Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

The German author Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621?-1676) is best known for his picaresque romance, "Simplicissimus, " the greatest 17th-century German prose work.

There is little accurate information about Jakob von Grimmelshausen. Some of his ancestors were Protestants and became wine growers, innkeepers, and bakers. Grimmelshausen was born in Gelnhausen, Hesse. The description of the early life of Simplicissimus in the Thirty Years War is to some degree autobiographical. Grimmelshausen spent some years as soldier's boy and wagoner in the imperial forces; he served as musketeer and later as secretary in the Schauenburg regiment. A year after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) he married Catharina Henninger, the 21-year-old daughter of a lieutenant in Schauenburg's army. Later, in the service of Lt. Col. Schauenburg, Grimmelshausen was a bailiff - an office which he held until ca. 1659. He then became an innkeeper. Finally, from 1667 he was a magistrate who collected taxes and administrated the law in Renchen.

It was not until Grimmelshausen was over 40 years old that he published Schwarz and Weiss oder der satirische Pilgram (1666), a book inspired by and modeled on H. M. Moscherosch's Wunderliche and wahrhaftige Geschichte Philanders von Sittewald (1642). About that time he also wrote fashionable love stories, but his world fame justly rests with Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (ca. 1668). This extraordinary literary success led him to write more Simplicissimus stories, which he considered parts of his great novel: Trutz-Simplex; oder ausführliche und wunderseltzame Lebensbeschreibung der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche (1670), Der seltzame Springinsfeld (1670), and Das wunderbarliche Vogel-Nest (1672). Bertolt Brecht's Mutter Courage bviously borrowed its title from the above, and Brecht may also, at least to some extent, have modeled Courage's character on Simplicissimus's cast-off mistress. Grimmelshausen, moreover, wrote gallant heroic romances such as Dietwald und Amelinde (1670). He published all his works anonymously; that is, he assigned them to fictitious writers whose names he liked to invent partly out of letters of his own name.

Simplicissimus is, after Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and before Goethe's Faust, one of the greatest original and artistic documents in German literature, in which the struggle between good and evil, purity of heart and lustful greed, is presented with vivid immediacy. This novel transcends the horizon of a merely bawdy, picaresque story; it is much more than an entertaining tale full of coarse descriptions of bestial adventures and human follies. It clearly leads the reader through godless unrest and sinfulness into an existence of inwardness and a recognition of the individual's responsibility toward society:being a creature of this earth man must recognize and accept his limitations; only through God's grace can man ever transcend himself.

When, in 1674, Louis XIV plundered Alsace and the neighboring regions, Renchen was endangered. Grimmelshausen did military service for the imperial army, but at the same time he remained a magistrate in his little town, where on Aug. 17, 1676, he died.

Further Reading

There is no biography of Grimmelshausen in English. A valuable background study is Roy Pascal, German Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 2: Renaissance, Reformation, Baroque (1968), in the Introductions to German Literature Series.

Grimmelshausen, Johann (Hans) Jakob Christoffel von (Gelnhausen, Hesse, 1621 or 1622-76, Renchen, Baden), came of a noble family which had sunk below its original station. As a boy he was carried off by Hessian and Croat soldiers in 1635, spending the next fourteen years first as a boy soldier, then as a musketeer, and finally, thanks to his quick and alert mind, as regimental clerk. His service with various regiments in the Thirty Years War (see Dreissigjähriger Krieg) was not confined to one side. In 1649 he married, and became steward at Gaißbach to his former commanding officer, Colonel von Schaffenburg. In this period of relaxation after the hard and restless years of soldiering, Grimmelshausen began to write. In 1662 he became castellan at Ullenburg Castle near Gaißbach, and is believed to have made good use of its substantial library. In 1656-8 and 1665-7 he also took an inn, ‘Zum Silbernen Sternen’, in Gaißbach, but gave this up to become magistrate of Renchen in Baden until renewed warfare prompted him, in 1676, to take up arms again; he died in the defence of his homeland.

