The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus
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Grimmelshausen had a keen understanding of hatred and the hypocrisy that accompanied it. The ‘war of God’ driven forwards by ‘strong hatred’ would be central to the narrative of the twentieth century as well. What Wilfred Owen in 1918 called the ‘cess of war’ would pour in torrents from the new godhead of nationalism that had risen in the nineteenth century. Edmund Wilson, quoting a Confederate battle song, offered a brutally apt label for this effluence of sacrifice to Leviathan: ‘patriotic gore’. The nineteenth-century German histories of the Thirty Years’ War were full of patriotic gore. Their repetitive and numbing narratives of atrocity sedulously replicated the graphic accounts of torture, rape and mutilation in Grimmelshausen’s novel. These atrocities, in a widening gyre of retribution, were reimagined as acts of judgment, the violent redress of injustice. For their part, the victims were offered up to God, their sufferings laid bare to the reader as a mark of grace and redemption. Who had suffered more in the Thirty Years’ War, Protestant or Catholic, for Germany and their faith? Writing in 1816, a Catholic playwright described the advance of the Swedish army on Villingen and the desperate resistance of the town: ‘Our loyalty to the Kaiser,’ one citizen declared, ‘and the fact that we remain true to our faith, enrages [the Swedes] so much that they refuse to spare the elderly, the mothers, the children [and threaten] that the name of Villingen will be wiped from the face of the earth, and those set wandering from the ruins will loudly lament: here was the revenge of the Swedes!’ One hundred years later, in 1917, a counter-narrative of Protestant suffering was invoked to inspire Germans in the midst of another catastrophic conflict. The foreword to this volume, a collection of contemporary accounts of the Thirty Years’ War, reprinted the preface to the 1683 edition of Simplicissimus which reminded ‘the Loyal German Reader’ of the destruction of that seventeenth-century war: the burnt villages, destroyed churches, and raped women, ‘a time when German blood had flowed like water’: all sacrifices demanded in defence of Germany liberty against the forces of tyranny.
Like Thucydides, Grimmelshausen had seen war at first hand. His experience of war, first as a bewildered and innocent civilian and then as a hardened and cynical soldier, informs his novel with the same visceral moral power that Francisco Goya would etch into his Disasters of War, accompanied by his simple, horrified declaration: ‘I saw this.’ At one level, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus belongs in the canon of the great first-person depictions of the horror of war along with Goya’s Disasters, Jacques Callot’s The Great Miseries of War and Otto Dix’s The War. But Grimmelshausen’s novel, as literature, also has a strikingly modern core. His narrative juxtaposes hilariously absurd and fantastical episodes that illustrate how war corrodes morality and mocks reason with passages that show with astonishing clarity and realism the true nature of war in all of its numbing cruelty, degradation and terror. In this respect, Simplicissimus creates the template for such twentieth-century masterpieces as Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Heinrich Böll’s The Train was on Time, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
Grimmelshausen’s biography is somewhat sketchy, with many of its details subject to dispute. The original title page of the novel offers the book as a ‘description of the life of a strange vagabond’, but only a minority of the book’s episodes, primarily in its opening chapters, are believed to correspond more or less to the author’s own experiences. It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that scholars even reliably identified Grimmelshausen as the novel’s author (the original title page gives the name of the ‘strange vagabond’ as Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim). Hans Jacob Christoffel (the ‘von Grimmelshausen’ was added later) was probably born in March of 1621 or 1622 in the Hessian town of Gelnhausen near Frankfurt am Main. Raised by his grandparents, Grimmelshausen is believed to have been attending school in 1634 in Gelnhausen, which had long been occupied by Spanish Catholic troops, when Protestant forces invaded the region in August. As the Imperial and Protestant armies clashed thousands of civilians, including the young Grimmelshausen, sought refuge in the nearby fortress of Hanau, which was itself invested until 1636 (the lifting of the siege by Swedish forces was celebrated in Hanau through the nineteenth century with an annual midsummer festival). However, Grimmelshausen was taken prisoner by Imperial forces in 1635. As was common with many prisoners taken in the Thirty Years’ War, the teenager was quickly impressed into Imperial service. As a stable boy, he very likely witnessed the second siege of Magdeburg (whose destruction in 1631 had become a contemporary byword for brutality) and the Battle of Wittstock in 1636.
