Götz von Berlichingen and the Art of Military Autobiography

Abstract

Götz von Berlichingen (1480/1–1562), immortalised in the young Goethe’s first drama as ‘Götz with the Iron Hand’, after that fearsome claw made when a cannon ball severed his sword-hand at the age of twenty-three, was far from being the most accomplished German military commander of the first halt of the sixteenth century. His fame in recent centuries is due rather to Goethe’s play and to his own autobiography, first printed only forty years before Goethe read it in 1771. Among the many liberties which Goethe took with the original text was to portray Götz as a German national hero and lover of freedom who died with that word on his lips. Operas by Schulz and later Goldmark followed, and the play was reworked by Jean-Paul Sartre and John Arden. Other twentieth-century accolades included the bestowal of the knight’s name in 1943 on an SS—Panzer division.² To the modern taste the original portrait of the autobiography may seem more attractive than most of the later overpaintings, especially since the recent publication of the first critical edition. The quality of Götz’s text stands head and shoulders above that of the nearest contemporary autobiography by a German military commander, that of Sebastian Schertlin von Burtenbach (1496–1577), and above two slightly earlier military biographies which had some autobiographical input, those of Wilwolt von Schaumburg (1446–1510) and Georg von Frundsberg (1473–1528).³

Elisabeth: Gib deinen Freunden ein Zeugniß in die Hand, deine Feinde zu beschämen; verschaff’ einer edlen Nachkommenschaft die Freude, dich nicht zu verkennen.

(Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, iv.5)

Elisabeth: Goetz, only the power of the word on the paper can vindicate your name

(John Arden, Ironhand)¹