The Critic of Contemporary Literature

Abstract

All students of German literature are familiar with the fact that the dawn of the eighteenth century found Germany, in sharp contrast to England and France, without a literary tradition. Though this was long attributed exclusively to the protracted slaughter and destruction of the Thirty Years War with its consequent lowering of cultural values, it seems probable that this was only the last of many factors (geographical, economic and social) which produced a decline in literature and the arts, already in evidence before the war broke out. Among these causes the most conspicuous were the geographical barriers to political unity in an age of poor communications, the shifting of trade from the overland route to the sea, with consequent benefit to the Western maritime nations at the expense of Germany, and the Reformation which produced more acute dissension and strife in Germany than elsewhere. The effect of these factors was of course reinforced and accelerated by the Thirty Years War.