Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [38]
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Luther said, ‘Look at their gobs to find out how they speak, then translate so they understand and see you’re speaking to them in German.
OPEN LETTER FROM LUTHER ON TRANSLATION, NUREMBERG, 15 SEPTEMBER 1530.
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In the 17th century, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) penned his Geschichte des Agathon (Agathon; 1766–67), a landmark in German literature because it was the first Bildungsroman (a novel showing the development of the hero); Wieland was also the first to translate Shakespeare into German.
Shortly after Wieland was summoned to Weimar in 1772, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) rose to become Germany’s most powerful literary figure, later joining forces with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) in a celebrated period known as Weimarer Klassik (Weimar classicism; Click here).
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Read Simplicissimus (Adventures of a Simpleton) by Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen as an appetiser to the early German novel.
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Writing in Goethe’s lifetime, the lyricist and early Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), created delicate balance and rhythms. Interestingly, he was largely ignored from the mid-19th century, only to be rediscovered in the early 20th century and misused by Hitler for Nazi propaganda.
A 600km-long tourist route called Fairy-Tale Road leads literary travellers around Germany in the footsteps of the Grimm brothers, Jakob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859). Serious academics who wrote German Grammar and History of the German Language, they’re best known for their collection of fairy tales, myths and legends.
The Düsseldorf-born Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) produced one of Germany’s finest collections of poems when he published Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs) in 1827, but it was his politically scathing Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter’s Tale) that contributed to his work being banned in 1835. By that time, Heine – one of Germany’s most famous Jews – was in Paris, in love with an illiterate salesgirl, and was surrounded by pesky German spies.
MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
The Weimar years witnessed the flowering of Lübeck-born Thomas Mann (1875–1955), recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, whose greatest novels focus on social forms of the day. For Mann, ‘Germany’s first lady’ was writer and poet Ricarda Huch (1864–1947), a courageous opponent of Nazism. Mann’s older brother, Heinrich (1871–1950), adopted a stronger political stance than Thomas in his work; his Professor Unrat (1905) provided the raw material for the Marlene Dietrich film Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel; ).
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A vivid picture of mid-19th-century German society is painted in Heinrich Heine’s Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter’s Tale), based on a trip the writer took from Aachen to Hamburg.
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Berlin’s underworld during the Weimar Republic served as the focus for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin (1878–1957). Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), another Nobel prize winner, adopted the theme of the outsider in Steppenwolf (1927) and imbued New Romantic spirituality into his work after a journey to India in 1911. Antiwar novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front; 1929) by Osnabrück-born Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was banned in 1933 and remains one of the most widely read German books.
Of the generation that has established itself in the literary scene since 1945, Günter Grass (b 1927) is the most celebrated. Grass burst into the literary limelight with his first novel, Die Blechtrommel (Tin Drum; 1959) and grew to become a postwar moral icon – until this was called into question by his youthful membership of the Waffen-SS, which he revealed in his latest book, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion; 2006).
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