GERMANY 



3505 



GERMANY 



seriously, owing to the promis- 

 cuous introduction of foreign words, 

 against which powerful linguistic 

 societies long fought in vain ; it 

 was not until the latter half of the 

 18th century that the language be- 

 came worthy of a classic literature. 



While the German language 

 has changed little since the time 

 of Goethe and Schiller, German 

 style has undergone consider- 

 able development in the direction 

 of flexibility and clearness ; and suc- 

 cessive legislation in the German- 

 speaking states has brought about 

 a uniform system of orthography. 

 An effort has also been made 

 throughout Germany, Austria, and 

 Switzerland to maintain the purity 

 and uniformity of German pronun- 

 ciation by means of a fixed stand- 

 ard in the language of the stage. 

 The claims of the dialects for 

 serious recognition, however, make 

 themselves still heard, not merely 

 in the N., but also in the south- 

 ern states, especially in Bavaria 

 and Austria. 



LITERATURE. The literature of 

 the earliest or Old High German 

 period calls for little comment, its 

 interest being mainly linguistic. 

 The chief monuments are a gospel- 

 harmony in verse by Otfrid of 

 Weissenburg, a ballad, Das Lud- 

 wigslied, and voluminous glosses 

 and translations by Notker Labeo, 

 a monk of St. Gall; indeed, the 

 most interesting documents of the 

 9th century are not High, but Low 

 German namely, the fragmentary 

 alliterative ballad, Das Hilde- 

 brandslied, and an old Saxon epic 

 of the Life of Christ, Der Heliand, 

 or The Saviour. In the 10th cen- 

 tury, under the Saxon emperors, 

 the vernacular fell into disfavour, 

 and such literature as there was, 

 the Lay of Waltharius, Ruodlieb, 

 a forerunner of medieval romance, 

 Ecbasis captivi, an early form of 

 the Beast saga, and the play? of 

 Roswitha, a nun of Gandersheim, 

 were written in Latin. 



French Influence 



In the llth century, when the 

 Middle High German period opens, 

 literature, hampered by the ascetic 

 : spirit of the Church, made at first 

 slow progress ; but French in- 

 fluence soon found its way across 

 the Rhine. Before the 12th century 

 was half over the Germans were 

 acquainted with the Song of Ro- 

 land, the epic of Tristan, and had 

 themselves, under Provencal stimu- 

 lus, begun to cultivate a lyric 

 poetry or Minnesang, of wonderful 

 freshness and purity. By the end 

 of the 12th century Middle High 

 German poetry had reached its 

 zenith. In the courtly epic, Hein- 

 rich von Veldeke, author of the 

 Eneit, bad given place to Hart- 



mann von Aue, Wolfram von 

 Eschenbach, and Gottfried von 

 Strassburg. To the first we owe 

 versions of the French romances of 

 Erec and Iwein, the legend of Gre- 

 gorius, and that most charming of 

 Middle High German idylls, Der 

 arme Heinrich ; to Wolfram a 

 German romance of Parzifal which 

 transcends all others in mystic 

 depth and romantic suggestive- 

 ness, and to Gottfried a German 

 Tristan which gives rein to the emo- 

 tional paganism of the Middle Ages. 

 More peculiarly German is the 

 great epic Das Nibelungenlied 

 not unworthily described as the 

 German Iliad which unrolls with 

 relentless tragic power the story of 

 Siegfried's death and Kriemhild's 

 revenge. Another epic, Gudrun, 

 more loosely constructed but of 

 gentler beauty, deals with sagas 

 of the North Sea ; others, of vary- 

 ing merit, constitute the so-called 

 Heldenbuch. 



Literature in the Middle Ages 

 The glory of Middle High Ger- 

 man literature is Walther von der 

 Vogelweide, the greatest Ivric poet 

 of the Middle Ages. Walther's 

 strength lies not solely in the un- 

 rivalled beauty of his love songs, 

 but in the width of his range ; he 

 is not merely a minnesinger, but 

 also a political poet. All this re- 

 markable outburst of poetry dates 

 from the last years of the 12th and 

 the first two decades of the 13th 

 centuries. Thereafter Middle High 

 German literature fell into diffuse 

 imitation and degenerated rapidly. 

