A history of German literature

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

In writing this volume, it was my task to compress more than a thousand years of literary history into a volume of about four hundred pages. The book was not to be a collection of sheaves garnered here and there in favorite fields, but a real history, dealing with the whole subject coherently and with due regard to the relative importance of periods, writers, and writings. As it was evident that I should be obliged to omit freely and boldly, I decided, first of all, to omit the scholars, philosophers, and men of science; that is, to confine myself pretty closely to " literature " in the restricted English sense of the word. The broader conception of literature is no doubt the more philosophic, but it is less convenient for a writer who must economize space at every step. The German genius has done much of its best work in scholarship, philosophy, and science, but I was not writing a history of the German genius.

I had, then, to apportion my space among the centuries, and to settle many a perplexing question of inclusion or exclusion. Most difficult of all was to decide, in

VI

PREFACE connection with each new topic taken up, what was on the whole best worth saying when so Httle could be said of all that one would have liked to say. As these are matters about which no two experts would agree, it will not be strange if I am taxed with sins of omission and disproportion. I hope, however, that such shortcomings will not seem very grave to anyone who has ever tried to write a brief account of any large and complicated matter. There are, in the main, two ways of condensing history. One is to reduce the manifoldness of the facts to a more or less abstract formula, and dwell at length on the " interpretation," treating the facts briefly as so much illustrative material. The other way is to select from the manifold concrete facts those which seem to be most representative and most pregnant, and to dwell on those at some length, leaving the minor phenomena unnoticed. In general, I have preferred the latter method.

Of the numberless writers whom I have drawn on for help, I owe most, probably, to the various editors of the great modern collections which are enumerated in the bibliographic note at the end of the volume. Of the many historians whose works have been accessible, I owe most to Goedeke, Scherer, Koenig, Francke, Meyer (for the nineteenth century), Hettner (for the eighteenth), and Vogt and Koch. The work of Vogt, in particular, has been laid under contribution more often than the foot-

PREFACE vii

notes — intentionally sparse — would indicate. While I have tried to deal independently with my subject, so far as critical appreciation is concerned, I am under great obligation to these predecessors for data of fact, points of view, and helpful hints of one kind and another.

Finally, I desire to thank my Columbia colleagues, Prof. A. F. J. Remy and Mrs. Juliana Haskell, Ph.D., for assistance rendered in the way of proof-reading.

Calvin Thomas.

New York, November, 1908.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — ^Thb Legacy of Paganism i

II. — Religious Poetry of the Ninth Century . . i6

Chapter I

The history of German literature, as a connected account of writings that have literary interest and are extant in the German language, begins about the year 800. It is true that for many centuries prior to that time Germans had been producing poetry in abundance, but it was not written down, and only one late fragment of it has been preserved. A system of alphabetic writing, the so-called runes, may possibly have been in use among the High Germans, but if so the letters were always cut on wood, metal, or stone, and were not employed for what would now be called literary purposes. It was not until Christianity came in, bringing the Latin alphabet and a class of men acquainted with the use of pen, ink, and parchment, that anything of literary value was written down in German.

When Karl the Great died, in the year 814, that part of his vast dominion which was to be known to its inhabitants as Deutschland was all nominally Christian, albeit less than sixty years had passed since the death of Boniface, the great English missionary who had found much of the German territory virtually untouched by the religion of the cross. Let it be remembered, however, that what the Germans had so quickly accepted under the name of Christianity was neither the ethics of Jesus, nor the theology of St. Paul, nor any species of asceticism. They continued to be, as they had been, a people for whom fighting was the most important of occupations, vengeance a matter of course, and fidelity to a chief the most exigent of social duties. There had been nothing like a right-about-face in their ideals or their mode of living. What they had accepted was, in its most impor; tant aspect, a church organisation which looked to Rome as its centre of authority and was felt to be closely connected with the imperialistic pretensions of the Prankish monarchy. The Saxons had lately been brought into the church by wholesale at the point of the sword.