Grimmelshausen's novels were written in the last ten years of his life. He began with translations before writing Der satirische Pilgram (1666), followed in the same year by Der keusche Joseph. His masterpiece, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch appeared in 1669, the first edition being dated 1668. It should be noted that the spelling of titles varies throughout, at times owing to the different spellings of editions published in Grimmelshausen's lifetime, or to uncertainties about their authenticity, or simply to modernizations in subsequent editions. The second edition, Neueingerichteter und vielverbesserter abentheurlicher Simplicissimus (1669), appeared virtually simultaneously with the Continuatio des abentheurlichen Simplicissimi oder Schluß desselben, a further volume resulting from the immediate success of the work, and bringing it to a total of 6 vols.

The next cycle of works, known as Simplicianische Schriften (which include the Continuatio), followed in swift succession: Trutz Simplex: Oder Ausführliche und wunderseltzame Lebensbeschreibung der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche (1670), the origin of Mother Courage in Brecht's play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, Der seltzame Springinsfeld (1670), Das wunderbarliche Vogel-Nest (1672), in which Springinsfeld again appears. The popular moralizing works Der erste Bärenhäuter and Die Gaukeltasche, and Die zweiköpfige Ratio Status appeared in 1670, as did also the almanac Ewig währender Calender containing autobiographical material. Another almanac, Wundergeschichten Kalender (1670-3), contains Der Teutsche Michel, Der Stolze Melcher, and Proximus und Lympida, Grimmelshausen's last novel.

A further title adds to the range of Grimmelshausen's immense output: the courtly novel Dietwalts und Amelinden anmuthige Lieb- und Leidsbeschreibung (Dietwalt und Amelinde) of 1670, which extends the scope of his literary models; none influenced him more than the picaresque Abenteuerroman and Schelmenroman. Simplicissimus nevertheless stands by itself as the most remarkable single literary work in German of the 17th c.

Grimmelshausen cautiously availed himself of pseudonyms which are anagrams of his name; they include German Schleifheim von Sulsfort, Samuel Griefnson von Hirschfeld, Philarchus Grosses von Trommenheim, and Michael Rechulin von Sehmsdorf. His authorship was not established until the 19th c.

The first editions of Grimmelshausen's collected works appeared from 1683 to 1713; the 19th-c. annotated edition by H. Kurz stands out (4 vols., 1863-4); Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben (13 vols.), ed. R. Tarot et al., appeared 1967-76.

Grimmelshausen, H. J. C. Von (Johann [Hans] Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen; 1622?–1676), German writer. Grimmelshausen was born in Gelnhausen in Hesse to a family that descended from the lower nobility but had long practiced bourgeois trades. This sometime soldier, secretary, steward, innkeeper, and village mayor belongs to the handful of seventeenth-century German writers of enduring fame whose work continues to influence German cultural production. His masterpiece, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669; The adventurous Simplicissimus), has been translated into many languages, and it, along with his lesser-known works, has influenced such German writers as the Grimm Brothers, Bertolt Brecht, and Günter Grass. As Grimmelshausen typically published under pseudonymous anagrams of his name, his identity as author of a vast prose corpus remained hidden until German philologists uncovered it in 1837/1838.

Scholars generally divide Grimmelshausen's works into four groups. Three satirical novels set in the Thirty Years' War, and the two parts of Der wunderbarliche Vogel-Nest (1672, 1675; The marvelous bird's nest) comprise the "Simplician works," a label Grimmelshausen himself provided. These satirical narrative works, loosely connected by the recurrence of characters and such motifs as a bird's nest that renders its bearer invisible, castigate the folly of the world. Two love stories, Dietwalts und Amelinden anmuthige Lieb- und Leids-Beschreibung (1670; Pleasant description of the love and sorrow of Dietwalt and Amelinde) and Des Durchleuchtigen Printzen Proximi, und seiner ohnvergleichlichen Lympidae Liebs-Geschicht-Erzählung (1672; The love story of the illustrious Prince Proximus and his incomparable Lympida), based on Christian legends, along with a rendering of the biblical Joseph story and a sequel, Musai (1666/1667, 1670), constitute a second group consisting of edifying works that present ideal types. Des Abenteuerlichen Simplicissimi Ewig-währender Calender (1670/71; The adventurous Simplicissimus' perpetual calendar) in the genre of the almanac and a symposium on husbanding wealth, Rathsstübel Plutonis (1672; Plutus' council chamber), number among the ten lesser works that form the third group. The fourth group consists of four tractates, including the anti-Machiavellian Simplicianischer Zweyköpffiger Ratio Status (1670; Simplician twoheaded reason of state) and Deß Weltberuffenen Simplicissimi Pralerey und Gepräng mit seinem Teutschen Michel (1673; The boasting and showing off of the world-famous Simplicissimus with his German Michael), a polemic on language that, while itself displaying nationalistic tendencies, mocks overzealous purists who would purge German of foreign words.

