The most conspicuous changes which came over the narrative poetry of the 13th century were, on the one hand, a steady encroachment of realism on the matter and treatment of the epic, and, on the other, a leaning to didacticism. The substitution of the “history” of the chronicle for the confessedly imaginative stories of the earlier poets is to be seen in the work of Rudolf von Ems, and of a number of minor chroniclers like Ulrich von Eschenbach, Berthold von Holle and Jans Enikel; while for the growth of realism we may look to the Pfaffe Amis, a collection of comic anecdotes by “Der Stricker,” the admirable peasant romance Meier Helmbrecht, written between 1236 and 1250 by Wernher der Gartenaere in Bavaria, and to the adventures of Ulrich von Lichtenstein, as described in his Frauendienst (1255) and Frauenbuch (1257).
More than any single poet of the Court epic, more even than the poet of the Nibelungenlied, Walther von der Vogelweide summed up in himself all that was best in the group of poetic literature with which he was associated—the Minnesang. The early Austrian singers already mentioned, poets like Heinrich von Veldeke, who in his lyrics, as in his epic, introduced the French conception of Minne, or like the manly Friedrich von Hausen, and the Swiss imitator of Provençal measures, Rudolf von Fenis appear only in the light of forerunners. Even more original poets, like Heinrich von Morungen and Walther’s own master, Reinmar von Hagenau, the author of harmonious but monotonously elegiac verses, or among immediate contemporaries, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose few lyric strophes are as deeply stamped with his individuality as his epics—seem only tributary to the full rich stream of Walther’s genius. There was not a form of the German Minnesang which Walther did not amplify and deepen; songs of courtly love and lowly love, of religious faith and delight in nature, patriotic songs and political Sprüche—in all he was a master. Of Walther’s life we are somewhat better informed than in the case of his contemporaries: he was born about 1170 and died about 1230; his art he learned in Austria, whereupon he wandered through South Germany, a welcome guest wherever he went, although his vigorous championship of what he regarded as the national cause in the political struggles of the day won him foes as well as friends. For centuries he remained the accepted exemplar of German lyric poetry; not merely the Minnesänger who followed him, but also the Meistersinger of the 15th and 16th centuries looked up to him as one of the founders and lawgivers of their art. He was the most influential of all Germany’s lyric poets, and in the breadth, originality and purity of his inspiration one of her greatest (see [Walther von der Vogelweide]).
The development of the German Minnesang after Walther’s death and under his influence is easily summed up. Contemporaries had been impressed by the dual character of Walther’s lyric; they distinguished a higher courtly lyric, and a lower more outspoken form of song, free from the constraint of social or literary conventions. The later Minnesang emphasized this dualism. Amongst Walther’s immediate contemporaries, high-born poets, whose lives were passed at courts, naturally cultivated the higher lyric; but the more gifted and original singers of the time rejoiced in the freedom of Walther’s poetry of niedere Minne. It was, in fact, in accordance with the spirit of the age that the latter should have been Walther’s most valuable legacy to his successors; and the greatest of these, Neidhart von Reuental (c. 1180-c. 1250), certainly did not allow himself to be hampered by aristocratic prejudices. Neidhart sought the themes of his höfische Dorfpoesie in the village, and, as the mood happened to dictate, depicted the peasant with humorous banter or biting satire. The lyric poets of the later 13th century were either, like Burkart von Hohenfels, Ulrich von Winterstetten and Gottfried von Neifen, echoes of Walther von der Vogelweide and of Neidhart, or their originality was confined to some particular form of lyric poetry in which they excelled. Thus the singer known as “Der Tannhäuser” distinguished himself as an imitator of the French pastourelle; Reinmar von Zweter was purely a Spruchdichter. More or less common to all is the consciousness that their own ideas and surroundings were no longer in harmony with the aristocratic world of chivalry, which the poets of the previous generation had glorified. The solid advantages, material prosperity and increasing comfort of life in the German towns appealed to poets like Steinmar von Klingenau more than the unworldly ideals of self-effacing knighthood which Ulrich von Lichtenstein and Johann Hadlaub of Zürich clung to so tenaciously and extolled so warmly. On the whole, the Spruchdichter came best out of this ordeal of changing fashions; and the increasing interest in the moral and didactic applications of literature favoured the development of this form of verse. The confusion of didactic purpose with the lyric is common to all the later poetry, to that of the learned Marner, of Boppe, Rumezland and Heinrich von Meissen, who was known to later generations as “Frauenlob.” The Spruchdichtung, in fact, was one of the connecting links between the Minnesang of the 13th and the lyric and satiric poetry of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The disturbing and disintegrating element in the literature of the 13th century was thus the substitution of a utilitarian didacticism for the idealism of chivalry. In the early decades of that century, poems like Der Winsbeke, by a Bavarian, and Der welsche Gast, written in 1215-1216 by Thomasin von Zirclaere (Zirclaria), a native of Friuli, still teach with uncompromising idealism the duties and virtues of the knightly life. But in the Bescheidenheit (c. 1215-1230) of a wandering singer, who called himself Freidank, we find for the first time an active antagonism to the unworldly code of chivalry and an unmistakable reflection of the changing social order, brought about by the rise of what we should now call the middle class. Freidank is the spokesman of the Bürger, and in his terse, witty verses may be traced the germs of German intellectual and literary development in the coming centuries—even of the Reformation itself. From the advent of Freidank onwards, the satiric and didactic poetry went the way of the epic; what it gained in quantity it lost in quality and concentration. The satires associated with the name of Seifried Helbling, an Austrian who wrote in the last fifteen years of the 13th century, and Der Renner by Hugo von Trimberg, written at the very end of the century, may be taken as characteristic of the later period, where terseness and incisive wit have given place to diffuse moralizing and allegory.
