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Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664)
On October 11, 1616, German Baroque
lyric poet and dramatist Andreas
Gryphius was born. For his poems and tragedies
Gryphius chose the topics of pain and moral decay during the times
of the Thirty Years’ War as well as
human restlessness, solitude and inner conflicts. Unless you have
attended a German highschool or have a strong interest in baroque
poetry, you might have never heard of him. Back at school, we had
to learn some of Gryphus’ poems by heart – besides of interpreting
his works again and again. Thus, parts of his poetry have become
part of my life and therefore, I decided to introduce Gryphius and
his work also to the readers of our daily history blog.
Andreas Gryphius and the Thirty
Years’ War
Andreas Gryphius was born on
October 11, 1616, in Großglogau, Silesia, which is today Poland, as
the youngest son of the Protestant archdeacon, Paul Gryphius.
Actually, his German family name was ‘Greif’. But, following the
prevailing fashion, he latinized it to Gryphius. Gryphius was born
right at the beginning of the Thirty Year’s war, which should
influence him as a major topic of his poetry throughout his entire
life. This war involved almost every country in Central Europe. It
was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European
history, and one of the longest continuous wars in modern history.
It was fought largely as a religious war between Protestants and
Catholics. A major consequence of the Thirty Years’ War was the
devastation of entire regions, denuded by the foraging armies.
Famine and disease significantly decreased the population of the
German states, Bohemia, the Low Countries, and Italy; most of the
combatant powers were bankrupted. In these troubled times, Andreas
Gryphius grew up, left early an orphan and driven from his native
town by the war. He received his schooling in various places, but
notably at Görlitz and Fraustadt, where he enjoyed an excellent
classical education.
Early German Poetry
In 1632, Gryphius had witnessed the
pillaging and burning of the Silesian town of Freystadt by Swedish
troops, and immortalized the event in his poem Fewrige
Freystadt in 1637. His first publications included Latin
poetry, Herodis Furiae, et Rachelis lachrymae (1634),
and his first collection of German sonnets (1637). From 1634
until 1636, he studied at the Academic Gymnasium in Danzig
(present-day Gdansk, Poland), where he met professors
Peter Crüger and Johann Mochinger,
who introduced Gryphius to the new German language poetry. Crüger
had for years close contacts to Martin Opitz, who is referred to as
‘father of German poetry‘. In Gdansk a second Latin
Herod epic, dedicated to the Gdansk councillors, and the
Parnassus Renovatus, dedicated to his later patron
Schönborner, were written; in addition, Gryphius probably already
wrote some of the sonnets that were printed in 1637 in the Polish
Lissa.
Georg von Schönborner
In 1636 Gryphius became tutor to
the sons of the eminent jurist Georg von Schönborner, a man of wide
culture and considerable wealth, who had been rewarded by the
emperor Ferdinand II.
with the title and office of imperial count-palatine
(Hofpfalzgraf). Schönborner, who recognized Gryphius’s genius,
crowned him poeta laureatus, gave him the diploma of master of
philosophy, and bestowed on. him a patent of nobility, though
Gryphius never used the title. The two-year stay on the estate of
the well-known lawyer and former imperial official was probably not
always free of tension due to the hypochondriac and paranoid
personality structure of the landlord, but Gryphius found a retreat
and an opportunity for self-study in the rich library. He described
the devastating fire of Freystadt in the night from 8 to 9 July
1637 in the longest German-language prose volume ever written by
him, which was published in the winter of 1637 under the title
Fewrige Freystadt. With this report, which was based on
his own and other eyewitnesses’ observations, Gryphius made many
enemies because he not only realistically described Freystadt’s war
situation, but also criticized the failure of the municipal
authorities in fighting the fire. In 1638, after the death of his
patron he accompanied Schönborner’s two sons on their knight tour
through the Netherlands to the prestigious university in Leiden,
where from 1638 to 1644 he studied a wide range of subjects and
also gave lectures. He traveled on his own to Den Haag, Paris,
Marseille, Florence, Rome, Venice, and Strassbourg in 1644.
Vanitas Mundi
The German baroque literature was
driven by two opposite currents, heavily influenced by the dramatic
events of the Thirty Year’s War: embracement of life and the
vanitas mundi. This Latin word means “vanity” and loosely
translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and
the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. A master of
the sonnet form, Gryphius wrote predominantly sombre poetry,
embodying Christian reflections on the vanity and brevity of human
life and earthly values.
Later Years
Finally, Gryphius settled in 1647
at Fraustadt, where he began his dramatic work. After an absence of
nine years it was certainly not easy for Gryphius to gain a
foothold in Silesia again. In a sonnet he laments the death of
numerous friends and acquaintances. The following two years were
extremely productive in literary terms. He wrote the tragedies
Cardenio and Celinde and Carolus Stuardus and the
comedies Peter Squentz and Horribilicribrifax.
All these pieces appeared in print years later, the
Trauerspiele in the authorized Complete Edition of 1657. A
revised and modified version of Carolus Stuardus appeared
in 1663, after Gryphius had learned new facts about the fate
of Charles Stuart. Calls to various universities
(Frankfurt/Oder, Heidelberg, Uppsala) he rejected. Gryphius married
Rosina Deutschländer in Fraustadt 1649 and in 1650 became secretary
to or legal representative of the estates (Landessyndikus) in the
principality of Glogau, a position he held until his death. Duke
William IV of Sachsen-Weimar inducted him into the Fruitbearing
Society in 1662, where he was referred to as “der Unsterbliche”
(the immortal).
On 16 July 1664 Andreas Gryphius
suffered a fatal stroke during a meeting of the Glogau estates.
One of my favourite poems of
Gryphius is ‘Es ist alles eitel‘ (The Vanity of This
World).
The Vanity of This World
Look anywhere you will, the Earth
is empty show.
What someone builds today, another soon tears down;
Where now a city stands will be a grassy mound,
A place that only shepherds grazing their flocks will know.
What blooms so fair at daybreak, by
noon is trampled low;
What bravely struts and strives soon turns to ash and bone;
No substance lasts forever, no brass, no polished stone.
One moment fortune smiles, the next brings bitter woe.
Tales of our mighty deeds like
dreams must fade away.
How then should Man—Time’s plaything—ever hope to stay?
Oh think, what are those objects we prize beyond compare,
Mere shadows, dust, and wind—all
worthless, false and vain;
Field flowers glimpsed in passing and never seen again!
For that which is immortal, no man seems to care.
Craig Wright, Lecture 16. Baroque
Music: The Vocal Music of Johann Sebastian Bach,
[9]
References and Further
Reading:
[1] Andreas
Gryphius at Poemhunter.com
[2] Andreas Gryphius at
answers.com
[3] Andreas Gryphius works
at gutenberg.org
[4] Works of Andreas
Gryphius at Wikisource (in German)
[5] Horribilicribrifax (Fraktur-Reprint in der
Arno-Schmidt-Referenzbibliothek der GASL)
[6] Works by or about Andreas
Gryphius at Internet Archive
[7] Works by Andreas
Gryphius at LibriVox
[8] Andreas
Gryphius at Wikidata
[9] Craig Wright, Lecture 16. Baroque
Music: The Vocal Music of Johann Sebastian
Bach, Listening to Music (MUSI
112), YaleCourses @
youtube
[10] Monath, Wolfgang (1966). “Gryphius, Andreas” (in German), in: Neue
Deutsche Biographie. Vol. 7. Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot. pp. 242–246
[11]
Timeline of 17th century Poets, via DBpedia and Wikidata
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