Johann (Hans) Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621 or 1622–17 August 1676) is deservedly the best known and most often read German novelist of the seventeenth century. In fact, he is the only author who can act as a bridge between the first and second classical periods of German literature, the first being that of high medieval literature, which reached its peak around 1200, with works such as the anonymous heroic epic Nibelungenlied and the courtly epics of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strasbourg, and the second that of German Classicism around 1800, which includes among its major writers Goethe and Schiller. Grimmelshausen is furthermore a writer whose works have stimulated an enormous quantity of scholarly studies over the past thirty years. This virtually unique activity in German Baroque studies has to do with a series of “discoveries” about several aspects of his works that mark them not as the naïve productions of an unlearned, “natural” author, but as the creations of a writer who consciously used exceedingly sophisticated and subtle modes of characterization, expression of symbolic meaning, and of narrative structure. His best known novel, Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668; first translated as The Adventurous Simplicissimus, 1912) is Germany's only early modern contribution to the canon of world-class literature. Because of the details that they provide about the times, especially about the Thirty Years’ War, Grimmelshausen's picaresque novels are widely read by historians as well as by students of literature. That novel forms the focus of the Simplician cycle of novels (a total of five different novelistic works), but the figure of Simplicius Simplicissimus is found in many of his other works as well.

Biographical Sketch

Grimmelshausen's exact date of birth is not known. Although many assume he was born in 1621, some evidence in Simplicissimus indicates he was born in 1622, and, using astrological data presented there, some scholars hold that he was born on 17 March 1622. His hometown was Gelnhausen (Hessia), although his family originally came from Suhl (Thuringia). His father died when Grimmelshausen was very young. Although the exact date of death is not known, we do know that Grimmelshausen's mother remarried in 1627.