There is practically no Middle High German literature in prose; such prose as has come down to us—the tracts of David of Augsburg, the powerful sermons of Berthold von Regensburg (d. 1272), Germany’s greatest medieval preacher, and several legal codes, as the Sachsenspiegel and Schwabenspiegel—only prove that the Germans of the 13th century had not yet realized the possibilities of prose as a medium of literary expression.
III. The Transition Period (1350-1600)
(a) The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.—As is the case with all transitional periods of literary history, this epoch of German literature may be considered under two aspects: on the one hand, we may follow in it the decadence and disintegration of the literature of the Middle High German period; on the other, we may study the beginnings of modern forms of poetry and the preparation of that spiritual revolution, which meant hardly less to the Germanic peoples than the Renaissance to the Latin races—the Protestant Reformation.
By the middle of the 14th century, knighthood with its chivalric ideals was rapidly declining, and the conditions under which medieval poetry had flourished were passing away. The social change rendered the courtly epic of Arthur’s Round Table in great measure incomprehensible to the younger generation, and made it difficult for them to understand the spirit that actuated the heroes of the national epic; the tastes to which the lyrics of the great Minnesingers had appealed were vitiated by the more practical demands of the rising middle classes. But the stories of chivalry still appealed as stories to the people, although the old way of telling them was no longer appreciated. The feeling for beauty of form and expression was lost; the craving for a moral purpose and didactic aim had to be satisfied at the cost of artistic beauty; and sensational incident was valued more highly than fine character-drawing or inspired poetic thought. Signs of the decadence are to be seen in the Karlmeinet of this period, stories from the youth of Charlemagne, in a continuation of Parzival by two Alsatians, Claus Wisse and Philipp Colin (c. 1335), in an Apollonius von Tyrus by Heinrich von Neuenstadt (c. 1315), and a Königstochter von Frankreich by Hans von Bühel (c. 1400). The story of Siegfried was retold in a rough ballad, Das Lied von hürnen Seyfried, the Heldenbuch was recast in Knittelvers or doggerel (1472), and even the Arthurian epic was parodied. A no less marked symptom of decadence is to be seen in a large body of allegorical poetry analogous to the Roman de la rose in France; Heinzelein of Constance, at the end of the 13th, and Hadamar von Laber and Hermann von Sachsenheim, about the middle of the 15th century, were representatives of this movement. As time went on, prose versions of the old stories became more general, and out of these developed the Volksbücher, such as Loher und Maller, Die Haimonskinder, Die schöne Magelone, Melusine, which formed the favourite reading of the German people for centuries. As the last monuments of the decadent narrative literature of the middle ages, we may regard the Buch der Abenteuer of Ulrich Füetrer, written at the end of the 15th century, and Der Weisskönig and Teuerdank by the emperor Maximilian I. (1459-1519) printed in the early years of the 16th. At the beginning of the new epoch the Minnesang could still point to two masters able to maintain the great traditions of the 13th century, Hugo von Montfort (1357-1423) and Oswald von Wolkenstein (1367-1445); but as the lyric passed into the hands of the middle-class poets of the German towns, it was rapidly shorn of its essentially lyric qualities; die Minne gave place to moral and religious dogmatism, emphasis was laid on strict adherence to the rules of composition, and the simple forms of the older lyric were superseded by ingenious metrical distortions. Under the influence of writers like Heinrich von Meissen (“Frauenlob,” c. 1250-1318) and Heinrich von Mügeln in the 14th century, like Muskatblut and Michael Beheim (1416-c. 1480) in the 15th, the Minnesang thus passed over into the Meistergesang. In the later 15th and in the 16th centuries all the south German towns possessed flourishing Meistersinger schools in which the art of writing verse was taught and practised according to complicated rules, and it was the ambition of every gifted citizen to rise through the various grades from Schüler to Meister and to distinguish himself in the “singing contests” instituted by the schools.
