WHO WAS HANS SACHS AND WHAT IS SCHLARAFFENLAND?
Hans Sachs, 1494-1576, (Figure 1) was by vocation, a cobbler, and by avocation, a Meistersinger of Nrnberg, but he was such a prolific writer that one might think the reverse was true. He wrote more than 4,000 master songs in addition to more than 2,000 fables, tales in verse, morality plays and farces. By his own count, the total was 6,048. Sachs was a contemporary and a follower of, Martin Luther and many of his religious songs became church hymns. He also took most of his characters from daily life as he saw it, the Catholic priest and his housekeeper, the cheating landlord, the wicked and quarrelsome old woman, the sharp-witted wandering scholar, the unfaithful wife, the jealous husband and many more. Schlaraffenland was the Glutton’s, or Fool’s, Paradise.” It was the “Big Rock Candy Mountain” of the 1500s, the place where dreams came true.
