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Abraham

a Santa Clara,

In 1635 Schupp was appointed Professor of History and Rhetoric in Marburg, and, fourteen years later, was called to Hamburg. It was not long, however, before the Hamburg clergy scented a wolf in sheep's clothing; they accused him of introducing satire, jests, and comic anecdotes into his sermons, but Schupp, who had much of Luther's fighting spirit, soon proved himself more than equal to them. His writings (first collected, 1663) are written in a vigorous popular style, which, in its lack of restraint, sometimes reminds us of Fischart; for Opitz and the poets of the Renaissance he had nothing but scorn. His satire, like Logau's, is serious rather than witty, and his standpoint is invariably one of personal experience and conviction. As a preacher, Schupp is seen to most advantage in his powerful impeachment of Hamburg, the Catechismuspredigt vom dritten Gebot oder Gedenk daran Hamburg (1656).

Abraham a Santa Clara was a man of a different stamp. He had not the learning and experience, the wide human 1644-1709. sympathy of his North German brother, but he had more genius, and a brilliant and incisive wit. And in matters of religion, Catholic monk and Protestant preacher naturally stood at opposite poles. Santa Clara's faith sat lightly on his shoulders; he introduced the coarsest anecdotes and witticisms in his sermons; he was ruthless as to the weapons with which he attacked his enemies, and delighted in scurrilous personalities; but he had the art of clothing everything in a light, interesting, and attractive form, which appealed strongly to the South German Catholic. In 1679 Vienna was visited by the plague, and Santa Clara was obliged to suspend for a time his activity as a preacher. He employed his leisure in writing tracts which were published under characteristic titles, such as Merk's Wien! (1680), Lösch Wien! (1680). The second siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683 was the occasion of a powerful appeal to his fellow-citizens, Auf, auf ihr Christen! (1680),1 a tract which Schiller took as his model for the sermon of the Capuchin monk in Wallenstein's Lager. Again, in the Grosse Todten Bruderschafft (1681), the medieval "Dance of Death" is made the basis of a satire. Santa

1 Ed. A. Sauer (Wiener Neudrucke, 1), 1883.

Clara's chief work, however, is Judas der Ertzschelm (1686),1 Judas der which contains the essence of his sermons.

Ertzschelm,

Judas der Ertzschelm is partly a novel, partly a collection of 1686. homilies. Each section of the book begins with a short narration, which is followed by what is practically a sermon. The individual parts have little connection with one another, except in so far as the romance itself provides a thread. For the story of Judas, Santa Clara was mainly indebted to the Legenda aurea by Jacobus a Voragine, and, in the German writer's hands, it bears considerable resemblance to the romances of the later seventeenth century. The mother of Judas, Ciboria, learns in a dream that the son she will give birth to will be a villain; so she puts the child in a basket and throws it into the sea. The basket ultimately reaches the island of Iscariot, and the child is adopted by the queen of that island. When Judas grows up, he returns to Jerusalem, after having murdered the rightful heir to the throne of Iscariot. In Jerusalem, he unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. When he learns what he has done, he is filled with repentance and becomes a disciple of Christ. The part he now plays is enlivened by incidents of a similarly romantic nature, and at the close of the book, the soul of Judas is condemned to occupy a place in the lowest quarter of hell, beside Lucifer himself. The sermons in Judas der Ertzschelm are, however, more important than its story; Geiler's irony seems here to be mingled with the full-blooded satire of Murner, while the whole is expressed with Fischart's fantastic love of epithets. Santa Clara's work stands thus in a direct line with the characteristically South German literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

1 Ed. F. Bobertag, in D.N.L., 40[1883]. Cp. T. G. von Karajan, Abraham a Santa Clara, Vienna, 1867, and W. Scherer, Vortrage und Aufsatze, Berlin, 1874, 147 ff.

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226

CHAPTER VIII.

THE NOVEL IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

H. M. Moscherosch, 1601-69.

Gesichte Philanders von Sitte

wald, 1642

43.

THE most important form of German literature in the second half of the seventeenth century was unquestionably the novel. In the preceding centuries, there had existed prose versions of medieval romances and innumerable collections of anecdotes; but, with the possible exception of the novels of Jörg Wickram, fiction, in the modern sense of the word, was unknown. Now, however, with the help of Spanish and French models, the German novel began to assert itself as an independent literary genre; in other words, it ceased to be merely a form of satire or didactic literature. At the same time, fiction was more early freed from didactic elements than from satire, and even the greatest novel of the century, Simplicissimus, is often satirical in intention. The beginning of what might be described as the transition from satire to novel under Spanish influence is to be seen in the work of an Alsatian, Hans Michael Moscherosch (1601-69).

