Grimmelshausen
Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621/22-1676)
Grimmelshausen was born in 1621 or 1622 in Gelnhausen, a poor Lutheran town near Hanau in Hessen. His family were impoverished nobles. In 1634-35 his home town was destroyed and he was kidnapped by Croatian mercenaries. He served in various regiments in the Thirty Years War, on different sides, first as a foot soldier, then as a musketeer, and then as a secretary or clerk. In 1649, one year after the end of the war, he got married in Offenburg. In 1665-67 he kept an inn in Gaisbach (Oberkirch), then in 1667 he became a magistrate in the village of Renchen, which was occupied by the French army in 1673. In his last years in Renchen between 1673 and 1676, he was drawn into ongoing violence between the French and the Germans.
His masterpiece Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch; The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668), is the most important picaresque novel (Schelmenroman) ever written in German.
Grimmelshausen’s ‘Simplician’ novel-cycle (Simplicianische Schriften), written in the last decade of his life, depict war, violence, and the difficult search for a meaningful life with humanity and humour. Alan Menhennet (see reading list below) calls him ‘an accomplished satirist and profound allegorist, who confronted the temporal and eternal issues of the seventeenth century’. Grimmelshausen’s work has exerted a profound influence on modern German writers including Bertolt Brecht, Günter Grass and Irmtraud Morgner.
Grimmelshausen’s cycle of ‘Simplician’ novels consists of ten books:
[Books 1-5] Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch; The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668)
[Book 6] Continuatio des Abentheuerlichen Simplicissimi oder Der Schluss desselben; The Continuation of Simplicissimus (1669)
[Book 7] Trutz Simplex: Oder Ausführliche und wunderseltzame Lebensbeschreibung Der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche; The Life of Courage: The notorious Thief, Whore and Vagabond (1670)
[Book 8] Der seltzame Springinsfeld; Tearaway (1670)
[Books 9-10] Das wunderbarliche Vogel-Nest; The Magical Bird’s Nest (1672/1675)
English Translations
Grimmelshausen, The Adventures of a Simpleton (Simplicius Simplicissimus), trans. by Walter Wallich (London: New English Library, 1962)
H.J.C. Grimmelshausen, Simplicius Simplicissimus, trans. by Hellmuth Weissenborn and Lesley Macdonald (London: John Calder, 1964)
Grimmelshausen, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, trans. by Mike Mitchell (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2017)
Grimmelshausen, The Continuation of Simplicissimus, trans. by Mike Mitchell (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2019)
Grimmelshausen, The Life of Courage: The notorious Thief, Whore and Vagabond, trans. by Mike Mitchell (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2015)
Grimmelshausen, Tearaway, trans. by Mike Mitchell (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2003)
Further Reading in English
Jeremy Adler, ‘Time to Rob the Dead’, London Review of Books, 16 March 2017, 31-32
Jeffrey Ashcroft, ‘Ad astra volandum: Emblems and Imagery in Grimmelshausen’s “Simplicissimus”’, Modern Language Review 68 (1973), 843-62
Janet Bertsch, Storytelling in the Works of Bunyan, Grimmelshausen, Defoe, and Schnabel (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2004)
P. Brugh, ‘The Aesthetics of Gunpowder: Grimmelshausen’s Springinsfeld and the Narration of War in Early Modern Germany’, Clio 41:3 (2012), 289-310
Ian Thomas Fleishman, ‘A Printed Proteus: Textual Identity in Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus Teutsch’, The German Quarterly, 84:1 (2011), 4-20
Mary E. Gilbert, ‘Simplex and the Battle of Witstock’, German Life and Letters 18 (1964/65), 264-69
Carl Hammer, ‘Simplicissimus and the Literary Historians’, Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht 40:8 (1948), 457-64
Kenneth C. Hayens, Grimmelshausen (London: St. Andrews University and Oxford University Press, 1932)
John Heckmann, ‘Emblematic Structures in “Simplicissimus Teutsch”’, Modern Language Notes 84 (1969), 876-90
John Henning, ‘Grimmelshausen’s British Relations’, Modern Language Review 40 (1945), 37-45
Robert L. Hiller, ‘The sutler’s cart and the lump of gold’, The Germanic Review 39 (1964), 137-44
C.M. Horwich, Survival in Simplicissimus and Mutter Courage (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997)
John Wesley Jacobson, ‘The Culpable Male: Grimmelshausen on Women’, The German Quarterly 39 (1966), 149-61
T. Mast, ‘The allure of the world: Capitalism and gender in Grimmelshausen’s “Courasche”’, Seminar 34:2 (1998), 95-109
Alan Menhennet, Order and Freedom: Literature and Society in Germany from 1720 to 1805 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973)
Alan Menhennet, Grimmelshausen the Storyteller: A Study of the ‘Simplician’ Novels (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1997)
Karl F. Otto, Jr., A Companion to the Works of Grimmelshausen (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003)
Richard Sheppard, ‘The Narrative Structure of Grimmelshausen’s “Simplicissimus”’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 8 (1972), 15-26
Hans Speier, Force and Folly: Essays on Foreign Affairs and the History of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), Part 2: ‘Folly’, pp. 235-323
Christoph Stoll, Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen 1676/1976 (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Inter Nationes, 1976)
H.H. Weil, ‘The Conception of the Adventurer in German Baroque Literature’, German Life and Letters 6 (1953), 285-91
A.J.F. Zieglschmid, ‘An Unpublished “Hausbrief” of Grimmelshausen’s Hungarian Anabaptists’, The Germanic Review 15 (1940), 81-97
Further Reading in German
Dieter Breuer, Grimmelshausen-Handbuch (Munich: Fink, 1999)
Hans Dieter Gebauer, Grimmelshausens Bauerndarstellung. Literarische Sozialkritik und ihr Publikum (Marburg: Elwert, 1977)
Rainer Hillenbrand, ‘Sprachliche Gegenreformation in Grimmelshausens Teutschem Michel’, Daphnis 43:5 (2015), 592-619
Robert Jütte, ‘Vagantentum und Bettlerwesen bei Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’, Daphnis 9 (1980), 109-31
Volker Meid, Grimmelshausen: Epoche, Werk, Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 1984)
Hans-Gerd Rötzer, Picaro – Landstörtzer – Simplicius. Studien zum niederen Roman in Spanien und Deutschland (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972)
Further Reading in Italian
Rodolfo Bottacchiari, Grimmelshausen: Saggio su “L’avventuroso Simplicissimus” (Torino: G. Chiantore, 1920)
Claudio Magris, ‘Le robinsonaden fra la narrativa barocca e il romanzo borghese’, in Arte e Storia. Studi in onore di Leonello Vincenti (Torino: Giappichelli, 1965), pp. 233-84
Web Links in German
http://www.grimmelshausen.org/
Grimmelshausen Society, founded in 1977
The town of Renchen in Baden-Württemberg, where Grimmelshausen wrote his novels
