GRIMMELSHAUSEN, Hans Jakob Christoffel von. – German writer, born at Gelnhausen, or nearby, around 1620 (1625?), died at Reuchen on 17 Aug. 1676. Of 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 in the guise of mistrust, now of cynicism or violent and corrosive revolt, found in G. the poet in whom a powerful and sensitive morality was fully fused: in 1668 there appeared, in five books, G.’s masterpiece: Der abenteuerliche Simplicius Simplicissimus. Centered on autobiographical moments (it tells of a naive boy whom war cast into the most unforeseen and perilous adventures, alternating between poverty and wealth, scorn and glory, until he reaches the haven of a meditative and ascetic life), woven with picaresque threads – G. certainly knew, in German reworking, some of the most celebrated Spanish novellas of the genre – it is then enriched with elements that might be called realistic and so intimately wrapped in the moral and specifically religious problem of the author (who, very probably, converted to Catholicism after 1660) as to be considered a first Bildungsroman, informed by a concentrated will to construct a better spiritual world. To this same will, but with more common aspects of the taste of the age, such as violent satire and openly didactic tendency, are also shaped the numerous other writings of G.