Poetry as a pleasant distraction from life, as a conventional ornament for social occasions, as linguistic play or experiment, even as the sincere expression of heartfelt emotions, belongs to comparatively recent times. In its beginnings, humankind used the magical power of patterned, rhythmic speech to impose meaning and order on the world. Through poetry, humankind hoped to gain mastery of both the natural and the social environment. Certainly this was true of the Germanic tribes: The first writer to mention Germanic poetry, the Roman historian Tacitus (c. 55-120 C.E.), expressly refers to the Germanic custom of celebrating gods and heroes in song. Religion (humanity’s relation to God) and history (humanity’s relation to the community in time) were to remain poetry’s central domain for centuries to come. Thus, the historical and cultural context can never become a matter of indifference to those who care for poetry. What might appear to later generations as mere background was related strictly to the purpose and theme of poetry in its own day. In ancient times, few deeds were unaccompanied by the poetic word, and fewer still would be remembered were it not for poetry.
Germanic tribes lived on the shores of the North and Baltic seas as early as 2000 B.C.E. Some time after 500 B.C.E., when climatic changes forced most of them to migrate south, they divided into three distinct groups. The North Germanic tribes (Normans, Danes, Jutes) were those that stayed behind; the East Germanic tribes (Goths, Vandals, Burgundians) slowly drifted southward into present-day Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria; and the West Germanic tribes (Saxons, Franks, Angles, Swabians, Alemanni) moved into the middle of Europe, present-day Germany, northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
The Germanic tribes had barely settled in their new environment when the Huns, a fierce Mongolian people, swept into Europe around 400 C.E. The impact of the Hunnish invasion was most directly felt by the East Germanic tribes. Pushed forward by the relentlessly advancing Huns, the Germanic tribes fell on an already tottering Roman civilization, gaining and losing power over the nations in their path with spectacular speed. The Vandals established kingdoms in Italy, Spain, and North Africa; the Goths, in Italy and Spain; the Burgundians, on the Rhine.
ORIGINS TO ELEVENTH CENTURY
Two hundred years later, these tribes had all but disappeared, exhausted and decimated by their heroic exploits, absorbed by the cultures and people they had overrun, yet they disappeared only after leaving behind a lasting record of their remarkable feats. If history demands patterned, poetic order, it certainly demanded it here, in the face of the splendid achievements and the tragic end of the East Germanic tribes. Soon, the scop, the warrior-poet, sang in the lord’s hall of heroic courage and loyalty, of betrayal and revenge, of inscrutable fate and man’s fortitude when confronted with its cruel decrees. For centuries, this oral poetry informed and stimulated the imagination of the Germanic tribes until, several hundred years later, some accounts were finally given literary form.
Though naturally influenced by the tumultuous events around them, the West Germanic tribes underwent a gradual development. The most notable migratory action was that of the Angles and some of the Saxons, who, after the Roman forces had pulled out of Britain, began to settle there in the fifth and sixth centuries. On the Continent, historical progress took place under the steady ascendancy of the Franks. Clovis I (481-511) united all major West Germanic tribes, with the exception of the Continental Saxons, under Frankish leadership. When Clovis converted to Roman Catholicism, Latin culture quickly accompanied Christianity on its missionary journeys. The ensuing political and cultural unification was underscored by a growing linguistic unity among the tribes. Starting among the Alemanni of Germany’s southern highlands, a consonant shift spread through the West Germanic tribes, differentiating their language from that of their North Germanic neighbors as well as that of the Angles and Saxons. This language, Old High German, is considered the first distinct forerunner of modern German.
The unity of the West Germanic tribes reached its culmination under the rule of Charlemagne (768-814). Charlemagne was not only a brilliant political leader but also a farsighted patron of the arts; the earliest extant literary fragments in the vernacular date from his reign. Baptismal vows, creeds, and prayers give evidence of the importance that church and state placed on the vernacular in their concerted effort to convert the Germanic peoples to Christianity. Nevertheless, cultural life under Charlemagne and his Carolingian successors proceeded mostly in Latin. Of lyric poetry in Old High German, only two fragments of poems have survived. Both are religious in nature, though secular poetry did exist, as is indicated by an ecclesiastical injunction against the writing or sending of Winileodos (songs of friendship). The “Wessobrunner Gebet” (c. 780; “Wessobrunn Prayer”) contains in twenty-eight lines a fragmentary account of creation, while the “Muspilli” (c. 830), almost four times as long, describes the Day of Judgment.
The most important poetic work of the ninth century, however, is an epic, the religious epic Der Heliand (c. 840; The Heliand, 1966). In its six thousand lines of dramatic alliterative verse, Christ has been transformed into a magnanimous Germanic lord and his apostles into retainers who, moving with him from castle to castle, believe in his mission with unflinching loyalty. Unfortunately, the epic did not have its deserved impact on German literature, because it was not written in Old High German, but in Old Low German (Old Saxon), a Germanic dialect as yet unassimilated by the developing German language. Thus, it was quickly forgotten and not rediscovered until, in the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation searched high and low for a historical tradition.
Charlemagne’s liberal cultural policies also encouraged a collection of heroic songs reaching back into the pre-Christian days of the Great Migrations. This collection is said to have been burned by Charlemagne’s son, the weak and bigoted Louis the Pious. A glimpse of what such a collection might have contained is provided by a brief fragment, the sixty-eight lines of the Hildebrandslied (c. 800; The Song of Hildebrand, 1957). It commemorates in a terse and somber style the tragic conflict which pits Hildebrand’s loyalty to his liege against his affection for his son, who, with an equally fervent loyalty, has embraced the cause of Hildebrand’s sworn enemies. Though the poem breaks off before the issue is decided, it is clear that Hildebrand’s ideals of heroic conduct will force him to kill his son rather than forsake his lord in battle.
The future of German poetry did not lie with The Heliand or with The Song of Hildebrand, but with Otfrid von Weissenburg’s Krist (c. 865; Christ). An Alsatian monk, the first German poet whose name is known, Otfrid incorporated a most promising metrical innovation into his otherwise lackluster disquisitions into the life of Christ. Influenced by the style of Latin church hymns, Otfrid decided to rhyme his poetry. With his work, rhyme—until the ninth century essentially foreign to the alliterative verse of the Germanic tribes—was to establish a hold over German poetry that would not be relinquished until the twentieth century.