By 1639, after serving in General Götz’s Rhine army in 1637 and 1638, Grimmelshausen was a musketeer in an Imperial regiment deployed near Strasbourg. By virtue of his Latin school education, he managed to lift himself out of the ranks when he became the regiment’s clerk, an assignment that eventually led to his appointment as the personal secretary of another Imperial regimental commander, Johann von Elter, in 1645. After the peace, Grimmelshausen converted to Catholicism (though some accounts date his conversion to the late 1630s), settled in Offenburg on the Rhine across from Strasbourg, married (and added ‘von’ to his name), and took the job of administering the family properties of his first commander, Hans Reinhard von Schauenburg. From 1662 to 1665, he worked as the caretaker of a property of a Strasbourg doctor while running a small inn, ‘The Silver Star’, in the village of Gaisbach. In 1667 he was appointed magistrate of the nearby town of Renchen, a post he held until he died in August 1676. It was in this latter period that he began work on the novel that would make him the most widely read German author of the seventeenth century.4
The first edition of Simplicissimus was published in Nuremberg in 1669, with six further editions appearing in Grimmelshausen’s lifetime. The original novel consists of five ‘books’. Encouraged by its success (a second, significantly altered edition appeared in 1671), Grimmelshausen continued, between 1669 and 1675, to work on what came to be called the ‘Simplician Cycle’, which he regarded as a single integral work. The Continuatio was added as a sixth book of Simplicissimus in 1669 – although only, it is widely thought, to ‘cash in’ on the commercial success of the original publication. Four more books, published between 1670 and 1675, concluded the cycle and dealt with new characters and new narratives and themes connected to the war. The best known of these later works was The Life of the Arch-Cheat and Runagate Courage (1670), which inspired Bertolt Brecht’s famous play set during the Thirty Years’ War, Mother Courage (1939). Between 1683 and 1713, multi-volume editions of Grimmelshausen’s works continued to appear, though these were heavily amended and altered by his publisher. By the late eighteenth century, however, they began to be superseded by editions that, while abridged (or ‘modernized’) to make them more readable for a broader audience, were closer in content to the editions published in Grimmelshausen’s lifetime.5
Simplicissimus was ‘rediscovered’ as a great German novel in the first half of the nineteenth century when a younger generation of patriotic Germans, basking in the victorious glow of the ‘wars of liberation’ that had freed the German states from occupation by Napoleonic France in 1813, began to envision a unified German nation and were determined, as part of the broader intellectual enterprise of promoting a ‘German consciousness’ (as opposed to the patchwork of regional loyalties that characterized the defunct Holy Roman Empire), to recover a narrative testifying to German suffering, resilience and ‘national spirit’. The outpouring of new histories of the Thirty Years’ War in the nineteenth century, when the war was ‘refought’ as part of the great debate over the shape of a future unified Germany, was a remarkable manifestation of this nationalist project. The rediscovery of Simplicissimus or, more precisely, the reassessment of Grimmelshausen’s reputation as a ‘writer of the people’ (Volksschriftsteller) and the novel itself as an authentic expression of the ‘true German voice’ –
and as such a reliable first-person account of Germany’s martyrdom during the war – formed an integral part of this debate.6 It also provided historians with a rich source for their accounts of the barbarism and devastation Germany had endured during the war. In countless histories of the war written during the first half of the nineteenth century, we find these historians incorporating, in detail and often verbatim, Grimmelshausen’s descriptions of the atrocities committed by the Swedish soldiers and the tortures meted out in return by peasants bent on retribution. In the novel’s harrowing opening chapters, we read of two gang rapes, a peasant roasted alive in an oven, numerous horrific mutilations, the crushing of skulls with knotted ropes and thumbs in the flintlocks of pistols, and the administration of the notorious ‘Swedish Punch’, which consisted mainly of liquid offal and manure forced down the victim’s throat. To understand the context within which these historians were using Grimmelshausen, it is important to remember that through the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, Grimmelshausen’s accounts of these atrocities were considered factually accurate. Because of the brutal realism of its descriptions of action and landscape, and its rendering of the different German regional dialects, the novel was held in high regard as a singularly valuable seventeenth-century historical source. It needs to be pointed out that one notable peculiarity of the nineteenth century’s use of the novel as a historical source is that Protestant historians, while appropriating exactly the details of the atrocities in their own accounts, would simply transform the Swedish (and Protestant) perpetrators into Imperial (and Catholic) soldiers.
