leisure hours at night he took up a book or violin. His son became a physician; the son of a craftsman, a painter; and the minstrel, who had no sons, or at best illegitimate ones, pursued his playful and tuneful path between the respectable classes, tempting them to try their own hand at singing and versifying.
All the forces that brought the Germans so much trouble when they directed their vision to far-off things and world dominion brought them happiness when they concentrated on music and intellectual endeavor. These flights of fancy from the thralldom of a life of violence have brought forth a wealth of stories about spooks and magic, glimpses into the nether realm which the Germans are so fond of mentioning in their farces and sacred plays.
With part of the people giving themselves up to discoveries in the world of art and intellect, the gap separating them from those who directed the country’s destinies grew even wider. The commoners resigned themselves to the leadership of the nobility and held more and more aloof from politics. The nobility in turn, filled with contempt for this other world it found so incomprehensible, was less and less concerned with matters of the mind. This growing discord in the German character, as expressed in social life, led to a schism, the full force of which is making itself felt to this day.
What we here and hereinafter call the German sense for music is merely a collective term for the immortal works the Germans have offered the world: for all their great art—the Cologne Cathedral, the visions of Grünewald, Goethe’s poems—are musical in an elemental way. Here we are confronted with the greatness that marks their personality—the reverse side of their nebulous drifting character. Across the ages and peoples, their mastery of music offers the purest revelation of their rich endowment.
9
THE POETS and minstrels who enlivened the German Middle Ages, in addition to the architects and creative artisans, were of a worldly mind, loving “Vanity Fair.” The Church turned against them; bishops spoke of buffoons and courtesans when they meant poets and singers; and an abbot of St. Gall who wrote love songs was already reckoned half a heretic.
At first it was only the knights in their castles, constituting the society of the time, who kept singers and poets in addition to their pages, falconers and mistresses. How else were they to dispel the tedium of winter? Between one raid and the next they sat in their gloomy castle halls, blackening with the soot from the pine torches and smoky fireplaces, glad at last to be rid of the crushing weight of their armor. For the hundredth time they related their deeds of valor to each other—how many raven-locked maidens they had ravished in the Holy Land. The women sat farther down in their smaller chamber—for not even the mistress of the manor was asked to sit at the table in honor of a new guest, and the men for the most part kept to themselves.
For the strange contradictions of the German character assigned to the women of the age of chivalry a position midway between slave and goddess. In France at this time women were already sitting with the men at meals, even then paired off and in all likelihood at the small tables at which they are still seen in every French bistro—or were until yesterday. They sat and sipped from the same cup with their squires, cutting their meat for them in turn. But in the German castles women were chattels of the knight, handed over—one might even say, sold—by their fathers after prolonged haggling. Often they were of extremely tender age—Kriemhild was but fifteen when she married—yet their welfare depended on whether they bore healthy sons or merely daughters. “In durance vile,” as the law put it, the husband might sell and even kill them. That this is documented down into the fifteenth century throws a significant light on German history, as does the fact that the Frisians offered human sacrifices into the thirteenth century.
Yet at court and at the tournaments these same women, who had neither freedom nor property nor any rights over their children, were placed in the seat of honor. Homage was paid them, and after the French fashion their silk ribands became the champions’ prize; their signal for mercy was the law of the court; above all, their clothes became the center of attraction for the spectators and the poets too; epics and chronicles are full of long descriptions of their cloaks and hats, down to the manner of their smile.
Yet girls were exclusively destined for marriage, and their abduction and even their love almost never became subjects for song. The knight’s desire turned solely to the wives of other knights, yet these seem to have strictly upheld the honor of their homes and the ideal of monogamy. When Minne, as this higher form of love was called, was imported to give a higher content to their crude warrior and robber lives, it soon became the great fashion, with far-reaching effects on the national life. It reached the convents and monasteries too—nuns and monks reading Juvenal and Ovid, forsooth, even in each other’s company, to the dismay of aged bishops. How much more colorfully could castles and palaces dispose of love! It was always the physical possession of the lady to which the knight aspired, and she knew with great guile how to take advantage of her handicap as the wife of another as long as her womanly instinct told her it was possible. Often she spent years accepting the worship due to a remote goddess, all the while sleeping by the side of her husband, who in turn might be worshipping at another altar. There were far fewer examples in Germany in those years of husbands doing away with their wives and their wives’ lovers than in more southerly lands. This was the only form of killing, however, in which the Germans lagged behind other nations.
10
IT WAS about this time and under such social and linguistic conditions that the two great and thrilling epics of Germany were written—poems in whose intense power this first epoch of German art was lifted to the heights of a national document.
The Nibelungenlied spreads its wings farthest in time, since it was created between the sixth and fifteenth centuries. For this epic, rightly regarded as the national poem of the Germans, reveals their soul in all its sinister savagery, without pretense or apology. Here their passions—cruelty and vengeance—rise to demoniac proportions, and since they recur with gods as with men, they can only be looked upon as symbols. The difference between the Northern Seas, forests and steppes and the fertile countryside of the South, the spiritual contrast between North Sea and Mediterranean, become clear when one compares the Nibelungenlied with the Iliad, from a purely human rather than esthetic point of view. Such a comparison does full justice to the basic paganism which they both share. Homer, two thousand years the senior, ought to appear closer to the elements, further removed from culture, his characters of greater savagery.
Yet what a contrast, when one compares Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope with Siegfried, Hagen and Brunhild! Murder and guile are amply foreshadowed by the Greeks, but they are used to defend love, loyalty, freedom. The Nibelungenlied, on the contrary, might be called the glorification of perfidy, for it is this, together with the German passion for revenge, that impels its heroes. The cunning and the vengefulness exhibited by these men and especially by their womenfolk; how friends and spouses break the vows they have sworn, betraying each other in the very bridal night; how liegeman breaks faith with his lord, not for the sake of love, liberty and home, but for a golden treasure over whose loss everything crumbles into ruins in the end—all this sets the basic spirit of the Nibelungenlied apart not only from the Greek, but also from the Anglo-French spirit, which at this same time was turning to the Holy Grail for its national epics. Whoever seeks to grasp the deep passions that today again flame in the Germans should study the Nibelungenlied in the original, or at least consult an adequate summary of the original, rather than the distortions of the Wagnerian operas which are virtually the only versions known abroad today.
The three great poets of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried of Strasbourg, and Walther von der Vogelweide, thrice confirm throughout the epoch of their activity the social law of the German spirit. They all flourished while the Reich disintegrated; they all came from the South of Germany; and they all were commoners, or knights so
