From the Gesta Romanorum to Werner Bergengruen: Literary Mirrors for Princes from the Late Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century.

Horribile dictu , the twenty-first century is witnessing a steady decline of democracy and the rise of autocratic, self-aggrandizing rulers in many countries across the world. How long will they stay in power, however? Already since the high Middle Ages, numerous poets across Europe explored the topic of the 'emperor in misery,' in which an angel takes on the appearance of the emperor, which forces the latter to go through a long period of extreme suffering, being denied all respect, rejected, beaten, imprisoned, suffering from hunger and cold. Eventually, the poor emperor learns to accept his destiny, repents his previous hubris, confesses his sins, and suddenly realizes that his doppelgänger is actually an angel sent from God to teach him a lesson. Once this transformation in his soul has happened, the angel explains the entire situation, warns the emperor never to commit his sins again, and disappears. Of course, it is doubtful whether these narratives might have ever had a direct impact on the political situation, but the warning for evil rulers resonated throughout the centuries and found a remarkable continuation in one of the novellas of the Baltic-German author Werner Bergengruen (1946). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]