Whatever promise Old High German poetry might have held, historical changes brought it to a most ignoble end. Charlemagne’s vision of a politically, culturally, and linguistically unified Europe disintegrated in the dynastic feuds of his grandsons. Scarcely thirty years after his death, his empire divided along lines that foreshadowed the borders between the future states of Germany and France. The political split was ratified by a linguistic one: The oaths confirming the Frankish division were no longer sworn in one Frankish language, but in two: Old High German and Romance, the ancestor of modern French.
During the declining years of the Carolingian Empire, the religious unity of Western Europe provided the only force against the centrifugal tendencies of the Germanic tribes. With the growing influence of the Church, Latin inhibited the development of German poetry. This situation became even more serious following the accession of the dukes of Saxony to the throne of what by then had become Germany. With forceful single-mindedness, the Saxon emperors achieved a degree of political and administrative unity that allowed Germany to dominate European politics for more than two centuries. On the other hand, these emperors had neither the time nor the inclination for poetry. Moreover, Saxon—as has been mentioned before—was the only major West Germanic dialect on the Continent that had not yet adopted the consonant shift of Old High German. It was only to be expected that a house of Saxons would have no particular interest or stake in the advance of an Old High German language or literature. The results are certainly striking: Not a single poem in German is extant from a period of some one hundred and fifty years. During these dark ages of neglect, Old High German starved to death. It was only after further linguistic changes, which led to the new language patterns of Middle High German, that German poetry received a second chance.
ELEVENTH TO FOURTEENTH CENTURY
In an effort to weaken tribal independence in their realm, the Saxon emperors had relied increasingly on the prelates of the Church for the administration of the country. Unmarried, the higher clergy would obviously be less likely to form dynastic interests of their own and would be more inclined to give their unreserved loyalty to the man who had invested them with their office. In the course of a century, the Church in Germany had thus been transformed into an effective branch of imperial government. Under the Frankish line of the Salians, which followed that of the Saxons, this practice had finally overtaken Rome itself. Henry III (1039-1056) considered it simply one of his personal responsibilities to install and depose popes as he saw fit. Against this glaring political abuse of the Church, the Burgundian monastery of Cluny started a campaign that struck at the heart of the German Empire. The battle cry of Cluny was that all further lay interference in appointments to high ecclesiastical office should cease. Henry IV (1056-1106), politically dependent on a Church hierarchy willing to do his bidding, had no choice but to defy this religious reform. The confrontation lasted for about fifty years and ended in a devastating defeat of the imperial cause, resulting in a dramatic loss of German power without and German unity within.
The effect of the rigorously ascetic revival on poetry proved, at least immediately, no less intimidating. Heavily dogmatic and didactic poetry dominated the second half of the eleventh century. However, it was the very same religious enthusiasm of Cluny that made another spiritual call possible, a spiritual call that was soon to overwhelm Cluny’s monastic objectives with a renewed worldliness. Unforeseen adventures arose from the fervent appeal to free the Holy Land from the Saracens, to organize a Crusade. For almost two centuries—the First Crusade began in 1096, the last ended in 1270—the European imagination was captivated by the ideal and the reality of the Crusades as nothing had captivated it since the Great Migrations half amillennium before. The joys of the world quickly crept back into poetry. Narrative poems were told for the sheer fun of telling tall tales of exotic lands. What these poems still lacked, however, was some organizing principle that would lift their episodic style to the level of a unified theme and ethos. This vacuum was soon to be filled by the new, ideal man of the Crusades, the Christian knight.
Knighthood, or chivalry, could trace its origins most directly to the political and economic conditions during and after the Great Germanic Migrations. At a time of rapid tribal expansion and in the absence of the necessary logistical means for the operation of large-scale armies, the tribal lord stood in need of a highly mobile and well-equipped fighting elite. To maintain this force and to gain its unswerving loyalty, the lord rewarded its members by granting them land, the surplus of which would support them and their military craft befittingly. When not called up to serve his lord, the vassal administered his land. He would also be free to grant land to some of his retainers on similar conditions. In this way, there arose over the centuries a whole pyramid of intricate dependencies—the system of feudalism.
Feudalism, however, had slowly begun to deteriorate. The property which the lord had lent to those who had served him faithfully tended to become hereditary. As tribal expansion within the limits of Western Europe could not go on forever, the lords found themselves increasingly hard put to reward those they needed for the exercise of their power, while at the same time and for the same reason, many young noblemen saw themselves excluded from the lifestyle of their fathers.
In this deepening crisis, the Crusades provided European society with a momentary easing of its social and economic dilemmas. Through the Crusades, the inevitable decline of the feudal system was delayed. Knighthood received a reprieve during which it rose to heights of artistic splendor and ethical idealism that were to dazzle the people of Europe long after knighthood itself had lost its historical relevance.
What was new about the ideal of the Christian knight was that, for the first time, Germanic political and social realities were sanctioned by Christian idealism. The perfect knight was to strike a balance between the primarily Germanic virtues of courage, loyalty, and honor and a more tempered set of Christian values such as moderation, chastity, generosity, and mercy. Self-interest, class-interest, and Christian idealism joined forces, allowing the knight to prove himself, through endless adventures, worthy before God and the world.
France was the first nation in which the ideals of chivalry gained a firm hold on literature and life. In Germany, it was only during the rule of Frederick I (1152-1190) of the Swabian house of the Hohenstaufen that chivalry was accepted as an indigenous element of Germanic culture. An extraordinarily brilliant period of German poetry was soon to follow. In the short span of merely two decades (1190 to 1210), several poetic masterpieces were produced which not even the great works of German Romanticism can be said to have surpassed.
NIBELUNGENLIED
The Nibelungenlied (c. 1200; English translation, 1848), an epic composed by an unknown Austrian monk, is built on specifically Germanic conceptions in its effort to explore the true values of knighthood. At least two Germanic oral traditions—the Frankish legend of Siegfried and the narrative of the downfall of the Burgundians (or Nibelungs) under the onslaught of the Huns in 437 C.E.—are here combined to create the German national epic. It tells the story of Siegfried, the perfect knight, at the court of the Burgundians and of Kriemhild, his wife, a Burgundian princess, who swears revenge on her kinsmen when she learns that they killed Siegfried—jealous of his unequaled prowess. For thirteen years, she has brooded on the wrong done to her, when Attila offers her his hand in marriage. She accepts and another thirteen years later lures the nobles of her homeland to the court of Attila, where they are slaughtered in a bloodbath which finally engulfs even the vengeful queen. Behind a veneer of courtly decorum and Christian morality, there arises before the listener the most profound image of the heroic age in the German language. A world holds sway in which the joys and sorrows of life are experienced with stark intensity, in which the virtues and vices of men are as bold as the actions they engender, but also a world in which fate, not the deeds of heroes, ultimately determines the course of all events.
