German Literature of the Middle Period: Working with the Sources

Summary

In memoriam Victor Lange et Herbert Penzl

Middle German Literature

In the History of German Literature the middle period (Mittlere Literatur) came to be regarded not only as independent of medieval literature, on the one hand, and modern literature, on the other, but as having fundamental significance for the subsequent evolution of German literature after the eighteenth century. Middle German literature includes the period from the end of the fourteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, approximately 1400 to 1750. The term Frühe Neuzeit (early modern period) has become the designation of choice for cultural historians of the middle period, and in this essay both terms — middle and early modern — will be used interchangeably.

The period of middle German literature thus covers some 350 years. Texts have been transmitted to us in abundance in all their variety, but most have yet to be edited, annotated, and properly understood. The intensive textual criticism of the last forty years has made clear that the terminology traditionally used for the historical evaluation of these texts was entirely unsuited to a systematic description of the multifaceted phenomena and problems of this massive body of literature. The individual texts defy the traditional categories that derived not from literature but from the realms of politics, philosophy, religion, and art. The basic error in traditional methodology was that it failed to view literature — which is a humanly constructed world of textuality — as an independent historical achievement (Geschichtsleistung), and instead as a handmaiden to abstract ideologies.

However, when these texts are systematized according to their own literary criteria and reception, an entirely different perspective arises, because texts (and their authors) communicate in reaction to problems, ideas, events, forms, and the like, and produce human discourses that introduce us to the existential problems of people at particular times in history. The middle period is rich in human questions about the right way of living, about values, dangers, the need for change, about criticism and affirmation of old and new authorities.