Such are the decadent aspects of the once rich literature of the Middle High German period in the 14th and 15th centuries. Turning now to the more positive side of the literary movement, we have to note a revival of a popular lyric poetry—the Volkslied—which made the futility and artificiality of the Meistergesang more apparent. Never before or since has Germany been able to point to such a rich harvest of popular poetry as is to be seen in the Volkslieder of these two centuries. Every form of popular poetry is to be found here—songs of love and war, hymns and drinking-songs, songs of spring and winter, historical ballads, as well as lyrics in which the old motives of the Minnesang reappear stripped of all artificiality. More obvious ties with the literature of the preceding age are to be seen in the development of the Schwank or comic anecdote. Collections of such stories, which range from the practical jokes of Till Eulenspiegel (1515), and the coarse witticisms of the Pfaffe vom Kalenberg (end of 14th century) and Peter Leu (1550), to the religious and didactic anecdotes of J. Pauli’s Schimpf und Ernst (1522) or the more literary Rollwagenbüchlein (1555) of Jörg Wickram and the Wendunmut (1563 ff.) of H.W. Kirchhoff—these dominate in large measure the literature of the 15th and 16th centuries; they are the literary descendants of the medieval Pfaffe Amis, Markolf and Reinhart Fuchs. An important development of this type of popular literature is to be seen in the Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), where the humorous anecdote became a vehicle of the bitterest satire; Brant’s own contempt for the vulgarity of the ignorant, and the deep, unsatisfied craving of all strata of society for a wider intellectual horizon and a more humane and dignified life, to which Brant gave voice, make the Narrenschiff, which appeared in 1494, a landmark on the way that led to the Reformation. Another form—the Beast fable and Beast epic—which is but sparingly represented in earlier times, appealed with peculiar force to the new generation. At the very close of the Middle High German period, Ulrich Boner had revived the Aesopic fable in his Edelstein (1349), translations of Aesop in the following century added to the popularity of the fable (q.v.), and in the century of the Reformation it became, in the hands of Burkard Waldis (Esopus, 1548) and Erasmus Alberus (Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit, 1550), a favourite instrument of satire and polemic. A still more attractive form of the Beast fable was the epic of Reinke de Vos, which had been cultivated by Flemish poets in the 13th and 14th centuries and has come down to us in a Low Saxon translation, published at Lübeck in 1498. This, too, like Brant’s poem, is a powerful satire on human folly, and is also, like the Narrenschiff, a harbinger of the coming Reformation.
A complete innovation was the drama (q.v.), which, as we have seen, had practically no existence in Middle High German times. As in all European literatures, it emerged slowly and with difficulty from its original subservience to the church liturgy. As time went on, the vernacular was substituted for the original Latin, and with increasing demands for pageantry, the scene of the play was removed to the churchyard or the market-place; thus the opportunity arose in the 14th and 15th centuries for developing the Weihnachtsspiel, Osterspiel and Passionsspiel on secular lines. The enlargement of the scope of the religious play to include legends of the saints implied a further step in the direction of a complete separation of the drama from ecclesiastical ceremony. The most interesting example of this encroachment of the secular spirit is the Spiel von Frau Jutten—Jutta being the notorious Pope Joan—by an Alsatian, Dietrich Schernberg, in 1480. Meanwhile, in the 15th century, a beginning had been made of a drama entirely independent of the church. The mimic representations—originally allegorical in character—with which the people amused themselves at the great festivals of the year, and more especially in spring, were interspersed with dialogue, and performed on an improvised stage. This was the beginning of the Fastnachtsspiel or Shrovetide-play, the subject of which was a comic anecdote similar to those of the many collections of Schwänke. Amongst the earliest cultivators of the Fastnachtsspiel were Hans Rosenplüt (fl. c. 1460) and Hans Folz (fl. c. 1510), both of whom were associated with Nuremberg.