Action scenes from world literature: When Ulrich von Hutten went to the Pfaffenkrieg

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The year 1521 was extremely bad for Ulrich von Hutten.

At the Reichstag in Worms in May, Emperor Karl had disappointed all hopes that the monarch would be at the head of the church reform.

Instead, the emperor continued to rely on the hated "Rome" - that is, the Vatican - against which Hutten had polemicized for years, including with the first writing in which the Varus conqueror Arminius was recommended as a model for the present.

Now Martin Luther, whom the writing knight had long regarded as his spiritual guiding star, had been declared a heretic and Hutten had to allow himself to be ridiculed by Reformation forces because he, the mouth radical, did not take up arms.

On top of that, the syphilis, which Hutten considered defeated after a radical cure with the South American guaiac plant, returned and destroyed his body.

Hutten, this unique hybrid of a free, warlike imperial knight and a high-ranking humanistic noble pen, had to admit that his literature had little effect.

Now he remembered the older and inherited part of his personality - he went into battle.

According to the traditional understanding of the knighthood, which was in decline at the time, that was his right.

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It is true that the king and later emperor Maximilian issued an edict called "Eternal Peace" in 1495, according to which even knights would kindly have to settle their legal disputes by legal means and no longer by guerrilla warfare.

But Hutten, his friend Franz von Sickingen, or Götz von Berlichingen, famous for Goethe, never really accepted the ban.

Just like the terrorists of the 1970s, Hutten seriously hoped that his actions would trigger a general uprising: "Often there was a big flame from Fünklein."

The dreaded robber

First he attacked the ambassadors of Pope Hieronymus Aleander and Marino Caracciolo, who were moving from the Reichstag down the Rhine to Italy.

The attack failed because the two Italians had received strong escorts from the emperor.

But from then on Aleander no longer dared to go to Germany for fear of the "little robber" (

) Hutten.

Then Hutten demands a declaration of honor and 10,000 guilders from the Carthusian monastery in Strasbourg.

Because his strictly old-believing prior had boasted of having wiped his buttocks with pictures of Hutten.

The monks granted the explanation that they traded the compensation down to 200 guilders.

"Hutten's Grave" by Caspar David Friedrich

Source: pa / akg-images

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He had absolutely no luck with the ultimatum to the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt to drive out his old enemy, Pastor Peter Meyer, who was inciting against the humanistic knight there in word and in writing.

They were supposed to remove Meyer from their city "as a let-in wolf among the sheep, as a local poison and penultimate pestilence."

Hutten was able to afford his aggression, which is sometimes loudly called “Pfaffenkrieg”, because he was under the protection of the far more powerful knight Sickingen.

After his defeat and death, he had to flee to Switzerland, already terminally ill.

There he experienced a final humiliation: Erasmus von Rotterdam refused to even receive him in Basel.

The reformer Zwingli finally granted Hutten asylum in Zurich.

Hutten died there on an island in Lake Zurich, where he is also buried.

In 1823 Caspar David Friedrich painted the tomb as a ruin, in which a man in the uniform of the Lützow Freikorps mourns Germany's lost freedom.

It is said that all life as a writer is paper.

In this series we provide counter-evidence.