One of them is populated by mermen and mermaids and located at the bottom of a lake in the Black Forest. The only controlling logic of the work is unpredictability. There is no development of character, no movement toward an ethical goal, only the changing of masks. At each point where a stable life could develop, some unpredictable catastrophe interferes, often brought about by the war. In the end, the fool-hero abandons the treacherous world and retreats to the forest, where he lives as a religious hermit.
Alongside Grimmelshausen, other Baroque writers who deserve mention are the poet and poetic theorist Martin Opitz, who introduced foreign literary models and rules into German poetry, and the lyric poet and dramatist Andreas Gryphius, who wrote sonnets and tragedies imbued with a deep Christian faith.
Baroque-era efforts to form a German literary culture in the popular theatre and in the Sprachgesellschaften (“language societies”)—established to further the use of the German language and the development of German literary activity—were small currents in the chaotic tide of pessimism, fear, cynicism, and despair that swept Germany in the 17th century. C. Stephen Jaeger The 18th century Age of Enlightenment
Recovery from the devastating Thirty Years’ War was reflected in the cultural life of the Holy Roman Empire and in the various German states. The era of confessional conflict and war had come to an end in 1648, but urban culture continued to decline, and the empire became a country of innumerable courts. Dependent mostly upon princely patronage, cultural life became decentralized and very provincial. By the middle of the 18th century, however, after decades of exhaustion, stagnation, and provincialization, a significant cultural and literary revival occurred that was to provide the basis of one of Germany’s most exalted literary periods, the Weimar Classicism of the 1790s (sometimes called the “age of Goethe”). Rationalism
This recovery was accompanied by a new understanding of man’s ability to master nature and by a belief in his rational capacity to set his own moral course. Enlightenment optimism envisioned progress as attainable through education and science. The foundations of this rationalism were laid in science by Sir Isaac Newton and in philosophy by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with his Essais de Théodicée (1710; Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil) and his Monadologie (1714; Monadology). To Leibniz this was the best of all possible worlds. He constructed a model for the universe as an absolutist state with God as the monarch, or central monad, which all other monads, including man, reflect and strive to emulate. This metaphysical model of the universe influenced European writers from Voltaire (who satirized Leibniz in Candide) to Goethe, who as late as 1832 represented the protagonist of Faust as a monad seeking salvation.