In the domain of religion proper, as distinguished from the machinery of the church, a process of adaptation had been going on. The old gods had not been forgotten, nor did the clergy teach that they were unrealities. As devils, witches, Unholde, they continued for a while to be as real, perhaps, as they had ever been. Meanwhile there was much in the new system which a German could use without any bouleversation of his ideas. The magic of the church was not so very unlike that to which he had been accustomed, and its doctrine of a life after death was in the line of his own beliefs. So he readily learned to swear by Christ and the saints, instead of Donar and Ziu, and to substitute holy for interdicted names in his incantations. Por sortie time the lines were not very distinctly drawn, and there was much friendly comity between the old order and the new. A Christian church might be erected on the spot where a pagan altar had stood, and the old rites continued, with some modification, as a part of the new worship. Pagan festivals were transferred to the Christian calendar, and pagan offerings were converted to the use of the church.

Who were the old gods, and what was the nature of their cult?

This question is pertinent to a history of German literature, because among the Germans poetry was at first in large measure an expression of the religious instinct. One may say that their gods, including the numerous minor divinities with which their imagination peopled earth and sky, forest and stream, mountain and cave, were their earliest poetic creations. This being so, it is regrettable that we know so very little of their religion as it had shaped itself just before their acceptance of Christianity. Hardly a glint of light is thrown on the subject by the Old German documents. The priest or monk, who alone could write, was no anthropologist. For him the old gods were anathema;' to write out a calm description of their damnable rites was not his affair. So we are left to rely mainly on the Edda and Tacitus, with here and there a hint from other sources. But Norse mythology, as known to us, is the result of a long evolution in which, for many centuries, the continental Germans had had no part. We cannot identify Donar with Thor, for example, except for the purposes of etymology. Far back in time they had been of course identical; but what D'onar had come to be in the eighth century a.d. we simply do not know. We only know about Thor. It is a persistent error inherited from the eighteenth century to suppose that the rehgion of the Norsemen, as known to us, was at one time the religion of the continental Germans. And as for the priceless little book of Tacitus, the Germania, let it be remembered that seven centuries of upheaval and readjustment had intervened since it was written, in the year

In general the great gods are of small importance in literary history. With the advent of Christianity they drop quickly out of sight, and no poetry of the ensuing centuries is vitally connected with them. It is quite different, however, with regard to the lower mythology of dwarfs, elves, kobolds, wood-sprites, nixies, and so forth, with the concoffljtant ideas of magic, monsters, metamorphoses, quasi-^uman souls inhabiting the bodies of beasts, and all that. Such conceptions, rooted in a deep subsoil of ancient superstition, have proved wonderfully tenacious of life and have furnished an element of mysterious fascination to countless folk-songs, ballads, and Mdrchen. In all ages, German poetry in some of its most appealing aspects has drawn nourishment from a supernaturalism that is in part older than Christianity. The progress of science in the fields of anthropology and mythology is making it increasingly evident that these products of primitive superstition are everywhere much the same, and that everywhere the higher mythology is to a large extent a development from them. It is probable, if not yet proved, that imaginative men have made the gods, very much as gardeners have made the jacqueminot. And this supernaturalism is indestructible. It changes form with the lapse of ages, but it does not die or lose its zest for the imagination. Hence it is that such a play as Hauptmann's Sunken Bell, with its elfish heroine, its faunish Waldschrat, and its croaking Nickelmann, could leap into instant favour without much need of commentary. Every German whose childhood had fed on the folk-lore of the fatherland understood him readily. When Heine, wishing to explain the Germans to Frenchmen, wrote first a book on religion and philosophy, and then a book on elemental spirits and demons, he was quite on the right track.

