Schiller’s account of the fate of Protestant soldiers who fell into the hands of Catholic peasants was taken almost word for word from Simplicissimus:
In this land soldiers who did not believe in the Pope were a new and unheard-of phenomenon; the blind zeal of the priests had portrayed [the Swedes] as monsters, the children of hell, and their leader as the anti-Christ … Woe to the lone Swedish soldier who fell into the hands of these savages! Every torture that a fiendish imagination could devise was practiced on these unlucky stragglers. The sight of their mutilated bodies inflamed the Swedish army to a terrible retribution.
In his foreword to Schiller’s history, Wieland declared that ‘such historical pictures from our past are one of the most effective means with which the German nation is brought together and this common spirit energized and maintained’. Celebrating Schiller as Germany’s ‘national poet’, the liberal journalist Julian Schmidt proclaimed in 1863 that since the publication of Schiller’s history of the war, ‘only a Protestant perception of German history is possible’. For their part, Catholic German historians strenuously pushed back against Schiller’s interpretation of the war’s meaning, arguing that his chronicle reinforced the popular misconception of the Thirty Years’ War as a struggle between the dark forces of foreign Catholic tyranny and the Protestant princes who fought for German liberty and independence. In their view such a reading, which they believed had been largely refuted by modern historical research, only perpetuated the marginalization of Catholics as less-than-authentic Germans. Nevertheless, the ‘Protestant perception of German history’, propagated by Prussian historians, remained dominant well into the twentieth century.
But the great popularizer of the history of the war in nineteenth-century Germany was Gustav Freytag. His multi-volume and best-selling Pictures from the German Past, launched in 1858, appeared in several editions through the 1920s and was intended as a celebration of the German national spirit. Seizing on the rising German nationalism of the 1860s, Freytag used the series to promote the conclusion that the rise of the kingdom of Prussia to the leadership of a unified Germany was historically inevitable. For Freytag, the story of the Thirty Years’ War was a particularly useful means to this end as it told of Protestant Germany’s heroism and resilience and of its recovery, against great odds, from the economic, social and cultural destruction of the war. Appearing first in 1858 as a series in the journal Die Grenzboten (‘Border Courier’), Freytag’s history of the war opened with a ‘harrowing sketch of daily life’ during the war that borrowed liberally from Simplicissimus. This account depicted a flourishing Germany that had been morally and spiritually ruined by the ravages of foreign armies, a land emptied of people by plague and massacre, haunted by ghosts and strange heavenly portents, its women raped, tortured and enslaved, its language debased, its culture destroyed, and its peasantry having degenerated into cannibalism and ‘dull brutality’ as it returned atrocity for atrocity. ‘Because of this war,’ Freytag wrote, ‘Germany would be thrown back two hundred years behind her more fortunate neighbours … Ruined and powerless, for the next one hundred years her western border was a playground and prize for France.’ Yet by 1866, with Prussia’s victory over Austria in the second of Bismarck’s ‘wars of unification’, Freytag could proclaim in the fifth volume of his Pictures that, ‘It has become a joy to be German, and it will soon be reckoned a great honour among the nations of the earth’. The triumphant story of Germany’s resurrection as a modern and unified nation state could not be separated from the history of its suffering during the Thirty Years’ War.
Book One contains perhaps the best-known episodes of Grimmelshausen’s novel, and its narrative corresponds most closely to the actual events of the author’s early life. It introduces us to Simplicius (unnamed for the moment) as he is swept up into the whirlwind of the war as Protestant troops move into the Spessart, a mountainous region in south-western Germany on the border between lower Bavaria and Hesse. Covered in dense forest, it is somewhat isolated, being bound by the River Main to the west, south and east and by the Kinzig to the north. The year is 1634, which would make our semi-autobiographical protagonist around ten years old. The Protestant forces under Bernhard of Weimar and the Swedish general Horn are attempting to relieve the town of Nördlingen, under siege by Catholic Imperial troops. Simplicius, along with thousands of other refugees, finds himself in flight from the advancing army. Witnessing the destruction and plundering of his home, the torture of his father and the rape of the farm’s women, Simplicius is violently and suddenly propelled from the innocence of childhood into the hatred, godlessness and unreason of war. Pursued by the screams of tortured peasants, he runs into the dark woods, where he encounters a pious hermit who takes him in and begins his instruction as a Christian and his transformation from a beast into a man. In a foretaste of the novel’s many fantastic and mystical episodes, chapters fifteen to eighteen describe Simplicius’s vivid dream of a giant oak tree casting its shadow over all of Europe. Peasants, labourers and artisans compose its roots, and on its lower branches sit the common soldiers. Higher in the tree, whose boughs are festooned with weapons, the dreamer sees the sergeants, the officers and, in the top branches, the aristocratic warlords, each more ostentatiously bedecked with the spoils of war than the last. At the top sits Mars, the god of war (this ‘war tree’ image was replicated for the frontispiece of a 1727 collection of eye-witness accounts of the destruction of Magdeburg in 1631). This is Simplicius’s first vision of the natural order of the world of the Thirty Years’ War, a hierarchy of suffering, sin and corruption that grew out of the systematic plundering and looting that fuelled the war and kept the armies in being.
