Better than any historian, storyteller Gertrud von le Fort brings her unique genius for laying bare the human heart in making sense of and finding redemption amid the horror of human suffering.
Is there a Catholic home in America that does not display an Infant of Prague watching over the family from the top of a bookcase or from the corner of a dresser or from the center of a mantle? Of the good souls in so many homes, how many can give an account of the origins of the devotion?
Fair enough. Piety does not insist on historical literacy. Nonetheless, the cataclysm at the center of the story of the Holy Infant Jesus of Prague is remarkable for the altogether inverse relationship between our conversancy with the event and its impact on the modern age. I am speaking of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The conflict gave Europe the nation-state, saved Protestantism in central Europe, and reduced Spain. During and following the conflict the tactics of modern warfare and modern diplomacy matured. Some eight million perished, although more recent estimates claim as many as twelve million.
The reader will recall, however, that while there was a good bit of fanfare in 2017 to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s rebellion, one year later, the four-hundredth anniversary of the Defenestration of Prague—the moment that set the match to the touchhole of one of the most sanguinary and destructive wars in all history—came and went without notice. Yet it is in the midst of this conflict that the Infant of Prague, a nineteen-inch Christ Child doll of wood and wax with a near universal reach, enters the popular imagination: the doll is lost, then is found on a trash heap, and then is invoked by the faithful to protect Prague from a siege prosecuted by the relentless Protestant soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden.
It is not without explanation that American ignorance of the Thirty Years’ War is near total. We are a former British colony, after all, and James I laudably kept England out of the conflict, though not a few of the future Roundheads and Cavaliers of the subsequent English Civil War would cut their teeth as freelancers on the Continent’s battlefields. Moreover, our knowledge of Continental history, especially east of the Rhine, is near blank. Until one of today’s masters of silver-screen brutality (Ridley Scott? Mel Gibson?) commit the event to celluloid, English speakers who have given up reading will have to make do with the compelling if problematic (and with carnage enough) 1971 picture The Last Valley, written and directed by Great Escape screenwriter James Clavell. Michael Caine and Omar Sharif play a Protestant mercenary captain and a Catholic schoolteacher respectively, who broker a separate peace during the Thirty Years’ War in a secluded farming village protected by mountains. Caine, who read the picture as an indictment of religious turmoil in contemporary Northern Ireland, felt he delivered one of his standout performances. The photography is striking, clearly influenced by Jacques Callot’s baroque engravings Les grandes misères de la guerre. The masterful score is the work of none other than John Barry, composer of the James Bond soundtracks. Catholics looking for a “we were the good guys” narrative of the Thirty Years’ War will be disappointed. So will they be by The Wedding of Magdeburg, penned by the great German Catholic novelist and convert Gertrud von le Fort.
To le Fort’s masterpiece in a moment. First, a fool’s errand: summarizing the causes, action, and consequences of what may be the most involved war in history.
Since the Protestant rebellion, wars between Catholic and Protestant princes flared and quieted, but a century later, the Habsburg Empire, at strength in Spain and Austria (and Africa and America), seemed positioned to impose by political and cultural influence, and by military might if needed, a thoroughgoing restoration of the Catholic Faith throughout Europe. Indeed, any observer of the time would have reason to doubt the future of Protestantism as a serious political and cultural force.
The office of Holy Roman emperor had been for centuries filled by election. Indeed, the great princes and prelates of Europe were called “electors”. Long had the Imperial throne been a Habsburg possession, but Protestant holdouts in Bohemia feared the potential rule of the heir apparent, the fervent Ferdinand II. The aforementioned tossing out the window of Ferdinand’s ambassadors by the Bohemian Protestant nobility provoked the Catholics. Quick victories in Bohemia and the Palatinate (southern Germany) might have put the matter to rest, but the devout and enthusiastic Ferdinand, who was at last elected in 1619, pressed—overpressed—his advantage.