An Old German charm presents Wodan, whose name is preserved in our Wednesday, as wiser than the other gods in the ways of magic healing. As he is riding through the woods with certain other divinities, a horse's leg is sprained. The others " bespeak " the injury in vain, but Wodan, who " well knew how," effects a cure. Another alliterative charm tells of Idises, female divinities similar to the Norse valkyries, who take part variously in a battle : some fastening fetters, others breaking bonds, others fighting the foe. The Lay of Hildebrand, sole surviving relic of heroic song, appeals to a " mighty god," perhaps Ziu, whose name we have in our Tuesday, as witness to the truth of an assertion.

This is all there is to be learned from Old German sources about the gods. How they were worshipped, how they looked in the mind's eye of their worshippers, what ethical qualities were ascribed to them, we do not definitely know. If we go back to Tacitus, however, we do get an interesting glimpse of the worship of Nerthus, a Low German goddess of fecundity. At the appointed time her veiled image was placed in a cart and drawn about the country by cows. At the end of this solemn procession, which was doubtless accompanied by liturgical rites — one may imagine hymns of thanksgiving for past favours, and prayers and offerings for the further bestowal of increase, — the symbol of the goddess was returned to her sacred island grove. Other sacred groves, in which a tribal divinity was worshipped, are known to have existed in different parts of Germany. Thus we hear of one which was held in such awe by the Semnones, a branch of the Suevi, that it might not be approached save with fettered limbs. The cult of the god — probably Ziu — included occasional human sacrifices.

From what is known of other peoples, it is fairly certain that these religious rites consisted partly in choral processions, with measured chant and rhythmic movements of the body. Such was the use, probably, of those " ancient songs in which," says Tacitus, " they celebrate the earth-born god Tuisto and his son Mannus as the original ancestors of their nation." We have to think, evidently, of solemn hymns, with more or less of epic recital, involving a tribal myth. Tacitus observes that these songs were the only kind of traditionary annals that the Germans possessed. He also speaks of their singing heroic lays when about to go into battle. From other sources we know that the funeral of a chief was likewise an occasion for commemorative song. Tacitus does not mention the singing of songs for entertainment, but the custom may well have existed in his time, as it certainly did later.

The existence of hymns and heroic lays, thus clearly attested for the end of the first century a.d., presupposes a class of men who may best be called by the Greek name poet, or maker, — the predecessors of the Old English scop and the Scandinavian skald. What the art of these men may have been like, in the centuries that precede the first records, can only be divined in a general way. Very certainly it was based on alliteration, as it is somewhat inaptly called. The verse, or " turn," consisted of two parts bound together by a scheme which required — to take the normal case — ^that two strongly stressed syllables in the first part should begin with the same sound; and that this sound should then be repeated at the beginning of a stressed syllable not too far along in the second part ; thus :

Grimly they gird on their gear for the fray.

The alliteration always fell on important words such as could fitly bear the stress. Any vowel might alliterate with any other vowel, and the number and arrangement of the unstressed syllables and non-alliterating elements might vary. Indeed, the number of alliterations was not rigidly fixed ; while the norm was three, as in the example given, there was often but one in each half verse, and there might be two. If it be a sound theory which traces the origin of versification back to primitive choral movements, we may suppose that, in the early stages of Germanic alliteration, the utterance of the stressed syllables was attended by some sort of rude metronomic action, which in time developed into a musical accompaniment.

But this is speculation. What is certain, and at the same time important, is that the Germans, a thousand years before they commenced making Hterary records, had developed an indigenous poetic art which served the purposes of religious worship and of ethnic annals, very likely also the purpose of social entertainment. There is a lost and irrecoverable German literature, the extent and value of which can never be known. We have no reason to believe that a German Homer may have missed immortality through lack of a scribe, but there may well have been poets whose fame flew far and wide and endured for generations. There may have been hymns comparable to those of the Veda and the Old Testament. There may have been heroic poetry superior to any that was afterward produced in Christian times. We do not know ; but the attentive reader of the Edda and Beowulf will be inclined to imagine rather large possibilities for this extinct German poetry.

