Fischart, Johann

FISCHART, JOHANN. - Writer, b. in Mainz (?) in 1546, d. in Strasbourg in 1590. He was the most vigorous and free German personality of the second half of the century, marked by resolute Calvinism and by a bellicose attitude toward Catholicism, Jesuitism and Lutheranism.

His vast output consists partly of polemical writings of a confessional character (Der Binnenherb, 1579; Das Jesuitenhütlein, 1580, etc.), and partly — and here he excels — of satirical writings against his own countrymen. In these he is the fool-judge who, amid laughter and buffoonery, speaks the raw truth, whether by reworking in rhyme the popular book of the adventures of Till Eulenspiegel (1572), or by inveighing (in Aller Praktik Grossmutter, 1572) against the evil custom of sorcery. His fame rests principally on the short poem Das gleichhaft Schiff von Zürich (1576; reprinted in Tübingen in 1828 with a preface by Uhland), but more on the Geschichtsblitterung (1575), in appearance a translation of Rabelais's Gargantua, but in reality clearly distinct from it, both for the transfer of the action to Germany and for its respect for religion and for its aim, which is not educational but moral. Prodigious is the use he makes there of the language, which he bends to his every purpose, succeeding almost as a gangway toward the coming Baroque.