Science and literature
Going back in history could be as tedious as trying to understand the subterfuges and power plays that led Bavaria to change hands - and kings - more often than not in its early centuries. However, this doesn't mean we should forget Bavaria's ancestral origins, Celtic before it was Germanic, and the fact that its history - this one literary - began to be written in Nuremberg. We could mention Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514), the author (or more accurately, the collector) of the Chronicles bearing the name of his native town, an exceptional incunabulum and encyclopedic work which - in addition to remarkable engravings - dwells on the past and the present, mixing real biographies with peddled legends. Then there are two poets who have at least inspired musicians, Bach and Wagner respectively. The first, Lazarus Spengler, was born in the year of our Lord 1479. A fervent admirer of Luther, his faith inspired him to write hymns and canticles. The second shared his elder's beliefs and elective affinities, but that's not why he remained famous. Indeed, Hans Sachs (1494-1576) is best known as the greatest Meistersinger of his time, and thus follows in the footsteps of two other Bavarians, Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170-1220) and Konrad von Würzburg (c. 1225-1287). These "Maîtres chanteurs" (in French, "master singers") are worthy heirs to the tradition of medieval Minnesang, poets of the same ilk as our troubadours who recited - or improvised - verses in accordance with the metre defined by the Tabalatur. Hans Sachs, a shoemaker by trade, is said to have written several thousand works in his spare time. Some of them may not have been written by him, but some are still performed today.
By taking a leap of faith in time and space, we meet Friedrich Julius Heinrich von Soden, who uttered his first cry on December 4, 1754 in Ansbach. In 1824, he joined the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, founded some sixty years earlier in Munich, but it was to literature that he devoted his passion, becoming a translator and director of a theater in Bamberg at the dawn of the 19th century. His near-contemporary Jean Paul (1763-1825) - Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, who chose his pseudonym in homage to Rousseau - also worked on the stage, before abandoning it after a quasi-mystical crisis to devote himself to the novel. He then frequented the literary circles of Weimar, in Thuringia, where he met Goethe and Schiller, but after a stopover in Berlin, he finally returned to his native Bavaria, where he died in 1825. Oscillating between the most ferociously realistic irony and his fascination for the dream, Jean Paul discovered himself in French, in particular with Editions Corti(La Lanterne magique, Mon enterrement vivant, etc.). In fact, this constant oscillation between pragmatism - the sciences - and the imaginary - literature, even spirituality - seems to be to some extent the hallmark of Bavarian writers, as the career of Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841), a mining engineer and philosophy professor, devout Catholic and esotericist, seems to confirm. His difficult prose - notably Fermenta cognitionis - was translated into French by Albin Michel in the Cahiers de l'hermétisme, but is unfortunately no longer available. The writers of the new century, Franz von Pocci, born in Munich in 1807, and Isabella Braun, born in Jettingen in 1815, take a more playful approach: the former is a caricaturist and songwriter, and writes plays for puppets - he also founded the Münchner Marionettentheater - while the latter publishes mainly texts for young people
From circle to circle
At the turn of the century, in 1856, a poetic circle was founded in Munich, whose name was perhaps inspired by a short evocation by Hermann Lingg (1820-1905), Das Krokodil von Singapur. Its members kept the animal as a totem, meeting to sublimate the intellectual life of Bavaria's capital. Here, too, scientists met - such as the chemist Max Joseph von Pettenkofer, who committed suicide in 1901, despite having ingested the cholera germ in front of his students without falling ill - as well as writers, both Bavarian and non-Bavarian, such as Berlin's Paul von Heyse, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1910. Meanwhile, in the "beautiful circles" of the Court, the polyglot Thérèse de Bavière (1850-1925) was preparing to travel the world, from which she would bring back her travel accounts(Ausflug nach Tunis, 1880; Meine Reise in den Brasilianischen Tropen, 1897...) and the Munich-born Karl von Perfall was appointed Director of Music in 1864, before taking over the Royal Bavarian Theatre three years later. Carl du Prel (1839-1899) frequented secret societies and was initiated into the secrets of spiritualism. As for Ludwig Ganghofer, born in Kaufbeuren in 1855, he was about to make a lasting mark on the literary history of his native region, and not just thanks to the local novels he published, some of which would be adapted for the cinema a few decades later(L'Ivresse de la forêt in 1962, Château de Saint-Hubert in 1973). Perhaps inspired by Baroness Sophie von Todesco, whom he had met in Vienna, he founded the Münchener Literarische Gesellschaft with Ernst von Wolzogen and Richard Strauss in 1897. Its purpose was to encourage literary creation, and it was here that Rainer Maria Rilke, a young philosophy student with a prestigious destiny, met