Especially rich in poetic creation, or in the mythopoeic beginnings which formed the raw material of poetry, was the epoch of the great migrations. A large body of heroic saga, on which the Germanic imagination was destined to feed for centuries to come, originated in the fifth and sixth centuries. As these tales, more or less modified and incrusted with new matter, will meet us in the poetry of the Middle Ages, it will be in order to glance at them here. And first let it be remarked, in a general way, that they are stories of persons. The great fighter is the one interesting object. The mighty events that destroyed the Roman Empire and completely changed the course of European civilisation are reduced in Germanic saga to a mass of personal narratives, in which history is strangely perverted and mixed up with fabulous invention. Patriotism, tribal instinct, religion, play no part of any importance. There is no feeling for the pathos of national calamity, or for the larger import of national triumph, save as these may be reflected in the fate of persons.

Thus, for example, the terrific collisions of Goth and Hun in the East left no trace in saga-lore, nor is the important relation of Goth and Roman anywise reflected in it. For some three hundred years, counting from the middle of the fourth century, the Goths played the leading part among the Germanic tribes. They were the first to come under the influence of Christianity and of Roman civilisation. During the fourth century a large community of them was converted to Arianism by their gifted bishop Wulfila, or Ulphilas, whose partly preserved translation of the Bible into Gothic is the earliest literary record in any Germanic language. From this time on the Goths were constantly in contact with the superior civilisation of southern Europe. Driven from their home on the lower Danube, they surged westward in successive waves of migration, overthrew the Roman Empire and established powerful kingdoms in Italy, Gaul, and Spain. But of all this, in its momentous political aspect, the sagas have nothing to say. We do hear, indeed, of Odoacer, and of his adversary, Theoderic, who, under the name of Dietrich of Bern, towers above all the other saga-heroes. But the relations of the two men are curiously perverted. The real Theoderic waged war against Odoacer in Italy, finally prevailed, and then treacherously lo GERMAN LITERATURE

murdered his antagonist ; but the saga, seizing, it would seem, upon some temporary reverse, makes Dietrich flee eastward from the wrath of Otacher (sometimes it is Ermanric from whom he flees), and spend thirty years in exile at the court of Etzel (Attila), who in reality died long before Theoderic became king. There he appears, at the end of the Nibelung Lay, as the mightiest man of all the fierce and doughty rout.

In barest outline the genesis of the complicated Nibelung saga was somewhat as follows.^ Long prior to the fifth century a.d. there arose gradually, in Westfalia and the neighbouring Denmark, a saga of greed, murder, and vengeance among kinsmen by marriage. The story told of two Low German kings, Siegfried and Hagen. Siegfried is married to Hagen's sister, whose name is Grimhild or Gudrun. Hagen covets a treasure possessed by his brother-in-law, and murders him to get it. The widow marries a king of the Hvinen living at Soest (Hiinaland is an old name of Westfalia). This king, whose original name is lost, but who was conceived as a monster of cupidity, cruelty, and treachery, covets the treasure, invites Hagen to his court, and murders him. Grimhild is on the side of her blood-kin, and when Hagen is killed she takes horrible vengeance on her husband. But neither Hagen nor Siegfried is a natural human being. The great antiquity of the story appears in the fact

' In the main I here accept the conclusions of R. C. Boer in his exhaustive Untersuchungen uber den Ursprung und die Entwickelung der Nihelungensage, Halle, 1907. I am also much indebted, here as in other places, to the admirable work of Friedrich Vogt in his part of Vogt and Koch's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 2d ed., 1904.

THE LEGACY OF PAGANISM ii

that it is mixed up with ideas of magic, monsters, talking animals, and other elements of primitive superstition.^ Hagen is the son of an elf. Siegfried is of divine lineage, and as a boy receives instruction from a wonderworking smith, who gives him magic weapons. With these he kills a dragon and thereby captures a treasure which the dragon has taken by force from the black dwarfs. These gold-gathering dwarfs, who live underground, are the original Nibelungs or Darklanders. Possessed of the treasure, on which a curse now rests, Siegfried makes his way, by an act of supreme daring, to a bewitched maid (sleeping beauty), whom the Scandinavians came to think of as a valkyr. He wakens Brynhild from her trance, loves her, leaves her, and marries Grimhild.

