And yet there was one great exception—a Court of the Muses in the very heart of Germany, with a prince who played sponsor to the spirit. That was the landgrave Herman of Thuringia who resided in the Wartburg. Except for the Court of Vienna it was only here in Saxony, later the home of great musicians, that the honor of the German princes was saved. Three times this happened—around 1200, around 1500, and finally around 1800; for it was here in the Wartburg or at least close by that Luther and Goethe found princely protectors. That the German Republic in the year 1919 removed its parliament to Weimar had a profound symbolic meaning.
The poetry that later came into being in the medieval cities was far inferior. The craftsmen were to give rise to great painters and sculptors, but as poets they lagged behind. The mastersingers of Nuremberg and Augsburg, who rose from the crafts to special schools of song, have left behind nothing to enter into the heart of the nation—not even Hans Sachs, the shoemaker, six thousand of whose poems have disappeared altogether.
Indeed, neither the carnival plays nor the craftsmen’s farces, nor the great epics, live on among the people—only the songs, beginning with Walther von der Vogelweide.
The minstrel was the musician whom the people put up against the singers at the courts. A few, of course, passed from one estate to the other. For this reason the minstrel’s position was full of curious contradictions, similar to that of the women for whom he sang. Was he a pickpocket or a messenger of the Gods? In Worms the burghers were prohibited from taking him into their homes; elsewhere he was lumped together with other suspicious characters, such as jugglers, dancers and animal trainers.
The source of this attitude lay in the people rather than in the cities. The minstrel was essentially a wayfarer on the highway, visiting a village inn, the courtyard of a castle, a dance in the market place. The first great poet produced by the Germans could play the fiddle and clash the cymbals. Only a faint inkling of the sweetness and freshness in the poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide can be conveyed to those unfamiliar with the German tongue, for even Germans today can grasp his ancient dialect only with difficulty.
Walther, the first German poet and musician of real stature, was an Austrian, born in the Tyrol around 1170; for a short while he was at the court of Vienna; then he took to the highway. In truth we know nothing about him except what he tells of himself in his songs. We do know, however, that the decisive turn did not come until he had forsaken the court for the highway. Like Goethe, Walther followed the French fashion for only a few years, shining in sparkling verses before finding his mother tongue. But the well-springs opened up to him, and they are still open to us, as in the pristine freshness of Goethe’s youthful songs.
Walther’s name grew notorious as well as famous for the manful attitude he took as a political poet. He wrote about the flight of peace from the highways; everywhere in nature order prevailed—but not in Germany; the Pope he called a servant of Satan.
Only late in life, when he had grown gray on the highways, exhausted by the factional struggles, did he find a patron. He had written, now for this, now for that rival king, whichever was to his advantage, for, in the end, Walther was a German. But later, Frederic II granted him a small homestead, as Augustus had once done with Horace. In all likelihood the King did not even know Walther; but a young knight, a companion in falconry, may have sung him Walther’s song of the Falcon and the Beloved, adding that the poet was eking out his wretched life on the highways. The Emperor, after all, was himself a poet, and between the two cups of wine he told the Chancellor that the singer in the North must be aided. It is a wondrous moment in German history, and we grasp it more profoundly than the two men did then—to see the greatest king of the Middle Ages with a flourish of his pen presenting to the greatest singer of his time, far from his court, a shack, a garden, a little piece of ground.
11
THE MISTS are lifting. Through the shifting, heavy clouds in which men and forces of the German Middle Ages grope a light shines in the distance. Is it the dawn of a new day? It is the morning star that speeds it on its way.
From very different sources—from mystics who sought to sense and divine rather than to know, from heretics who sought to know and comprehend rather than merely to pray—there arose in the fifteenth century the cry for universal knowledge, for a learning that should not remain the secret prerogative of the priests. The German language prevailed in letters and in law, and it spread widely. The burghers and peasants wanted more than the Church had given them—knowledge, an understanding of God and the world—and this vision of democracy pervaded the town halls under their mighty towers, the gloomy halls of the universities. Hitherto all knowledge had been confined to the copies laboriously made by the monks, and how few they were! The time was ripe for invention. As early as 1400 pictures had been cut in wood and metal, and pressings or printings had been made of them. What was needed was the inspiration to cast movable type quickly and cheaply. In those days a young man in Strasbourg was trying to answer this question.
Born about 1400 in Mayence, Johannes Gensfleisch, called Gutenberg, had emigrated with his father. He was not of the gentry, as has been asserted, but the son of a burgher, a member of the goldsmiths’ guild, for he was a gem cutter. He began to make mirrors, and while mounting them in metal frames with the help of a press, he conceived the idea of using a similar press to hold individual types, joined in words, sentences and pages, which might then be printed.
Lack of money drove him, like most inventors, on his way. He returned to his home town, where he found a certain Fust, who has impressed himself upon history through no merit of his own. He was the type of avaricious and unimaginative financial backer who even today exploits the genius of artists and inventors, becoming the master of those whose shoelaces he is unworthy to loosen. Soon afterward the banker sued the genius—just as still happens today—because the debtor’s work had not progressed sufficiently. Fust won in court, though he himself was guilty of having defaulted on promised payments. The judge assigned Gutenberg’s type to him, and but for the intercession of a priest in Mayence, the inventor might have perished.
For it was none other than the Church that first grasped the meaning of this most dangerous of all modern inventions—the same Church that should have destroyed it, burning the inventor together with his type! Did it not sense the diabolical spirit that dwelt in these little letters, these wooden frames, this black ink? Instead it became the first client of the new art. The first documents printed by the creator of the new light were those of the dark ages—letters of indulgence, in which the Church forgave the faithful their sins, for money. As in the fairy tale, it was a remote and legendary prince, the King of Cyprus, who was at the time rallying the faithful against the infidel Turks, so that he might save his inherited isle. To finance this war, the Pope had indulgences distributed throughout all the countries by his agents. The German agent found it useful to have the papers printed instead of written, for in this manner a few hours sufficed to broadcast a hundredfold that all souls were released from their sins for the years from 1452 to 1455—if they paid well.
Gutenberg, then about sixty and all his life a bachelor because he gave all his time to inventions, had been called to the Archbishop of Nassau. He could now set about completing what he had long begun: the printing of a German Bible.
Those who have handled this first forty-two–line Bible of 1455 (it is too heavy to be lifted and must be inspected on a lectern; one of the few still preserved is now in New York) marvel that instead of a first clumsy effort like the first steam engine or the first automobile they are face to face with a work that is perfect. Centuries of monastery practice in miniature are solemnly transferred to the initials on the printed page. This was precisely the problem facing the type cutter and founder—how to combine beauty and utility.
GOTHIC
