Ah come forth to the cheerful light."
On the other hand, especially later during the Renaissance period when the wealth of the burghers excited the jealousy of the mighty country nobility, the houses of the wealthy burghers were often genuine palaces, with rich antique and Italian or French furnishings. Nürnberg, Augsburg, Strassburg, etc., were real treasure cities with their mediaeval architecture; so were Ulm, Frankfort, Mainz, Cologne, with their mansions filled with fine tapestry, rich furniture, colored carpets, precious art objects, painted windows, silver and gold trappings.
When the interregnum was over, with its political anarchy, with its plague (black death) that swept away hundreds of thousands, with its flagellants and other crazy penitents, the natural concomitants of the plague; when the gloomy religious fanaticism which vented its horrible "hatred of races and classes and masses" on heretics, Jews, and infidels in terrible Jew slaughters and witch burnings began to melt away under the radiant sun of the incipient Renaissance, there arose in western and southern Germany a wondrously rich and luxurious life among the city aristocracy. A caricature of chivalrous customs sprang up. It is characteristic that "a light miss" was the prize of a tournament in Magdeburg in 1229.
In the cities, life was more refined than on the estates of the nobles in the country. There were sleigh riding, dances, carnivals, and serenades before the windows of the fair ones. Even the churches, as stated before, offered for entertainment "mysteries and passion plays that verged on blasphemy." We hear of practical jokes which the ladies played with illustrious guests, like Emperor Sigismund and, later, Maximilian I., which genial lord the ladies took from his bed half naked, threw a wrapper over him, and danced with him through the streets of the city, which pleased the debonnaire emperor immensely.
Many German patrician women were already given over to the pleasures of society and became ladies of fashion rather than mothers, housekeepers, and helpers to their husbands. The nouveau-riche artisans soon began to imitate the luxuries of the patricians: we hear of gold bracelets, silk garments, gold girdles studded with diamonds; of shoes with silver buckles, garters embroidered with gold brocade. A chronicler relates the immense amount of wealth squandered at the wedding of a rich baker, Veit Gundlinger, in 1493. There were then consumed twenty oxen, thirty stags, forty-six calves, ninety-five swine, twenty-five peacocks (turkeys?), etc., etc.
Patricians were, however, more elegant: bridegroom and bride adorned with rings and bracelets of gold, walked to the Cathedral surrounded by bridesmaids, while fiddles, lutes, pipes, trumpets made music. At the dancing hall, however spacious, not more than five couples could dance at the same time on account of the ladies' long trains which, according to a preacher of the time, "served the devil as a dancing place." With torches the newly wed couple were at last led home to the bridal chamber, where the maidens undressed the bride, the cavaliers took off her shoes, and "when one cover covered the couple" as the technical term ran the companions discreetly retired.
But the unfree peasants, alas! continued to live in debasement; as also their wives and daughters. There is even documentary evidence from A. D. 1333 that women could be sold into slavery and at a very low price, moreover, "with all their descendants." The free and rich peasants, on the other hand, sometimes lived in an unbecoming state of luxury. We glean the most interesting types of peasant life from the poets who arose among the Bavarian-Austrian race. Neidhart von Reuenthal, who lived till about 1240 at the Bavarian and Austrian courts, though a noble himself, is a rugged, old German type who neutralizes the sentimental minnesong. He contrasts strikingly the bizarre life of the lower people with the unnaturalness of the "chivalric courtoisie." All is depicted in strong relief, though it appears to our taste extremely coarse. Yet if any poet ever understood the life and actions of the lower classes, it was Von Reuenthal. He describes South German peasant life as it is, their dances and carousals; he compares satirically the breaking of lances at tournaments, as practised by knights, with the peasants' festivals that are turned into bouts of gluttony and free fights. His types of rustic women, however, are "courteously" dressed, with wreaths in their prettily arranged hair, fashionable hand mirrors in their girdles; they appear at the village linden tree on a Sunday, courting and flirting with the rustics (Törper) who carry swords and spurs in truly knightly fashion. Nevertheless, the peasant girls prefer their liaisons with the genuine article, and the poet reveals no idyls, no abstinence, no innocent play, but downright immorality. As they could not have the knights for husbands, they chose them for lovers.
Frivolity is general also among the lower strata of society. Drastic pictures are drawn and overdrawn. There are dialogues in spring songs. Sometimes two maidens converse and open their hearts. Then mother and daughter commune; the mother desires to participate in the dance, the daughter tries in vain to dissuade her; or the daughter wishes to go and the mother dissuades; the daughter desires to join Neidhart, but the mother has a peasant ready for her to whom she is, however, indifferent; the mother keeps her clothing from her; the daughter takes it by force; the mother whips her daughter with a rake or a spindle; the other resists, and there are blows on both sides. In all these songs the girl is longing and passionate; the knight is a successful lover.
In the winter songs the case is reversed. Here the knight is sighing, complaining, rejected. The peasant girl for whom he pines makes him languish. The peasants prove superior to the knight, who avenges himself by mocking, satirizing, caricaturing the brutalities of the peasant dances, their fights, their gluttony, tawdry luxury of dress, and drunkenness.
However painful it may be to the historian of culture to record the mournful facts of degeneracy and demoralization of entire periods in the life of great and noble nations, yet he owes it to historical truth to conceal nothing. It is unfortunately true that entire classes of the German people, entire periods, entire regions, were sunk in the mire of immorality due to outer and inner conditions over which neither the nation nor its leaders had any control. Yet, such periods of moral depression are perhaps as necessary for a vigorous convalescence as the glorious periods of the moral purity, honor, and chastity of women.