In the fourth century the Burgundians, who had been living on the banks of the Vistula, were driven westward and found a new home on the Middle Rhine. This country, that about Worms, was reputed to be very rich, and gold in small quantities was actually found in the bed of the stream. The idea became current that the Burgundian kings possessed a wonderful Rhinegold. In 437 the Burgundians were attacked by the Huns and almost annihilated. Twenty thousand of them, including their

> It is still a favourite theory of German writers, following Lachmann, that the Siegfried story was originally a nature-myth, and the hero himself either a dawn-god or a spring-god. In that case his enemies, the original Nibelungs or Darklanders, would be the demons of the night or of the winter clouds. The reader must take this speculation for what he thinks it worth. Personally, I incUne more and more to the opinion that celestial allegory had little to do with the origin of the Aryan hero-tales.

king Gundicarius, says the Latin chronicler, were slain. Saga said that the Huns coveted the Burgundian treasure. In 452 Attila, the Scourge of God, was found dead in his bed, and the suspicion arose that he had been murdered by his wife, a German princess named Ildico (diminutive of Hilde). What now happened was that the old Low German saga of Hagen and Siegfried and Grimhild, and the King of the Hiinen at Soest, was attached to and mixed up with the historical saga of the Burgundian defeat and the death of Attila, whose wife had killed him to avenge the death of her Burgundian kin. The King of the Hunen at Soest became the King of the Huns at Ofen. Hagen was transferred to Worms, but on account of Gunter's kingship could not remain an independent prince. He became the vassal of the Burgundian princes, but retained his essential primacy over them in the story. His sister Grimhild became his liege mistress Kriemhild, the Burgundian princess who had married Attila. But as the story developed on German soil the characters of Kriemhild and Attila underwent a great change. Attila was no longer thought of as a depraved monster, but as a benevolent and high-minded monarch, in no way privy to his wife's vengeful plans. And Kriemhild, originally the avenger of her blood-kin upon her husband, became, perhaps in consequence of changing conceptions of wifely duty, the avenger of her murdered husband upon her blood-kin. In the Scandinavian versions of the story, Atli and Grimhild, or Gudrun, as she is there called, retain more of their original characteristics.

These are but examples of a saga-lore that sprang up abundantly on German soil during the migration period.

A large part of it has perished utterly. Some of it got recorded, imperfectly and with complete loss of its poetic form, in Latin. Some of it was carried to the far North, where it was worked over into poems that have reached us in other languages than German. In Germany it continued, after as before the introduction of the Latin alphabet and the art of writing, to be propagated orally among the unlettered folk. The usual form was that of alliterative verse, which was used also for incantations, riddles, and wise sayings. The existence of sagas in prose, or in a mixture of prose and verse, is quite thinkable, but cannot be proved from German /^ sources.

What has survived of pagan poetry in the German language consists of two charms — the so-called Merseburg Incantations — and the fragmentary Lay of Hilde- BRAND. This last comprises sixty-nine verses which were written down early in the ninth century on the first and last pages of a Latin manuscript now preserved at Cassel. The language shows a mixture of High and Low German, there are breaks in the sense, and the versification is defective. The subject-matter is an episode of the Dietrich-saga. Hildebrand, Dietrich's doughty old retainer, being on the way home from his long exile at the Hunnish court, is met by his son Hadubrand, whom he has not seen for thirty years. The two leaders hold parley between their armies. Hildebrand quickly comprehends the situation, declares himself and tries to make peace; but the younger man is sceptical and replies with taunts. Hildebrand sees that he must fight. " Woe now," he exclaims,

Woe now, Wielder above, woe-weird comelhl

I have wandered summers and winters sixty abroad.

And ever have found me where fighters foregathered,

Yet before no burg did bane befall.

