CHAPTER XXVI
GERMAN CONSIDERATIONS: WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE
A criticism of the world of feudalism, chivalry, and love may be had from the impressions and temperamental reactions of a certain thinking atom revolving in the same. The atom referred to was Walther von der Vogelweide, a German, a knight, a Minnesinger, and a national poet whose thoughts were moved by the instincts of his caste and race.
In language, temperament, and character, the Germans east of the Rhine were Germans still in the thirteenth century. They had accepted, and even vitally appropriated, Latin Christianity; those of them who were educated had received a Latin education. Yet their natures, though somewhat tempered, showed largely and distinctly German. Moreover, through the centuries, they had acquired—or rather they had never lost—a national antipathy toward those Roman papal well-springs of authority, which seemed to suck back German gold and lands in return for spiritual assurance and political betrayal.
A different and already mediaevalized element had also become part of German culture, to wit, the matter of the French Arthurian romances and the lyric fashions of Provence, which, working together, had captivated modish German circles from the Rhine to the Danube. Nevertheless the German character maintained itself in the Minnelieder which followed Provençal poetry, and in the höfisch (courtly) epics which were palpable translations from the French.[1] The distinguished group of German poets whose
- ↑ The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach have been given. One may also refer to works of older
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