"Please kill yourself": The Ethos of Mauricius von Craûn (Part 1: Prelude)

Comments on the single strangest work in all of German literature and its Old French forebear

(translated from the original German by the author)

Since the earliest beginnings of mankind, ideas of a regularly recurring movement from a golden age—a heyday of artistic development and moral uprightness—to an epoch of incipient degeneration and deep moral corruption can be observed. Hesiod raves about a time in which people lived free from all care and labor, which, however, degenerated into a third generation through human iniquity, into a warlike people brimming with arrogance. His successor Ovid, following Hesiod's example, also traces the decline of mankind from a golden age, where justice does not prevail under the compulsion of punishment (aurea aetas), to a degenerate age in which everyone is bloodthirsty for battle (aenea proles). But to turn the well-known bon mot on its head: where there are great shadows, there is great light. Virgil, child of the eternal age, prophesies in his fourth Eclogue the imminent return of a heyday, a Saturnia regna, and he should be granted the right to it, as Latin poetry reaches its height Auguste imperante. However, such earnestly hopeful visions of salvation from spiritual poverty and the arrival of a promising future often turn into the opposite: read the risibly exuberant dedication of Pseudo-Oppian in his Cynegetica.

               σοί, μάκαρ, ἀείδω, γαίης ἐρικυδὲς ἔρεισμα,
               φέγγος ἐνυαλίων πολυήρατον Αἰνεαδάων,
               Αὐσονίου Ζηνὸς γλυκερὸν θάλος, Ἀντωνῖνε: 
               τὸν μεγάλη μεγάλῳ φιτύσατο Δόμνα Σεβήρῳ ... 
               εὐμενέοι Τιτὰν Φαέθων καὶ Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων.
               τῷ ῥα πατὴρ μεγάλῃσι πονησάμενος παλάμῃσι
               δῶκεν ἔχειν πᾶσαν τραφερήν, πᾶσαν δὲ καὶ ὑγρήν. 
               σοὶ μὲν γὰρ θαλέθουσα κύει πάνδωρος ἄρουρα, 
               καὶ πάλιν εὐδιόωσα τρέφει κλυτὰ φῦλα θάλασσα 

               For you, O best, I sing the glorious earth's support, 
               The much-coveted splendor of the warlike Aeneades, 
               The Ausonian Zeus' sweet offspring, Antonius, 
               Whom the great Domna bore to the great Severus ... 
               Titan Phæton and Phoebus Apollo are well-disposed towards you.
               So the father, exhausted by exertion, with his great hands, 
               vouchsafes us the whole land and sea to rule. 
               For you, risen to blossom, the fruitful seed field is pregnant 
               Again his justice lets the glorious tribes of the seas swell. 

Praise and hope for a man who, according to reports, behaved arrogantly to the point of self-parody and thereby merited his own murder, also barely escaping the dreaded damnatio memoriae! Read also the ridiculously awkward hexameters of Calpurnius Siculus, who, as a self-confident epigone emulating Virgil, prophesies a golden age: aurea secura cum pace renascitur aetas/ et redit ad terras Tandem squalore sitque/ Alma Themis posito iuvenemque beata sequuntur/ saecula, maternis causa qui vicit Iulis. Praise and hope for a man who, due to his notorious megalomania, actually fell victim to the damnatio memoriae. So—what are we to make of this? In sum, the epigone encounters and, moreover, feels the belatedness of his time and, as a salutary antidote, imagines a golden age which, however, often relapses as the ouroboros into the ruin that forced this vision upon him in the first place. The literature of the German Middle Ages does not lack this ancient motif either: the figure of Mauricius, the titular anti-hero of the bizarre epyllion Mauricius von Craûn, a stylized ideal embodiment of the fourth and final stage of the translationis militae and ultimately also of chivalry, is, in its own way, clearly part of this epigonal tradition. The knighthood, ultimately driven out of Rome by the acrasia of Nero, experienced a final heyday in France after its restoration by Charlemagne. However, its current representatives, Mauricius among them, rendered sleepy and sluggish by the burdensome awareness of their lateness, fail to meet the enormous responsibility of their task and often commit the same transgressions that once brought earlier golden ages to ruin. This is particularly evident in the self-ironic pessimism of the narrator, which is expressed through both meta-literary reflections on the value and significance of the narrative (as well as on the narrative style and even language itself) and historical examples whose greatness makes the present appear insignificant and small. Through an analysis of the various narrative techniques, the relationship between the self-ironically pessimistic narrator and the personality of Mauricius — and a comparison with the plot motifs of the Old French source Du chevalier qui recovra l'amor de sa dame — this essay will reveal and describe this epigonal self-consciousness, which represents, by far, the most distinctive feature of the German adaptation.