Grimmelshausen's graphic detailing of violence and the vicissitudes of war in Simplicissimus, Trutz Simplex: Oder ausführliche und wunderseltzame Lebensbeschreibung der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche (1670; translated as The runagate courage), and Der seltzame Springinsfeld (1670; The strange Hop-in-the-Field) offers a compelling look at a period when the economic and social fabric of the German territories was rent by armed conflict in the name of religion. The Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648, leaving the German empire divided into sixty-one imperial cities and around three hundred sovereign states, offered an autocratic solution to religious strife by ordaining that the religion of the ruler dictate the religion of the territory. Grimmelshausen, who had converted to Catholicism sometime before 1649, would devote his voluminous oeuvre to railing against the venality and horrors of this world, asserting ideals of good rulers and proper husbandry of personal and public wealth, and writing both exemplary and cautionary tales of redemptive import, and to literary experimentation with mending the broken world by incorporating and piecing together its diverse texts in his writing.

Grimmelshausen's linguistic virtuosity and searing critique of contemporary mores made him a popular author in his own time, as evidenced by the proliferation of imitations, most notably by Johann Beer (1655–1700), and by accounts of reading his books by members of both the nobility and the urban middle classes. Although the scant biographical information about Grimmelshausen provides no indication of extended education, his work evidences broad reading of (pseudo)scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary texts and displays encyclopedic knowledge. His oeuvre indicates, furthermore, engagement with the literary and cultural production and debates of his day as they had been recorded and transmitted across Europe.

As is typical of seventeenth-century prose, hybridity characterizes Grimmelshausen's writings. Indeed, he dabbled in and mixed genres. The three aforementioned wartime novels reveal in their pseudoautobiographical stance affinities to the Spanish picaresque novel; the rapscallion protagonists struggle to survive in a harsh world while sharing in its corruption. These same novels, however, draw on a variety of traditions, both fiction and nonfiction.

Grimmelshausen's oeuvre shares in the nascent cultural nationalism of the period when, for example, it ridicules those who ape French manners or facetiously notes that the entry of a foreign word into the German language always means trouble, as, for example, the militant word marschieren, 'to march'. Grimmelshausen thus remarks on the linguistic dominance of the French in the art of war, and war, he will remind his readers repeatedly, gives humankind license to do its worst.

Grimmelshausen's Nuremberg publisher, Wolf Eberhard Felsecker, advertised these works as delightful and entertaining but also affirmed their didacticism. In fact, the energy, unruliness, and transgressiveness of Grimmelshausen's narratives, derived from the literary arsenal of the Renaissance at its bawdiest—bodily excess, cross-dressing, pranks, and farce—exert a fascination over readers that can obscure the yearning in these texts for stable social arrangements, divine justice, and Christian redemption.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoph von. Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben. Edited by Rolf Tarot. 13 vols. Tübingen, 1967–1976.

——. The Life of Courage, the Notorious Thief, Whore, and Vagabond. Translated by Michael Mitchell. Sawtry, U.K., 2001. Translation of Trutz Simplex; Oder ausführliche Beschreibung der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche (1670).

——. Simplicissimus. Translated by Michael Mitchell. Sawtry, U.K., 1999. Translation of Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669).

