GERMAN LITERATURE 



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GERMAN LITERATURE 



of first rank, and that was Martin Luther. 

 Though German literary achievement has thus 

 been crowded into a comparatively brief period, 

 it is worthy to rank with that of any other 

 great nation. No scholars are more profound 

 than those of Germany, and from no other 

 country have so many systems of philosophy 

 been issued; no poets are more exquisitely 

 lyrical than the Germans, and German songs 

 are sung the world over; while in Goethe, 

 Germany has one master who stands with the 

 few dominant literary figures of the world. 



Early Period. As in most countries, litera- 

 ture began in Germany with the songs of the 

 minstrels, the sagas of great heroes. These 

 were written, or sung, rather, in various dia- 

 lects and were merely local in their appeal, 

 for Germany was not in those early times a 

 nation, but a group of little, warring states. 

 But a national feeling was being born, and 

 every emperor who did anything to unite the 

 severed states or to increase German power 

 at the expense of some other country was 

 helping to give it life. And with the birth of 

 a national spirit there came into being in the 

 early thirteenth century the great national epic, 

 the Nibelungenlied (which see). This was 

 not the product of a single poet or a single 

 time, but was woven of the ballads and folk 

 ta-les of innumerable minstrels of the centuries 

 that were past. The spirit of the Crusades 

 was abroad, and the love of chivalry was 

 voiced by the German Minnesingers, who cor- 

 respond in a measure to the troubadours of 

 France (see MINNESINGER; TROUBADOUR). 



In time this first spontaneous outburst of 

 song died away, and poetry became more 

 stilted and artificial. The Meister 'singers took 

 the place of the Minnesingers, and the commer- 

 cial spirit of the times made itself felt even 

 through the poetry. 



The Reformation Period. An upheaval was 

 preparing which should both startle men's 

 minds into keenness and banish artificiality 

 the great Protestant Reformation. Luther is 

 the commanding figure of this period in its 

 literature as in its history, and his translation 

 of the Bible was the one truly great work 

 handed down by it to later times. Of literature 

 in the sense of easy and graceful tales or serious 

 writing there was practically none; everybody 

 was interested in some phase of the Refor- 

 mation and cared more to advance his cause 

 than to produce matter that was formally cor- 

 rect. Even the chief poet of the era, the pic- 

 turesque Meistersinger,. Hans Sachs, sounded 

 155 



the aggressive spiritual note in his songs. From 

 the close of the Reformation period to the be- 

 ginning of the eighteenth century little that 

 was noteworthy was produced. The Thirty 

 Years' War exhausted the country so com- 

 pletely that the people had no heart for litera- 

 ture. 



From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. 

 It seems little short of marvelous to turn from 

 such dearth of literary accomplishment to the 

 richness of this later period. As the country 

 recovered from the disastrous effects of the 

 Thirty Years' War a new feeling of nationality 

 began to awaken, and this was intensified by 

 Frederick the Great and his achievements in 

 the Seven Years' War. This powerful ruler 

 gave no special encouragement to German 

 literature, but it grew up about him and actu- 

 ally helped him in his work of building up a 

 real Germany, with Prussia as a center. The 

 technique of poetry improved much in the 

 hands of Klopstock, the first master of the 

 modern German lyric; the new spirit of free- 

 dom and expansion found expression in Wie- 

 land; German drama rose to fresh heights with 

 the production of Lessing's great plays; and 

 almost every field of German thought felt the 

 influence of Herder. 



But the real Golden Age of German letters 

 was yet to come, though it was near at hand; 

 for Goethe and Schiller were born near the 

 middle of the eighteenth century, and with 

 them German literature reached its great 

 height (see GOETHE; SCHILLER). Few nations 

 can present so perfect a type of the universal 

 genius as was Goethe, and his influence is still 

 felt in every literature of Europe. Contempo- 

 raneous with the great two, or slightly later, 

 was a group of men distinguished in every field. 

 Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Uhland, Jacob and 

 Wilhelm Grimm those were but a few of the 

 names that made the era illustrious. As in 

 France, Romanticism had its day, with Jean 

 Paul Richter at the head of the movement, 

 and though its excessive emphasis on idealism 

 and fantastic imagination defeated its own pur- 

 poses and brought about its decline, it had 

 succeeded in modifying permanently the formal 

 classicism. 



In the period following that of Goethe the 

 most important figure in German literature was 

 Heine, influential in many departments, but 

 supreme in that of lyric poetry. The second 

 quarter of the nineteenth century was a time 

 of political and social unrest in Germany, and 

 much of the literature produced, whether it 



