[30] Cf. K. Luick, Deutsche Lautlehre mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Sprechweise Wiens und der österreichischen Alpenländer (1904); O. Brenner, “Zur Aussprache des Hochdeutschen” l.c., pp. 218-228.
GERMAN LITERATURE. Compared with other literatures, that of the German-speaking peoples presents a strangely broken and interrupted course; it falls into more or less isolated groups, separated from each other by periods which in intellectual darkness and ineptitude are virtually without a parallel in other European lands. The explanation of this irregularity of development is to be sought less in the chequered political history of the German people—although this was often reason enough—than in the strongly marked, one might almost say, provocative character of the national mind as expressed in literature. The Germans were not able, like their partially latinized English cousins—or even their Scandinavian neighbours—to adapt themselves to the various waves of literary influence which emanated from Italy and France and spread with irresistible power over all Europe; their literary history has been rather a struggle for independent expression, a constant warring against outside forces, even when the latter—like the influence of English literature in the 18th century and of Scandinavian at the close of the 19th—were hailed as friendly and not hostile. It is a peculiarity of German literature that in those ages when, owing to its own poverty and impotence, it was reduced to borrowing its ideas and its poetic forms from other lands, it sank to the most servile imitation; while the first sign of returning health has invariably been the repudiation of foreign influence and the assertion of the right of genius to untrammelled expression. Thus Germany’s periods of literary efflorescence rarely coincide with those of other nations, and great European movements, like the Renaissance, passed over her without producing a single great poet.
This chequered course, however, renders the grouping of German literature and the task of the historian the easier. The first and simplest classification is that afforded by the various stages of linguistic development. In accordance with the three divisions in the history of the High German language, there is an Old High German, a Middle High German and a New High German or Modern High German literary epoch. It is obvious, however, that the last of these divisions covers too enormous a period of literary history to be regarded as analogous to the first two. The present survey is consequently divided into six main sections:
I. The Old High German Period, including the literature of the Old Saxon dialect, from the earliest times to the middle of the 11th century.
II. The Middle High German Period, from the middle of the 11th to the middle of the 14th century.
III. The Transition Period, from the middle of the 14th century to the Reformation in the 16th century.
IV. The Period of Renaissance and Pseudo-classicism, from the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th.
V. The Classical Period of Modern German literature, from the middle of the 18th century to Goethe’s death in 1832.
VI. The Period from Goethe’s death to the present day.