ROMANCE
More directly indebted to French influence and the newly established ideals of chivalry are the court epics of Hartmann von Aue (c. 1160-1165 to c. 1210-1220), Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170-c. 1217), and Gottfried von Strassburg (fl. c. 1210). In contrast to the heroic epic, the court epic, or romance (so called because of its origins in the Romance languages), does not restrict itself to the praise of national heroes. Even great men of classical antiquity such as Aeneas and Alexander become heroes of courtly epics. Neither are the fates of nations the concern of romances. Instead, the romance is focused on an individual knight whose valor is tested against the temptations and afflictions of the world. To make these tests as representative as possible, a romance will prefer ideal knights in ideal settings to anything that might smack of mere reality.
The most famous and most popular locale of the German romance is the legendary court of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Hartmann von Aue introduced the Arthurian theme into the German language. His two Arthurian romances, Erek (c. 1190; Erec, 1982) and Iwein (c. 1190-1205; Iwein: The Knight with the Lion, 1979), closely follow court epics of the French poet Chrétien de Troyes in their devotion to the typical preoccupation of the French romance: the discussion and exemplification of ethical conflicts arising within the knightly code of values. Erec neglects his duties as a knight for love of his wife; Iwein neglects his wife for love of knightly adventures. In both cases, harmony is reestablished as soon as the knights have learned the lesson of the golden mean.
The discussion of these neatly, dialectically arranged conflicts proved to be more French than German. The two greatest masters of the German court epic moved away from such delicate planning to pursue the very limits of all courtly conventions. Wolfram, much less learned than Hartmann, proceeded in his Parzival (c. 1200-1210; English translation, 1894) with a decidedly unconventional style and theme. Highly individualistic, often obscure in his use of metaphors, he created a world of daring and immoderate yearnings. The story is that of Parzival’s vicissitudes on the way to an understanding of life, suffering, and death. During this journey, King Arthur’s Round Table is recognized as little more than a stage on the long and narrow path to perfection. Only by abandoning the security of all previous values—not merely by balancing them in an aesthetically pleasing order—only by a complete change of heart does Parzival finally discover the source of all inner peace in the total submission to the will of God. For Wolfram, perfect knighthood is nothing less than sainthood.
It is hard to believe that two works of such contrasting styles and themes as Wolfram’s Parzival and Gottfried’s Tristan und Isolde (c. 1210; Tristan and Isolde, 1899) were written in the span of less than a decade. What they obviously have in common is their determination to follow courtly ideals beyond all courtly conventions. However, where Wolfram was consciously obscure and other-worldly, Gottfried wanted to be consciously lucid and human. Tristan and Isolde is also an epic of immoderation: It speaks of the earthly, sensual passion that Tristan and Isolde feel for each other. Tristan is a vassal of King Mark of Cornwall and Isolde is Mark’s young wife, yet Tristan and Isolde persist in their love and build an illicit relationship through long adventures of deceit and subterfuge. The willful, often mocking breach of the knightly ideal of chastity was in itself nothing new for courtly poetry. What was new was the total seriousness, the total lack of frivolity with which Gottfried treated this adulterous union as a troubling human predicament.
LYRIC POETRY
Lyric poetry, too, experienced an amazing surge of creativity under the auspices of the chivalric ethos. It was poetry devoted primarily to an extremely stylized, extremely idealized form of loving adoration of the “fair sex,” a love which in German was to be known as Minne, the practitioners of which would become known as Minnesänger. This lyric poetry reached its most elaborate form in the song of the troubadour, the canso d’amor (love song) of southern France. With ever new variations, the poet describes in his song the typical stages through which he courts a lady who is almost always of a higher station than himself and married to another man. Arduous periods of wooing and pleading are often rewarded by shows of the lady’s favor. These shows of favor—smiles, acknowledgments, the wearing of the knight’s colors (sexual favors are granted only rarely)—are, nevertheless, constantly jeopardized by malevolent friends and cold conventions, frequently by the fickle or obdurate heart of the lady herself. Thus, brief moments of bliss are usually followed by long spells of mournful longing and dejection. Though a poet’s love did at times stray from the elevated plane of these platonic feelings, Minne was not incompatible with marriage and should not be misunderstood as an actual challenge to the harsh and dreary marriage conventions of the day. More often than not, Minnelieder (songs of Minne) were barely more than a fashionable parlor game. In spite of the assumed intimacy of the confessional style, little of what is expressed in them should be taken for more than the polite gallantry of a professional singer in his attempt to gain the protection of a powerful lady at court.
WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE
Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170-c. 1230) gave the conventions of the troubadours their most creative adaptation in the German language. His strong and unabashed zest for life filled his Minnelieder with a surprising vitality. It was this zest for life which convinced Walther that Minne cannot be bound to social station, that it can be felt toward any woman, and that true nobility of heart is found more often outside rather than inside the nobility of rank. There, too, love seems so much freer to give itself to the beloved. Walther refused to consider a Minne that is predicated on the notion of its remaining unfulfilled anything but a false and inhuman emotion.
In a similar vein, Walther’s spontaneous appreciation of nature enlivened the many threadbare metaphors inherited from the troubadours. Even the tradition of the troubadour’s sirventes (poems exploring political and moral questions) assumed in Walther’s hands an unusual urgency. Fights between emperor and pope had erupted again; civil war had returned to Germany; and the lyricist of fervent love threw himself into the partisan struggle with political verse of equal ardor. Walther was undoubtedly not only the greatest but also the most versatile poet of the Middle Ages. Love, nature, politics, and religion were themes for his inspiration, creating an unmatched lyric summa of medieval culture on the eve of that culture’s collapse.
FOURTEENTH TO SIXTEENTH CENTURY
With the execution of the last of the Hohenstaufens at the hands of his enemies in Italy (1268), the fabric of medieval politics in Germany unraveled rapidly. The election of Rudolph of Habsburg (1273) ushered in an era in which imperial power forsook its claim to European leadership and restricted itself to the politics of dynastic self-aggrandizement. Of even greater importance for the future of medieval culture was the glaring failure of the Crusades in 1270. European nobility in all of its heroic posturing saw itself confronted initially with a serious loss of face and ultimately with an even more serious loss of legitimacy.