 Of the later poets, Konrad von 

 Wiirzburg, who cultivated the epic, 

 and Neidhart von Reuental, a 

 lyric poet, are the most eminent. 



A period of confused and in- 

 effectual literary effort now set in, 

 in which old forms and new ideas 

 jostled together. On the one hand 

 the Germans gave themselves up 

 to mysticism and allegory ; on the 

 other they imitated the incisive 

 and witty literature of the human- 

 ists, from whom they also learned 

 the art of translation. But there is 

 little originality until the end of 

 the 15th century, when two out- 

 standing works appeared, Das 

 Narrenschiff, by Sebastian Brandt, 

 which foreshadowed the coming 

 Reformation, and the Low German 

 beast epic, Reynke de Vos or Rey- 

 nard the Fox. The 16th century is 

 the century of the Reformation. 

 Martin Luther himself is its chief 

 man of letters; his translation of 

 the Bible is the greatest German 

 book of the century, and his hymns 

 are its most characteristic lyric ex- 

 pression. Under his influence the 

 drama sprang into new life ; at 

 first restricting itself to Biblical 

 themes, but later drawing freely 



on the wealth of story liberated by 

 the Renaissance. A typical German 

 dramatist of the 16th century is 

 Hans Sachs, the cobbler of Nurem- 

 berg, who especially excelled in the 

 comic Fastnachtspiele or Shrove- 

 tide plays ; and in his hands also 

 the Meistergesang flourished, a 

 form of poetry which took the 

 place of the medieval Minnesang. 

 The 16th century was also the 

 great age of German Volkslied. 



17th and 18th Centuries 

 Besides the drama, the most 

 virile form of literature was satire, 

 which with the grim Catholic monk, 

 Thomas Murner, attained a fierce- 

 ness and brutality without example 

 in any other period. Later in the 

 century Johann Fischart, an Alsa- 

 tian, led German prose into lines 

 of Rabelaisian extravagance, with- 

 out an adequate substitute for 

 Rabelais' humour. The promise 

 of the 16th century was not ful- 

 filled, for in the 17th Germany was 

 devastated by the Thirty Years' 

 War. Literature fell almost ex- 

 clusively into the hands of learned 

 poets like Martin Opitz, Paul Flem- 

 ing, Simon Dach, and Andreas 

 Gryphius, who sought to impose on 

 the Germans a rule-bound litera- 

 ture on strictly classic lines. The 

 literary spirit of the nation is to be 

 found not here, but in its religious 

 poetry, above all, in the hymns of 

 Paul Gerhardt, and in Grimmels- 

 hausen's romance Simplicissimus, 

 which held the mirror up to the 

 long war with relentless realism. 

 The peace of Westphalia (1648) 

 left Germany exhausted, and the 

 literature of the later 17th century 

 consists mainly in imitations of the 

 French gallant novel, and in bom- 

 bastic verse which reduces to 

 absurdity the " preciosity " of 

 Marini and Guarini. 



At the opening of the 18th cen- 

 tury an endeavour to introduce a 

 classic taste in accordance with the 

 tenets of Boileau was apparent. 

 The chief representative of this 

 movement was J. C. Gottsched, 

 the literary dictator of Leipzig, 

 whose Kritische Dichtkunst ap- 

 peared in 1730. But this pseudo- 

 classicism soon found itself in con- 

 flict with new doctrines more in 

 harmony with nature, which had 

 found their way to Germany from 

 England. With the conflict in 1740 

 between the champions of these 

 ideas, the Swiss critics, J. J. Bod- 

 mer and J. J. Breitinger, and Gott- 

 sched, the new era may be said to 

 open. C. F. Gellert, who won great 

 popularity with fables in the style I 

 of La Fontaine, introduced the 

 comedie larmoyante from France ' 

 and the Richardsonian novel from 

 England, and, in 1748, F. G. Klop- 

 stock published the first cantos of 



