their crude warrior and robber lives, it soon became the great fashion, with far-reaching effects on the national life. It reached the convents and monasteries too—nuns and monks reading Juvenal and Ovid, forsooth, even in each other’s company, to the dismay of aged bishops. How much more colorfully could castles and palaces dispose of love! It was always the physical possession of the lady to which the knight aspired, and she knew with great guile how to take advantage of her handicap as the wife of another as long as her womanly instinct told her it was possible. Often she spent years accepting the worship due to a remote goddess, all the while sleeping by the side of her husband, who in turn might be worshipping at another altar. There were far fewer examples in Germany in those years of husbands doing away with their wives and their wives’ lovers than in more southerly lands. This was the only form of killing, however, in which the Germans lagged behind other nations.
10
IT WAS about this time and under such social and linguistic conditions that the two great and thrilling epics of Germany were written—poems in whose intense power this first epoch of German art was lifted to the heights of a national document.
The Nibelungenlied spreads its wings farthest in time, since it was created between the sixth and fifteenth centuries. For this epic, rightly regarded as the national poem of the Germans, reveals their soul in all its sinister savagery, without pretense or apology. Here their passions—cruelty and vengeance—rise to demoniac proportions, and since they recur with gods as with men, they can only be looked upon as symbols. The difference between the Northern Seas, forests and steppes and the fertile countryside of the South, the spiritual contrast between North Sea and Mediterranean, become clear when one compares the Nibelungenlied with the Iliad, from a purely human rather than esthetic point of view. Such a comparison does full justice to the basic paganism which they both share. Homer, two thousand years the senior, ought to appear closer to the elements, further removed from culture, his characters of greater savagery.
Yet what a contrast, when one compares Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope with Siegfried, Hagen and Brunhild! Murder and guile are amply foreshadowed by the Greeks, but they are used to defend love, loyalty, freedom. The Nibelungenlied, on the contrary, might be called the glorification of perfidy, for it is this, together with the German passion for revenge, that impels its heroes. The cunning and the vengefulness exhibited by these men and especially by their womenfolk; how friends and spouses break the vows they have sworn, betraying each other in the very bridal night; how liegeman breaks faith with his lord, not for the sake of love, liberty and home, but for a golden treasure over whose loss everything crumbles into ruins in the end—all this sets the basic spirit of the Nibelungenlied apart not only from the Greek, but also from the Anglo-French spirit, which at this same time was turning to the Holy Grail for its national epics. Whoever seeks to grasp the deep passions that today again flame in the Germans should study the Nibelungenlied in the original, or at least consult an adequate summary of the original, rather than the distortions of the Wagnerian operas which are virtually the only versions known abroad today.
The three great poets of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried of Strasbourg, and Walther von der Vogelweide, thrice confirm throughout the epoch of their activity the social law of the German spirit. They all flourished while the Reich disintegrated; they all came from the South of Germany; and they all were commoners, or knights so impoverished that they had to make their way as minstrels.
And yet there was one great exception—a Court of the Muses in the very heart of Germany, with a prince who played sponsor to the spirit. That was the landgrave Herman of Thuringia who resided in the Wartburg. Except for the Court of Vienna it was only here in Saxony, later the home of great musicians, that the honor of the German princes was saved. Three times this happened—around 1200, around 1500, and finally around 1800; for it was here in the Wartburg or at least close by that Luther and Goethe found princely protectors. That the German Republic in the year 1919 removed its parliament to Weimar had a profound symbolic meaning.
The poetry that later came into being in the medieval cities was far inferior. The craftsmen were to give rise to great painters and sculptors, but as poets they lagged behind. The mastersingers of Nuremberg and Augsburg, who rose from the crafts to special schools of song, have left behind nothing to enter into the heart of the nation—not even Hans Sachs, the shoemaker, six thousand of whose poems have disappeared altogether.
Indeed, neither the carnival plays nor the craftsmen’s farces, nor the great epics, live on among the people—only the songs, beginning with Walther von der Vogelweide.
The minstrel was the musician whom the people put up against the singers at the courts. A few, of course, passed from one estate to the other. For this reason the minstrel’s position was full of curious contradictions, similar to that of the women for whom he sang. Was he a pickpocket or a messenger of the Gods? In Worms the burghers were prohibited from taking him into their homes; elsewhere he was lumped together with other suspicious characters, such as jugglers, dancers and animal trainers.
The source of this attitude lay in the people rather than in the cities. The minstrel was essentially a wayfarer on the highway, visiting a village inn, the courtyard of a castle, a dance in the market place. The first great poet produced by the Germans could play the fiddle and clash the cymbals. Only a faint inkling of the sweetness and freshness in the poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide can be conveyed to those unfamiliar with the German tongue, for even Germans today can grasp his ancient dialect only with difficulty.
Walther, the first German poet and musician of real stature, was an Austrian, born in the Tyrol around 1170; for a short while he was at the court of Vienna; then he took to the highway. In truth we know nothing about him except what he tells of himself in his songs. We do know, however, that the decisive turn did not come until he had forsaken the court for the highway. Like Goethe, Walther followed the French fashion for only a few years, shining in sparkling verses before finding his mother tongue. But the well-springs opened up to him, and they are still open to us, as in the pristine freshness of Goethe’s youthful songs.
Walther’s name grew notorious as well as famous for the manful attitude he took as a political poet. He wrote about the flight of peace from the highways; everywhere in nature order prevailed—but not in Germany; the Pope he called a servant of Satan.
Only late in life, when he had grown gray on the highways, exhausted by the factional struggles, did he find a patron. He had written, now for this, now for that rival king, whichever was to his advantage, for, in the end, Walther was a German. But later, Frederic II granted him a small homestead, as Augustus had once done with Horace. In all likelihood the King did not even know Walther; but a young knight, a companion in falconry, may have sung him Walther’s song of the Falcon and the Beloved, adding that the poet was eking out his wretched life on the highways. The Emperor, after all, was himself a poet, and between the two cups of wine he told the Chancellor that the singer in the North must be aided. It is a wondrous moment in German history, and we grasp it more profoundly than the two men did then—to see the greatest king of the Middle Ages with a flourish of his pen presenting to the greatest singer of his time, far from his court, a shack, a garden, a little piece of ground.
11
THE MISTS are lifting. Through the shifting, heavy clouds in which men and forces of the German Middle Ages grope a light shines in the distance. Is it the dawn of a new day? It is the morning star that speeds it on its way.
From very different sources—from mystics who sought to sense and divine rather than to know, from heretics who sought to know and comprehend rather than merely to pray—there arose in the fifteenth century the cry for universal knowledge, for a learning that should not remain the secret prerogative of the priests. The German language prevailed in letters and in law, and it spread widely. The burghers and peasants wanted more than the Church had given them—knowledge, an understanding of God and the world—and this vision of democracy pervaded the town halls under their mighty towers, the gloomy halls of the universities. Hitherto all knowledge had been confined to the copies laboriously made by the monks,