While knighthood had weakened itself in seven Crusades, its adventures in the East had helped another class to gather unforeseen strength. As it turned out, the Crusades had opened wider horizons not only for the idealistic imagination of chivalry but also for the decidedly materialistic imagination of the middle class. Trade was flourishing, and so were the cities of Germany. A money economy, originating in Italy, replaced the complex relations of loyalty with the simple cash nexus. Armies of loyal knights gave way to armies of mercenaries; light infantry and gunpowder relegated the heavily armored knight to eventual obsolescence. Even where the knights did manage to redirect their crusading spirit—as did the Knights of the Teutonic Order when they declared the conversion and colonization of Prussia to be a new goal—their efforts could no longer be sustained without the ever more obtrusive money of the burghers. The Middle Ages had entered a period of complex yet obvious transition. The effects of this transition on poetry were equally complex but not nearly as obvious.
The demands of the changing times were felt in the nobility itself. In search of novel themes and renewed vitality, Minnelieder strove to combine, rather incongruously, the overwrought ideals of Minne with intentionally crude peasant settings. Much of this lyric poetry reads like a deliberate satire of itself. Didactic poems, on the other hand, tried desperately to explain chivalric ideals to a less and less receptive audience. Furthermore, the court epic, sensing the need for a closer grasp of reality, admitted historical events and characters into the never-never land of romance. Soon, the peasant epic evolved to debunk the whole conceited glitter of courtly perfection. Meier Helmbrecht (c. 1250; peasant Helmbrecht), the most famous peasant epic in the German language, tells the story of a young man who, seduced by social ambition and the airs of chivalry, joins a band of robber barons. At the end of a short life of tragic illusions and suffering, he is turned away by his own father and finally hanged by the people of his own village.
Social and economic power shifted from the knightly courts to the towns and their burghers. The rising middle class, however, was slow to realize a class consciousness of its own. The cultural vacuum that arose as a result of this hesitation was not easily filled. Instead of creating values appropriate to its interests and aspirations, the middle class felt that its socioeconomic power entitled it at long last to the values of its erstwhile betters. The resulting disparity between the anachronistic idealism of what was believed and the materialism of what was practiced led to a whole culture of satire, a culture castigating itself for its lack of authenticity.
The pretensions of the court epic were lampooned in the mock epic, while the excitement of knightly adventures gave way to stories about the pranks with which clever rogues exploited the vanity of others. The animal fable, derived from Greek and Oriental sources, finally broadened the social critique to include all classes of society. Reynke de Vos (1498; Reynard the fox) no longer poked fun at the nobility, but at all the social climbers who, like their archetype, the cunning and unprincipled fox, spare no effort on their way into the antechambers of the king. The international best seller of late medieval satire was Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (1494; The Ship of Fools, 1509), a poem whose author viewed his own times with an utterly jaundiced eye. Brant, who is considered one of Germany’s earliest Humanists, was in fact no reformer. He favored no trend or class and offered no prospect of any solution. More than one hundred follies and vices are paraded around and soundly thrashed by an impartially venomous tongue, leaving a vivid picture of the cultural uncertainty that gripped the waning Middle Ages.
The curious inability of the middle class to move beyond the cultural values of a society whose economic and social restrictions it had long left behind is evidenced in the appropriation by sturdy and conscientious burghers of the courtly Minnelieder. From a wide variety of Minnelieder, which they carefully collected and studied, artisans in the towns culled a system of twelve rigid patterns. These they proceeded to employ, with slavish adherence, for their own songs on moral and didactic themes. Minnesänger had turned into Meistersänger (master singers), well-intentioned craftspeople who made up for their lack of imagination by a display of pedantic learning and a bizarre ingenuity in the arrangement of their metrical schemes. Inventiveness reached fantastical heights when it was felt that only those singers could be declared Meistersänger who had added at least one original “tone” (verse arrangement) to their guild’s stock in trade. In his middleclass smugness and with his matter-of-fact imagination, the cobbler Hans Sachs (1494-1576)—one of the last and certainly the most accomplished of the Meistersänger—assumed an almost patriarchal stature in German literature. Nine years before his death, he proudly counted among his numerous literary works no fewer than 4,275 Meistersänge (master songs) in 275 strophic forms, 13 of which he had invented himself.
The Volkslied (folk song)—to the modern sensibility, the most appealing poetic achievement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—occupied a very marginal place in the literary world of its day. It, too, had its origins in the Minnelied, but, in contrast to the Meistersäng, the Volkslied refused to live up to the formality of its courtly predecessor and instead infused the conventional themes of love and longing with the simplicity of experience. In simple rhymes, repetitive images, and catchy refrains, the Volkslied deals with typical situations of easily identifiable classes of people: hunters, millers, students, soldiers, and so on. Over the centuries, many of the Volkslieder were overlaid with the patina of a garbled text, a naïve nonsense which, if anything, seems to have added to their perennial charm.
In spite of its popularity, the Volkslied did not possess the formative power to fill the cultural void that the receding chivalric society had left behind. Other forces had to originate to fashion a new image of world, humans, and society. When these forces arrived on the scene, they were not particularly related to poetry, nor were they particularly productive of it. The origins of modern humans were accompanied by a tremendous loss of the power of poetry. The culture of knighthood had been an unmistakably poetic one; prose virtually did not exist as a literary form. The new society arose almost in the absence of poetic formulation and evolved a decidedly prosaic culture.
Like the eleventh century, the fourteenth century was marked by a wave of religious fervor. In contrast to the earlier revival, however, this religious enthusiasm championed no ecclesiastical cause. The secular power of the Church had reached its high point at the end of the thirteenth century when, with almost no transition, it found itself embroiled in every imaginable ecclesiastical and political trouble. The Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy in southern France (1309-1377) and the following forty years of schism—in which two, then three popes stood against one another—had driven the religious aspirations of the people upon themselves and into the arms of mysticism. Mysticism, a form of religious individualism which strives for a direct union with God through contemplation, found its most creative expression in the philosophical sermons of Meister Eckhart (died 1327). The imaginative prose style used to explain his difficult and often highly paradoxical thoughts greatly extended the scope of the German language.