his muse, Lou Andreas-Salomé, fourteen years his senior, but it also welcomed writers whose tone offended propriety, such as Frank Wedekind, who, in addition to living with Frida Uhl (still married to August Strindberg, but with whom he had a son), worked for the satirical journal Simplicissimus. The publication, named after Grimmelshausen's picaresque novel of the same name, was a hot topic of discussion, and Wilhelm II - and he was not the only one - did not take kindly to the caricatures he was subjected to. Against all odds, the publication lasted until 1944, and while it must admit to having succumbed to a certain nationalism during the First World War, it can still pride itself on having published some of Thomas Mann's works in its pages. The future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1929) moved to Munich in 1892, where he became an insurance broker before giving up the profession to devote himself to writing his first novel, The Buddenbrooks, published in 1901. In Munich, Thomas Mann also married and gave birth to several children, including Klaus, who was born in 1906 and followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a writer - a body of work which, unfortunately, would not find its audience until after his suicide at the age of 42, but which has since been widely translated into French: Nouvelle d'enfance (Rivages), Alexandre : roman de l'utopie (Libretto), Speed (Phébus), and others. For the time being, the twentieth century was just around the corner, and with it two world wars that would see some turn their backs - as would Ludwig Thoma (1867-1921), until then rather popular thanks to the humorous texts depicting Bavarian daily life that he published in Simplicissimus, which openly declared itself to be anti-Semitic - and others left the country, like Emerenz Meier (1874-1928), a fellow poet and author of a single novel, Aus dem bayrischen Wald, published in Prussia in 1896, who emigrated to Chicago with her family in 1906.
20th and 21st centuries
Born in Augsburg in 1898, Bertold Brecht died in East Berlin in 1956. Mobilized as a nurse in 1918, he wrote his first play that same year, Baal, about a young poet with a Rimbaudian air, who fills his existential void with large swigs of schnapps. In 1919, he followed this up with Tambours dans la nuit - originally entitled Spartakus - a play that won him the Prix Kleist and was praised by the great literary critic of the time, Lion Feuchtwanger (one of the founders of Der Siegel, and author of the internationally acclaimed novel Le Juif Süss, published by Le Livre de poche). But the honors Brecht won - notably with L'Opéra de quat' sous (1928) - did not prevent him from being the target of provocations by the National Socialists, who had little sympathy for his Marxist ideas. Victim of the 1933 autodafé, stripped of his nationality in 1935, he was forced into a long exile that took him as far as Hollywood. His many travels and political involvement did not dry up his inspiration, and no doubt even fueled it, and his works, whose list is impressive, can be discovered, with pleasure and curiosity, at Arche éditeur: L'Abc de la guerre, La Noce, L'Achat du cuivre, La Vie de Galilée, Sainte Jeanne des abattoirs, etc. Another writer, political to say the least, is Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whose Le Bref été de l'anarchie has become a classic in Gallimard's L'Imaginaire collection. This fictionalized biography focuses on the life of the Spaniard Buenaventura Durruti during the social revolution of 1936. But Enzensberger is far from being a one-man show: his poetry(L'Histoire des nuages: 99 méditations), his essays(Politique et crime: neuf études, Culture ou mise en condition?) and even his writings for young people(Les Sept voyages de Pierre) have found a wide audience in France. Michael Ende (1929-1995), author of L'Histoire sans fin (1979), was also active in the latter sector. His film adaptations lulled the childhood of many a viewer (but greatly displeased the writer!). His contemporary Herbert Achternbusch, born in Munich in 1938, is a film director in his spare time, and has also worked in the theater(Gust, La Botte et sa chaussette, Werner Herzog, published by L'Arche), as has playwright Martin Sperr, whose Scènes de chasse en Bavière, the story of a pointless dispute that turns into a manhunt, is published in French by the same publisher. Patrick Süskind also began his career in the theater, with La Contrebasse, first performed in 1981, but it was undoubtedly his novel Le Parfum, published four years later in Zurich, that made him an international name, for - despite cultivating discretion and mystery - the story of his murderer became a worldwide bestseller.
Today, Bavarian literature is alive and well, represented, for example, by Harald Grill, writer-traveler and poet, or Matthias Politycki, who shares this taste for travel but also knows how to be gritty when he sketches the foibles of the rich in the picaresque In 180 Tagen um die Welt (in French, two texts have been translated by Jacqueline Chambon éditions: Roman de l'au-delà and Samarcande Samarcande). In the black novel vein, we find Loup Harlander with 42 Grad, or Ferdinand von Schirach available on our side of the border from Gallimard(Crimes, Coupables, Sanction, etc.). Finally, the work of Daniel Kelhmann, born in 1975, is available in translation from Actes Sud: La Nuit de l'illusionniste and, more recently, the highly effective Tu aurais dû t'en aller.