Moscherosch, whose family was of Spanish origin, studied law in Strassburg, took his degree as doctor juris in Geneva, and spent some time in France. He then received an ap pointment in a small village near Metz, and subsequently at Finstingen on the Saar. For twelve years he was exposed to all the horrors of the war, plundered by both parties, exposed to the plague, and reduced almost to starvation. Finally he sought refuge in Strassburg, where he was appointed secretary to the town. And here he published his chief work, Wunderliche vnd warhafftige Gesichte Philanders von Sittewald, of which the first complete edition appeared in

1 A selection ed. F. Bobertag, in D. N.L., 32 [1884]. For this chapter, cp. F. Bobertag, Geschichte des Romans in Deutschland, 1, 2, Berlin, 1876-84.

1642 and 1643. At least half of these "Visions" are direct imitations of a collection of "Dreams" (Sueños) by the Spanish writer, Francisco de Quevedo, which, however, Moscherosch only knew in a French translation. Moscherosch treated his original as Fischart had treated Rabelais; he made it a receptacle for his own ideas and observations, and the condition of his country gave him more opportunity for satire than Quevedo had found in Spain. In the first of the visions (Schergen-Teuffel), Philander is shown the futility of justice; in the second (Welt-Wesen), he sees the vanity and hypocrisy of the world; while the third (Venus-Narren) is a satire on the "fools of love." The most powerful and imaginative of the visions is that in which Philander finds himself in hell, and sees his contemporaries as Höllen-Kinder. In À la mode Kehraus, German slavery to things foreign which, as we have seen, had been the favourite butt of satirists all through the century, is once more attacked, and Soldaten-Leben, in which Moscherosch obviously draws from his own experiences, gives a repellently realistic picture of the demoralisation of the land during the Thirty Years' War. Moscherosch is less of a novelist than his Spanish original; his hero's adventures only interest him in so far as they afford him an opportunity for satire. As far as originality is concerned, the Gesichte Philanders cannot be compared with Fischart's Gargantua, but it suffers from the same formlessness and contempt of style; Moscherosch falls into those literary vices of exaggeration and pedantic phraseology which he satirises. But the pictures he calls up are vivid, and the occasional verses scattered through the book are in the vigorous style of the Volkslied.

7

To the Thirty Years' War was due one significant book, Simplicius Simplicissimus, a_romance which may be said to form the link between the Middle High German epic and the modern novel. The author of Simplicissimus was a writer of many pseudonyms; his real name, however, seems to have been Johann Jakob Christoffel, to which he himself added J. J. Chrisvon Grimmelshausen. He was born about 1624 at Gelnhausen toffel von in Hesse, and as a boy of ten was carried off by soldiers hausen, and had his first taste of the war. He fought now on the ca. 1624one side, now on the other. In 1646 he is known to have been in Offenburg, where he went over to the Catholic

Grimmels

76.

Der Aben

theurliche

Simpli cissimus, 1669.

Church, and the last years of his life were spent as bailiff ("Schultheiss") in Renchen on the border of the Black Forest, where he died in 1676. Before writing Simplicissimus, Grimmelshausen experimented with Traumgesichte similar to those of Moscherosch, and tried his hand at translating a French novel, Der fliegende Wandersmann nach dem Monde (1659). Under the influence of the early Spanish picaresque romances which had been translated into German early in the century,1 he discovered his vocation and became the creator of the German "Schelmenroman." Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, Das ist: Die Beschreibung dess Lebens eines seltzamen Vaganten, genant Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim, wo und welcher gestalt Er nemlich in diese Welt kommen, was er darinn gesehen, gelernet, erfahren und aussgestanden, auch warumb, er solche wieder freywillig quittirt2 was printed at Montbéliard in 1669.

Of good

In the story of Simplicius Simplicissimus's youth there is an unconscious? echo of Wolfram's Parzival. birth, the boy is brought up in the Spessart by a peasant, whom he believes to be his father. He is a simple child who plays a "Sackpfeife" or bagpipe, and herds his flock in happy innocence. His first glimpse of the world of men comes to him, as it came to Parzival, from soldiers— not, however, courteous knights, but rough cuirassiers who fall upon the village, burn and pillage all they can find, and carry off Simplicissimus, who clings to his bagpipe as his most precious possession. Like Parzival again, he comes to a hermit in the forest,-who, as he only discovers long afterwards, is his own father, and for two years he sits at the hermit's feet, learning wisdom from him. The hermit dies, and Simplicius once more falls into the hands of soldiers. He is brought to the Governor of Hanau, who learns that he is his own nephew, and makes him his page.

1 Mendoza's Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the earliest picaresque romance, was translated into German in 1617, but there had appeared, four years earlier, a translation of Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache (1599), by Agidius Albertinus. On Albertinus (1560-1620), who was secretary to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, and translated extensively from the Spanish, cp. R. von Liliencron in D. N.L., 26 [1883]. A translation of part of Don Quixote appeared in 1625, the first complete one in 1683. Cp. A. Schneider, Spaniens Anteil an der deutschen Litteratur des 16. und 17. Jahrh., Strassburg, 1898.

2 Ed. J. Tittmann (Deutsche Dichter, 7, 8), 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1877; R. Kögel in the Neudrucke, 19-25, Halle, 1880. The edition in D. N.L. is by F. Bobertag, 33-34 [1882].

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