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- Herausgeber: Dedalus
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A companion volume to Simplicissimus: the story of younggirl named Courage, caught up in the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War, who survives, even prospers, by the use of her native cunning and sexual attraction. Completely amoral, she flits through a succession of husbands and lovers and ends her life with a band of Gypsies. Theconceit here is that Courage supposedly tells her story to get back at Simplicissimus, who treats her dismissively in his own memoirs. Thisis a remorseless tale of lechery, knavery and trickery.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Dedalus European Classics
General Editor: Mike Mitchell
The Life of Courage
A map of the main towns and countries in ‘Courage’.
The state boundaries are modern.
Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
The Life of Courage: the notorious Thief, Whore and Vagabond
Translated with an introduction and chronology by Mike Mitchell
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,
24–26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE
email: [email protected]
www.dedalusbooks.com
ISBN 978 1 907650 01 7
Dedalus is distributed in the USA by SCB Distributors,
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First published by Dedalus in 2001
First Dedalus e-book edition in 2010
Translation copyright © Mike Mitchell 2001
The right of Mike Mitchell to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988
Printed in Finland by WS. Bookwell
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.
THE TRANSLATOR
Mike Mitchell is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme. His publications include The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: the Meyrink Years 1890–1932; Harrap’s German Grammar and a study of Peter Hacks.
Mike Mitchell’s translations include the novels of Gustav Meyrink and Herbert Rosendorfer, The Great Bagarozy by Helmut Krausser, Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen and The Road to Darkness by Paul Leppin.
His translation of Letters Back to Ancient China by Herbert Rosendorfer won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck German Translation Prize.
German Literature from Dedalus
Dedalus features German Literature in translation in its programme of contemporary and classic European fiction and in its anthologies.
Androids from Milk – Egner
£7.99
Undine – Fouque
£6.99
The Dedalus Book of German Decadence – Furness
£9.99
The German Refugees – Goethe
£6.99
The Life of Courage – Grimmelshausen
£8.99
Simplicissimus – Grimmelshausen
£12.99
Tearaway – Grimmelshausen
£6.99
The Great Bagarozy -Krausser
£7.99
The Road to Darkness – Leppin
£7.99
The Angel of the West Window – Meyrink
£9.99
The Golem – Meyrink
£6.99
The Green Face – Meyrink
£7.99
The Opal (and other stories) – Meyrink
£7.99
Walpurgisnacht – Meyrink
£6.99
The White Dominican – Meyrink
£6.99
The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy – Mitchell
£12.99
On the Run – Prinz
£6.99
The Staff Room – Orths
£6.99
The Architect of Ruins – Rosendorfer
£9.99
Grand Solo for Anton – Rosendorfer
£9.99
Letters Back to Ancient China – Rosendorfer
£6.99
Stephanie – Rosendorfer
£7.99
The Class – Ungar
£7.99
The Maimed – Ungar
£6.99
Forthcoming titles include:
The Dedalus Meyrink Reader – Meyrink
£9.99
For further details visit our website www.dedalusbooks.com or email us at [email protected] or write to Dedalus Limited, 24–26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE
Introduction
Grimmelshausen quickly followed up the success of Simplicissimus (1668, though dated 1669) with a number of other books to which he himself refers in the foreword to the last as the ‘Simplician writings’. Probably the best of these – and certainly nowadays, since Brecht’s appropriation of the heroine, the best-known – is The Life of Courage, the Notorious Thief, Whore and Vagabond, which appeared in 1670. All these books were published under elaborate anagrammatic pseudonyms (German Schleifheim von Sulsfort, Philarchus Grossus von Trommenheim, Michael Rechulin von Sehmsdorf) and the identity of Grimmelshausen as author was not established until 1835.
The Life of Courage is conceived as A Counterblast to Simplicissimus. Courage is the woman with whom Simplicissimus has an affair, then discards as a ‘man-trap … whose easy virtue soon disgusted’ him. Neither her name, nor the means by which he gets rid of her are mentioned in Simplicissimus but his nasty and embarrassing trick is described in some detail in Courage and is part of the fictional motivation for her recounting her life story. She does it, she tells us, to shame Simplicissimus by showing the world what a depraved woman he boasted of having had an affair with. This allows Grimmelshausen to make his heroine give a frank confession of all her misdeeds: cheating, lying, stealing and, above all, fornication. The claim of a serious purpose in using her story as a dire warning is really a piece of moral sticking plaster rather crudely applied in a note from the author at the end. The third of these ‘Simplician writings’, Der seltzame Springinsfeld (The strange life of Tearaway), starts with a meeting between Simplicissimus, Tearaway and ‘the author’ in which the latter tells how he met Courage and was conned into writing down her life story for her.
Courage is in many ways the female counterpart to Simplicissimus. Like him, she is swept away in the wars as a young innocent and like him makes her way through the devastation of war-torn Germany by using her considerable talents, in her case her beauty, a nimble and resourceful mind and an extremely elastic conscience. Unlike Simplicissimus, who becomes involved in the war as a boy only after the battle of Nördlingen in 1634, Courage goes through almost the whole thirty years, from the initial Bohemian campaign of 1619–1620 to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
As in Simplicissimus, Grimmelshausen again employs the device of the heroine’s mysterious parentage which, of course, turns out to be aristocratic. Although her father is only referred to by initial, as Count T., a nobleman who ‘had been the most powerful in the kingdom’ but had been forced to flee to Istanbul because of his rebellion against the emperor, the reference is clearly to Mathias Thurn, the leader of the Bohemian rebels. This device is borrowed from the courtly romances which Grimmelshausen, and his Spanish models, parodied. It is interesting to note that he also wrote a courtly novel himself, Dietwalt und Amelinde, perhaps, like Sullivan desperately trying to make his name as a composer of grand opera, in order to appear to the public as a respectably serious artist.
Courage’s life is set against a real historical background, which Grimmelshausen emphasises by frequent reference to battles, sieges and campaigns, regiments, armies and generals. In her odyssey she covers almost the whole of the territory drawn into the German wars, from Slovakia in the east to the Rhine in the west, from Holstein in the north to Mantua in the south. This background is matched by the realism of the characterisation, realism not so much in the sense of detailed psychology as in the concentration on physical reality and an absence of idealistic motivation. Most of the men offer Courage violence (some getting more than they bargained for) and she is frequently raped; a particularly graphic episode, with deliberate humiliation, is in chapter 12. She, for her part, almost comes to expect this and is quite happy to use her attraction to gain money and power over men. She has seven husbands (or similar), numerous lovers and hundreds of customers for her services as a prostitute. She accepts the brutal facts of life in a brutal age and makes the most of them. One aspect that will perhaps strike the reader as modern is the way in which she insists on preserving her independence, especially in the financial and contractual arrangements she makes with some of the men she marries or otherwise lives with.
Courage tells her own story and the crude facts of her life are matched by a language which is vigorous and earthy. Despite the occasional moral reflection the author obviously feels obliged to put into her mouth, Courage has a great capacity for enjoyment and is completely unrepentant. (The relationship between morality and entertainment is well put by Henry and Mary Garland in their comment on another of Grimmelshausen’s books: ‘The moral basis of the story is somewhat impaired by the gusto devoted to the description of obscene incidents.’) As the first chapter makes clear, this is no old woman regretting the aberrations of youth, but one who has enjoyed life to the full and intends to go on doing so for as long as she can. To describe this she is not afraid of crude, down-to-earth expressions, but she also uses suggestive remarks, vivid images and even outrageous puns. The whole narrative throbs with the personality of its heroine.
Although Brecht, in Mother Courage and her Children, borrowed the name of Courage and the regimental canteen she runs for part of the book, that, together with the background of war and devastation, is really all the two works have in common. Grimmelshausen’s Courage, for example, is barren and has no children. Whereas she often manages to come out on top, and always comes up smiling, Brecht’s character is a rather grim survivor. This reflects the different purposes of the two authors. Grimmelshausen wants to entertain his readers and teach a moral lesson, Brecht intends the audience to derive a political message from his play. While both figures exploit circumstances whenever possible, Grimmelshausen’s does so with zest, fully aware that it is a dog-eat-dog world and determined to eat rather than be eaten. Brecht’s Courage takes advantage of people where she can, but is unaware of what the audience (supposedly) sees, namely the contradiction that all her activities ultimately support a system which is so arranged that it is impossible for her to thrive. Zest, perhaps not surprisingly, is not a characteristic we associate with Mother Courage.
Chronology
As with Simplicissimus, frequent reference to battles, generals and armies sets the fictional story of Courage against a real historical background. The following chronology records the main datable events in the novel to give a general indication of the time scheme against which the story is set.
Summer 1620: ‘When the Duke of Bavaria and General Buquoy marched into Bohemia to depose the Winter King, I was a pert young girl of thirteen …’
8 November 1620: ‘I wished I were a man so I could spend my whole life making war. And this desire was only increased by the Battle of the White Mountain …’
Spring 1621: ‘In the meantime we had entered the Hungarian province of Slovakia … and taken Bratislava.’
10 July 1621: ‘… but at Nitra we suffered a reverse in the course of which not only did my captain receive a fatal wound, but our General, Count Buquoy himself, was killed.’
27 April 1622: ‘… for my captain was shot dead at Wiesloch …’
6 May 1622: ‘In that pleasant, not to say lively encounter at Wimpfen …’
2 July 1622: ‘I carried on this way until we defeated the Duke of Brunswick at Höchst …’
29 August 1622: ‘… the Count of Anhalt defeated Mansfeld and the Duke of Brunswick again, this time at Fleurus … my runaway husband was captured, recognised as a deserter and strung up from the nearest tree …’
27 August 1626: ‘… it was the second day after we had joined with Tilly that we came up against the King of Denmark at Lutter.’
12 December 1626: ‘… while I was leaving Hoya, tearful and downcast, with our men, who had surrendered for fear the castle might collapse on top of them …’
Summer/autumn 1627: ‘It was at about this time that Wallenstein, Tilly and Count Schlick overran Holstein and other Danish territories …’
May 1629: ‘We were soon out of the wood and that evening reached the musketeer’s regiment, which was preparing to set out for Italy with the forces of Collalto, Altringer and Gallas.’
Autumn 1629: ‘But at a time when our army was marching at full speed for Italy and had to force its way through Grisons, not many sensible officers were thinking of looking for a wife …’
Winter 1629/30: ‘After the first siege of Mantua we went into winter quarters in a lively little town …’
18 July 1630: ‘Shortly before the imperial army took Mantua …’
29 August 1631: ‘… peace itself broke out between the Empire and the French, just as if our clash had signalled the end of the Italian campaign.’