At a time when northern Europe developed in mysticism a religious version of individualistic self-reliance, the Italian city-states—for once uninhibited by the presence of either pope or emperor—advanced a strictly secular counterpart. Believing themselves the rightful heirs of classical Rome, the Italians accepted it as their duty to resurrect the classical ideal of a human perfection to be achieved without interference of church or state. Faith in a rebirth (renaissance) of classical antiquity soon spread to other parts of Europe. What the Humanists of the German Renaissance lacked in natural links to the classical spirit, they eagerly compensated for by a meticulous adherence to its letter. Preoccupied with the editing and translating of classical texts, German Humanism quickly degenerated from a rebirth of humanity to a mere rebirth of philology. It is true that with the image of the poeta doctus (poet-scholar), Humanism gave the poet a fresh and lofty mission. As a learned educator, he was no longer to be subservient to anything outside the demands of his chosen profession. At the same time, however, Humanism clipped the wings of German poets by insisting that Humanist poetry could only succeed in the clarity of Latin, not in the murky barbarisms of the German language. The rich harvest of Latin poetry produced by German poets during the Renaissance yielded some impressive fruit. Nevertheless, it has remained a harvest unclaimed, a literature relegated to the limbo of unread and forgotten books.
As admirable as the goals and values of the German Humanists in all of their balanced sanity might have been, no cultural reform is likely to succeed that sets itself up in opposition to the imaginative propensities of the people it wants to educate. Humanism was destined to remain the ideal of a small elite of literati. It was quickly swept away by a reform that did speak to the imagination of the people, Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation.
SIXTEENTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
When Martin Luther (1483-1546) posted his ninety-five theses against indulgences on a church door in Wittenberg, nobody, least of all Luther, could have predicted the repercussions this act would have for him and his country. Despair about the prevailing corruption of the Church was general, and there was nothing in Luther’s theses that had not been said before. Still, the object of his attack was chosen with the instinct of a true rebel.
In the granting of indulgences, the Church had given itself the power to remit some of the punishment a sinner had to expect after death even for those sins that had been forgiven in the sacrament of penance. This remittance of future punishment for past sins was usually tied to some spiritual or material sacrifice on the part of the sinner: fasting, praying, almsgiving, pilgrimages, and so on. In the fifteenth century, a financially strapped Papacy had made monetary “sacrifices” by the sinner—to be paid into the Papacy’s always empty coffers—the center of its dealings with indulgences and a regular item in its fiscal planning. Soon, unscrupulous monks roamed the countryside, promising nothing short of salvation to those willing and able to pay for it. The poor, who of all classes were most dependent on the hereafter for any hope of a happier life, felt excluded from the spiritual benefits of these transactions. The selling of indulgences represented simply too much of what people in Germany had hated for so long: the Church’s heavy-handed interference in people’s most personal affairs, its greedy exploitation of foreign countries, and its un-Christian preference for the rich. Thus, a devotional practice which had existed in the Church for a long time galvanized the discontented masses of Germany almost overnight.
The initial strength of a movement is rarely a reliable indication of its staying power. What made Luther’s reforms survive was that Luther himself, appalled by the widespread anarchy he had caused, directed his reform into the rigid channels of a new ecclesiastical organization. Excommunicated by the pope and under imperial ban, he turned for support to the only authority that could still profit from his cause: the power of Germany’s territorial princes. Lured by the promise of the confiscation of Church property, they were only too willing to become Luther’s Notbischöfe (emergency bishops). When the emperor finally found the time and means to intervene, he saw himself confronted by a well-entrenched state church. Reluctantly, he accepted its existence in the Peace of Augsburg (1555).
It remains astounding that the sixteenth century, which stirred so many political, social, and religious emotions, produced almost no poetry. It is less surprising that the important contributions that were made came during the first two decades of the Reformation and were the work of Luther himself.
Luther’s greatest literary achievement was his extraordinarily successful translation of the Bible. It is hard to think of any book in the German language that has influenced German literature more than has the Lutherbibel (1522, 1534). For more than a century, Middle High German had been in transition. The imperial chancery had long attempted to arrive at a uniform German language for its own legal and diplomatic affairs. Whatever effort may have gone before, Modern High German came alive only when Luther, through his ingenious use of dialect and idiom, transformed the German of the chanceries into a language that could serve all people for all purposes. Luther’s language spread even faster than his Reformation. By the end of his life, more than 100,000 copies of the Lutherbibel—anamazing number for those days—were in circulation. For the first time in its history, Germany had a standard written language.
Luther contributed most directly to poetry through his composition of thirty-six hymns, the only lasting poetic creations of the whole of the sixteenth century in Germany. Spiritual songs had certainly existed before, often as converted versions of popular secular songs. What distinguishes Luther’s hymns—one has only to think of the rousing “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”)—is that they express not only the communing of an individual with his God but also the common faith of the whole congregation. Luther’s Geistliche Lieder (1524; Spiritual Songs, 1853) started a tradition of hymnal poetry in Germany which was to remain creative well into the nineteenth century.
It must have seemed clear from the beginning that the Peace of Augsburg had been arranged as little more than a truce between the warring parties. By the early seventeenth century, Catholic and Protestant princes began to arm and organize their hatred in opposing leagues. The bloody Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) started in Prague when the Protestant nobility of Bohemia refused to acknowledge the accession of the Catholic emperor, Ferdinand II, to the throne of Bohemia. With the help of the Catholic League, Ferdinand proved victorious in 1620, and the war appeared to have come to a quick end. Too much, though, rode on the Protestant cause. Alarmed by the Catholics’ easy victory and their brutal reprisals, the Protestant princes, under the leadership of Danish King Christian, resolved to try for another outcome. Once again, Ferdinand prevailed in 1626, this time with the help of his celebrated general Albrecht von Wallenstein. The next Protestant willing to try improving Protestant fortunes was Swedish King Gustavus, and under him—not without the financial support of Catholic France—the Protestant cause finally triumphed, though Gustavus himself was killed in the decisive battle in 1632. With the death of Gustavus and the murder of Wallenstein in 1634, it looked as if the war had spent itself, yet as no one seemed satisfied with the resulting stalemate, hostilities were resumed on an even larger scale. France entered the war on the side of the Protestants, while Spain fought for the imperial and Catholic party. In 1635, chastened by seventeen years of grueling war and appalled by its widening dimensions, the Protestant princes arranged a peace with Ferdinand. The task of ridding themselves of their former allies, however, proved to be a lengthy and frustrating affair. None of these friends wanted to leave Germany without having something to show for his pains. War and negotiations dragged on for another thirteen years, until the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, ratified the total exhaustion and despoiling of Germany.
