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Rh translated early in the 17th century, the picaresque romance had found its way to Germany at a still earlier date; while H. M. Moscherosch (1601–1669) in his Gesichte Philanders von Sittewald (1642–1643) made the Sueños of Quevedo the basis for vivid pictures of the life of the time, interspersed with satire. The best German novel of the 17th century, Der abenteurliche Simplicissimus (1669) by H. J. Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (c. 1625–1676), is a picaresque novel, but one that owed little more than its form to the Spaniards. It is in great measure the autobiography of its author, and describes with uncompromising realism the social disintegration and the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War. But this remarkable book stands alone; Grimmelshausen’s other writings are but further contributions to the same theme, and he left no disciples worthy of carrying on the tradition he had created. Christian Weise (1642–1708), rector of the Zittau gymnasium, wrote a few satirical novels, but his realism and satire are too obviously didactic. He is seen to better advantage in his dramas, of which he wrote more than fifty for performance by his scholars.

The real successor of Simplicissimus in Germany was the English Robinson Crusoe, a novel which, on its appearance, was immediately translated into German (1721); it called forth an extraordinary flood of imitations, the so-called “Robinsonaden,” the vogue of which is even still kept alive by Der schweizerische Robinson of J. R. Wyss (1812 ff.). With the exception of J. G. Schnabel’s Insel Felsenburg (1731–1743), the literary value of these imitations is slight. They represented, however, a healthier and more natural development of fiction than the “galant” romances which were introduced in the train of the Renaissance movement, and cultivated by writers like Philipp von Zesen (1619–1689), Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick (1633–1714), A. H. Buchholtz (1607–1671), H. A. von Ziegler (1653–1697)—author of the famous Asiatische Banise (1688)—and D. C. von Lohenstein (1635–1683), whose Arminius (1689–1690) is on the whole the most promising novel of this group. The last mentioned writer and Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau (1617–1679) are sometimes regarded as the leaders of a “second Silesian school,” as opposed to the first school of Opitz. As the cultivators of the bombastic and Euphuistic style of the Italians Guarini and Marini, and of the Spanish writer Gongora, Lohenstein and Hofmannswaldau touched the lowest point to which German poetry ever sank.

But this aberration of taste was happily of short duration. Although socially the recovery of the German people from the desolation of the war was slow and laborious, the intellectual life of Germany was rapidly recuperating under the influence of foreign thinkers. Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), Christian von Wolff (1679–1754) and, above all, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716), the first of the great German philosophers, laid the foundations of that system of rationalism which dominated Germany for the better part of the 18th century; while German religious life was strengthened and enriched by a revival of pietism, under mystic thinkers like Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), a revival which also left its traces on religious poetry. Such hopeful signs of convalescence could not but be accompanied by an improvement in literary taste, and this is seen in the first instance in a substitution for the bombast and conceits of Lohehstein and Hofmannswaldau, of poetry on the stricter and soberer lines laid down by Boileau. The so-called “court poets” who opposed the second Silesian school, men like Rudolf von Canitz (1654–1699), Johann von Besser (1654–1729) and Benjamin Neukirch (1665–1729), were not inspired, but they had at least a certain “correctness” of taste; and from their midst sprang one gifted lyric genius, Johann Christian Günther (1695–1723), who wrote love-songs such as had not been heard in Germany since the days of the Minnesang. The methods of Hofmannswaldau had obtained considerable vogue in Hamburg, where the Italian opera kept the decadent Renaissance poetry alive. Here, however, the incisive wit of Christian Wernigke’s (1661–1725) epigrams was an effective antidote, and Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680–1747), a native of Hamburg, who had been deeply impressed by the appreciation of nature in English poetry, gave the artificialities of the Silesians their death-blow. But the influence of English literature was not merely destructive in these years; in the translations and imitations of the English Spectator, Tatler and Guardian—the so-called moralische Wochenschriften—it helped to regenerate literary taste, and to implant healthy moral ideas in the German middle classes.

The chief representative of the literary movement inaugurated by the Silesian “court poets” was Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), who between 1724 and 1740 succeeded in establishing in Leipzig, the metropolis of German taste, literary reforms modelled on the principles of French 17th-century classicism. He reformed and purified the stage according to French ideas, and provided it with a repertory of French origin; in his Kritische Dichtkunst (1730) he laid down the principles according to which good literature was to be produced and judged. As Opitz had reformed German letters with the help of Ronsard, so now Gottsched took his standpoint on the principles of Boileau as interpreted by contemporary French critics and theorists. With Gottsched, whose services in purifying the German language have stood the test of time better than his literary or dramatic reforms, the period of German Renaissance literature reaches its culmination and at the same time its close. The movement of the age advanced too rapidly for the Leipzig dictator; in 1740 a new epoch opened in German poetry and he was soon left hopelessly behind.

(a) From the Swiss Controversy to the “Sturm und Drang.”—Between Opitz and Gottsched German literature passed successively through the various stages characteristic of all Renaissance literatures—from that represented by Trissino and the French Pléiade, by way of the aberrations of Marini and the estilo culto, to the art poétique of Boileau. And precisely as in France, the next advance was achieved in a battle between the “ancients” and the “moderns,” the German “ancients” being represented by Gottsched, the “moderns” by the Swiss literary reformers, J. J. Bodmer (1698–1783) and J. J. Breitinger (1701–1776). The latter in his Kritische Dichtkunst (1739) maintained doctrines which were in opposition to Gottsched’s standpoint in his treatise of the same name, and Bodmer supported his friend’s initiative; a pamphlet war ensued between Leipzig and Zürich, with which in 1740–1741 the classical period of modern German literature may be said to open. The Swiss, men of little originality, found their theories in the writings of Italian and English critics; and from these they learned how literature might be freed from the fetters of pseudo-classicism. Basing their arguments on Milton’s Paradise Lost, which Bodmer had translated into prose (1732), they demanded room for the play of genius and inspiration; they insisted that the imagination should not be hindered in its attempts to rise above the world of reason and common sense. Their victory was due, not to the skill with which they presented their arguments, but to the fact that literature itself was in need of greater freedom. It was in fact a triumph, not of personalities or of leaders, but of ideas. The effects of the controversy are to be seen in a group of Leipzig writers of Gottsched’s own school, the Bremer Beiträger as they were called after their literary organ. These men—C. F. Gellert (1715–1769), the author of graceful fables and tales in verse, G. W. Rabener (1714–1771), the mild satirist of Saxon provinciality, the dramatist J. Elias Schlegel (1719–1749), who in more ways than one was Lessing’s forerunner, and a number of minor writers—did not set themselves up in active opposition to their master, but they tacitly adopted many of the principles which the Swiss had advocated. And in the Bremer Beiträge there appeared in 1748 the first instalment of an epic by F. G. Klopstock (1724–1803), Der Messias, which was the best illustration of that lawlessness against which Gottsched had protested. More effectively than Bodmer’s dry and uninspired theorizing, Klopstock’s Messias, and in a still higher degree, his Odes, laid the foundations of modern German literature in the 18th century.