Get down to business! New non-fiction books: hate preachers in Augsburg, shortage of skilled workers in Rome

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Disease, war, climate: there is no doubt that the Earth is currently in crisis. In the Middle Ages, the poet Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) represented the world with a woman’s face: “Fro welt” was a symbol of seduction and transience. In the visual arts – for example, in the form of a stone figure on the Cathedral of Worms – “Frau Welt” looks seductively beautiful from the front, but her back is full of pus, parasites, toads and snakes: a dying body, a symbol of crisis.

“The crisis originating in medicine referred to a dramatic moment in time between life and death,” writes German history professor Ewald Frei (60) in Thinking Crises Differently. Fry published this anthology with more than 30 articles on threats to humanity from antiquity to the present day, together with his colleague from Tübingen Mischa Meyer (51). This is a handout to be able to learn from history.

“Let’s think about crises in a different way, taking seriously the fact that they are presented, felt and understood as a threat,” they solemnly begin the book, as if it were a prayer. Threats are self-signaling from orders. They occur when people report something quickly, loudly, and impressively: a celestial phenomenon, an approaching storm, a group of people, a virus, a military attack.

This anxiety, which in the Internet age can range from hateful information to hateful comments, was no different in the past; it just spread through other channels besides social media. “As in the late Middle Ages, sermons were also a highly effective means of communication in the early modern period,” writes the Italian historian Michele Camaioni (40) in his article on the Protestant preacher Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564) who worked in Augsburg. He organized hatred for Catholics.

Just as incitement is not an invention of social media, skill shortages are not new. In Rome in 375 AD there was a shortage of food and a famine. A demand quickly arose for the expulsion of non-Romans, against which the prefect of the city strongly warned, because then there would be a shortage of agricultural workers: “If they are not available, should we not find other farmers in their place?” Ignorant and different, they will not act in the same way.

Peace came to Augsburg only after the coexistence of Catholicism and Lutheranism was guaranteed by the legal basis. In Rome, the problem was solved by combining various strategies, “sometimes creating conditions and incentives to attract or retain workers, sometimes using coercion by tightening long-standing restrictions on freedom of movement.” After all, you can learn from history.

Source: Blick