About half of the German population died as a result of the Thirty Years’ War. Agriculture almost ground to a halt as hundreds of villages simply ceased to exist. Trade had been interrupted for too long to be resumed without great delay; neither was there any capital to restart even the most essential industries. The country had been bled white. Only political systems, the most parasitic of all human organizations, increased and multiplied with prodigious fertility. By 1648, Germany had disintegrated into eighteen hundred independent territories, fifteen hundred of them averaging a population of about three hundred people. Even among the remaining territories, barely a handful could be classified as states. The nobility survived the war nearly intact, and the reconstruction of Germany proceeded under its leadership and on its terms, delaying the assertion of a middle-class consciousness for more than a century.
In the context of this momentous national decline, German literature tried belatedly to absorb the Humanism of the Italian Renaissance into the vernacular. For guidance and inspiration, poets and critics turned to France, the country in which such an assimilation of the Italian Renaissance had been accomplished most successfully. What the French poet and aesthetician Joachim du Bellay had done for France with his La Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549; The Defence and Illustration of the French Language, 1939), Martin Opitz wanted to do for his compatriots seventy-five years later.
MARTIN OPITZ
Das Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624; book on German poetry), by Martin Opitz (1597-1639), although a very slim volume by the standards of German scholarship, became the most influential treatise on German poetry for more than a century. Its program was as simple as it was practical. For the Renaissance, poetry was a branch of rhetoric, a rhymed form of oratory whose ultimate aim lay not within itself, but in the pleasing instruction and persuasion of its reader. Since Aristotle’s treatment of the subject, rhetoric had always been thought to follow objective, teachable rules. All that needed to be stated more explicitly was simply how German poets could profit from these rules in their efforts to construct more persuasive poems. First, Opitz suggested, rhetorical poetry, like any other argument, needs to be organized rationally, avoiding everything that might startle or confuse. Second, rhetorical poetry ought to be elegant, employing the fitting word while never offending with even the semblance of crudity. Finally, rhetorical poetry must be dignified, a goal to be achieved by borrowing as many lofty metaphors from the ancients as can reasonably be accommodated by the text.
In his poetry—very mediocre stuff—Opitz conformed to the letter of his own law. It is poetry in which virtuosity of form and coldness of feeling stand in direct proportion to each other. As with the classical Sophists, who prided themselves on the fact that they could argue with equal conviction on both sides of any issue, Opitz’s poetic persuasiveness comes across as strangely opportunistic, even indifferent to the ostensible purpose for all of his rhetorical posturing: the themes of his poetry. The vanity of all earthly things, the praise of love, the inconstancies of fortune, the sorrows of war, and the longing for peace are all treated with an equally detached expediency.
BAROQUE POETRY
Soon, however, the frightening insecurities of life, made so obvious by the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, asked more from poetry than Opitz’s rationalistic disdain and stoic equanimity. Life could no longer be treated as a mere occasion for the making of good poetry. The resulting seriousness about subject matter also placed greater demands on the rhetorical form, straining it to the breaking point in the service of a poem’s passionate pleading. The period characterized by this new strain, this contorted urgency, is called the Baroque (a word of Portuguese origin describing the contorted shape of irregular pearls).
ANDREAS GRYPHIUS
The poet most often identified with German Baroque poetry is Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664). Having experienced the brutalities of war in a traumatic childhood that left him an orphan at an early age, Gryphius became obsessed with the Christian message of humanity’s utterly fallen state. In contrast to Opitz, Gryphius was a man of unshakable conviction, and it was the strength of this conviction which made his rhetoric so Baroque, so forced in its effort to persuade at all costs. At no point did it occur to Gryphius that the direct expression of his personal experiences might be the most appropriate theme for his poetry. The rhetoric of the Renaissance valued the persuasiveness of the representative, not the individualistic or existential. Gryphius, therefore, clothed his fears and pains in the verbal pomp of grandiose metaphors, expanding, recapitulating, polishing his unvarying message in an endless drive for more perfect rhetorical strategies.
If in Gryphius’s poetry representative rhetoric and existential message still fused in a creative though distorted vision, by the end of the seventeenth century, the power of rhetoric overwhelmed even the most serious subjects and finally disentangled itself from all of them. Opitz had not been very particular about his themes, but at least the comparative simplicity of his rhetoric had allowed no jarring disparity between elaborate form and superficial content. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, rhetoric resolved to disguise the absence of original themes by a most ornate extravagance in its treatment of traditional ones. This trend toward rhetorical affectation was by no means peculiar to German poetry; Italian and Spanish poets had set the example of virtuosity for its own sake.
CHRISTIAN HOFMANN VON HOFMANNSWALDAU
In Germany, the leading exponent of ultimate refinement and the mastery of all technical skills was Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau (1617-1679). Hofmannswaldau’s cherished subject was the vanity of all earthly joys, particularly the futility of erotic pleasure, yet his painstaking search for the most exquisite epithet, the most luxuriously sensuous metaphor, the most sensational analogy seemed to circumvent rather than to promote his somber faith. The feverish obsession with which Hofmannswaldau dwelled on the erotic pleasures he condemned betrayed him for what he really was: an eroticist with a bad conscience. In this respect, Hofmannswaldau was quite typical of Baroque culture at the end of the seventeenth century. Those espousing this culture no longer were convinced of what it said yet lived under the compulsion to say it ever more vehemently, as if repeating its faltering beliefs might rouse them to their former vigor. Instead, a less troubled generation started to react to the whole phantasmagoric display of the Baroque with swift retribution. At the turn of the eighteenth century, middle-class rationality still prided itself on its own good conscience and felt absolutely no qualms about dismissing the bad conscience that had preceded it.
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The politics of continental Europe in the eighteenth century—until the French Revolution of 1789—were taken up with a series of dynastic struggles that led to several international wars: the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), and the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778-1779). The absolute control which royal and princely families exercised over their states transformed any dynastic haggling among the intricately related ruling houses of Europe into an immediate and serious international power struggle. If these prolonged family feuds had a common concern, it was their desire to let no upstart join their illustrious ranks and thus destroy whatever balance of power they had orchestrated. However, it was the rapid rise of just such an upstart house and nation that provided Germany with its most important political development of the century. Prussia under the rule of the Hohenzollerns was the last state in Europe to emerge as one of its leading powers. Not even a kingdom before 1701, Prussia had become, under the hands of frugal and disciplined rulers, a power that half a century later was able to hold its own against the combined forces of Austria, France, and Russia.
Oddly enough, these dramatic political events did not influence German culture significantly. While the nobility had reserved for itself the theater of international politics, it had, at the same time and by an unspoken agreement, granted the middle class a considerable degree of private security and peace. After the hardships of the Thirty Years’ War, the middle class was eager to accept such a bargain, at least until it would be able to rebuild its economic stamina. Thus, the eighteenth century presents the picture of a Germany in which the nobility was responsible for matters of politics and the middle class was responsible for everything else.
