Balthasar Venator

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Balthasar Venator ( Latinized from Jäger ) (* 1594 in Weingarten (Kraichgau) ; † February 11, 1664 in Meisenheim ) was a late German humanist , neo-Latin poet and satirist . Together with other poets such as Martin Opitz , who died early , he founded the Heidelberg Poets' Circle and is considered one of the pioneers of the German language in poetry. His experiences during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) prompted him to make drastic descriptions , some of which were printed anonymously. The sharp-witted and sometimes pointed-tongued writings were extremely popular during his lifetime and were reprinted many times. On the other hand, his fabulous and far-reaching descriptions seem cumbersome today and find few readers. One of his two sons followed in his footsteps both professionally - as an ambassador of the court - and poetically, but did not achieve his father's fame.

Life

Venator was born in the then Electoral Palatinate village of Weingarten near Bruchsal . According to other sources, the son of Christoph Jäger was born in Weingarten's pastor, Laurentius Jäger, in his rectory, and was brought up in a Calvinist manner. From 1607 onwards, thanks to a scholarship, the gifted boy was able to attend the Neustädter Casimirianum high school, which enjoyed a very good reputation. His poetic talent was recognized early on. Rector Johann Philipp Pareus praised his talent and appointed the best of the class of the final year 1613 on the power of attorney of the Count Johann Jacob Grasser (1579–1627) in 1614 as poeta laureatus . On 25 October 1613 he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg and studied at the Faculty of Arts and 1616 as an alumnus of the Sapienzkollegs the Department of Theology . In 1617 he taught at the Heidelberg monastery school and then found a job as a secretarius at the court of the Electoral Palatinate. Venator was physically small, book-lover, learned, and well-read. He deeply regretted when libraries went to waste. The motto that he wrote in a friend's family book was ψυχήζ ίατρόζ γράμματα (literature is the doctor of the soul).

During his time in Heidelberg, Venator made important contacts. He had a warm friendship with the history professor and librarian Jan Gruter , in 1618 the Electoral Palatinate Secret Councilor Johann Joachim von Rusdorff (1589–1640) recommended him with praiseworthy words, and later he was significantly promoted by the Electoral Palatinate Oberrat and center of the Heidelberg Scholar Republic Georg Michael Lingelsheim . Venator, along with his friends Julius Wilhelm Zincgref and Martin Opitz, belonged to the Heidelberg circle of poets . The young poets particularly advocated the use of the German language in poetry.

The gallows tree. Murder and violence from Jacques Callot's cycle Les Misères et les Malheurs de la guerre (1633)

The Thirty Years' War , however, spread from Bohemia to the Electoral Palatinate. The capture of Heidelberg and the collapse of the Electoral Palatinate state in autumn 1622 ruined Venator's livelihood. His training as a Reformed theologian became completely worthless. As he himself writes in retrospect in the dedication of the Panegyricus , he suffered imprisonment and imprisonment, was threatened with life and had to suffer from hunger and at times be recruited as a soldier . Both of his parents died in a foreign country that same year, out of grief over the burning of Weingarten, as he says. A troubled phase began in the young man's life. In Heidelberg, as in Weingarten, it was impossible to earn money or to stay. A Catholic priest and a Catholic mayor were installed in Weingarten , about whom he wrote two Latin mocking verses in 1624. In 1624 he was allowed to eat his fill once at the medical professor and personal physician Friedrichs V. Peter de Spina . Lingelsheim, who lived in exile in his native Strasbourg and accepted him from 1624 to 1628 as tutor for his sons, released him from his precarious situation . Venator began studying law in Strasbourg in 1624 and published his first independent prints in 1625. In 1628, on the recommendation of Matthias Bernegger , he obtained a position as private tutor in Tübingen with Marcus von Rechlingen (also Rehlingen). Extensive gentlemanly journeys of his pupils took Venator to Switzerland and France . There he learned the French language and soon knew how to express himself in it. In the autumn of 1631 he was appointed tutor of the Hereditary Prince Friedrich von Pfalz-Zweibrücken , whom he accompanied on an extensive educational trip from 1631 to 1634, again through Switzerland, France and the Spanish Netherlands . Venator remained in the service of the Zweibrücken dukes until the end of his life.

Meisenheim around 1645 with the castle church in which Venator was buried

In June 1635 Venator, now regimental auditor , married Maria Katharina in Zweibrücken , the daughter of the former sponheim bailiff in Herrstein Christoph Frankengrüner. In the same year, with the capture of Zweibrücken by the imperial general Gallas , the Palatinate-Zweibrücken state system collapsed and a merciless plundering of the city and the surrounding area began; the majority of the population fell victim to war, hunger and plague over the next few years. Venator ended up with the remnants of the farm in the Meisenheim secondary residence in Zweibrücken, where he held the position of clerk from 1639 . In 1642 or 1643 he was sent on a mission to Zurich , in the summer of 1644 he stayed as envoy to Duke Wolfgang Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg in Düsseldorf , after having been there for half a year in the winter of 1633/34. In 1646 he was promoted to court counselor and finally found himself as administrative administrator in Meisenheim, where he held the highest possible office outside the royal seat that a bourgeois could achieve. From 1646 to 1673 Duke Friedrich von Zweibrücken and his entourage were not in Meisenheim and were represented there by him until Venator's death. He was buried in the Meisenheim castle church. The widow survived him by twenty years. The marriage gave birth to two sons and three daughters who were able to achieve respected positions or marry handsomely.

