Old and Middle High German: From Early to Medieval Literature

Heroic legends, among them the Lay of Hildebrand, date from the turn of the 8th cent. to the 9th cent. and are the earliest known works in Old High German (see German language). The Waltherius (10th cent.) is written in Latin. Low German and Saxon dialects are also used in these epics. Writings of the 9th to the 11th cent., largely inspired by the church, include the works of the monks Rabanus Maurus Magnentius, Otfried, and Notker Labeo.

The succeeding period of Middle High German (12th-14th cent.) is characterized by chivalric poetry, such as the songs and lyrics of the minnesingers on courtly love and other subjects. Courtly epics, such as Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (see Parsifal), were often based on French troubadour and trouvère sources (see troubadours; trouvères), while epics like the Nibelungenlied (see under Nibelungen) and Gudrun use Germanic traditions. A gradual decline of chivalric poetry is evident in the works of Ulrich von Lichtenstein, and the rise of the urban literary traditions is seen in such epics as Wernher der Gartenaere's Meier Helmbrecht (c.1250).

The Protestant Reformation, High German, and Literary Academies: The Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

After 1400 more popular literary forms became dominant: folk songs, fables, folktales, and short plays. The aristocratic heritage of the minnesingers was replaced by meistersingers, notably Hans Sachs. The Reformation profoundly influenced the course of German literature, and Martin Luther's translation (1522-34) of the Bible propagated a unified High German language. Religious and scholarly writings were also affected by humanism; German humanists included Ulrich von Hutten and Conradus Celtes.

The Thirty Years War (1618-48) brought religious schism, widespread devastation, and, concomitantly, a consolidation of national consciousness resulting in a flowering of German literature with strong courtly and absolutist tendencies. Literary academies, arising in Hamburg, Nuremberg, and other cities, worked for the purification and development of the German language. Most influential was the Silesian school, which included Martin Opitz, noted for his metrical reforms, and the poets Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau (1618-79), Paul Fleming (1609-40), Andreas Gryphius, and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. Leading writers of hymns were the Protestant Paul Gerhardt and the Catholic Angelus Silesius. Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669), a picaresque account of the Thirty Years War, may be considered the first German novel.

The Eighteenth Century

The great age of German literature began in the 18th cent. The classicist theories of Johann Christoph Gottsched aroused violent critical reactions, indirectly paving the way for Friedrich Klopstock and especially for Gotthold Lessing, the greatest preclassical critic and dramatist. The period known as Sturm und Drang embraced the works of Johann Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Jakob Lenz.

The period also encompassed the early works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Goethe and Schiller were widely considered the greatest figures in the subsequent classical period, when artistic forms in general were characterized by restraint, lucidity, and balance (see classicism). Their cultural ideals, expressed in the novel of self-formation or Bildungsroman, were also spread by C. M. Wieland and Friedrich Hölderlin, the age's greatest German poet.

At the end of the 18th cent. literary romanticism, initiated in Germany by the brothers Friedrich and H. W. von Schlegel and by Novalis, brought greater emphasis on subjective emotion. A new literary form appeared in the novelle, a prose tale often dealing with supernatural elements. Typical early romantic poets were Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and Joachim von Arnim, who were also collectors and editors of folktales and folk songs, sometimes set to music by Robert Schumann and other composers.

Freiherr von Eichendorff, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Ludwig Uhland were other notable German romantics. The movement's historical tendencies were supplemented by the philological and folkloristic researches of the brothers Grimm. The writer E. T. A. Hoffmann was romanticism's greatest psychologist of the unconscious. Hovering between classicism and romanticism, Heinrich von Kleist's stories and plays were masterpieces of dramatic economy, other important playwrights were Franz Grillparzer and C. F. Hebbel.

The Nineteenth Century: Realism and Naturalism

The revolutionary literary movement known as Young Germany, which strove to arouse German political opinion, turned from romanticism to the more sober realism; its great leaders were Karl Börne and Heinrich Heine. Realism was consolidated in the influential social novels of Theodor Fontane, whereas Eduard Mörike and Adalbert Stifter adhered to a form of classicism. The theory of realism was further developed by the school of naturalism, represented by the young Gerhart Hauptmann.

The Twentieth Century

Antinaturalistic movements grew stronger in the German imperialistic period. They became evident as symbolism and impressionism in poetry (Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal) and in the novel (Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch) and as expressionism in verse (Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, Gottfried Benn) and drama (Frank Wedekind, Georg Kaiser, Bertolt Brecht). The literature of the Weimar Republic carried forward prewar traditions and excelled in formal experimentation and innovation. This activity was stifled by the rise of National Socialism, which forced leading writers like Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig into emigration.