In the running of its affairs, the middle class was greatly helped by the spirit of rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism had become the philosophy of the bourgeoisie in France since René Descartes had declared reason, rather than tradition or precedent, as the sole authority in the management of human conduct. Empiricism, an elaboration of rationalism developed in England by John Locke (1632-1704), specified that reason needs to be based on experience and that no rational judgment ought to be made without prolonged observation of the facts. French rationalism and English empiricism combined to inspire the Age of Enlightenment. The middle class, which had nothing to lose by the abolition of a tradition that kept it out of power and had everything to gain from the rational observation of political, social, and economic facts, embraced the Enlightenment as its most sacred mission.
To the poets of the Enlightenment, the contorted rhetoric of the Baroque appeared neither rational nor based on facts. A first reaction against Baroque poetry had occurred in France, where Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, in his L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry, 1683), had insisted on the sober standards of truthfulness, naturalness, and reasonableness in the writing of poetry. In 1730, Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766) presented his countrymen with a German version of Boileau’s creed in his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (1730; attempt at a critical art of poetry for Germans). How quickly, though, attitudes were beginning to change in Germany is evident from the fact that Gottsched and his theories of rational poetry turned into the laughingstock of German poets in less than twenty years.
The reaction against Gottsched was led by two Swiss professors, Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783) and Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701-1776). Both men were admirers of the English scene and favored its literature over that of the French. In typically empiricist fashion, they suggested that it might prove more profitable to deduce a good poetic theory from the study of good poetry, rather than to hope for good poetry to be written in accordance with some preconceived poetic theory. In short, the theory of poetry must follow, not precede, the practice of poetry. Looking at poems without prejudicial expectations, Bodmer and Breitinger discovered that a good poem is, above all, imaginative and that reason played a very secondary role in its creation. The ensuing fight between the two camps ended with the total defeat of Gottsched and of the French influence over German poetry. In the end, what turned the tide in the acrimonious squabbles was the fact that Bodmer and Breitinger could point to a young poet who substantiated and justified all of their claims, while Gottsched, as hard as he tried, could not.
FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB KLOPSTOCK
This young, amazingly original poet was Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803). Klopstock’s poetry, with its outbursts of feeling and its flights of the imagination, caught the reading public totally by surprise. Klopstock made it his personal responsibility to restore to poetry the honorable function which it once had exercised within the Germanic tribes: to guide and express humanity’s relation to God, nature, and society. As the prophet of an all-powerful poetry, he naturally felt no inhibition to dismiss what small-minded academicians had laid down as poetic law. Language, Klopstock believed, belongs to poets, and only they can determine its possibilities. In incomplete sentences, in irregular syntax, often in free rhythms, Klopstock stammered in awe before the grandeur of his themes (God, nature, love, patriotism) as much as before the sublime emotions these themes evoked in him.
It was Klopstock’s faith in the power of poetry that impelled him to write in the genre in which poetry had exercised its power over society most forcefully: He set out to write an epic. Klopstock’s genius, unfortunately, was lyric rather than epic, and his Der Messias (1748-1773), which swelled to twenty thousand lines, has remained one of the most monotonous and unreadable epics of all time. The passion which gave Klopstock’s shorter poems their distinction could not be sustained over the course of twentyfive years; his emotions turned flat and belabored, exhausting and finally grating on the sensibilities of the reader.
Not even Klopstock’s lyric poems withstood the test of time as well as one might have expected. In spite of his emotionalism, Klopstock abided by the basic principles of rhetorical poetry: His feelings did not spontaneously transform themselves into words. To create a poetic effect, it was not enough for Klopstock to relate his experience poetically. That experience, however personal, needed to be made representative of all experiences under similar conditions. To arrive at this representative quality, the poet had to generalize the intimacy of what he felt until the feeling became comprehensible, not to say reasonable, to the reader. Klopstock, who was a very emotional poet, almost never lets the reader share in the immediacy of his emotions. Even when Klopstock seems to have been sincerely overwhelmed, one almost always senses the rational scaffolding that supports the poetic expression of his ecstasies.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, faith in human experience as representative and rational received a mighty jolt when it became clear that experiences are neither shared nor accessible to reason. On the contrary, each person’s experiences create a unique world—a strictly individualistic world and therefore (as one needs a point of reference outside oneself for rationality) beyond the power of reason.
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
From these disturbing insights, the philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) drew some surprisingly fruitful conclusions for poetry. As language originally was meant to express the emotional responses to experiences, and as these emotional responses are as individualistic and irrational as the experiences which caused them, the most primordial form of language could not have been rational prose but must have been irrational poetry. Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race, because it is in poetry that humanity’s first and only appropriate interpretations of the world occurred.
Most existing poetry, sadly enough for Herder, served as pleasing ornament or rhetorical confirmation of an already charted human environment. This trend needed to be reversed; poetry needed to reassume its primary function. Above all, it had to regain access to basic human experiences within the tradition to which it wanted to speak. Attempts to rejuvenate German poetry in accordance with the standards of Greece, Rome, or France were doomed to fail. Instead, a conscious effort was necessary to enable German poetry to reestablish its ties to the life of the German people. To this end, the poetic language would have to cleanse itself of all artificiality and return to the simplicity and spontaneity exemplified in the creations of folk poetry.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The success of Herder’s ideas was not, as has often been claimed, immediate or sweeping. Of the young poets of the time, only one showed himself deeply affected, yet one poet was all Herder needed for his theory to triumph, for this young man was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
Goethe met Herder in 1770, and one year later Goethe’s poems usually designated as Sesenheimer Liederbuch (1775-1789, 1854; Sesenheim Songs, 1853) made Herder’s program come true. The twenty-two-year-old poet speaks of his love for the pastor’s daughter at Sesenheim in tones of boundless joy, as if such love had never existed before and would never exist again. With a relaxed innocence, he trusts the poetic quality of all that is natural and recovers for the language of poetry, without the slightest tinge of embarrassment, love and heart, flowers and kisses, the sun, the moon, the air, and the clouds.
Still, for Herder, the poet was not merely an innocent participant in the world’s harmony. As a creator, the poet also carried grave responsibilities for the state of human affairs. In a series of forceful odes, Goethe explored the challenges of any creative response to earthly existence. Through a study of great prototypes (Prometheus, Mohammed, Ganymede) and their rhythms of life, Goethe felt confirmed in his belief that equal creativity is required for rebellion against and submission to the flow of things in this world. A poet can prefer one of these attitudes to the other only at the expense of constraining his or her most vital gifts, an infinite capacity for experience.
