German literature
German authors
- Angelus Silesius
- Heinrich Böll
- Bertolt Brecht
- Karl Georg Büchner
- Hans Magnus Enzensberger
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Günter Grass
- Brothers Grimm
- Hans von Grimmelshausen
- Peter Handke
- Gerhart Hauptmann
- Heinrich Heine
- Heinrich der Glïchezäre
- Johann Gottfried von Herder
- Hermann Hesse
- Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
- Friedrich Hölderlin
- Uwe Johnson
- Siegfried Lenz
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
- Thomas Mann
- Robert Musil
- Novalis
- Jean Paul Richter
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
- Friedrich von Schiller
- Arthur Schnitzler
- Georg Trakl
- Frank Wedekind
- Christa Wolf
Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1620-1676)
This German writer was born in Gelnhausen and is known especially for his picaresque novel Simplicissimus. He led an adventurous life, fought in the Thirty Years War and was a judge in Renchen, Baden-Württemberg from 1667 to 1676. Towards the end of his life he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism.
He wrote several picaresque novels, among which the most famous would have to be The Adventurous Simplicissimus (1669), one of the most important German novels of the 17th Century. In the story readers get an insight into the adventures of a naive youth who is a soldier, jester, thief, slave and hermit. The work builds a true representation of the social and economic conditions created by the European war.