Simplicius’s sanctuary is short-lived. After the battle he is captured by Protestant troops and taken to the fortress of Hanau, where he is forced to sing for his supper as a jester for the Swedish garrison’s entertainment. Then, in one of the many turns of fortune for the novel’s hero, he is captured by a Croat patrol and forced into Imperial service. Book Two tells the story of Simplicius’s first education as a soldier and as a predator in a corrupt and violent world. The most singular episode of this book is Grimmelshausen’s rendering of the savage Battle of Wittstock in October 1636 in chapter twenty-seven. Brief but intense, this passage is one of the most visceral descriptions of the chaos of combat ever written. It surely belongs alongside Lloyd Lewis’s account of the Battle of Shiloh during the American Civil War, Henri Barbusse’s descriptions of trench combat in the First World War and E. B. Sledge’s harrowing memoir of his service as a Marine in the Pacific theatre in the Second World War.
Simplicius manages to escape the carnage more or less intact but soon finds himself back in the ranks, this time in the dragoons. As Book Three opens, Grimmelshausen’s young hero is rising in the world as he learns the rules of war. His higher education continues with instruction in the wartime economics of looting and robbery (otherwise known as ‘foraging’ and ‘contributions’), the tactics of deception, trickery, lying, and most importantly how to make the best use of the spoils of war to advance his career. Out of the chaos of war, Simplicius emerges transformed into a famous and feared highwayman, the ‘Huntsman of Soest’. The key encounter in this book is when Simplicius meets the god Jupiter in chapters three and four. Jupiter gives Simplicius a quick lecture in the ways of the world and an overview of the political issues at stake for Germany in the Thirty Years’ War. Jupiter sees in the destruction of the war an opportunity to dismantle the medieval constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire and unify Germany in peace and prosperity under the governance of a parliament of wise men. Grimmelshausen’s sketch of Jupiter’s project to abolish feudalism, liberate the towns, reform the system of taxation and create a more comprehensive system of self-government for the Germans is remarkably similar to some of the modernizing aims that nineteenth-century historians attributed to the infamous Imperial generalissimo Albrecht von Wallenstein. Some of these historians also claimed that the
Habsburg emperor ordered Wallenstein’s assassination in 1634 primarily to prevent Wallenstein from carrying out this plan, which would have destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and replaced it with something that looked very much like a unified German polity.
Book Four relates Simplicius’s continued fall from grace and abandonment of God. His fortunes cycle downwards at an accelerating rate as he becomes little more than a common thief and confidence man. In some of the novel’s funniest passages, Simplicius finds himself in exile in France, where he thinks his degradation is complete when he is reduced to living on his looks by finding employment as, essentially, a gigolo servicing aristocratic women in Paris. But when his handsome face is scarred by smallpox, his hair falls out and his voice becomes a croak, even employment as a male prostitute is denied him. At this low ebb, Simplicius makes his way back to Germany, raising a stake by calling himself a doctor and fleecing French peasants by selling them quack medicines. Once back in Germany, in the garrison town of Philippsburg, he re-establishes himself as a marauder and freebooter. In chapter nine, Grimmelshausen provides a rich picture of the vital role women played in the war as basically the ‘service units’ behind the front lines. He does not denigrate them as mere camp followers, but depicts them as tough and ingenious survivors making their way in a world of masculine violence. They sew, wash, cook, forage, market essential goods and services, midwife and even serve as soldiers. They too are an important cog in the vast (and profitable) war machine that, after twenty years, has taken on a life and momentum of its own. Here too we can see the inspiration for Grimmelshausen’s 1670 story of the woman Courage that Brecht used as the basis for his play Mother Courage.
