Women of the Teutonic Nations

by Hermann Schoenfeld

The most loathsome poem, however, in the collection so foul with obscene pictures, is the one in which a mother teaches her daughter in undisguised terms the arduous, though lucrative, art of prostitution. It is scarcely possible that any other literature should contain a poem so degraded.

Again, a poem by Hans Rosenpliit is given entirely in the manner of Boccaccio. The servant of a rich man seeks the favor of his mistress and finds acceptance. She takes him to her chamber and hides him under the bed. When the husband retires to his couch, she tells him that the servant sought her love and that she had invited him for the night to the garden to have him chastised. She advises her husband to put on her clothing, to go into the garden, and to chastise the scoundrel with a heavy club. The husband does as he is bidden. Meanwhile, the wife bestows her favors upon the man-servant. Thereupon she gives him a stick with which he belabors his master unmercifully, saying he only wished to test the fidelity of his mistress toward his beloved master. The latter barely escapes from the heavy volley of blows, tells his wife the adventure, and finally thanks God for such a faithful servant. The poet, Hans Rosenpliit, composed many carnival plays which are filled with obscene jests, and deal mostly with the lowest peasant elements.

In the same collection, Klara Hatzlerin presents rather barren encomiums on Saint Mary, all of which were composed by Muscatblüt. Feebly, the Maria-cult arose once more with a narrow and superstitious treatment, painfully different from the beautiful conceptions of the older periods. Here everything is Philistine. The statutes of the Rosenkrantz order and the brotherhood of Saint Ursula decree eleven thousand prayers in honor of the eleven thousand virgins who are still adored as saints, with their seat at Cologne. Spiritual songs exalt Saint Mary as equal in strength to Christ, nay, in the estimation of the lowly masses, superior to Him. There is a bombastic praise of all her material and spiritual perfections. The songs are scholastic in their exaggeration, artificial in form, and barbarous in language; in pompous terms church controversies are treated there: the Trinity, original sin, the last judgment, and other orthodox and mystic broodings, similes, allegories, etc. A type of the treatment is the description Muscatblüt gives of the Blessed Virgin when he calls her "a chest in which God himself dwells, the rod of Aaron, a well illuminated torch, a chaste Arc of Noah, a deep pond, a cask of myrrh, a reed of grace in God's field, her body a coffin or a castle the decadence is marked everywhere. We look back with longing eyes to the pure, the beautiful, the lofty, all-merciful Mother of God of the rich, uncontaminated past, the Holy Virgin who has enriched, ennobled, purified the German nation, German literature, German music, and, above all, the German arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture."

Next to those bombastic, pseudo-pious songs we find hideous drinking songs, poems of gluttony and licentiousness, all of which are, nevertheless, highly valuable to the historian of culture. There are authentic documents revealing the tremendous downfall of national ideals from the pedestal of the glorious past, and the immense recuperative power of the nation in struggling upward again after two centuries and a half to the Second Period of Bloom, crowned by Lessing, Schiller, Goethe!

A poem in the compilation of Klara Hatzlerin, On the Nature of the Child, is intensely interesting, first, as regards the popular physiological knowledge of the time on the mystery of gestation; secondly, as a cultural document on the character of Klara, the nun's, occupation during her leisure hours. She appeals first to her patroness: "Virgin Mary, I call to thee at all times for thy grace. May thy help point out to me thy way that I may walk on thy path, and may also begin anon to consider how the nature of man's strength mingles in the female womb," etc., and then by an extraordinary medley of truth, error, and fiction she describes the entire process of gestation.

There are stories of shrews and of scolding, nagging women, concluding with: "Whoever has a nagging wife, shall rid himself of her as soon as possible, buy a good rope, hang her on a bough, take three big wolves and hang them beside her. Whoever saw gallows with worse skins? There the song has an end, God evil women to Hades send!"

