Courage: A funny, sexy woman who made war work for her

The Life of Courage

Author: Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, translated by Mike Mitchell

ISBN-13: 978-1910213247

Publisher: Dedalus

Guideline Price: £8.99

A chance reference to a woman of easy virtue in his picaresque classic Simplicissimus, first published in German in 1668, was developed by Johann Grimmelshausen two years later when he gave voice to that female character in a much shorter, if equally funny and earthy yarn.

The Life of Courage (1670), in which a self-confessed camp-following conwoman looks back on her life, allows her not only to reminisce about her many adventures during the stop-start European upheaval known as the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), it also provides a chance for her to settle a score with Simplicissimus, a half-hearted soldier of fortune with similarly rapacious sexual appetites who reduced her to an unflattering footnote in his story.

Courage begins her tale with a flurry of the engaging bravado which will quickly emerge as her trademark. She is confident of her audience and can afford to indulge in self-mockery: “‘What?’ I can hear you gentlemen say. ‘Who would have thought that the old bag would have the cheek to try and escape God’s wrath on the Day of Judgement?’”

She then proceeds with an unofficial prologue of sorts in which she refers to her good self in the third person: “Her youthful frolics are over, her wanton high spirits have evaporated, her anxious conscience has woken and she has reached that sour-faced age which is ashamed to continue its foolish excesses and feels disgust at the idea of keeping all her previous misdeeds locked up inside her. It has begun to dawn on the old reprobate that death is sure to come knocking at her door soon to collect her last breath.”

It is clear that this narrative is unlikely to be a confessional and is far more a celebration, if also a vindication. Courage is intent on embarrassing Simplicissimus for maligning her but she is also intent on having some fun and she does.

This is one of the jauntiest literary romps ever written; admirers of Fielding will love it. Be warned, she is a likeable, amoral and versatile rogue – predating Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) by 52 years. Her voice is candid, convincing, outrageously funny and more consistently sustained than Moll's. Courage is no victim of circumstances, she never courts sympathy. Regardless of what she does, the reader cheers her on.

Courage had been a great beauty in her day and she often refers to this, always good-naturedly. There is no lamentation for her lost charms. But when she had them, she used them as if they were weapons.

“Courage,” writes the distinguished translator Mike Mitchell in his introduction, “is in many ways the female counterpart to Simplicissimus. Like him, she is swept away in the wars as a young innocent and like him makes her way through the devastation of war-torn Germany by using her considerable talents, in her case her beauty, a nimble and resourceful mind and an extremely elastic conscience.”

Mitchell's brilliant translation of Simplicissimus in 1999 updated the earlier, stilted English-language version by S Goodrich from 1912. Mitchell caught the vigour of the voice which, although conversational in tone, also has some subtle stylistic shifts. Mitchell shares Grimmelshausen's lightness of touch and conveys the energy of a narrator thinking on his feet.

Simplicissimus, the first German literary bestseller, predating Goethe's epistolary melodrama The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; revised 1787) by over a century, is a historical document in that Grimmelshausen (1621-1676) did fight in the war, was captured and took part in the siege of Magdeburg in 1636.

The war provides the narrative framework but the hero’s experiences are varied. He is a schemer but he is also oddly childlike and even innocent; the characterisation is far more sophisticated than one might think. All the while time passes, Europe is changing. Even Germany itself is a collection of fragmented states; there is no Germany. Grimmelshausen’s medieval picaresque reflects the equally fragmented scraps of learning acquired by a survivor ever on the move, and ready to seize any opportunity.

Courage’s story is short, snappily told and episodic. She is given to colourful anecdotes and creates the impression of always having one more story to tell. Her account covers a longer period of time; she was a young girl during the initial Bohemian campaign of 1619 and 1620; and has become a seasoned sexual campaigner, several times widowed, by 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia is brokered.

Evoking the excitement of experiencing a period of ongoing war, she enthuses: “From there they marched on Rakonvy, where I saw my first clashes in the field. It was such stirring stuff it made my pulse race and I wished I were a man, so that I could spend my whole life making war. And this desire was only increased by the battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, where our side won a great victory with very few losses.

“After this battle Maximilian of Bavaria marched into Austria, the Elector of Saxony into Lusatia and General Buquoy into Moravia to bring those who had rebelled against the Emperor to heel. My nature was such that neither my inner torment nor the physical labour and troubled times caused me any worry.”

There are many men; most intriguingly a Danish prince who brings her to a castle. His relatives are shocked and she is tricked into leaving. By the time she met up with Simplicissimus, at a spa where she was recovering from the pox, her attractions were waning and, merchant-like, she says: “Let me tell him that by then I had less than one seventeenth of my original beauty and was already resorting to all kinds of creams.”

It is funny and visual with a hint of pathos. Courage regards men as stupid and untrustworthy yet she somehow remains a true romantic, aware of never having had a child. Aside from dealing in sexual favours, she is also a businesswoman and her brand of financial flair thrives in war situations.

Late in her life and the narrative she joins a band of gypsies: “By now I have travelled round almost every corner of Europe several times with these people [the gypsies] and the number of schemes and tricks I have both thought up and carried out is so great it would take a whole ream of paper, if not more, to write them all down.”

For all the raw humour, there is wisdom: “I know from my own experience,” says Courage, “the way women are at different ages.Who will clear my body of melancholy humour and with it my inclination to envy?”

She is practical; for women, time is cruel, there is always a younger beauty.

More commonly studied by history students, Simplicissimus is an important work of early literature, as is The Life of Courage. In this very funny 17th-century work, a male writer created a devastating, contemporary, three-dimensional woman, who proves to be a remorseless truth teller living against a backdrop of history.

She inspired Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children (1941), also set during the Thirty Years War. Anna Fierling, the canteen woman who prizes her goods wagon above all else, is far more solemn than the earlier Courage, yet they are both realists. Courage may be an old woman yet her story possesses a timeless sense of fun. Canny film-makers might consider forming an orderly queue.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent