Parallel Lives: Sigmund von Birken and Duke Anton Ulrich

Summary

Two German Men of Extraordinary Literary Ability, despite being born into widely separated social classes in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, were to cultivate a lasting personal and professional relationship spanning almost four decades. Like their contemporaries Marvell, Molière, and Racine, they came of age in a time of war yet directed their energies toward the world of art. Although changes in literary taste caused many later critics and readers to overlook their considerable accomplishments, in their own time they were highly respected figures; recent scholarship has reassessed their work and returned to the view that they were two of the most influential literary figures of the Baroque. These two men who led different but interconnected lives were Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1633–1714) and Sigmund von Birken (1626–81), a citizen of Nuremberg.

Anton Ulrich was born into a noble family and throughout life enjoyed the rights and privileges of the upper class. His was a life of power and leisure, one over which he exercised considerable control. Birken, on the other hand, came from modest circumstances and suceeded, against enormous social and economic odds, to become one of the most influential and respected literary figures of his time in Germany. As different as these lives were, they both reflect in a revealing way broader social and political changes taking place in Germany, as well as in western society as a whole, in the early modern period. It was during the lifetimes of Birken and Anton Ulrich, for instance, that the legitimacy of the established systems of rule and privilege were being questioned throughout Europe as never before. The aristocracy — or, in places like Nuremberg, the patriciate — continued to hold the reins of power and to determine political policies. But economic vitality was increasingly the product of an entrepreneurial merchant class whose wealth could buy political influence and pay for higher education for their sons. The intellectual elite of Germany arose in part from this newly wealthy Schicht (social level, class) and, in part, as in Birken’s case, from sheer talent and a desire for social betterment. Confident in their scholarly and professional achievements, the members of the European respublica litteraria promoted the idea, in circulation among humanists since the early Renaissance, of a “true nobility” (vera nobilitas), one whose privilege was based not on blood but on merit.