It was the German Romantics who were probably the most influential in sparking modern interest in Simplicissimus as a work of literature. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the towering figure of the German Enlightenment, was an early promoter of the novel’s importance to German culture, and his advocacy was cited as the inspiration for three new editions that appeared between 1785 and 1810, a period that coincided with the breakdown of absolutist Europe into revolution and war.7 As the story of a ‘German hero’ it was primarily commendable as a Bildungsroman (though the 1810 edition was advertised as an ‘adventure novel’). The publication of the first ‘modern’ edition of the book in 1836 (based on the revised versions published between 1669 and 1671) was largely due to the endorsement of the poet Ludwig Tieck, one of the leading lights of the German Romantic movement. In 1838, the literary scholar Theodor Echtermeyer was able, for the first time, conclusively to establish Grimmelshausen as the author of the novel. Before Echtermeyer’s research was published, ‘Grimmelshausen’ had been widely assumed to be a pseudonym which, among other things, had encouraged the proliferation of amended, ‘improved’ and radically altered versions of the novel over the course of a century and a half (one estimate puts the number at over 150 different versions). Adelbert von Keller supervised a ‘scholarly’ edition (based on the 1668 version) that was published in 1854. Keller also included a bibliography of Grimmelshausen’s works and a list of all the variant editions of Simplicissimus that had appeared since the author’s death.8
Most of the ‘improvements’ made to the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century editions of the novel were intended to render the language more accessible to modern readers, trimming what were considered the overly long ‘didactic’ and moralizing sections (of uncertain authorship, some of these having been added since 1668), and, most importantly, to tone down the ‘obscene’ and explicit descriptions of torture, rape and sexual activity.9 By 1871, the year of German unification, Simplicissimus was firmly established as a chronicle of ‘true German life’ of great national and cultural significance. In 1878, one reviewer praised Simplicissimus ‘as a true German novel, not only the best and most significant of the seventeenth century, but one of the best of all time’. It had become the German ‘national book’ (Volksbuch). Its popularity in the nineteenth century has been ascribed to three main factors, one patriotic and two cultural.10 It appealed to the German nationalist imagination with its depiction of a genuine German hero and survivor emerging out of the chaos and destruction of the Thirty Years’ War. It satisfied the yearning for the recovery of examples of a lost and authentically German ‘people’s art’ (Volkskunst). Finally, it entered a market in which there was a rising demand for ‘realistic’ fiction that dealt with the major events of German history.11
As an illustration of the prominence Simplicissimus had assumed in German cultural and intellectual life, it is worth pointing out that the novel became the subject of a very revealing debate in the German parliament in 1876. The historical background to this debate was the ongoing political conflict known in Germany as the ‘culture war’ (Kulturkampf). With the establishment of the unified German state in 1871 under the leadership of the Protestant Prussian Hohenzollern monarchy, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced a series of laws between 1872 and 1875 that progressively restricted the rights and independence of the Catholic Church and its clergy in German civil and educational life. This legislation provoked a sharp pushback by the German Catholic Church and its members and created an environment in which the Catholic Centre Party consolidated its role as the main defender of the political, cultural and social interests of German Catholics. In the midst of this, the government’s Minister for Cultural Affairs (which included education), Adalbert Falk, introduced a decree in 1876 to establish a curriculum in Prussian schools whose reading list included Simplicissimus. Since the government allocated the