Simplicissimus: A Survey of the Editions

The interest the romantics showed in Simplicissmus brought about the desire to make the novel available to the contemporary reader. With Ludwig Tieck's encouragement, Karl Eduard von Bülow published Die Abenteuer des Simplicissimus in 1836. It contained only the first five books and offered a rather altered text, which is discussed in more detail below. A number of scholars took issue with the edition and, as a consequence of their research, were able to establish the real name of the author. Von Bülow still thought that German Schleifheim von Sulsfort, the anagram Grimmelshausen used on the title page, was the author's real, given name.

Difficult, too, was the matter of finding out which of the editions of Simplicissimus that appeared during Grimmelshausen's lifetime was the first edition, the editio princeps. Wilhelm Ludwig Holland (1851) thought that the edition published by Georg Müller in 1669 was the first, the one on which to base his edition of the text. Rudolf Kögel used the same edition (1880) because he believed that the 1669 edition was based on an earlier edition that had been lost to posterity. According to Kögel, the text was revised — with Grimmelshausen's consent — to modernize the language and to reduce the number of dialect passages. We now know that Georg Müller published the novel without Grimmelshausen's knowledge and that he published his edition after the first edition, which had been printed by Wolff Eberhard Felssecker in Nuremberg. Just the same, as we shall see below, Georg Müller's text was to play a significant role in later editions of the novel that were, as far was we can ascertain, authorized by Grimmelshausen.

Basing their editions on the 1671 edition of Grimmelshausen's works were Heinrich Kurz (1863–64) and Felix Bobertag (Deutsche National-Litteratur, vols. 33–35, 1882–83). The first scholarly edition of Simplicissimus based on the 1668 Felssecker appeared in the “Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart” in 1854 (vols. 33–34). Adelbert von Keller, the editor of this work, also included most of Grimmelshausen's other works and listed variants found in subsequent editions. Thus, Keller's text is still a valuable edition even today.