From Introduction
Two hundred years after it ended, the collective memory of the Thirty Years’ War continued to exert a strong pull on the historical imagination of Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Luise Mühlbach’s popular historical novel of the war, Die Opfer des religiösen Fanatismus (‘The Victims of Religious Fanaticism’), was breathlessly advertised in 1872 as the story of ‘an epoch of the most fanatical and savage conflict’ that raged through Germany ‘with devastation and fire for a quarter of a century … a time filled with shame and horror!’. In German folklore the second decade of the conflict, the period between 1630 and 1638 known as the ‘Swedish War’, was remembered as the ‘time of annihilation’. Farmers throughout central and southern Germany, when questioned by travellers curious about the ruins of nearby abandoned villages and manors, would recall the tales passed down through the generations into the nineteenth century and reply, ‘That happened in the Swedish War – the Swede did that!’
Even as the passage of time gradually effaced the scars the war left on the German landscape, the estimation of the extent of the civilian losses caused by Europe’s first ‘total war’ understandably fluctuated, given the lack of exact and reliable demographic data for historians to work with. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the popular belief, endorsed by many historians, was that almost 70 per cent of Germany’s pre-war population, some fifteen million people, died in the conflict. Estimates at the other end of the scale put the number of lost at anywhere between 15 and 30 per cent, that is, between three and six million dead, while claiming
that some of the most devastated areas, notably the Rhine Palatinate, northern Bavaria, Bohemia, Mecklenburg and Brandenburg, were virtually depopulated by famine, disease and forced migration. Modern scholarship has arrived at a consensus that estimates that the total demographic decline amounted to about a third of the pre-war population, that is between six and six and a half million dead. But, as Peter Wilson has pointed out, even a population loss of 15 per cent would put the Thirty Years’ War at the top of the list of the most destructive of European conflicts, with the First World War (6 per cent) and the Second World War (5.5 per cent) ranking a distant second and third. Even after the wars of the twentieth century, for many Germans the Thirty Years’ War, in the scale of the suffering it had inflicted on the German nation, would be remembered as a catastrophe unique in history.1The cruel nature of the war, and the lasting bitterness it generated, were both rooted in religious conflict. For most historically literate Germans, the Thirty Years’ War was a civil war whose origins were to be found in the ‘great schism’ of the Reformation of 1517. This collapse of the universal Catholic Church led to the division of authority among the sovereign German polities of the Holy Roman Empire between rulers who had adopted Protestantism and those who continued to adhere to the Catholic Church (and the secular authority of the Habsburg emperor in Vienna). An uneasy ‘confessional peace’ had been negotiated in 1555 between the Catholic and Lutheran princes which stipulated that subjects were to follow the confession of their ruler (‘cuius regio, eius religio’). Though few expected the settlement to be permanent, the Peace of Augsburg was largely successful in keeping the peace in Central Europe for over half a century.
This peace finally broke down in 1618 in the form of a revolt of the aristocracy in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), who asserted what they believed was their legal right to choose a Protestant ruler from one of the smaller German states. Ferdinand II, the Habsburg emperor in Vienna who had assumed the throne in 1619, viewed this as a usurpation of
his authority and an impermissible Protestant infiltration of the Habsburg crown lands. With the aid of the Catholic League army under Maximilian I of Bavaria, and the financial support of Spain and the Pope, Ferdinand crushed the Bohemian rebellion, dispersed the forces of the Protestant Union that had been mobilized to support the rebels, and brutally restored his control over the renegade territory. The conflict expanded, however, as Ferdinand opportunistically used the suppression of the revolt to advance the larger cause of the Counter-Reformation and re-Catholicize the Protestant German states of the Holy Roman Empire by force. In the meantime, those powers that had supported the Protestant Union, France, the United Netherlands, Denmark and, eventually, Sweden, also came to see the conflict as an opportunity and determined to intervene in the war on the side of the German Protestant princes to acquire territory and accelerate the dissolution of Habsburg power in Europe. What had started as a localized rebellion, fuelled by religious animosities, in the Holy Roman Empire soon turned into a war for strategic dominance in Central Europe. It would drag on, waxing and waning in intensity, for another thirty years. Yet the treaty signed in 1648 that ended the war, the Peace of Westphalia, more or less confirmed the religious status quo and balance of power that had existed in 1618. How, then, to make sense of the horrific destruction the war had wreaked?