And now my son with sword shall smite me.

With battle-axe brain me, or a bane must I be to him.

Now easily mayst thou, if thy arm suffice.

Get thee the gear of such a graybeard,

Rob him of booty, if thou hast a right to it.

He were the meanest of the men of Eastland

Who should refuse thee the fight thou cravest,

The close encounter. Let combat decide

Who fares from here with his foeman's armour

And boasts of the byrnies both hereafter.

With the beginning of the duel the fragment breaks off. One may surmise that the end would have been the death of the headstrong son, as in the parallel story of Sohrab and Rustem. In a later version, however, the far-famed encounter is made to end happily, the son becoming convinced by the terrific blows dealt him that his redoubtable father has indeed returned.

With all its imperfections in the form that has reached us, this little remnant of the old pagan art is extremely interesting. While the most of the lines now sound rather tame, there are some that carry the day by their rugged force and laconic directness. The salient feature of the technic, apart from the alliterative form, is what is usually called " parallelism," though it is not exactly the familiar parallelism of Hebrew poetry. It consists in repeating the essential content of a clause, but with a different turn of phrase; for example, "looked to their armour " is varied as " got ready their war-gear " ; " the fight thou cravest " as " the close encounter." The effect of these constantly recurring appositions is to throw a strong emphasis on the elements thus repeated and to make the v^rse fluctuate instead of flowing steadily.

The incantations above mentioned hardly belong to literature in the restricted sense of the word, but they are interesting because, while preserved in a manuscript of the tenth century, they are pure products of paganism and afiford proof positive of the antiquity of the type to which they belong. The type, which is found also in English, Danish, and other languages, consists of two parts : first, a short narrative, in which it is told how the spell was first employed by some divine being ; secondly, the potent formula itself. The first of the Merseburg charms is a cure for the sprained leg of a horse, the second a charm to effect the liberation of a fettered prisoner. The first may be roughly Englished thus:

Phol and Wodan fared through the woods,

Of Phol's horse the foot was sprained.

Sinthgunt bespake it and Sunna, her sister;

Frija bespake it and Volla, her sister.

Then Wodan bespake it, who well knew how: Bone to bone, blood to blood, Part to part, as if pasted together.

Chapter II Religious Poetry Of The Ninth Century

Quite apart from his military achievements, the statesmanship of Karl the Great was marked by a truly imperial breadth of view and energy of initiative. For ages after his time there is no German ruler who can compare with him in far-sighted intelligence. Soon after his accession to the throne, in 768, he entered upon an educational reform the primary object of which was to banish gross ignorance from the priesthood. Candidates for the clerical life were required to pass an examination of specified scope, and schools in which the necessary knowledge could be obtained were established. It was provided also that these schools might be attended by boys who were not intending to be churchmen. The king's personal example supported his official measures. He called about him eminent scholars, such as Alcuin of York, and Paulus Diacdnus of Pisa, established a school at his court and took part in it himself. There was something like a royal academy, the members of which devoted themselves assiduously to reading, discussing, and imitating the Roman poets.

The influence of the king gave to scholarship an impulse that was felt throughout his dominions. Important centres of monastic learning soon developed at several different points in Germany, and a new race of scholars took to glossing Latin texts in the dialect of the locality, or rendering into it the creed, catechism, paternoster, monastic rule, baptismal vow, or such other documents as the Church had use for. And thus German literature begins. The glosses, which are very abundant and date farthest back, exhibit the first groping attempts at lexicography. The other earliest records, some of them referable to the last quarter of the eighth century, and representing the beginnings of German prose, have in general only a linguistic interest. Their total bulk is small, and they are largely fragmentary. Aside from specimens, in different dialects, of the species just enumerated, we have some parts of sermons, a version of Matthew's gospel, and a version of the De Fide Catholica by Bishop Isidore of Seville. The last is a work of considerable literary skill — the most important piece of German prose that has come down to us from the time of Karl the Great.