We cheerfully leave the foul atmosphere of a poetry which could not have sunk lower in form and spirit, and which, nevertheless, could not have existed but for its direct connection with the social sphere of which it treated and in which its roots were imbedded. And indeed we know also from incontestable historical evidence that while the privileges of the other three estates grew, a heavy slavery lay upon the fourth, the peasantry. When oppression lays its leaden hand too heavily upon a race or a class, it crushes out, gradually but surely, the divine instincts of the human soul. Munster, in his Kosmography, which appeared in 1545, speaks of "the low and wretched life of the peasants." Their houses are miserable hovels of dirt and wood, placed directly on the ground, and thatched with straw. Their food is black rye bread, oats or boiled lentils and peas. A coarse upper coat, two wooden shoes, and a cheap felt hat are their only clothing. These people have never peace or rest. Their masters they must serve through the whole year; there is nothing that the poor people must not do. The picture is completed by another author, who says: "The toilsome people of the peasantry are everybody's footrag, heavily laden and burdened with tasks of slavery, hard labor, interests, taxes, duties, etc." We will not unroll here the endless lists of personal and property dues which were imposed upon the unfortunate peasants of that period. The saddest aspect of that physical oppression is that the unfortunate people were not even conscious of their frightful moral subjugation. We have already mentioned that even the marriage of the serfs of both sexes depended upon the consent of their masters, the landed proprietor or, in most cases, of his steward, that the marital tax (maritagium) had to be paid for this consent, and that the body of the unfortunate peasant girl belonged to her oppressor, at least for the first night (jus primce noctis). The existence of this infamous right has been contested by German historians, but as proofs Scherr adduces two authentic documents of the years 1538 and 1543. All these facts are sufficient proof that the above literary remnants do not greatly exaggerate the moral and intellectual condition of that class, which is the basic element of every civilization.

We now proceed with more satisfaction to an estimate of the bourgeoisie. They became more and more cultured, and took upon themselves the task of raising the standards of education and morality, of upholding the sacred flame of German spiritual and intellectual life. They began to spin again the thread of poetry that had broken in the brutalized hands of a degraded nobility. This thread was now the "Mastersong." Mastersong, though of a prosaic, mechanical style, was nevertheless an ennobling, purifying element of culture in the frivolous and impure life of late mediæval German cities. Mastersong formed the bridge between the world of everyday realism and the world of ideals. Mastersong alone prevented an entire break of the continuity of German civilization between the two great periods of bloom, the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. As the bourgeoisie acquired a social position and a personal worth of their own, as the German peasantry, in the extreme North at the mouth of the Elbe between marshes and sea, the Ditmarschen and Stedingers, and again in the South between the Alpine passes, the Swiss, heroically defended their manhood and liberties, there began among those lowly born, but high-minded, vigorous, and comparatively pure classes an intellectual and a moral life of a higher order. The folk song of love, of warlike honor, of victory over the brutal squirearchy, of invigorating patriotism, of a national union embracing all classes, begins to ring through the German "poetic forest," as Uhland calls it. The loving maid speaks of the falcen, and means the lover; the rose garden signifies love's favor; flowers are maidens, like the rose on the heath that is plucked by the boy in spite of its thorns; the forget-me-not designates modesty, humility, chastity. There are little love songs describing the sorrow of parting, the joy of the dance, the dream of love under the tree from which a rain of blossoms bedews the sleeping beauty.

Emperor Maximilian (1493-1519), "the last knight," the best-beloved son of the house of Habsburg, reigns now in Germany. It is a time of transition, of universal change. The world has doubled its size by the discovery of America, and the horizon has been enlarged accordingly. The printing press has revolutionized the arts. Yet poetry is dry, allegorical, wooden. Maximilian, aided by his secretaries, relates in a rimed allegorical romance, Teuerdank, his wooing of Mary of Burgundy, or, as he calls her in his poem, the beautiful and illustrious virgin Ehrenreich, only daughter of the powerful king "Glorious" (Ruhmreich). He recounts the mighty deeds which he must accomplish before he can possess her.

The barrenness of the time, in spite of a great and varied literary activity which, however, bears the stamp of mediocrity, appears also in the translations made by several highborn ladies: Elizabeth of Lorraine, and Eleanor of Scotland, consort of Duke Sigmund of Austria. Princess Mathilda, of the illustrious Wittelsbach-Palatine house, the "Lady of Austria," as she is called in the folk song, fostered the first advent of humanism into Suabia and Bavaria, and entertained sympathetic relations with all those who worked in the direction of humanism and literary reform. Niclas von Wyle, an early Humanist, had already in 1474, in opposition to the popular farces which contained offensive, coarse, and frequently obscene treatment of woman, composed an encomium or eulogy in her honor, in which he enumerated the manifold blessings which woman had brought to the world. Yet the ribald farces still abound, and are even stimulated by the incipient religious reform. Joseph in Egypt is the typical subject for poems expressing the criminal and passionate love of woman; the monologue of Potiphar's wife expressing her sinful feelings for Joseph is nothing less than edifying. The play of Fair Susanna presented wicked passion in aged men, and innocence persecuted, but finally saved; Judith and Holofernes characterized the clash between conflicting religions.