funds for the purchase of schoolbooks, this curriculum became the subject of an intense parliamentary debate that illustrated all of the tensions at the heart of the ‘culture war’, especially conservative Catholic concerns about the elimination of the Church’s role in education. The problem was that there was some dispute over which version of the novel Falk was recommending for use in the schools. As it happened, Falk was actually proposing that a special ‘youth edition’, scrubbed of its most graphic depictions of sex, violence and moral degradation, be adopted. But some Catholic members of parliament were concerned that other versions, replete with ‘aimless wandering, sexual encounters, larceny, indecency, murder, and oath-breaking’, might find their way into students’ hands and lead to the ‘corruption of their souls’ (also bear in mind that the book had been placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books). The leading journal of Catholic opinion, Germania, condemned the book as ‘no more than a compendium of filthy obscenities and lies from the dissolute life of a mercenary in the Thirty Years’ War’. It can be presumed that this debate, and the press coverage it attracted, did nothing to depress sales of the novel. Nevertheless, expurgated versions continued to be used in schools through the 1960s. By 1940, the abridged and sanitized ‘youth edition’ first published in 1911 (with illustrations) had sold over 200,000 copies.12
Critical editions of Grimmelshausen’s collected works, annotated and edited by prominent scholars of German literature, first appeared in the early 1880s and continued to be published in new and revised editions into the 1990s. The annotated editions of the novel that came out in 1919 and 1922 both emphasized the comparisons to be drawn between Germany’s suffering in the Thirty Years’ War and in the First World War.13 Simplicissimus has remained by far the most widely read of Grimmelshausen’s works and, in all of its variants (including the large number of pirated and ‘improved’ editions), has never been out of print. The first English translation, by A. T. Goodrick, appeared in 1912, followed by French and Italian translations in 1922 and 1928 respectively. In the half-century after 1945, the novel was translated into an additional thirteen languages, including Chinese, Russian and Japanese.14
While the reputation of Simplicissimus as a canonical work of German literature was solidified in the second half of the nineteenth century, its enduring influence on German history-writing and the culture of remembrance surrounding modern Germany’s understanding of the Thirty Years’ War also has to be taken into account. In particular, the novel’s influence on the histor
ical writings of Friedrich Schiller and Gustav Freytag, arguably the two most formative voices that shaped the popular historical consciousness in nineteenth-century Germany, must be examined.
Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years’ War (1791–3) and his dramatic Wallenstein trilogy (1798–9) were the sources of most contemporary educated Germans’ knowledge about the war, its main actors, and its causes and legacy. Of the former work, Christoph Wieland observed that it ‘had so many readers that, of all the books in the German language, it alone allowed people to make an intellectual claim to some level of culture’. ‘I have just been reading [histories] of the Thirty Years’ War,’ Schiller wrote to a friend in 1786, ‘and my head is still full of it. How curious it is, that this period of greatest national misery should also be one of the brightest pages of human greatness!’ His descriptions of the atrocities committed by the foreign mercenaries (mainly Croats and Walloons) during the sack of Magdeburg in 1631 (for most Germans the defining event of the cruelty of the war) indelibly engraved the brutality of the Thirty Years’ War into the German national narrative:
The butchery began and the craft of the historian and the art of the poet can find no language to describe it. Neither the innocence of childhood nor the infirmity of age, neither youth, sex, rank, nor beauty could deflect the fury of the conquerors. Women were brutalized in the arms of their husbands and daughters at the feet of their fathers.