GRIMMELSHAUSEN, HANS JAKOB CHRISTOFFEL von. — German writer, born at Gelnhausen, or near there, around 1620 (1625?), died at Reuchen on 17 August 1676. Of poor Protestant family, he took part in the Thirty Years’ War and only in maturity was able to settle into a more tranquil life.
The immense turmoil of the times, which was reflected in the spirit of his contemporaries, at different moments, under the aspects of distrust, cynicism, or violent and corrosive revolt, found in G. the poet in whom a powerful moral inspiration and a responsive sensibility were fused: in 1668 there appeared, in three books, G.’s masterpiece: Der abenteuerliche Simplicius Simplicissimus. Based on autobiographical moments (it concerns a naïve boy whom the war hurls into the most unforeseen and dangerous adventures, through alternating misery and wealth, concealment and glory, until he reaches the haven of a meditative and ascetic life), developed along picaresque lines — G. certainly knew, in German adaptations, some of the most celebrated Spanish tales of the genre — it is further composed of elements that might be called realistic and so intimately enveloped by the author’s moral, and specifically religious, concern (who, in all probability, converted to Catholicism after 1660) that it may be regarded as an early Bildungsroman, informed by a concentrated determination to construct a better spiritual world. This same determination, though with aspects more typical of the taste of the period, such as violent satire and an openly didactic tendency, also informs G.’s numerous other writings.