plant

In addition to his professional activity, Venator also worked as a neo-Latin poet and author, whose works are famous for their perfect form. The work edition published in 2001 comprises 35 writings and 108 letters. Since then, another 14 letters have been found. His best-known work is Panegyricus Iano Gruteri (1630), the commendatory obituary for his former professor Jan Gruter, which exemplarily describes the life of a humanist and was published a total of seven times between 1630 and 1707. The writing owes its popularity in part to the notoriety of Gruter, but mainly to the polished language and the dissolute scholarly excursions into the Greek and Latin imaginations; Venator had had to fill 20 sheets of paper for the printer, a lot more than he knew about Gruter's real life. His other lyrical, aesthetic and laudatory works gained him much recognition. As a result, the vita of Catherine Tishem has been passed on, of whom it is said that she was the most educated Englishwoman of her time.

Venator's youth poems, dedicatory texts and memorial writings as well as his letters are almost exclusively written in Latin . With the "Klagschrift vber den Tödlichen Hintrit de Edlen Teutschen Helden Michaels von Obentraut " (1625) he tried his hand at German heroic poetry during his time in Strasbourg and in Panegyricus Iano Gruteri spoke out for the use of the German language and its sister languages ​​in poetry.

Venator is also an important contemporary witness of the history of the Palatinate during the Thirty Years War, which he witnessed from beginning to end and described several times. The Vita Petri de Spina (1625) and the aforementioned Panegyricus Iano Gruteri (1630) contain descriptions of the war fates of his home village Weingarten and the cities of Bretten and Heidelberg, the eulogy of his pupil Duke Friedrich von Pfalz-Zweibrücken on his 40th birthday Birthday (1656) makes a contribution to the biography of the prince. The anonymous and repeatedly reprinted Pictura loquens (1632) are a satirical contribution in which the main actors of the Thirty Years War reveal their thoughts, the Catholics come off significantly worse than the Protestants.

He wrote his Latin poem Donarium in nova Tigurinorum bibliotheca suspendendum in June 1643 in Meisenheim after a visit to Zurich. In 33 distiches he praises the Zurich Citizens' Library, founded in 1629 (forerunner of the Zurich City Library ), praises its skilful establishment in the Wasserkirche - at that time an island in the Limmat - and calls for science to be cultivated in addition to the art of war and fortification building in view of the since 1618 ruling war and human and cultural losses. He describes in detail his memory of the robbery of the famous Palatinate library Bibliotheca Palatina Heidelberg in 1623. The poem was translated into German verse ( Alexandriner ) by the Zurich occasional poet Johann Wilhelm Simler and entitled Arte et Marte , Through Science and Arms - the motto of the Zurich library at the time - printed as a New Year's sheet for the youth in 1661 in a single-sheet print and provided with an etching by Conrad Meyer (1618–1689). To mark the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Zurich Central Library published a reprint in 1979.

Also noteworthy are two depressing accounts of the fate of the city and duchy of Zweibrücken after the city was taken in 1635, first the Epistola de calamitatibus Ducatus Bipontini to the Calvinist Polish Count Andrzej Leszczyński (1637), then the Civitatis Bipontinae quaerimonia , the complaint of the Zweibrücker citizens against an excessive demand for money from Colonel Pallant zu Moriamé (1649). Venator describes how merciless the devastation and excesses of violence caused by the Soldateska were for the population during the occupation; He relentlessly describes torture and cases of cannibalism in great detail . However, these writings must not be read uncritically, because they could be a means of psychological warfare or, in the second case, journalistic influence.

Two anonymous satirical stories in German, influenced by Johann Michael Moscherosch , with whom Venator corresponded in 1650, appeared as Venator's older work. The dream image “Strange Dream-Story Von Dir und Mir”, released in 1656 in Zweibrücken with a fictitious imprint, shows the conditions at a court with baroque fabulously, probably referring to the Zweibrücker Hof, but familiar to readers from other areas. Four years later the "Kurtze and Kurtzweilige description of the previously unheard-of journey, which Mr. Bilgram von Hohen wandering longest done in the new upper world of the moon" appeared, in which a dream is also used to by shifting viewpoints to utopian grievances in politics and Describing the church. The gaze is directed from outside, in this case by curious and sensible moon dwellers, to the home, which takes the edge off the criticism. Both society satires were very popular and widely used, and were reprinted many times between 1656 and 1667. Under a false flag , namely as Grimmelshausen's youth work , they were - for whatever reasons - included by the publisher in the first edition of Grimmelshausen's work in 1684 and believed to be for a long time. It was not until 1924 that the correct author became known after extensive scientific research.

