German-Language Literature Quiz

Overview of German-language literature

• German literature includes texts written in the German language in Germany, Austria, the German parts of Switzerland and Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, South Tyrol in Italy, and works of the German diaspora.
• Medieval German literature includes literature written in Germany from the Carolingian dynasty until the Reformation (1517).
• The Old High German period is from the Carolingian dynasty to the mid-11th century, and the most famous works are the Hildebrandslied and the heroic epic known as the Heliand.
• Middle High German runs from the beginning of the 12th century to 1350 and includes Minnesang, courtly romances, and heroic epics.
• Early Modern German literature begins with the German Renaissance in the mid-15th century and the Baroque period (1600 to 1720), which includes works of Andreas Gryphius and Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein.
• The Enlightenment movement in the 18th century includes works of Herder, and the Sensibility movement of the 1750s–1770s ends with Goethe's best-selling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
• Sturm und Drang movement of the late 1760s through the early 1780s in which individual subjectivity and extremes of emotion were given free expression.
• Weimar Classicism was a cultural and literary movement of Europe from 1786 to 1805.
• German Romanticism was the dominant movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
• Biedermeier refers to work in the fields of literature, music, the visual arts, and interior design in the period between the years 1815 and 1848.
• Naturalism (1880–1900) includes works of Gerhart Hauptmann.
• Franz Kafka's iconic writing style captures themes of bureaucracy and existentialism.
• Under the Nazi regime, some authors went into exile (Exilliteratur) and others submitted to censorship ("inner emigration", Innere Emigration).
• The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to German-language authors fourteen times (as of 2020), tying with French-language authors, after English-language authors (with 32).