Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

German · 1622 to 1676

Born around 1621 or 1622 in Gelnhausen, a small free city in the Holy Roman Empire, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen came from a Protestant family of modest means whose fortunes were swept away by the Thirty Years War. He was barely ten when soldiers sacked the region, and as a boy he was carried off by marauding troops, a displacement that fixed the war at the center of everything he would later write. He spent his youth in the armies, serving first as a musketeer and then as a regimental clerk, learning soldiers' speech, plunder, hunger, and survival from the inside. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 he converted to Catholicism, married, and settled into a string of civilian offices, managing estates and eventually serving as bailiff, or Schultheiss, of the town of Renchen in Baden. There he wrote at night, after the day's administration was done. His great book, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668), follows an innocent peasant boy through the chaos of the war into folly, fortune, hermitage, and disillusion, and it remains the foremost German novel of the seventeenth century. He published it and its sequels under anagrams of his own name, including Samuel Greifnson vom Hirschfeld and German Schleifheim von Sulsfort, scattering his authorship so thoroughly that his true identity was not firmly established until the nineteenth century. He wrote further Simplician tales, among them Courage the Adventuress (1670) and The Singular Life Story of Heedless Hopalong (1670). He died on August 17, 1676, at Renchen, his parish register recording that two of his sons were away at war when he was buried.