The sharp confessional divide between Protestant and Catholic Germany shaped all subsequent narratives of the war (as it shaped German politics and culture) well into the twentieth century. Germany’s Protestants recalled the war as one more chapter in Germany’s long struggle, beginning in 1517 (and culminating in German unification in 1871 under Prussian leadership), to liberate itself from foreign domination and territorial and political disunity. Catholic Germans, on the other hand, saw this Protestant narrative (primarily advanced by Prussian historians) as a calculated attempt to write them out of German history as less-than-‘authentic’ Germans whose ancestors had fought for a ‘confederal’ idea of Germany under an Imperial Catholic monarchy. Coming to grips with the
meaning of the war, passionately contested in German national memory, persisted as a collective spiritual burden and psychological trauma because it was seen as a civil war that pitted two very different visions of ‘Germany’ against each other.2
History has shown that the wounds left by civil wars take the longest to heal. This is why the Thirty Years’ War, for many Germans, was a past that would not pass (Americans, in particular, should be able to recognize this persistence of memory). ‘Germany’s Darkest Hour’ was the title that the cultural historian Karl Biedermann chose for his influential 1862 history of the war. In it Biedermann lamented the ‘unparalleled ruin of the entire German national body’ by the war and its devastating psychological legacy, which he diagnosed as ‘the weakening of the national spirit’. Gustav Freytag’s best-selling series of popular histories, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (‘Pictures from the German Past’), which appeared in numerous editions from the 1860s on, warned readers that they were taking up a story of ‘a sad, joyless time’. Freytag introduced his history of ‘the Great War’ by describing it as a ‘terrible natural disaster … which had destroyed the strength of the German people’.
The dark maelstrom of the Thirty Years’ War, a chaotic time when the natural order of society and authority was inverted, shadowed modern Germany with multiple narratives of victimization. Prevalent anxieties about German cultural backwardness, political weakness, religious fragmentation and economic progress measured against that of rival nations found vivid expression in the nineteenth-century histories of the war. In his commemorative history marking the bicentennial of the Peace of Westphalia in 1848, Karl Schmidt wrote that the war had undermined ‘all the foundations of civil, domestic, and moral life’. Writing in the early 1830s, the historian Friedrich von Raumer lingered on the image of a world turned upside down in which ‘the maxim became all crimes were virtuous, all virtue the work of the devil’. Some two decades later, Heinrich Hecht declared that ‘cunning and deceit became universal’, while Otto Krabbe mourned that ‘the word of God was exiled from the land’. A deluxe modern edition of
Freytag’s history, published in 1925 (two years after the ‘Great Disorder’ of Weimar Germany’s period of hyperinflation), was illustrated with a reproduction of a seventeenth-century series of satirical woodcuts entitled ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ that depicted, among other disquieting marvels, the master serving the servant, the blind leading the sighted, the lamb eating the wolf and the sheep shearing the shepherd.
Grimmelshausen’s novel, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, is, at its heart, a story of the pilgrim Simplicius’s journey through the inverted moral universe of the Thirty Years’ War. As a narrative of Simplicius’s progress across the battlefields of Germany, from innocence through temptation to redemption, Grimmelshausen’s novel resists easy categorization. Its title promises, at one level, a heroic picaresque romance in the metafictional mould of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (first published in 1605; Simplicissimus was written in 1668), but it also anticipates the Bildungsroman (‘novel of development’) tradition of German Romanticism, notably Wieland’s History of Agathon (1766–7) and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–6). The mystical passages of the novel’s concluding sections even suggest that Grimmelshausen, a convert to Catholicism, wanted his book, at least in part, to be read as a Christian allegory on the models of the Psychomachia (c.AD 400), Hartmann’s Der Arme Heinrich (c.1190) and Piers Plowman (c.1370–90).
But Simplicissimus perhaps holds the greatest meaning for the modern reader as a story of war in all its horror and absurdity, which is among the reasons why this new translation is so welcome. The catastrophic violence of total war, shot through with the red thread of ideological and genocidal terror that is woven into the history of the twentieth century, was prefigured in the wars of religion that racked Europe from 1517 to 1648. Like all wars fought to advance the ‘one true faith’, these were conflicts of surpassing cruelty. Grimmelshausen makes this cruelty the foundation of his story and the main force that shapes his protagonist because, as Montaigne declares in his own meditation on cruelty, ‘Virtue demands a harsh and thorny road.’ Montaigne, born a century before Grimmelshausen and whose entire adult life was lived
amid the upheaval of the French wars of religion, knew well how war put reason and virtue to flight:
[O]wing to the licence of our civil wars … there is nothing to be found in ancient histories more extreme than what we witness every day … I could hardly persuade myself, before I had actual evidence, that there exist any souls so unnatural as to commit murder for the mere pleasure of doing so; as to hack and chop off men’s limbs, as to sharpen their wits for the invention of unusual tortures and new forms of death … merely for the enjoyment of the pleasing spectacle afforded by the pitiful gestures and motions, the lamentable groans and cries, of a man dying in anguish.3In condemning the barbarism of his epoch’s holy wars, Montaigne undermined an essential myth of European civilization: the elevating conviction that the light of Christianity was guiding the world out of pagan darkness and brutality.
Yet, through the eyes of Grimmelshausen’s protagonist, we see war as it has always been and always will be: a destructive energy that is integral to all cultures and all civilizations.
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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
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lifetime.5Simplicissimus 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.8Most 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.13Simplicissimus 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.14While 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 historical 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. (...)
Kevin Cramer
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