The postwar decades saw a gradual literary resurgence, with the social and critical novels of authors like Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Max Frisch gaining prominance. Two important centers of literary activity were Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter in Germany, and the Vienna Circle, which attracted a number of experimental writers, such as H. C. Artmann and Ernst Jandl in Austria. East Germany's writers generally upheld the tenets of socialist realism, while those in the west were more varied.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, both groups were preoccupied with the Nazi period. Among the significant German writers were Ingeborg Bachmann, Horst Bienek, Johannes Bobrowski, Uwe Johnson, Arno Schmidt, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss, and Christa Wolf. Some of the German-language writers who have received the greatest recent international attention are the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard and the Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan.

This includes literature written in Germany itself as well as German-language Swiss and Austrian literature, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora.

German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there are some currents of literature influenced to a greater or lesser degree by dialects (e.g. Alemannic).

An early flowering of German literature is the Middle High German period of the High Middle Ages. Modern literature in German begins with the authors of the Enlightenment (such as Herder) and reaches its "classical" form at the turn of the 18th century with Weimar Classicism (Goethe and Schiller).

Periodization

• Medieval German literature
• Old High German literature (750-1050)
• Middle High German literature (1050-1300)
• Late medieval German literature/Renaissance (1300-1500)
• Early Modern German literature (see Early Modern literature)
• Humanism and Protestant Reformation (1500-1650)
• Baroque (1600-1720)
• Enlightenment (1680-1789)
• Modern German literature
• Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century German literature
• Empfindsamkeit / Sensibility (1750s-1770s)
• Sturm und Drang / Storm and Stress (1760s-1780s)
• German Classicism (1729–1832)
• Weimar Classicism (1788-1805) or (1788-1832), depending on whether one marks the end of this period with Schiller's death (1805) or with Goethe's (1832)
• German Romanticism (1790s-1880s)
• Biedermeier (1815-1848)
• Young Germany (1830-1850)
• Poetic Realism (1848-1890)
• Naturalism (1880-1900)
• Twentieth-century German literature
• 1900-1933
• Fin de siècle (ca. 1900)
• Symbolism
• Expressionism (1910-1920)
• Dada (1914-1924)
• New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)
• 1933-1945
• National Socialist literature
• Exile literature
• 1945-1989
• By country
• Federal Republic of Germany
• German Democratic Republic
• Austria
• Switzerland
• Other
• By thematic or group
• Post-war literature (1945-1967)
• Group 47
• Holocaust literature
• Contemporary German literature (1989-)

Middle Ages

Medieval German literature refers to literature written in Germany, stretching from the Carolingian dynasty; various dates have been given for the end of the German literary Middle Ages, the Reformation (1517) being the last possible cut-off point.

Old High German

The Old High German period is reckoned to run until about the mid-11th century, though the boundary to Early Middle High German (second half of the 11th century) is not clear-cut.

The most famous work in OHG is the Hildebrandslied, a short piece of Germanic alliterative heroic verse which besides the Muspilli is the sole survivor of what must have been a vast oral tradition. Another important work, in the northern dialect of Old Saxon, is a life of Christ in the style of a heroic epic known as the Heliand.

Middle High German

Middle High German proper runs from the beginning of the 12th century. In the second half of the 12th century, there was a sudden intensification of activity, leading to a 60-year "golden age" of medieval German literature referred to as the mittelhochdeutsche Blütezeit (1170-1230). This was the period of the blossoming of MHG lyric poetry, particularly Minnesang (the German variety of the originally French tradition of courtly love). One of the most important of these poets was Walther von der Vogelweide. The same sixty years saw the composition of the most important courtly romances. These are written in rhyming couplets, and again draw on French models such as Chrétien de Troyes, many of them relating Arthurian material, for example, Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach. The third literary movement of these years was a new revamping of the heroic tradition, in which the ancient Germanic oral tradition can still be discerned, but tamed and Christianized and adapted for the court. These high medieval heroic epics are written in rhymed strophes, not the alliterative verse of Germanic prehistory. For example, the Niebelungenlied.

Early Modern period

German Renaissance and Reformation

• Sebastian Brant (1457–1521)
• Thomas Murner (1475–1537)
• Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560)
• Sebastian Franck (1500–1543)
• Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (1503–1572)

Baroque period

The Baroque period (1600 to 1720) was one of the most fertile times in German literature. Many writers reflected the horrible experiences of the Thirty Years' War, in poetry and prose. Grimmelshausen's adventures of the young and naïve Simplicissimus, in the eponymous book Simplicius Simplicissimus, became the most famous novel of the Baroque period. Andreas Gryphius and Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein wrote German language tragedies, or Trauerspiele, often on Classical themes and frequently quite violent. Erotic, religious and occasional poetry appeared in both German and Latin.

