2 - The Novels of Georg Wickram

Summary

“And they lived honestly and well with their women and children”

GEORG WICKRAM's INTEREST IN well-functioning relationships between man and woman, young and old, master and servant is well documented; scholars of early modern German literature have shown his prose novels an increasing interest over the past two decades because of their exemplary images of perfect marriages and harmonic family life. Especially in his later works where he writes more independently of his sources, Wickram makes up his ideal version of an early modern society — almost as an antithesis to the world turned upside down in the chapbooks or in texts written in the tradition of Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1494) — yet without having an explicit political intention. He generally avoids everything that could appear provocative in the eyes of the reader, but his idealistic visions of urban life are nevertheless regarded as interesting, especially because of the scarcity of similar texts in German.

Because of the greater originality of his works from the 1550s, I have chosen to focus on Der jungen Knaben Spiegel (Manual for Young Boys, 1554) and Von guten und bösen Nachbarn (Of Good and Bad Neighbors, 1556). Wickram's early works are adaptations of older texts and they focus almost entirely on courtly love, although in a version far removed from middle high German poetry and epic in time and space and heavily influenced by sixteenth-century Alsatian town life. Since Wickram frequently uses plots, themes, and characters from a wide array of sources, it is difficult to prove what is exclusively original and what is borrowed, what is new and what belongs to convention. Building his stories on traditional themes, he mixes well-known literary figures and topoi with matters of topical interest to his contemporaries. He thus moves freely from the courtly setting in Galmy and Gabriotto und Reinhardt to the urban life in Nachbarn while giving the nobility of a distant past the traits often ascribed to early modern burgher and at the same time letting sixteenth-century merchants or craftspeople practice courtship in a manner typically found in courtly literature. Despite his fear of controversy, Wickram is thus one of the first German authors to give characters from the lower and middle social classes a status long reserved for the nobility in literature.