Also in Book Four, Simplicius becomes reacquainted with the demonic trickster Olivier, who pushes him deeper into a life of common thievery and base murder for gain. However, Simplicius’s fortunes begin to wheel upwards again when he is reunited with an old friend who, Samaritan-like, had once before saved him from captivity and death. In Book Five Grimmelshausen begins to bring his hero back to his beginnings as a seeker of the Word and salvation of God in a world filled with sin and temptation. The book opens with an account of Simplicius’s brief resumption of a religious life and his pilgrimage to Switzerland, a land of such peace and prosperity that, in comparison to a corrupt and war-torn Germany where war has become a way of life, appeared to the pilgrim’s jaded eyes as a land as strange and remote as Brazil or China.
Somewhat restored, Simplicius returns to Imperial service. After surviving the brutal Battle of Jankau in Bohemia in March 1645, he makes his way back to the land of his birth in western Germany. He marries again (a wife taken in an earlier misadventure has since died), discovers that his adoptive parents are still alive, learns of his true parentage (and name) and settles down to a life as a gentleman farmer (and reluctant husband and father). But he continues to yield to temptation and, as always, sin and misfortune find him. Finally he is compelled to reflect on all the myriad identities the exigencies of war forced him to adopt, his failure to find his true self and his repeated wanderings from the road of virtue. The second half of Book Five follows Simplicius on a fantastic voyage of self-discovery through magical earthly portals to strange subterranean realms that are paradisiacal mirrors to the inverted world of the German war. Returning to the ‘real’ world above, Simplicius resumes the life of a religious hermit (unsuccessfully, as it turns out, but that story is recounted in the Continuatio). The novel concludes with Grimmelshausen leaving the reader wondering if Simplicius will be able to escape the inverted universe of the great European war, a mercenary’s world where nothing is as it seems and corruption and evil have buried innocence and truth. In short, will Simplicius Simplicissimus ever find peace?
Kevin Cramer
NOTES
1. Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 786–95.
2. See Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). This book is the source of all the direct quotations from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German histories of the Thirty Years’ War.
3. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Cruelty’, in his Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958), pp. 175, 186.
4. For further biographical details of Grimmelshausen’s life see Karl F. Otto, Jr, introduction to A Companion to the Works of Grimmelshausen, edited by Karl F. Otto, Jr (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), pp. 1–24; A. T. S. Goodrick, introduction to The Adventurous Simplicissimus, by H. J. C. von Grimmelshausen (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), pp. ix–xxvi; Kenneth Negus, Grimmelshausen (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1974); Alan Menhennet, Grimmelshausen the Storyteller: A Study of the ‘Simplician’ Novels (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997), pp. 3–27; and George Schulz-Behrend, introduction to The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), pp. vii–ix. See also William Rose, ‘Grimmelshausen and His Simplicissimus’, in his Men, Myths, and Movements in German Literature (London: G. Allen & Unwin, Ltd, 1931), pp. 85–100.
5. On the publishing history of the novel, see Menhennet, p. 5; Schulz-Behrend, pp. viii–ix; Otto, pp. xi–xiv, 3–8; Christoph E. Schweitzer, ‘Problems in the Editions of Grimmelshausen’s Works’, in Otto, pp. 25–44; and Dieter Breuer, ‘In Grimmelshausen’s Tracks: The Literary and Cultural Legacy’, in Otto, pp. 235–49.
6. Otto, p. 3; Menhennet, pp. 12–14.
7. Schweitzer, pp. 25–30.
8. Otto, pp. 3–5; Schweitzer, p. 32.
9. Ibid.
10. Breuer, p. 259.
11. Barbara Salditt, Das Werden des Grimmelshausenbildes im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1933), pp. 3–21.