One of the sons - the figures vary between the older son Friedrich and the younger son Balthasar Venator junior  - sat as Electoral Palatinate ambassador at Perpetual Reichstag paternal tradition away, leaving 1669-1673 anonymously and without printing location, the seven-volume Series Ominosa Rerum series appear that caricatured the people and negotiations of the Reichstag in a non-hurtful way. Zedler acknowledges them as "nice and ingenious satirical writings". The seventh volume also contains - in anonymized form - a new edition of the two writings by Balthasar Venator Sr. relating to Zweibrücken.

List of works

  • Lament against the fatal accession of the noble German hero Michael von Obentraut (1625)
  • Vita Petri de Spina (1625)
  • Panegyricus Iano Gruteri (1630)
  • Pictura loquens (1632)
  • Epistola de calamitatibus Ducatus Bipontini (1637)
  • Epistola ad Andream Comitem de Lesno (1638)
  • Civitatis Bipontinae quaerimonia de debito non debito (1649)
  • Strange Dream-Story Of You And Me (1656)
  • Kurtze and Kurtzweilige description of the previously unheard-of journey, which Mr. Bilgram von Hohen wandering most unlikely to do in the new upper world of the moon (1660)

Work editions

  • Collected writings , ed. by Georg Burkard, Johannes Schöndorf. Manutius-Verlag, Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 3-934877-02-8 .

literature

  • Erich Volkmann: Balthasar Venator . Phil. Dissertation, Berlin 1936.
  • Johannes Schöndorf: Balthasar Venator and his German satires. In: Wolfenbütteler Barocknachrichten 21, 1994, ISSN  0340-6318 , pp. 95-107.
  • Johannes Schöndorf: Balthasar Venator's life and work. In: Balthasar Venator: Gesammelte Schriften (= Bibliotheca Neolatina 9.1), ed. by Georg Burkard, Johannes Schöndorf. Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 3-934877-02-8 , pp. XIII-XXXVI.
  • Reiner Marx: Article by Balthasar Venator . In: Time brings fruit - Saar-Palatinate authors' lexicon . Saarpfalz, special issue 2008, Homburg 2008, ISSN  0930-1011 , pp. 187–190.
  • Klaus Conermann, Harald Bullbock (ed.): Martin Opitz: Correspondence and life testimonies : Critical edition with translation . Volume 1. De Gruyter, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-017907-1 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Gilbert Waterhouse: The Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Seventeenth Century . Cambridge 1914, pp. 20, 51f. online (english)
  • Werner Zeder: Arte et Marte, an armory for the spirit: Balthasar Venator's poem in praise of the citizen library in Zurich (1643) . - In: Turicensia latina: Latin texts on the history of Zurich from antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times / ed. by Peter Stotz u. a. - Zurich 2003; ISBN 3-03823-013-8 ; Pp. 258–263 Latin text and German prose translation, with illustration of the single-sheet print from 1661 p. 257.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Balthasar Venator: Collected writings in two volumes ; Latin-German. Edited by Georg Burkard and Johannes Schöndorf, Manutius-Verlag, Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 3-934877-02-8 , page XV ( limited preview in Google book search).
  2. ^ Siege and capture of Heidelberg in 1622 on Wikisource
  3. ↑ Klaus Conermann, Harald Bullbock (Ed.): Martin Opitz: Briefwechsel und Lebenszeugnisse: Critical Edition with Translation , Volume 1. Berlin 2009, p. 353 and p. 390 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  4. ^ Catalog entry at the State Archives Ludwigsburg
  5. ↑ Klaus Conermann, Harald Bull Bock (ed.): Martin Opitz: Correspondence and Testimonies: Critical edition with translation . Volume 1, Berlin 2009, p. 1197 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  6. ^ Wilhelm Weber: Karlsberg Castle . Ermer, Homburg 1987, p. 14
  7. ↑ a b Reiner Marx: Article Balthasar Venator . In: Time brings fruit - Saar-Palatinate authors' lexicon . Saarpfalz, special issue 2008, Homburg 2008, pp. 187–190, ISSN  0930-1011
  8. ↑ Palatinate State Library Speyer, Hs. 614
  9. ^ Latin text printed in: Salomon and Anton Salomon Vögelin: Geschichte der Wasserkirche , Zurich 1842–1848, 7 parts, Neujahrsblatt ed. from the city ​​library in Zurich , pp. 55–57.
  10. ↑ Martin Germann: Arte et Marte, through science and weapons: the founding idea of ​​the Zurich Citizens' Library (1629) . - In: Zürcher Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1981 , pp. 25–45, with illustration of the New Year's sheet 1661 and the library stamp of the Zurich City Library of the 17th century with the motto “Arte et Marte” (woodcut).
  11. ↑ Venator, Balthasar. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 46, Leipzig 1745, column 1149–1152 (here: column 1152, on the son of Balthasar).
personal data
SURNAME Venator, Balthazar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meleager, Janus; Hunter, Balthasar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Late humanist, neo-Latin poet and satirist
DATE OF BIRTH 1594
PLACE OF BIRTH Weingarten (Baden)
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 1664
Place of death Meisenheim