THE TRANSITION PERIOD (1350-1600) To the End of the 15th Century.—By the middle of the 14th century, knighthood was rapidly declining, and the conditions under which mediaeval poetry had flourished were passing. But the stories of chivalry still appealed as stories to the people, although the old way of telling them was no longer appreciated; the feeling for beauty of form and expression was lost. Signs of the decadence are to be seen in a continuation of Parzival by two Alsatians, Claus Wisse and Philipp Colin (c. 1335), and in an Apollonius von Tyrus by Heinrich von Neuenstadt (c. 1315) . The story of Siegfried was retold in a rough ballad, Das Lied vom hiirnen Seyfried, the Heldenbuch was recast in Knittelvers or doggerel (1472), and even the Arthurian epic was parodied. A no less marked symptom of decadence is to be seen in a large body of allegorical poetry analogous to the Roman de la Rose in France. As time went on, prose versions of the old stories became more general, and out of these developed the V olks biicher, which were the favourite reading of the German people for centuries. As the last monuments of the decadent narrative literature of the middle ages, we may regard the Buck der Aben teuer of Ulrich Fiietrer, written at the end of the 15th century, and Der Weisskonig and Teuerdank by the emperor Maximilian I. , Printed in the early years of the i6th. At the be ginning of the new epoch the Minnesang could still point to two poets of distinction, Hugo von Montfort (1357-1423) and Oswald von Wolkenstein ; but as the lyric passed into the hands of the middle-class poets of the German towns, its emotional sensitiveness gave place to moral and religious dogmatism ; and the simple forms of the older lyric were superseded by ingenious metrical distortions. Under the influence of writers like Heinrich von Meissen ("Frauenlob," c. 1250-1318), Heinrich von Miigeln and Michael Beheim (1416–c. 1480), the Minnesang passed over into the Meistergesang. In the later 15th and in the 16th centuries all the south German towns possessed flourishing Meistersinger schools in which the art of writing verse was taught and practised according to complicated rules.
The great lyric poetry of these transition centuries was not the Meistergesang, but the Volkslied. Never before or since has Germany been able to point to such a rich harvest of popular poetry as now. Every form of popular poetry is to be found in the old collections—songs of love and war, hymns and drinking songs, songs of spring and winter and historical ballads. In prose the most popular form was the Schwank or comic anecdote. Collections of such Schwanke range from the practical jokes of Till Eulenspiegel (1515), and the coarse witticisms of the P f afe vom Kalenberg (end of 14th century) and Peter Left (155o), to the religious and didactic anecdotes of J. Pauli's Schimpf and Ernst (1522) and the more literary R ollwagenbiichlein (i5) of Jorg Wickram and the Wendunmut (1563 seq.) of H. W. Kirchhoff. Of the first importance is the Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), where the humorous anecdote became a vehicle of the bitterest satire. It appeared in 1494, and is a landmark on the way that led to the Reformation. The beast fable and beast epic appealed with peculiar force to the new generation. At the very close of the Middle High German period, Ulrich Boner revived the Aesopic fable in his Edelstein translations of Aesop in the following century added to the popularity of the fable (q.v.), and in the century of the Reforma tion it became, in the hands of Burkard Waldis (Esopus, 1548) and Erasmus Alberus (Bach von der Tugend and Weisheit, 155o), a favourite vehicle of satire and polemic. A still more popular form of the beast fable was the epic of Reinke de V os, which had been cultivated by Flemish poets in the 13th and 14th centuries and has come down to us in a Low Saxon translation, published at Lubeck in 1498.
The drama, as we have seen, had practically no existence in Middle High German times. As in all European literatures, it emerged slowly and with difficulty from the Church liturgy. As time went on, the vernacular was substituted for the original Latin, and with increasing demands for pageantry, the scene of the play was removed to the churchyard or the market—place; the next step was an enlargement of the scope of the religious play to include legends of the saints, and finally we find a complete separation of the drama from ecclesiastical ceremony. The most interesting example of this encroachment of the secular spirit is the Spiel von Frau Jutten by an Alsatian, Dietrich Schernberg, in 1480. Meanwhile, in the 15th century, a beginning was made to a drama entirely independent of the Church. The mimic repre sentations—originally allegorical in character—with which the people amused themselves at the great festivals of the year, were interspersed with dialogue, and performed on an improvised stage. This was the beginning of the Fastnachtsspiel or Amongst the earliest cultivators of this type of play were Hans Rosenpliit (fl. c. 146o) and Hans Folz (fl. c. both of Nuremberg.
