As there can be no life without death, no joy without pain, no good without evil, as no religion was ever conceived in which the principle of God, of immortality, and of infinite goodness remained unassailed by the evil forces, be it devil, demon, Loki, or Ormuz, so the history of the German nation is filled with evil forces, against which generation after generation, so far as our records go, struggled, yet finally conquered per aspera ad astral.
Every German historian of culture, especially Scherr, who sought the truth and stated it fearlessly, has been attacked, reviled by captious critics, but strong is the truth and it will prevail! veritas prevalebit!
In this period of German decadence the moral sense seems indeed frequently to have entirely vanished. In a mutual confession by a peasant and his wife of their moral shortcomings, which are treated jestingly, the demoralization appears plainly, without any apparent conception of its impropriety. At a peasant wedding, we hear of brutish drinking and gluttony, coarse speeches and actions, consummation of marriage before church consecration, brutal and deadly fights.
The character of the peasantry of the time appears most distinctly from Werner's Meier Helmbrecht, a Bavarian village story, which depicts the ambitions, sorrows, and joys, and the dissatisfaction of that class. Young Helmbrecht, an ambitious peasant boy, who had been spoiled by mother and sister, proud as a peacock in knightly raiment, desires to play a role at the court. In spite of his father's warnings, he joins a robber knight. After one year of debauch and degradation, he returns home as a braggart, and the old and the new generation of peasants are contrasted. The father, who in his youth had known court life, when he went to the castle to sell his products, tells of knightly noble games, chaste dances with beautiful song and music, and the reading of the ancient heroic lays. The son reports heavy drinking, impure speeches, lies, quarrels, frauds. He replies to the exhortations of his father with vile threats. He induces his sister to follow him secretly, to be married to his comrade Lamsling; but the crisis comes at the wedding. The judge and sheriffs come and capture the robbers. Helmbrecht is blinded, driven away from home, and hanged by the peasants.
In the cities the state of affairs is even worse. Pandering is a common and thriving business, though the laws against it are of barbaric severity. In Brunswick, those convicted of the heinous crime of fostering prostitution were buried alive. But when did laws and police measures ever do away with crime when moral putrefaction once impregnated a social structure? The clerics and monks play a prominent role in the literature of the sexual excesses of that time, although, or perhaps because, celibacy as such has now become an enforced institution. It is true, however, that the literature of a decaying time, catering to corrupt tastes, furnishes to us sensational and extraordinary cases of impurity, while it fails to record the numerous instances of virtue, self-abnegation, and nobility.
An authority of first rank, Ænea Silvio Piccolomoni, later Pope Pius II., transmits to us a glaring picture, with little light and much lurid shadow, of Vienna as he saw it. We find there society of all ranks sadly demoralized. The burghers invite to their houses vile carousers and "light misses;" the common people are represented as steeped in immorality and drink. Wives are rarely satisfied with one husband, and the husbands knowing their shame are not specially pained by it. Gallant nobles call on married burgher women, their husbands offer wine and then leave them to themselves. Widows do not wait, even for decency's sake, the expiration of the year of mourning before they remarry; rich old men marry young girls, who then carry on adultery with their husband's valets as they did before marriage. It happens not infrequently that fathers or husbands who dare to disturb their daughters or wives in their iniquities with the nobles are killed or poisoned. Such is Æneas Silvio's account of Viennese society.
Similar stupefying pictures of social life in many other cities may be gleaned from chronicles, history, and sermons. Debauch is constant and appalling. In the thriving Hanseatic city of Lübeck we hear of illustrious ladies masked by thick veils holding bestial orgies with common sailors in the vilest drinking resorts. Again we read of the great severity of the penal laws, and again we note their practical inefficiency. The punishment for the crime of rape was death, usually by decapitation, but in Suabia and Hessen the criminal was buried alive or transfixed. The injured woman, however, to give legal force to her accusation was required to announce her disgrace immediately by loud screams and by the exhibition of dishevelled hair and torn garments. The statutes vary, but all are harsh. Adulterers belonging to the lower classes,--in the upper classes adultery was too common to be punished,--when seized in flagranti delicto, were liable to be decapitated or to be buried alive together. Incest was punishable by confiscation of property; bigamy, by death. The penalty for infanticide also was death, either by decapitation or by drowning; sometimes a snake, a cat, or a dog was put into the sack with the victim to render her punishment more terrible. Shrews and evil-tongued women were sometimes punished by being placed backward on asses and driven through the streets in disgrace.
Even the pleasures considered legitimate during the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, were decidedly equivocal or immoral. Public bathing which was so general that even in the country every well-arranged house had its own bathroom, might be considered rather a redeeming feature of the unclean life recorded. But excesses soon make it doubtful whether public baths should not be regarded as baudy houses of the worst kind. The city of Basle in the thirteenth century had not fewer than fifteen bathhouses. As in ancient Rome, the bathhouses were public places of amusement somewhat like the clubs of to-day. There men were shaved and had their toilette perfected and the ladies had their hair dressed. Massage was in fashion. Amusements of all kinds, gambling, drinking, flirting, and love intrigues made public bathing a rather costly pastime. At most places there was common bathing of men and women. The most famous water resorts were the Wildbad in the Black Forest, Baden in the Breisgau, and Baden in Aargau. There is gathered all the wealth of the surrounding country. Princes and knights, highborn ladies, rich merchants, prelates, and abbesses bathed, jested, and led a gay life.
We have an intensely interesting account from the pen of the scholarly Francis Poggio of Florence (1380-1459) of the bathing customs of Baden. He had accompanied Pope John XXIII. to the Council of Constance, and had then gone to Baden to cure the "chiragra" from which he suffered. From a Latin letter written to his friend Niccolo Niccoli, in the summer of 1417, and translated by Gustav Freytag, in his famous Pictures from German Life, we glean the following facts:
"Baden itself affords for the mind little or no diversion; but has in all other respects such extraordinary charm that Venus seems to have come from Cyprus, for whatever the world contains of beauty has assembled here, and so much do they uphold the customs of this goddess, so fully do you find again her manners and dissoluteness, that, though they may not have read the speech of Heliogabalus, they appear to be perfectly instructed by Nature herself....