Get to work! New non-fiction books: Basel hooligans from February 9, 1529.

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Tomorrow, Monday, Morgestreich – then the dressed and illuminated residents of Basel will march through the dark old town to the sound of drums and whistles; and in the evenings, schnitzelbanglers make fun of the authorities in the style of court jesters. Since 1835, the spiritual father of the carnival is buried in the cathedral: Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536). Every time I visit Basel, I visit the tomb near the front column in the north aisle. Here he rests, the author of “Praise of Folly” (1511).

“Mrs. Folly appears,” writes Dutch historian Sandra Langereis (56) in her biography Erasmus, recently published in German. “She performs in front of large audiences. And she sees that her audience immediately forgets all their worries.” Foreheads smooth out, smiles appear on faces. “Their audience is intoxicated with happiness. Everyone applauds when she performs.” This is how Langereis describes the beginning of the most famous work of the Dutch humanist.

Erasmus was not always in a laughing mood: between 1466 and 1469 he was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the illegitimate son of a wealthy copyist and his housekeeper, and was baptized by Gerasmus. When he was a teenager, his parents died, he was given guardianship, received lessons from clergy, and was forced into a monastery against his will. Langereis knows “that after five or six years he went out into the world and never returned to his cell.”

Erasmus came to Basel in 1514 by way of Paris (studying theology at the Sorbonne), Turin (doctorate) and Cambridge (teacher in Greek). The city is famous for its printing press, most famously for its publisher Johannes Froben (1460–1527). In 1515 he published The Praise of Folly in large numbers, and the book sold extremely well. Langereis writes about Erasmus: “With the Basel edition he wanted to convince both friends and enemies of the literary and therefore playful character of Frau Volheit.”

In addition to book friends, Erasmus also has various enemies. “I am a heretic for two parties,” he wrote in a letter during his first months in Basel: for the Lutherans, because he believed in the free will of man, and for the anti-Lutherans, because he wanted to allow Christ to be man. Free-spirited, Erasmus was a humanist through and through. And since Basel showed its inhuman side on February 9, 1529, he moved to nearby Freiburg im Breisgau.

“No city in Europe has ever experienced anything like it,” Langereis writes. “Two hundred people went from church to church and carried all the equipment everywhere.” The Reformation after Luther (1483–1546) took complete control of Basel. Erasmus returned to the Rhine only in 1535 and died there a year later. And although he did not renounce the Catholic faith, he was buried in the now Protestant Munster with great sympathy from the residents of Basel.

Source: Blick