In what is still the standard survey of German historical drama, Das deutsche Geschichtsdrama (1952), Friedrich Sengle understands -historical drama- as that in which objective history is blended with an idea that is the basis of its dramatic coherence and force. This idea inevitably becomes the engine of a dramatic action, inclining the theatergoer to become wholly engaged with dramatic characters in a dramatic present, rather than with -real- figures in a historical past. Such plays (for instance Schiller's Maria Stuart) may remain broadly -true to history, - but the experience they afford...

Johann Jakob von Grimmelshausen (1622-76) wished to be taken seriously as a writer, which by and large, in his own day, he was not. He was in fact the author of the first great German novel, Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus (1688), out of which arose a kind of cycle of Simplician' novels. Later generations have made up for this neglect, and established him as an accomplished satirist and profound allegorist, who confronted the temporal and eternal issues of the seventeenth century. This study sets out to show, principally through detailed textual analysis, that Grimmelshausen's Simplician...