Modern period

18th century

The Enlightenment

• August Friedrich Wilhelm Crome
• Johann Gottfried Herder
• Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach
• Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
• Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel
• Immanuel Kant
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
• Moses Mendelssohn
• Carl Leonhard Reinhold
• Christian Thomasius
• Christian Jacob Wagenseil
• Christian Felix Weiße
• Christoph Martin Wieland
• Christian Wolff
• Friedrich Nicolai
• Christian Garve

Sensibility

Storm and Stress

Sturm und Drang (the conventional translation is "Storm and Stress"; a more literal translation, however, might be storm and urge, storm and longing, or storm and impulse) is the name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in response to the confines of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements. The philosopher Johann Georg Hamann is considered to be the ideologue of Sturm und Drang, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a notable proponent of the movement, though he and Friedrich Schiller ended their period of association with it, initiating what would become Weimar Classicism.

German Classicism

19th century

Romanticism

• Heinrich Heine
• G.W.F. Hegel
• E.T.A. Hoffmann
• Friedrich Hölderlin
• Heinrich von Kleist
• Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)
• Friedrich Schlegel
• August Wilhelm Schlegel
• Friedrich Schleiermacher
• Ludwig Tieck
• Ludwig Uhland
• Joseph von Eichendorff

Biedermeier and Vormärz

Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) was a loose group of Vormärz writers which existed from about 1830 to 1850. It was essentially a youth movement (similar to those that had swept France, Ireland and originated in Italy). Its main proponents were Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt and Ludolf Wienbarg; Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne and Georg Büchner were also considered part of the movement. The wider circle included Willibald Alexis, Adolf Glassbrenner and Gustav Kühne.

Realism and Naturalism

Naturalism (1880-1900)

20th century

1900 to 1933

• Fin de siècle (ca. 1900)
• Symbolism
• Expressionism (1910-1920)
• Dada (1914-1924)
• New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)

Nazi Germany

• National Socialist literature: see Blut und Boden, Nazi propaganda

Under the Nazi regime, some authors went into exile (Exilliteratur) and others submitted to censorship ("internal emigration", Innere Emigration)

• Innere Emigration: Carl von Ossietzky, Gottfried Benn, Werner Bergengruen, Hans Blüher, Otto Dix, Hans Heinrich Ehrler, Werner Finck, Gertrud Fussenegger, Ricarda Huch, Ernst Jünger, Erich Kästner, Volker Lachmann, Oskar Loerke, Erika Mitterer, Walter von Molo, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Richard Riemerschmid, Reinhold Schneider, Frank Thiess, Ernst Wiechert
• in exile: Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch, Ernst Bloch, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank, A. M. Frey, Anna Gmeyner, Oskar Maria Graf, Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Hermann Kesten, Annette Kolb, Siegfried Kracauer, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Robert Neumann, Erich Maria Remarque, Ludwig Renn, Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Otto Rühle, Alice Schwarz-Gardos, Anna Seghers, B. Traven, Franz Werfel, Bodo Uhse, Arnold Zweig, Stefan Zweig, Balder Olden, Rudolf Olden.

1945 to 1989

• Group 47
• Holocaust literature: Anne Frank, Edgar Hilsenrath
• literature of the GDR: Wolf Biermann, Sarah Kirsch, Günter Kunert, Reiner Kunze
• Postmodern literature: Oswald Wiener, Hans Wollschläger, Christoph Ransmayr, Marlene Streeruwitz

Nobel Prize laureates

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to German language authors twelve times (as of 2007), or the third most often after English and French language authors (with 27 and 13 laureates, respectively).

• 1902 Theodor Mommsen
• 1908 Rudolf Christoph Eucken
• 1910 Paul Heyse
• 1912 Gerhart Hauptmann
• 1919 Carl Spitteler
• 1929 Thomas Mann
• 1946 Hermann Hesse
• 1966 Nelly Sachs
• 1972 Heinrich Böll
• 1981 Elias Canetti
• 1999 Günter Grass
• 2004 Elfriede Jelinek

Contemporary literature

• Science-Fiction Andreas Eschbach, Frank Schätzing.
• Peter Schmidt
• "pop literature": Christian Kracht, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Rainald Goetz.
• migrant literature: Feridun Zaimoglu, Wladimir Kaminer, Rafik Schami
• Poetry: Marcel Beyer, Uwe Kolbe, Thomas Kling (1957-2005)
• Literaturport (in German): audio clips of contemporary literature, many read out by the authors themselves

See also

• German-speaking Europe
• Standard German
• Swiss literature
• Austrian literature
• Alemannic literature
• History of German
• list of German-language authors, list of German-language playwrights
• list of German-language poets
• list of German-language philosophers.
• History of literature
• Projekt Gutenberg-DE