Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von

GRIMMELSHAUSEN, HANS JAKOB CHRISTOFFEL VON. - German writer, b. at Gelnhausen, or near there, around 1620 (1625?), d. at Reuchen on 17 Aug. 1676. From a poor Protestant family, he took part in the Thirty Years' War and only in maturity was able to settle into a quieter life.

The immense chaos of the times, which was reflected in the spirit of his contemporaries, now under the aspects of distrust, now of cynicism or of violent and corrosive revolt, found in G. the poet in whom a powerful moral aspiration and a closely attuned sensibility were fused: in 1668 there appeared, in 3 books, G.'s masterpiece: Der abenteuerliche Simplicius Simplicissimus. Built upon autobiographical moments (it concerns an ingenuous boy whom the war tosses among the most unforeseen and dangerous adventures, in alternations of misery and wealth, of disgrace and glory, up to the harbor of the meditative and ascetic life), strung along picaresque lines - G. certainly knew, reworked in German, some of the most celebrated Spanish tales of the genre - it is moreover imbued with elements that might be called realistic and so intimately enveloped by the author's moral and specifically religious problem (who, very probably, converted after '60 to Catholicism) as to be able to be considered a first Bildungsroman, informed by a concentrated will to build a better spiritual world. It is by this same will, but with aspects more common to the taste of the age, such as violent satire and an openly didactic tendency, that G.'s other numerous writings are also informed.

Gastone Pettenati