The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag
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to represent those phases of the spirit and social circumstances, which more especially define the character of a people. By these the continuity and many peculiarities of our present cultivation will be illustrated.
The new time began in Germany, after the invention of printing, by a struggle in which Germans broke the fetters of the Papal Church of the Middle Ages, and passed from submissive belief in authority, to an energetic, independent search after truth. But they did not at the same time succeed in building up a compact monarchy out of the unsymmetrical feudalism of the Middle Ages. The Imperial House of Hapsburg became the zealous opponent of the national development. Owing to this opposition arose the power of separate territorial princes, and the political weakness of Germany became the more perceptible, the more the rising vigour of the nation demanded an answering development of political energy. From this the German character suffered much. Ecclesiastical disputes were for a long period the only national interest; there was but too great a deficiency in Germans of that pride and pleasure in a fatherland, and of that whole circle of moral feelings, to which political independence gives life, even in the most obscure individual.
After the Reformation it became the fate of the German nation to develope its character under conditions which were materially different from those of the other civilised people of Europe. In France, the Protestant party was struck down with bloody zeal by the crown under the despotic government of Louis XIV.; and the Revolution was the growth of this victory. In England, the Protestant party gained the dominion under the Tudors; the struggle against the Stuarts and the completion of the English constitution was the result. In Germany, the opposition of parties was not followed either by victory or conciliation; the result was the Thirty Years' War, and the political paralysis of Germany, from which it is only now beginning to recover.
This Thirty Years' War, the worst desolation of a populous nation since the national exodus, is the second period of German history which gave a peculiar tendency to the character of the people. The war shattered into ruins the popular strength, but it also certainly removed the dangers which threatened German cultivation, by the alliance of the Imperial House with the Roman Hierarchy. It also separated the Imperial State, politically, from the rest of Germany; what was lost to France in the west by the Hapsburgers, was gradually regained to Germany in the east by another Royal House. The great destruction caused by the war, changed the State life of Germany to a hollow form; it threw the Germans almost two centuries back, in comparison with their English kinsmen, in wealth, population, and political condition. It must again be repeated that it destroyed at least two thirds, probably three fourths of the population, and a still greater portion of their goods and cattle, and deteriorated the morals, arts, education, and energies of the survivors. Out of these remains of German life, the modern character of Germans was slowly and feebly developed--individual life under despotic government.
It is this period, in which our popular strength was slowly raised from the deepest degradation, which will be here portrayed by the narratives of contemporaries. Again a great time, but a period of German development of which the last and highest results have not yet become history.
The way in which the people raised themselves from this abyss is peculiar to the Germans. Marvellous as was the destruction, so also was the revival. More than one nation has been overpowered by outward enemies or cast down under political oppression, each of which has had to undergo special trials which have given them from time to time a hopeless aspect, but through the whole course of history a renovation has been effected, so that the strengthening of the State has gone hand-in-hand with intellectual progress. When the Greeks during the Persian war felt their own political worth, their science and art blossomed almost simultaneously; when Augustus had given a new support and constitution to the declining Roman republic, there began forthwith a new Imperial culture in enjoyment-seeking Rome: the intellectual life, from Horace and Virgil to Tacitus, followed the destiny of the State; the increased expansive power of the Empire ever gave a wider stretch and stronger independence to individual minds. And again in England,--when the war of the Red and White Roses was ended, when the people peacefully danced round the maypole, and a brilliant court life enforced courtly manners upon the wild Barons, when daring merchants and adventurers waylaid the Spanish galleons, and conveyed the spices of India up the Thames,--then the popular energies found expression in the greatest poetic soul of modern nations. Even in France the splendid despotism of Louis XIV., after the wars of the Huguenots and the Fronde, gave suddenly to the tranquillised country a brilliant courtly bloom of art and literature. It was quite otherwise in Germany. Whilst everywhere else the State might be compared to the body whose abundant energy calls forth the creative development of the nation, in Germany, since the Thirty Years' War, owing to the awakening popular energy, a new national civilisation has gradually arisen in a shattered, decaying government, under corrupting and humiliating political influences of every kind,--first dependent upon strangers; then independent and free; finally, a shining pattern for other people, producing blossoms of poetry, and blossoms of science of the greatest beauty, of the highest nobility, and the greatest inward freedom: it was developed by individuals who were deficient in just that discipline of the mind and character, which is only given to them when they are members of a great State. The German culture of the eighteenth century was indeed the wonderful creation of a soul with out a body.
It is still more remarkable that this new national cultivation helped, in an indirect way, to turn the Germans into political men. From it the enthusiasm and struggle for an endangered German State, passions, parties, and at last political institutions were developed. Never did literature play such a part or solve such great problems, as the German, from 1750 to the present day. For it is thoroughly unlike the modern endeavours of other nations, who from patriotism, that is to say, from the need of political progress, mature an objective literature. In these cases art and poetry serve, from the beginning, as handmaids to politics; they are perhaps artificially fostered, and the artistic and scientific worth is probably less than the patriotic aim. In Germany, science, literature, and art only existed for their own sake: the highest creative power and the warmest interests of the educated classes were engrossed with them alone; they were always German and patriotic, in opposition to the overpowering French taste; but, with the exception of a few outbreaks of political anger or popular enthusiasm, they had no other aim than to serve truth and beauty. Nay, the greatest poets and scholars considered the political condition under which they lived, as a common reality out of which art alone could elevate mankind.
As therefore in Germany art and science desired nothing but honourable exertion within their own sphere, their pure flames refined the sensitive disposition of Germans till it was hardened for a great political struggle.
Before giving pictures of the German character during the last two centuries, we will endeavour to portray the peculiarities which are developed in the family relations of the different classes of ancient Germany, both the peasantry, the nobility, and the citizens. But the aim of the book is to show how, by means of the Hohenzollern State, Germans changed gradually from private to public men; how dramatic power and interest entered into lyrical individual life; how the Burgher class was strengthened by increasing education, and the nobility and peasantry submitted to its influence; finally, how it cast aside the specialities of classes, and began to form characters according to its own needs and points of view.
CHAPTER I.
THE LIFE OF THE GERMAN PEASANT.
(1240–1790.)
In seven hundred years the independent life of the Greeks terminated; about a thousand embraces the growth, dominion, and decline of the Roman power; but the German Empire had lasted fifteen hundred years from the fight in the Teutoburg Forest,[1] before it began to emerge from its epic time. So entirely different was the duration of the life of the ancient world to that of the modern; so slow and artificial are our transformations. How rich were the blossoms which Greek life had matured in the five centuries from Homer to Aristotle! How powerful were the changes which the Roman State had undergone, from the rise of the free peasantry on the hills of the Tiber to the subjection of the Italian husbandmen