His generals, who both feature in le Fort’s novel—Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein and Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly—vanquished Protestant armies as far north as the Baltic Sea. Ferdinand did not extend to his Protestant subjects the religious tolerance that his predecessor, Rudolph II, had codified in his Letter of Majesty of 1609. Backed into a doctrinal corner, the German and Bohemian Protestant princes formed an alliance with King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and, alas, Cardinal Richelieu, working for the long-standing Habsburg rival Louis XIII.
For more than a generation Christian Europeans tore at their own collective throat. Europe, Germany especially, became a wasteland of slaughter, plunder, and rape by mercenaries whom neither side could afford to pay and by religious fervor gone mad. Notorious among these soldiers of fortune—and villains of the novel—were Croatians. Le Fort’s portrayal is not ahistorical, much less unjust, but one wonders whether it was not also without contemporary inspiration. She was writing as the Nazis in her own country were ascendant, and she cannot have been ignorant of the Ustaše Croatian racial and religious purity movement, whose foot soldiers just a few years after The Wedding of Magdeburg was published would perpetrate under Nazi alliance the genocide of as many as half a million Serbs.
In decades of horrific slaughter, it is ridiculous to speak of a nadir, but the siege and destruction in 1631 of Magdeburg, Saxony’s capital city, site of the death of Saint Norbert and resting place of Otto I, the first Holy Roman emperor, must be the most infamous. Ferdinand’s 1629 Edict of Restitution (the “Imperial Edict” in the novel and central to its moral crisis) proved too much for the Protestant burghers of Magdeburg’s Rathaus. They resisted the edict and invested vain hope in Gustavus Adolphus. How le Fort portrays the heartbreaking failure of both sides to seek the better part in the other should make run ice-cold the blood of any American who has ever uttered “unconditional surrender” and meant it. Two-thirds or more of Magdeburg’s thirty thousand citizens were shelled, burned, or starved. Four-fifths of the city was laid waste.
Count Tilly’s culpability for the war crime is in doubt. The Jesuit-trained officer was a man of moral principle. Le Fort is sympathetic. She does paint his number two, Gottfried Heinrich, Count of Pappenheim, as more of an enthusiast for bloodshed in the service of the Catholic cause. While we know that Pappenheim ordered the burning of two buildings, historians in search of an accurate account have argued that the strong winds of that fateful day (also in the le Fort work) and the mercenary mob gone out of control (foreseen by Tilly, according to le Fort) carry much of the blame.
There were no winners of the Thirty Years’ War, although, as with war today, a few people in power became extraordinarily wealthy. The most harmful and lasting effect of the war was the privatization of religion that began with Martin Luther a century before. Germany did not recover until well into the eighteenth century. Magdeburg’s recovery wasn’t until the nineteenth. The Catholic Church knows, especially in the modern age, that once the dogs of war are let loose, horrible human suffering will follow. I’m not hopeful that American military institutions will regard seriously the Church’s just-war doctrine, when Christian princes set it aside with abandon in the seventeenth century. Still, perhaps The Wedding of Magdeburg could be required reading at Annapolis and West Point. More than for military officers, however, le Fort’s novel should be required reading for the staffs of those think tanks and journals ever advocating for more American funding of, and participation in, perpetual war.
The rest of us need to seek something more: redemption. “Who can understand the human heart?” asks Jeremiah (17:9, GNT). In times of tragedy especially, its best and worst qualities are made manifest. Better than any historian, storyteller Gertrud von le Fort brings her unique genius for laying bare the human heart in making sense of and finding redemption amid the horror of human suffering. She stands with Gironella and Manzoni in this regard—and, in my mind, ahead of Dickens. All due praise and thanks to Ignatius Press for bringing this and other of her works back into print for English readers.
This essay was first published as the Foreword to the first English translation of The Wedding of Magdeburg (Ignatius Press 2024). Watch Joseph Pearce, Father Fessio and Vivian Dudro discuss The Wedding of Magdeburg at the Off the Shelf Book Club.
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The featured image is “The Siege (Defense of a Church Courtyard During the Thirty Years’ War) [1848],” by Carl Friedrich Lessing, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.