delit1-3, Exercise 3: Gryphius and Grimmelshausen on the war

Model answer (check the details):

Gryphius: short, intense sonnets that present the war as devastation and the world as vanity. The speaker mourns the ruin of the country and sets worldly loss against eternal values. The form is strict and the language rhetorical.

Grimmelshausen: a long picaresque novel, narrated by a man who has lived through the war as page, soldier and rogue. It shows violence, hunger and chance from below, mixing comedy, satire and religious reflection, and ending in withdrawal from the world.

Why neither is plain reportage: both follow the conventions of their genres and of Baroque thought (vanity, memento mori, the picaresque pattern). Grimmelshausen's book is a novel with a fictional narrator, and Gryphius's poems are rhetorical laments. They show how the war was understood and felt, which is valuable, but facts about events and numbers must be checked in historians' accounts.