The Lament may trace its heritage to the contempo-
rary scholastic disputatio, a learned argument between
two university professors, or to legal cases or classical
models of disputation. The stichomythic (rapid dia-
logue exchange) give-and-take between the heart and
body in the third part of the work points ahead to the
debate between the abbot and the young knight-to-be
in Gregorius, and to alternating dialogue in Erec and
Iwein. Whatever the origin of the work, this early writing
bears the imprint of Hartmann’s education, whether in
a monastery or a church school.
After the body and the heart exchange reproaches
and offer their defenses in the Lament, and after the
stichomythic exchange between the two, the body, hav-
ing seen the wisdom of the heatt’s arguments, redirects
its attention in the fi nal exchange to the courtly lady in
question. A striking feature of the Lament is the heart’s
paradigmatic explanation of what makes up courtly
love. Ethical attributes that form the underpinnings of
Minnesang fi nd echoes in some of Hartmann’s poetry,
and, coupled with a Christian ethic, resonate throughout
Hartmann’s works in the striving of the heroes toward
betterment and self-fulfi llment.
Of all of Hartmann’s writings, his lyric poetry has
raised the most contention among critics. The nine-
teenth-century Romantic/positivist viewpoint held
that the lyrics mirrored Hartmann’s life and could
thus be grouped in chronological fashion, tracing fi rst
Hartmann’s obeisance to the concepts of minne (courtly
love), then, his disillusionment with and subsequent
rejection of it in poetry praising common women, and,
fi nally, to an ethical-spiritual substitution for minne, as
represented in his Kreuzlieder (crusading songs).
What can be said is that Hartmann’s poems—eigh-
teen in the canon, but some of these are spurious—can
be divided thematically: (1) traditional Minnesang; (2)
complaints, whether by a man or a woman—the latter
being called a Frauenklage; (3) songs of anti-minne,
comprising a rejection of the high ideals of minne and a
turn to more worldly love for fulfi llment; and (4) crusad-
ing songs. Taken as a whole, much of Hartmann’s lyrical
poetry reads like the poetry of his age, and infl uences
from earlier Minnesänger are apparent. At times he uses
some stunning imagery, and his anti-minne songs and
crusading songs strike the reader as honest and bold;
they certainly must have infl uenced his contemporaries,
including Walther von der Vogelweide. But Hartmann
is a more conventional, conservative poet than others of
his time, disdaining the erotic and the comical.
Hartmann most likely composed his Erec sometime
in the 1180s, when he was in his twenties, shortly after
the Lament, and contemporaneously with some of his
lyric poetry. Although the legend of King Arthur had
nationalistic overtones in England and France, mirroring
the court of Henry II Plantagenet, king of England and
of large parts of western France through his marriage
to Eleanor of Aquitaine, this nationalism gave way
to the trappings of courtly society and chivalry when
Hartmann introduced the large-scale Arthurian romance
in Germany.
Though he may have also used other sources, written
and oral, Hartmann based Erec largely on Chrétien de
Troye’s Erec et Enide and acknowledged that fact in
line 4629. It would be more appropriate to call Erec a
reworking, or an adaptation, rather than a translation,
however, for Hartmann took great liberties with his
French model and expanded Chrétien’s version by over
3,000 lines: 10,192 versus 6,958.
The differences between the two Erecs illuminate the
disparate intentions of the two authors and highlight the
similarities and dissimilarities of the two courtly societ-
ies. What strikes the reader of both works is Hartmann’s
focus on courtly society, and its concomitant etiquette
of chivalry, and on the relationship between Erec and
Enite. One can justifiably call Hartmann didactic,
moralistic, and possibly even preachy, for, behind the
Arthurian façade, he had a point to make. Both Erec and
Enite are guilty of failing to understand their roles in
a courtly society. It is their perilous journey that leads
them to the awareness that courtly love is more than
just physical attraction; it entails a mutually supportive
relationship integrated into and supportive of a courtly
society. While Erec is not a Fürstenspiegel (a sort of
primer for the education of a prince), Hartmann would
probably not have been disappointed had all knights
turned out like his hero.
Hartmann also modeled Gregorius after a French
prototype, the popular La Vie du Pape Saint Grégoire.
Gregorius shows similarities with varying versions,
leading to the conjecture that an Ur-Gregorius existed at
some point. Whatever the exemplar of Gregorius, Hart-
mann’s use of it, as with Erec and Iwein, amounts more
to a reworking or adaptation than a strict translation.
Compared to the extant Old French versions, Gregorius
is between one-third and one-half again as long, show-
ing once more that, for Hartmann, the French original
served mainly as a foundation on which he could use his
poetic skill to erect a vastly different structure.
Gregorius followed Erec and the Lament, perhaps
toward the end of the 1180s, and this positioning of the
work has led to one aspect of its interpretation, i.e., that
Gregorius is “anti-Erec,” or anti-chivalric, a rejection by
a more mature author of his earlier work, namely Erec.
The thread of individual self-realization, a kind of rite de
passage, ties Hartmann’s major works together. Grego-
rius, moving from infancy through boyhood to manhood
and fi nally to a precocious middle age of insight and
wisdom, comes closest among Hartmann’s characters
to the Bildungsfi gur (character undergoing formative
changes) of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.HARTMANN VON AUE