The most virile literature of this age was inspired by religious strife. Amongst Luther's henchmen, Philipp Melanchthon (1497 156o), the "praeceptor Germaniae," and Ulrich von Hutten (1488 15 23) were powerful allies in his cause, although their intellectual sympathies inclined to the humanists. The satirical dramas of Niklas Manuel (1484-1530), a Swiss Protestant, and the polemical fables of Erasmus Alberus (c. I 5oo-53) were, however, insig nificant compared with the fierce assault on Protestantism by the Alsatian monk, Thomas Murner (1475-1537), the most ruth less of all German satirists. It was not until the following gen eration that the Protestant party could point to a writer who, in genius and power, was at all comparable to Murner, namely, Johann Fischart (c. 1550–c. 1591). His chief work, the A ff en theuerliche Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitteruivg (1575), a Ger manization of the first book of Rabelais' satire, is a witty and in genious monstrosity, a satirical comment on the life of the i6th century. Other satirists were Bartholomaeus Ringwaldt (153o and Georg Rollenhagen (1542-1609), author of the Frosch meuseler On the whole, the form of literature which succeeded best in extricating itself from religious polemics in the i6th century was the drama. Protestantism proved favourable to its develop ment, and the humanists, who had always prided themselves on their imitations of Latin comedy, introduced into it form and proportion. The Latin school comedy in Germany was founded by Wimpfeling with his Stylpho (141o) and by J. Reuchlin with his witty adaptation of Maitre Pathelin in his Henno (1498). In the i6th century the chief writers of Latin dramas were Thomas Kirchmair or Naogeorgus (1511-63), Caspar BrUlow (1585 1627), and Nikodemus Frischlin (1547-9o). In Basle, Pamphilus Gengenbach produced moralizing Fastnachtsspiele in 1515-16; and in Berne Niklas Manuel employed the same type of play for anti-Catholic propaganda. The Parabell yam vorlorn Szohn by Burkard Waldis (1527), the many dramas on the subject of Susanna—notably those of Sixt Birck (153 2) and Paul Rebhun Frischlin's German plays are attempts to treat Biblical themes on humanistic lines. In another important literary centre of the i6th century, in Nuremberg, the drama developed on more indigenous lines. Hans Sachs (1494-1576), the Nurem berg cobbler and Meistersinger, has left behind him a vast literary legacy, embracing every form of popular literature from Spruch and Schwank to complicated Meistergesang and lengthy drama. But in the progressive movement of the German drama he played an even smaller role than his Swiss and Saxon contemporaries; for his tragedies and comedies are little more than stories in dialogue. In the Fastnachtsspiele, where dramatic form is less essential than anecdotal point and brevity, he is at his best. At the close of the century the influence of the English drama— brought to Germany by English actors—introduced the dramatic and theatrical element which had hitherto been lacking in the German drama. This is to be seen in the work of Jakob Ayrer (d. 1605) and Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick (1564-1613). But unfortunately these beginnings had hardly made themselves felt when the full current of the Renaissance swept across Ger many, bringing in its train the Senecan tragedy. Then came the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, which made the creation of a popular and national theatre impossible.
The novel was less successful than the drama in emancipating itself from satire and religious controversy; Fischart was too dependent on foreign models and too erratic to create a national form of German fiction. The most important novelist was a much less talented writer, the Alsatian Meistersinger and dramatist Jorg Wickram (d. c. 156o), who has been already mentioned as the author of a popular collection of anecdotes, the Rollwagen buchlein. His Der Knabenspiegel (15 54) and Der Gold f qden (1557), are in form, and especially in the importance they attach to psychological developments, the forerunners of the modern German novel. But Wickram stands alone. The old Volksbucher were the real novels of the Reformation age ; and none of these affords clearer insight into its temper and spirit than the famous story of the magician Doctor Johann Faust, published at Frank furt in 1587.