Goethe’s career as an administrator at the court of Weimar (1775-1786) demanded a firmer, more realistic response from the poet. In view of humanity’s innumerable limitations, moderation had the last word. Emotional introspection was replaced by objective overview, as the typical rather than the extraordinary in life received Goethe’s attention. Only in an occasional lyric sigh for release—as in Germany’s most famous poem, the weightless, dreamlike “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” (“Over All the Hilltops It Is Still”)—could Goethe admit to himself the strain which his search for order and objectivity had placed on him.
Emotional release in the midst of order and objectivity became Goethe’s great discovery on his journey through Italy (1786-1788). Goethe lived and celebrated this release upon his return to Weimar in his cycle of Römische Elegien (1793; Roman Elegies, 1876). The unashamed eroticism of the classical age is praised here in the strict order of classical meters. Emphasizing the sensual, often outright licentious foundations of antiquity’s formal achievements, Goethe freely mocked his compatriots’ prudishly ideal conception of classical perfection. Almost a quarter of a century later, Goethe would reaffirm his faith in sensuality as a precondition of great art—this time encouraged by his discovery of Persian poetry—in a similar cycle of poems, his Westöstlicher Divan (1819; West-Eastern Divan, 1877).
Goethe’s lyric poetry reached its last peak in the eighteenth century between 1797 and 1798 when, in friendly competition with Friedrich Schiller, Goethe wrote several of his finest ballads.
FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), the greatest dramatist of the eighteenth century, was a primarily speculative mind, and his poetry rarely achieves the confessional intimacy which so often makes Goethe’s poems read like fragments of an autobiography. Schiller philosophized in his poems on the painful antagonism between what is and what ought to be, between the innate freedom of humans and the acquired constraints of a person’s conventional mind and heart.
These differences of poetic perspective also distinguish Goethe’s and Schiller’s ballads. The ballads of Goethe remain close to their popular roots; they focus on the inexplicable omnipresence of demonic powers, as in the well-known “Der Zauberlehrling” (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”). Schiller’s ballads, by contrast, dramatize ethical or philosophical conflicts: The downfall of pride is the theme of “Der Taucher” (“The Diver”); the jealousy of the gods, that of “Der Ring des Polykrates” (“The Ring of Polycrates”); and “Die Bürgschaft” (“The Pledge”) proclaims the invincible power of friendship. With their easy combination of dramatic narrative and didactic intent, Schiller’s ballads enjoyed an unparalleled popularity throughout the nineteenth century; in modern times, they are often unjustly dismissed.
FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN
Schiller’s poetry of ideas and Goethe’s poetry of experience were fused at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). Hölderlin wrestled for a few intense years with such apparent abstractions as freedom, love, fatherland, divinity, and fate in intensely existential, at times opaque poems until the onset of a severe mental illness at the age of thirty-three broke up his creative struggle.
Classical Greece was Hölderlin’s model of a harmonious society, and the French Revolution raised his hopes for a reconstitution of such a society even in his own country. Hölderlin wanted to be the prophet of this great advent. To be a worthy prophet, he was ready to bridge the gulf between future and present, ideal and reality, knowing full well that this would mean to be exiled from both, to exist as a lonely wanderer in time, a victim of his own promises. His having been exiled by God and humanity—expressed in poems such as “Die Heimat” (“Homeland”) and “Abendphantasie” (“Evening Fantasy”)—Hölderlin considered a great suffering and a great distinction, the suffering and distinction of a heroic fate. Hölderlin’s only fear was that he might not be equal to the demands of this calling. His unquestioning faith in the power of poetry he shared with the Romantics of his era, while the humility with which he lived his vocation foreshadowed a much more modern sensibility.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker-Cantarino, Barbara, ed. German Literature of the Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005. Essays ranging from historical contexts to dominant ideas in the works of major writers. Bibliography and index.
Beiser, Frederick C. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Explains how early German romanticism differed from later romanticism. One chapter defines “Romantic Poetry,” which the writer insists dominates and defines the Romantic movement. An important reinterpretation.
Classen, Albrecht, ed. and trans. Late-Medieval German Women’s Poetry: Secular and Religious Songs. Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Through intensive research, the writer has discovered and identified a number of German women who wrote lyric poetry in the fifteenth and sixteenth century and undoubtedly will be added to the literary canon. An important contribution to medieval studies. Introduction, notes, and interpretive essay by the editor.
Cocalis, Susan L., ed. German Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present: ABilingual Anthology. New York: Feminist Press, City University of New York, 1986. Introduces and rediscovers German women poets dating back to the thirteenth century.
Dobozy, Maria. Re-membering the Present: the Medieval German Poet-Minstrel in Cultural Context. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepois, 2005. Examines performance art from 1170 to 1400, pointing out both how the fact of performance influenced the poet’s techniques and how the poet-performer used his art to mold his society. Bibliography and index.
Gentry, Francis G., et al., eds. German Epic Poetry. New York: Continuum, 1995. Heroic poetry from the great epics of German literature, including Jungere Hildebrandslied, The Battle of Ravenna, Bitterolf and Dietlieb, and The Rose Garden.
Haymes, Edward R., and Susann T. Samples. Heroic Legends of the North: An Introduction to the Nibelung and Dietrich Cycles. New York: Garland, 1996. Traces the origins of epic tales in the Dark Ages and follows their spread throughout medieval literature. Surveys the medieval literary versions: the hero, heroic poetry, and the Heroic Age.
Hutchinson, Peter, ed. Landmarks in German Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Examines the scope of German poetry, providing critical essays and history.
Newman, Jane O. Pastoral Conventions: Poetry, Language, and Thought in Seventeenth Century Nuremberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Traces the development of the seventeenth century Nuremberg pastoral poetry society Pegnesischer Blumenorden as a historical, interpretive community of theorists and poets, and offers a detailed analysis of their writings, through which are explored issues at the center of scholarly debate about the Renaissance and early modern period.
Resler, Michael, ed. and trans. German Romance I. Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2003. In this first volume of a series, Middle High German versions of Arthurian romances and translations into English are presented on facing pages. Extensive notes, bibliography, and index.
Walsøe-Engel, Ingrid, ed. German Poetry from the Beginnings to 1750. Foreword by George C. Schoolfield. New York: Continuum, 1992. These translations into English are an excellent starting place for the study of early German poetry. Bibliography and index.
Joachim Scholz