Above us Tyll Ulenspiegel turned, slowly and carelessly — not like someone in danger but like someone looking around with curiosity. He stood with his right foot lengthwise on the rope, his left crosswise, his knees slightly bent and his fists on his hips. And all of us, looking up, suddenly understood what lightness was. We understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted, who believed in nothing and obeyed no one; we understood what it would be like to be such a person, and we understood that we would never be such people.
Tyll is the very best kind of historical fiction: Using a folkloric German character (the fabled prankster imp, Tyll Ulenspiegel) and transplanting him into a very real, very tragic period that includes the Thirty Years War (apparently 60% of the German population died in that 17th century conflict, mostly from starvation and disease), author Daniel Kehlmann is able to paint a vivid picture of a truly horrifying time and place without making those horrors overly explicit; this is mostly stench and chills and the telling of fairy tales to still an empty belly. The average person had very little freedom — lives were controlled by custom, superstition, fear of marauding armies and the witch-hunting Church — but as a wandering entertainer, this version of Tyll Ulenspiegel was beholden to no man, neither priest nor king, and he could speak truth to power with a wink; and that wink is what makes this history lesson so entertaining. The timeline in Tyll is jumbled — chapters jump around major episodes from Tyll’s life, and in several chapters from the points-of-view of actual historic characters, Tyll doesn’t necessarily appear at all — and from the sentences to the structure, this is a serious and well-constructed work of fiction that amused and bemused me beginning to end. I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Suddenly the dance was over. Gasping for breath, we looked up at the wagon, on which Tyll Ulenspeigel was now standing alone; the two women were nowhere to be seen. He sang a mocking ballad about the poor, stupid Winter King, the Elector Palatine, who had thought he could defeat the Kaiser and accept Prague’s crown from the Protestants, yet his kingship had melted away even before the snow. He sang about the Kaiser too, who was always cold from praying, the little man trembling before the Swedes in the imperial palace in Vienna, and then he sang about the King of Sweden, the Lion of Midnight, strong as a bear, but of what use had it been to him against the bullets in Lützen that took his life like that of any mere soldier, and out was your light, and gone the little royal soul, gone the lion! Tyll Ulenspiegel laughed, and we laughed too, because you couldn’t resist him and because it did us good to remember that these great men were dead and we were still alive.
I confess to not knowing anything about the Thirty Years War beforehand, but without lecturing or infodumping, Kehlmann lays out the history of that conflict — how it started, how it played out, how it affected the average person on the ground — in vignettes of how people (commoner or king) lived out their daily lives. In some of my favourite bits, Tyll somehow gets taken on as the official Court Fool for Frederick V and his wife Elizabeth Stuart — briefly the King and Queen of Bohemia, derisively known as the Winter King and Queen for the brevity of their reign — and in this role, Tyll is free to make Falstaffian observations about Their Majesties; fair, since it was the egos of this pair that provoked the war. I especially liked the chapters from Elizabeth’s POV — a royal personage might expect more comforts in life than groats and small beer, but rules of etiquette very much restricted her freedom, too — and I enjoyed her memories of watching the King’s Men perform in London as a girl and meeting with Shakespeare himself; I liked her English disdain (as imagined by a German author) as she dismissed German culture:
In German lands real theatre was unknown; there, pitiful players roamed through the rain and screamed and hopped and farted and brawled. This was probably due to the cumbersome language; it was no language for theatre; it was a brew of groans and harsh grunts, it was a language that sounded like someone struggling not to choke, like a cow having a coughing fit, like a man with beer coming out his nose. What was a poet supposed to do with this language? She had given German literature a try, first that Opitz and then someone else, whose name she had forgotten; she could not commit to memory these people who were always named Krautbacher or Engelkrämer or Kargholzsteingrömpl, and when you had grown up with Chaucer, and John Donne had dedicated verses to you — “fair phoenix bride,” he had called her, “and from thine eye all lesser birds will take their jollity” — then even with the utmost politeness you could not bring yourself to find any merit in all this German bleating.
Tyll himself — as a tight-rope walker, juggler, ventriloquist, actor, and balladeer — is one of these lowbrow “pitiful players”, but German culture is eventually redeemed by a chance meeting with Paul Fleming (a poet who unapologetically wrote his verses in German), and many years later, at a reception during the peace talks at Westphalia that negotiated the end the Thirty Years War, Elizabeth is stunned by a small chamber group (four violinists, one harpist, and a man with a strange horn) that play an oddly compelling music (that I took to presage the eventual dominance by German composers in symphony and opera; “cat pianos” notwithstanding.)
Along the way, we also meet a pair of witch-hunting Jesuits — the actual scholars Oswald Tesimond (lone surviving architect of the Gunpowder Plot that had targeted Elizabeth’s family in England) and Athanasius Kircher (a Da Vinci-like polymath and author of dozens of “major works”) — and as they keep an eye out for dragons (the best proof for the existence of a dragon in any area is the fact that no one has ever claimed to see one there; they are just that crafty), the pair demonstrate the Kafkaesque nature of a witch trial, with zero self-awareness of their own hypocrisies. Just one more oppressive mechanism that the average person has no power to fight back against. And just like we don’t actually see battle, just the war’s effects on the population (the closest we get is the Winter King’s visit to a Swedish army camp, where he is knocked back by the stench and can’t keep his eyes off a particularly horrific sight), we don’t see inside the witch-hunters’ torture chamber, just witness its effects:
She is silent. Her lips don’t move, her eyes seem extinguished. She looks like an empty shell, her face a mask that no one is wearing, her arms as if hung wrong at the joints. Better not to think about it, thinks Dr. Kircher, who at the same moment naturally cannot help thinking about what Master Tilman did to those arms to make them hang so wrong. Better not to imagine it. He rubs his eyes and imagines it.
But no matter how powerless the peasantry, Tyll and his band of motley players is bound to eventually make an appearance in their village square; and even if it’s Tyll’s donkey, Origenes, who gets to say the words that mock powerful men to their faces, everyone will feel a vicarious twinge of strength. The concept of inserting the fictional Tyll into actual historic drama is ultimately a very powerful one and Kehlmann must be applauded for this feat of engineering; I am looking forward to picking up more from the author.