12. Otto, pp. 9–10; Breuer, pp. 249–50.
13. Schweitzer, p. 33.
14. Breuer, p. 250.
Translator’s Preface
This is a very well-known book. In the German-speaking world (where Simplicius Simplicissimus was first published in 1669), many students become acquainted with at least some of the text before leaving school; in the rest of the world it has been often translated (including into contemporary German, although the German language has not changed hugely since 1669), with many of the translations being into English; and Grimmelshausen’s work has a substantial presence on the Internet.
So my editor and I have decided to let readers conduct their own background research to whatever level they require. Rather than produce a learned version of an acknowledged literary masterpiece by ramming home easily accessible points in long footnotes that will slow down the eye, we prefer to offer an attractive reading experience.
Perhaps, like the translator, readers will discover that a seventeenth-century best-seller can come across as surprisingly modern.
J. A. U.
This translation has been made from the original 1668/9 German edition.
Book One
* * *
One
Tells of Simplicius’s rustic origins and ditto upbringing
These days (the last, some say) there’s a new fad among the lower orders. Some folk, as soon as they’ve scrimped and saved enough to put a few pence in their purses, waste no time in dolling themselves up in the latest daft fashion – all ribbons and bows. Or, if they can call themselves celebrities, they’ll scratch and scramble like toffs to trace a lineage as long as your arm. Often their forebears will turn out to have been navvies, their cousins mule-drivers, their brothers either fuzz or villains, their sisters plain whores, their mothers pimps if not witches – in a nutshell, their whole tribe for generations back is tarnished through and through the way Prague’s felonious Sugar Boy Gang was, one hears. That’s how it is, you see: most upstarts are as black as the ace of spades.
Without wishing to stoop as low as such idiots, I’ve often, to be honest, felt I must
be descended from some high lord, or a plain aristocrat at least. I have a natural bent for the nobleman’s trade. Given the opportunity and the gear, I reckon I could make it my own. Seriously, my background and upbringing are as good as a prince’s, if you ignore the gap between us. You don’t think so? Look at it this way: dad (as fathers are called in the Spessart) had his own palace. Better than a palace, in fact. And so skilfully put together that no king could have built anything like it with his bare hands. It would have stood for ever – and then some. The outside walls were whitewashed, and for the roof he used none of your sterile slate or cold lead or buffed-up copper. His roof was made of straw, ordinary straw, bearer of the noble grain. And to give that whiff of nobility and wealth, dad didn’t copy other high-ups and have the wall around his castle made of the building stones you find on the path or grub up from rocky ground, let alone those cheap bricks that can be cast and fired in no time. He used oak, ancient timbers from which sausages and fat hams had hung. Oak trees take more than a century to mature. Show me the king who can top that! The interior (entrance, great hall, bedchambers) dad had allowed to become smoke-blackened throughout, for the simple reason that black lasts. Black is the most permanent colour there is. A picture painted black will take longer to perfect than the artist’s greatest masterpiece. The hangings were made of the finest stuff in the whole wide world, the thread that once defeated Minerva in a spinning competition. The windows were dedicated not to St Nicholas but to St No-Glass-at-all, the reason being that, as dad well knew, panes made from hemp and flax-seed take a lot more time and money to produce properly than the clearest, most see-through Murano glass. Dad’s station in life had taught him: if a thing was a pain to make, it possessed value, and the greater the value, the better the high-ups were pleased. Rather than pageboys, lackeys and a groom he kept sheep, cattle and pigs, all gloriously dressed in their natural livery and more often than not out grazing, waiting for me to drive them home. The armoury was well stocked with the ploughs, mattocks, axes, shovels and pitchforks he wielded on a daily basis; hoeing and hacking made up his disciplina militaris as much as for ancient Romans in peacetime; harnessing oxen was his barked command, spreading dung his future defence, ploughing his waging war. But mucking out was his noble hobby, his drill; here he bestrode the world (his bit of it, anyway), plundering the Earth every harvest time for its rich booty. All this I took for granted. This isn’t a boast, I refuse to give anyone an excuse for mocking me and others like me, you won’t catch me claiming to be better than my dad. He lived in a lovely part of the world (the Spessart, like I said, where even the wolves say ‘goodnight’ to one another). I won’t waffle on about dad’s people, his immediate forebears, his good name. I don’t want to bore you. The main thing is, we’re not dealing here with some noble institution where I’d have to swear to my ancestry. I was born in the Spessart – that’s all you need know.
The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus Page 3
