Published under pseudonym: authorship not established until the 19 th century. Born: Gelnhausen, near Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1622. Education: Educated at Lutheran Latin School, Gelnhausen, 1627. Family: Married Katharina Henninger in 1649. Career: Family fled to Hanau, 1634, after Gelnhausen was plundered in the Thirty Years War; served in the Kaiser’s army after 1637: garrison soldier in Offenburg, 1639, clerk, 1645, then secretary, 1648, in regimental office; steward for the von Schauenburg family in Gaisbach bei Oberkirch, 1649; innkeeper in Gaisbach, 1658; steward for Dr. Kueller, 1662; innkeeper, 1665; mayor of Renchen, 1667; temporary soldier, 1675. Died: 17 August 1676.
Publications
Collections
[Collected Works], edited by H. Kurz. 4 vols., 1863-64.
Gesammelte Werke, edited by Rolf Tarot. 1966-.
Works
Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch und Continuatio, edited by Rolf Tarot. 1967; as The Adventurous Simplicissimus, translated by A.T.S. Goodrich, 1912; as Simplicissimus the Vagabond, 1924; as The Adventures of a Simpleton, translated by Walter Wallich, 1962; as Simplicicius Simplicissimus, translated by Monte Adair, 1986; as The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, translated by George Schulz-Behrend, 1993; as Simplicissimus, translated by Mike Mitchell, 1999.
Dietwalts und Amelindens anmutige Lieb- und Leidsbeschreibung,edited by Rolf Tarot. 1967.
Trutz Simplex; oder, . . . Lebensbeschreibung der Erzbetrugerin und Landstorzerin Courasche, edited by Wolfgang Bender. 1967; as Mother Courage, translated by Walter Wallich, 1965; as The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief, Whore, and Vagabond, translated by Mike Mitchell, 2001.
Des durchleuchtigen Prinzen Proximi . . . und Lympidae Liebs-Geschicht-Erzahlung, edited by Franz Gunter Sieveke. 1967.
Des vortrefflich keuschen Josephs in Agypten Lebensbeschreibung samt des Musai Lebenslauf, edited by Wolfgang Bender. 1968.
Simplicianischer Zweikopfiger Ratio Status, edited by Rolf Tarot. 1968.
Der seltsameSpringinsfeld, edited by Franz Gunter Sieveke. 1969; as The Singular Life Story of Heedless Hopalong, translated by Robert L. Hiller and John C. Osborne, 1981.
Satyrischer Pilgram, edited by Wolfgang Bender. 1970.
Das wunderbarliche Vogelnest, edited by Rolf Tarot. 1970.
Die verkehrte Welt, edited by Franz Gunter Sieveke. 1973.
Kleinere Schriften (Beernhauter, Gauckeltasche, Stolze Melcher,Bart-Krieg, Galgen-Mannlin, etc.), edited by Rolf Tarot. 1973.
RatstUbel Plutonis, edited by Wolfgang Bender. 1975.
Teutscher Michel und Ewigwahrender Kalender, edited by Rolf Tarot. 1976.
Critical Studies:
Grimmelshausen by Kenneth C. Hayens, 1932; Grimmelshausen by Kenneth Negus, 1974; Grimmelshausen in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten by Curt Hohoff, 1978; The Nature of Realism in Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus Cycle of Novels by R.P.T. Aylett, 1982; Grimmelshausen the Storyteller: A Study of the ”Simplician” Novels by Alan Menhennet, 1997.
Reading Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen we feel ourselves to be in the immediate company of a narrator; stories are told—to fictional listeners and to us—and much of the material rings like first-hand truth. But the narrative voices have to be listened to critically; they are continually ironized and relativized by other perspectives offered in the text. The text itself supplies its own commentary—from the perspective of the narrator’s old age, for example—or we ourselves, among the listeners, are encouraged to comment.
Grimmelshausen is a great realist. He worked in a genre, the picaresque, marvellously suited to his times, his purposes, and his gifts. The picaresque novel, imported from Spain in the service of the Counter-Reformation by Aegidus Albertinus, is realistic and anti-heroic. In Spain it flourished during the Moorish Wars, and the Thirty Years War makes up all of Grimmelshausen’s world. The picaro is a delinquent, and he lives in delinquent times. In times of licensed immorality he lives his immoral life.
War is depicted truthfully by Grimmelshausen, as pointless and horrible. He repeatedly mocks the lying heroic tradition. War is the licence, under arbitrary creeds and slogans, to commit atrocities. War is seen from the true, the lowest point of view: from among the dead, for example, as the scavengers come round. We learn most, to our greatest horror, quite incidentally. What happens to an officer’s mistress when he tires of her? She is given to the stable boys: a detail, Grimmelshausen implies, too ordinary to dwell on. War is continually rendered strange; it has to be, or we should not see it for what it is, so accustomed have we become.
Grimmelshausen works to the important Baroque principle of ”mogliche Realitat” (”possible reality”). More happens to his heroes than really could; he accumulates around them an implausible number of truthful incidents. For realism is not an end in itself; it serves an urgent moral and religious purpose. Man must be shown as he is, as he really lives, in order that he may change. All human life is precarious and war only accentuates that fact; and in war man behaves according to his nature, which is greedy, cruel, and selfish. Much of Baroque literature rests on a simple antithesis: the World or God. To be in the world is to be apart from God. The ordinary state of the world, for Grimmelshausen, is war. What the child last sees of the world as he enters the forest is his family home pillaged and its inhabitants raped or tortured; and what he first sees when he leaves the forest is again torture. That is the world.
Simplicissimus passes, without plausible inner motivation, through the predetermined stages of a religious and ethical career. He begins life in brute ignorance; in the forest with the hermit (his true father) he acquires sancta simplicitas; leaving the forest he is for a time a holy fool (Christianity in such a world appearing necessarily foolish); then, as court fool, he becomes a knowing social critic. Next, for most of the book, he lives not as a critic of the world but as its exemplar, as a worldling. Finally, with only nominal motivation, he leaves the world to resume his innocent hermit’s state. He undergoes an exemplary disillusioning, an Enttauschung.
Grimmelshausen’s books are still, as he intended them, amusing and instructive. They are enjoyable and affirmative in their exuberance of language and invention; and salutary in their truthful exposure of man living badly.
