appear at the village linden tree on a Sunday,
courting and flirting with the rustics (_Toerper_) who carry swords and
spurs in truly knightly fashion. Nevertheless, the peasant girls prefer
their liaisons with the genuine article, and the poet reveals no idyls,
no abstinence, no innocent play, but downright immorality. As they could
not have the knights for husbands, they chose them for lovers.

Frivolity is general also among the lower strata of society. Drastic
pictures are drawn and overdrawn. There are dialogues in spring songs.
Sometimes two maidens converse and open their hearts. Then mother and
daughter commune; the mother desires to participate in the dance, the
daughter tries in vain to dissuade her; or the daughter wishes to go and
the mother dissuades; the daughter desires to join Neidhart, but the
mother has a peasant ready for her to whom she is, however, indifferent;
the mother keeps her clothing from her; the daughter takes it by force;
the mother whips her daughter with a rake or a spindle; the other
resists, and there are blows on both sides. In all these songs the girl
is longing and passionate; the knight is a successful lover.

In the winter songs the case is reversed. Here the knight is sighing,
complaining, rejected. The peasant girl for whom he pines makes him
languish. The peasants prove superior to the knight, who avenges himself
by mocking, satirizing, caricaturing the brutalities of the peasant
dances, their fights, their gluttony, tawdry luxury of dress, and
drunkenness.

However painful it may be to the historian of culture to record the
mournful facts of degeneracy and demoralization of entire periods in the
life of great and noble nations, yet he owes it to historical truth to
conceal nothing. It is unfortunately true that entire classes of the
German people, entire periods, entire regions, were sunk in the mire of
immorality due to outer and inner conditions over which neither the
nation nor its leaders had any control. Yet, such periods of moral
depression are perhaps as necessary for a vigorous convalescence as the
glorious periods of the moral purity, honor, and chastity of women.

As there can be no life without death, no joy without pain, no good
without evil, as no religion was ever conceived in which the principle
of God, of immortality, and of infinite goodness remained unassailed by
the evil forces, be it devil, demon, Loki, or Ormuz, so the history of
the German nation is fi