Parallel Lives: Martin Opitz and Julius Wilhelm Zincgref

Summary

This essay is dedicated to Conrad Wiedemann in grateful friendship.

The Ingenious Idea of Juxtaposing Two representatives of early modern literature within one biographical sketch, such that the one casts the other into greater relief, recalls the famous prototype of parallel biography: the Bioi paralleloi of Plutarch (ca. 46–ca. 120), whose impact was still felt deep into the nineteenth century. Although certain of Plutarch’s habits — not least his uncritical treatment of textual sources — are no longer acceptable, his concept of the life sketch or character portrait remains extremely stimulating. The goal of a parallel biography of Martin Opitz and Julius Wilhelm Zincgref is to portray these early-seventeenth-century scholar-poets both personally and objectively to discover, on the one hand, what separated them and, on the other, what bound them in humanist friendship (amicitia). The divisive elements stem mainly from the external, or extraliterary, contexts of their lives: their social and religious backgrounds as well as the political and diplomatic spheres in which they operated; the connective elements stem from the internal world of literature itself: the poetological theory and literary ambitions of the two men. Ultimately, however, how we interpret their lives will be best explicated in terms of the cultural anthropology of early modern friendship, in which friendship appears in its premodern form of humanist amicitia, distinguished by a primarily intellectual, not yet individualized emancipation within an otherwise rigidly structured society. This emancipating power increased proportionately to the degree of upheaval experienced by contemporary society.

Amicitia and Literary-political Aspiration

The relationship between the two authors was not free of tension, as two experiences from the years of their most intense literary production illustrate. In 1631 Julius Wilhelm Zincgref (1591–1635) published part two of his collection Teutscher Nation Denckwürdiger Reden (Memorable Speeches of the German Nation). Opitz contributed an alexandrine (six-foot iambic) poem — written on 21 June 1630 in Paris while on a diplomatic mission — to the preface, addressed An Herrn D[octorem] Zincgrefen; it is a conventional preface poem of the occasional, or casual variety common to the period between Humanism and Baroque.