——. Tearaway. Translated by Michael Mitchell. Sawtry, U.K., 2003. Translation of Der seltsame Springinsfeld (1670).

——. Werke. Edited by Dieter Breuer. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main, 1989–1997.

Secondary Sources

Breuer, Dieter. Grimmelshausen Handbuch. Munich, 1999.

Menhennet, Alan. Grimmelshausen the Storyteller: A Study of the "Simplician" Novels. Columbia, S.C., 1997.

Negus, Kenneth. Grimmelshausen. Twayne World Author Series, no. 291. New York, 1974.

Otto, Karl F., Jr., ed. A Companion to the Works of Grimmelshausen. Rochester, N.Y., 2003.

Tatlock, Lynne, ed. Seventeenth Century German Prose. The German Library, no. 7. New York, 1993.

Wagener, Hans. "Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen." In German Baroque Writers, 1661–1730, edited by James Hardin. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 168. Detroit, 1996.

—LYNNE TATLOCK

Grimmelshausen, painting (1641)

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621 – August 17, 1676) was a German author.

Grimmelshausen was born at Gelnhausen. At the age of ten he was kidnapped by Hessian soldiery, and in their midst tasted the adventures of military life in the Thirty Years' War.^{[citation needed]} At its close, Grimmelshausen entered the service of Franz Egon von Fürstenberg, bishop in Straßburg and in 1665 was made Schultheiss (magistrate) at Renchen in Baden.^{[citation needed]}

On obtaining this appointment, he devoted himself to literary pursuits, and in 1668 published Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, d.h. die Beschreibung des Lebens eines seltsamen Vaganten, genannt Melchior Sternfels von Fuchsheim, the greatest German novel of the 17th century. For this work he took as his model the picaresque romances of Spain, already to some extent known in Germany. Simplicissimus is in great measure its author's autobiography; he begins with the childhood of his hero, and describes the latter's adventures amid the stirring scenes of the Thirty Years' War. The rustic detail with which these pictures are presented makes the book one of the most valuable documents of its time. In the later parts Grimmelshausen, however, over-indulges in allegory, and finally loses himself in a Robinson Crusoe story.

The historian Robert Ergang, however, draws upon Gustav Könnecke's Quellen und Forschungen zur Lebensgeschichte Grimmelshausens to convey the assertion that "the events related in the novel Simplicissimus could hardly have been autobiographical since [Grimmelshausen] lived a peaceful existence in quiet towns and villages on the fringe of the Black Forest and that the material he incorporated in his work was not taken from actual experience, but was either borrowed from the past, collected from hearsay, or created by a vivid imagination."^[1]

Among his other works, the most important are the so-called Simplicianische Schriften:

• Die Ertzbetrügerin and Landstörtzerin Courasche (1669)
• Der seltsame Springinsfeld (1670)
• Das wunderbarliche Vogelnest (1672)

His satires, such as Der teutsche Michel (1670), and gallant novels, like Dietwald und Amelinde (1670) are of inferior interest. He died at Renchen on August 17, 1676, where a monument was erected to him in 1779.

Grimmelshausen's "Landstörtzerin Courasche" became an important inspiration for Bertolt Brecht´s play "Mutter Courage".

References

Editions of Simplicissimus and the Simpliclanische Schriften have been published by

• A. von Keller (1854)
• Hermann Kurz (1863, 1864)
• Julius Tittmann (1877)
• Felix Bobertag (1882)

A reprint of the first edition of the novel was edited by R. Kügel for the series of Weudrucke des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (1880). See the introductions to these editions; also

• F. Antoine, Etude sur le Simplicissimus de Grimmelshausen (1882)
• Erich Schmidt, Charakteristiken, vol. i. (1886).

Notes

1. ^ Robert Ergang, The Myth of the All-Destructive Fury of the Thirty Years’ War (Pocono Pines: The Craftsmen, 1956), 7.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

• Projekt Gutenberg-DE author page for Hans von Grimmelshausen
• Online Projekt Gutenberg-DE text of Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch
•  "Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Johann_Jacob_Christoffel_von_Grimmelshausen. 

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