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German literature

Written by
Ehrhard Bahr
Professor of German, University of California, Los Angeles, California. Author of Irony in the Late Works of Goethe and History of German Literature.
Ehrhard BahrAll
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History

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 ZaubersprĂŒche” [“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 RagnarÇ«k, 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, behavior, and speech were adapted from the Roman Empire’s ideals of the statesman and orator.

4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
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Famous Poets and Poetic Form

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.

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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 hîhe 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. Hîhe 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 hĂŽhe 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 favored by the philosopher-teacher Peter Abelard and his learned student and lover, HĂ©loĂŻse, in their tragic relationship.

Courtly romance

Courtly romance, a new narrative form in the 12th century, was the major vehicle for Middle High German Classicism. The earliest courtly narratives were “romances of antiquity.” They show Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, and Aeneas behaving like 12th-century chivalric knights, fighting boldly but with noble restraint on horseback with lances, wondering in long inner monologues whether they can win the love of their ladies, and writing them love letters and poems. The northern German poet Heinrich von Veldeke produced the Eneide (c. 1170; written in an intermediate dialect that contained elements of both Low and High German), a “modern” version of Virgil’s Aeneid adapted from the anonymous Old French Roman d’ÉnĂ©as. It turns on the two loves of Aeneas—one passionate and destructive (Dido); the other chaste, courtly, and the foundation of family and empire (Lavinia). The Trojan War was another popular theme from antiquity.

But the tales received from the ancient world paled before the wild popularity of the figure of King Arthur and his knights (see Arthurian legend). Arthurian romance in the wake of its great inventor, the French poet Chrétien de Troyes, overwhelmed other contenders for dominance of narrative poetry.

Hartmann von Aue

A Swabian knight, poet, theoretician of love, and writer of Minnesang (courtly love lyrics), Hartmann von Aue was the first to bring the new tales of King Arthur to Germany. He adapted and translated into elegant Middle High German verses two of ChrĂ©tien’s romances: Erec (c. 1180–85), from Érec et Énide, and Iwein (c. 1200), from Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion. These works created a new structure for narrative and with it a new conception of the destiny of the hero: his education and gradual achievement of ethical perfection through making amends for shameful conduct, expunging guilt, resisting temptation, and avoiding behavior conducive to tragic failure. Erec is the tale of a knight’s quest to repair his reputation, damaged when he neglects his duties as knight to spend all his time with his bride. In Iwein a great knight falls from grace by disregarding a seemingly trivial deadline. Denounced before King Arthur’s court by his wife, Iwein loses his mind and is reduced to living naked and wild in the forest. Restored by a magic salve and accompanied by a lion whom he has helped fight a dragon, he sets out on a series of grand chivalric undertakings, rescuing the helpless and those unjustly accused. Eventually, his acts of justice and compassion bring about a reconciliation with his wife.

The obsession with guilt expunged and shame overcome found its most poignant expression in Hartmann’s two “chivalric legends,” Gregorius (c. 1185–95) and Der arme Heinrich (c. 1195; “Poor Henry”). Gregorius is a chivalric-Christian adaptation of the Oedipus story, a tale of double incest in which the tragic hero, born from an incestuous union and later wed to his own mother, is raised to the position of pope after 17 years of suicidal penance for his sins as knight and lover. “Poor Henry,” a wealthy, virtuous, and famous knight, is stricken with leprosy and loses his possessions and standing. The only medicine that can cure his disease is the blood of a virgin willing to sacrifice herself for him. The youngest daughter of the family that takes him in at once offers herself and refuses to take no for an answer. Ultimately her sacrifice is rejected and the will accepted in place of the deed. Miraculously cured, the grand lord marries the young peasant girl.

Hartmann’s elegant simplicity and his gentle, noble sentimentality were greatly admired both in his own time and since. (Selections from his works can be found in English translation in The Narrative Works of Hartmann von Aue, 1983.) His younger contemporary, Gottfried von Strassburg, crowned him with the laurel wreath and praised him extravagantly. No less an author than Thomas Mann admired Hartmann’s legends of great sin and profound forgiveness; his late novel Der ErwĂ€hlte (1951; The Holy Sinner) adapts Hartmann’s Gregorius.

Wolfram von Eschenbach

The high point of Classical Middle High German literature is the work of the two great literary rivals Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg. Wolfram presents himself as an unlearned, rough-cut genius:

I am Wolfram von Eschenbach, and I know a thing or two about poetry.
I was born to knighthood, and any woman who lovesme for my writing instead of my boldness must be weak in her wits.
I don’t know a single letter of the alphabet.

Gottfried, the elegant, highly educated humanist-courtier poet, classified Wolfram as a teller of wild stories persuasive to “dull minds.” Wolfram’s style is eccentric and brilliant. His works, with a high ethical seriousness at their core, are full of a robust humor that can shade into the grotesque.

Wolfram adapted his major work, Parzival, from ChrĂ©tien de Troyes’s unfinished Perceval; ou, le conte du graal (Perceval: The Tale of the Grail) and completed it about 1205. He also wrote a long fragment of a heroic legend (chanson de geste, or “song of heroic deeds”), Willehalm, and two short fragments called Titurel, a spin-off from the Grail story begun in Parzival. (Wolfram probably stopped working on Willehalm and Titurel at some time after 1217.) In addition to these works, he composed a number of lyric poems.

Parzival has been compared with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. It is a kind of summation of the human condition in its 12th-century embodiment: the sinful knight questing to reconcile the demands of God with those of life in the world. Parzival is the simpleton with a grand destiny. He becomes king of the Grail castle and overcomes his youthful sins by steadfastly loving his wife, by learning discipline, compassion, and courtesy, and by remaining loyal to his own human destiny as knight and fighter. In fact, Parzival seems to reiterate the parable of the prodigal son: the good man who has sinned and fallen into doubt of God (zwüvel) is the candidate for grace. Parzival shares with Goethe’s Faust the idea that the very effort to perfect flawed human nature has redemptive power. The work contains a grand symbol of this obligation to maintain life and destiny, raised to the level of a religious symbol: the Holy Grail. Parzival becomes king of the Grail by remaining a knight and loyal husband. In this he is an answer to Hartmann’s Gregorius, who could find redemption only in complete renunciation of his human identity. Wolfram’s Parzival is a rejection of ascetic Christian values and a grand confirmation of the worth of life in this world.

Gottfried von Strassburg

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’ behavior. 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 TĂŒrlĂźn, who wrote an obscure and lengthy baroque romance of Sir Gawain called Die KrĂŽne (c. 1220–30; The Crown); Rudolf von Ems, who authored various longer epics and a chronicle of world history; and Konrad von WĂŒrzburg, 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.