What is it that we know so well and cannot speak? What is
it that we want to say and cannot tell? What is it that keeps
swelling in our hearts its grand and solemn music, that is
aching in our throats, that is pulsing like a strange wild
grape through all the conduits of our blood….?

—Thomas Wolfe
_____________

It might as well have been a city on the moon, for all I knew of it growing up. And even after I was grown up. Countries in Europe were never even remotely on my radar screen, not in any real sense. Sure, I knew those countries existed, like Germany. And I read about Berlin, because of the Wall. But not Muenster. I might well have lived my whole life and never even heard of the place. And you don’t know what you don’t know, until you do.

And right at twenty years ago, I learned a little bit of what I didn’t know. It was sometime during my first year at Bob Jones University, that timid and self-conscious time when I was wearing my detestable straight-cut suit coat to classes, as any good plain Mennonite would. And now and then, while studying at the library, I searched for any books that would shed a little more light on my Anabaptist heritage. I don’t know what I was looking for. Some original writings, maybe. And to its credit, BJU had a few volumes tucked away on some remote shelves in the religion section. I picked them up and paged through them. Sat there and read chunks from different chapters.

All I ever knew about the Anabaptists, all I’d learned growing up, had come from two sources. From the sermons of Amish preachers, and from the Martyr’s Mirror. My spiritual forefathers were always a persecuted people, always harassed and hunted and tortured and drowned and burned at the stake for their faith. That’s all I had ever heard and that’s all I knew. Or thought I knew. Until I paged through those few books at the library at BJU. And it just jumped out at me. Some of those vaunted Anabaptist forefathers weren’t all they’d been cracked up to be, in those sermons. Nah. Some of them were real scoundrels. Radicals. Riff raff. And it was startling to me. It really was.

Because some of them had not been all that quiet or peaceable. Some of them had taken up the sword. Some of them had embraced violence, and inflicted blood and fire and death on others. I sat there, shocked. It’s like saying black is white, I thought. It can’t be. Anabaptists can’t be violent like that. They’re the ones everyone else hunted and killed. Both the evil Catholics and the Protestants. I’ll have to tell Dad about this. I wonder if he knows. I bet he does, and never told me. And I kept on reading. (Side note: The next time I went home to visit, I told Dad about my discovery. Did you know that, that some Anabaptists were crazy and violent? I asked him. He folded his arms and chuckled. “Har, har. Those weren’t real Anabaptists,” he said. Well, uh, yeah they were, I said. They were all re-baptizers. You can’t just pick and choose which ones were “real” or not. And we left it at that.)

The most brutal Anabaptist violence against others came down in the city of Muenster. There, a whacked-out firebrand of a leader named Jan von Leiden and his followers seized the city and proclaimed a new heaven on earth. Of course, the local king was not at all amused. Actually, he was quite furious. He besieged the city. But Jan and his followers weren’t about to give up their newfound heaven. They met force with force and violence with violence. Fire with fire and blood with blood. And they ruled the terrified inhabitants of Muenster with savage force as well.

It was a different time back then, obviously. And it’s tough, to grasp how it really was so long ago. Those were turbulent and dangerous days. You could easily lose your life, for thinking wrong. It was the struggle of the western world, to reach the place we now are. A place where you are free to think and believe what you want. Mostly, anyway. A post-Christian world, one might say, in Europe. Where most people recoil from any kind of personal profession of faith. A natural progression, maybe, a reaction to the cesspool of corruption that will always flow when people are taxed against their will to support any state-sponsored church. Any entity connected to the state will be corrupt from its inception. By nature. There’s no way it can be anything else, because the nature of the state is always corrupt and evil. But I digress. Bunny trail territory, right there.

The siege of Muenster dragged on for four brutal and bloody years, from 1533 to 1536. I won’t go into a lot of details. Let’s just say things got really hard and really messy inside those walls. Jan von Leiden ruled with an iron fist. Forced the city residents to either be re-baptized or face something a whole lot worse. Like being expelled from the city, turned over to the king’s murderous troops, lurking right outside the walls. Or stay and get murdered right in the city. There were no good choices for the common people trapped inside those walls. Food was scarce. And many of the men fell, either from starvation or during battles. Their widows needed husbands. So Jan took sixteen wives to himself. And lived in luxury, bedecked in gold and all kinds of finery, as the city starved around him.

Long-term, Jan could not win, of course. The king’s forces eventually broke through. The people inside Muenster were too weak and too starved to resist, after four years. And the king made an example of the leaders, so an uprising like that would never happen again. Jan and two of his henchmen were tortured to death in the public square. And this is where it all gets just a little creepy. After they had been dispatched by stabbing after having chunks of flesh torn from them with hot iron tongs, the king had the bodies of Jan and his two buddies stuffed into three cages. And hung them high on the steeple tower of the old church where Jan had ruled and preached and dictated the lives of others. Hung the cages up there on that steeple, and let the bodies decompose to the elements. As a warning to others. Don’t even try to rebel against the powers that be. Look what happens to those who did.

And that’s why I wanted to go to Muenster so badly. Because those cages still hang on that church today.

Thursday morning. I woke up feeling a little strange. And a little sad. It was all flying by so fast. The first week, more than half over now. And Leuphana University, the reason I had even been invited here, that was over, too. I’d leave today. Probably never see this place again, I thought. I puttered about, packing my things into Big Red and the little burgundy carry-on. The bags bulged at the seams. Heavier, now. People had given me gifts, here and there. A book. Another book. This and that. It all had to be packed in. After checking the room top to bottom to make sure nothing was left behind, I pulled my bags out and down to the front desk. The nice lady smiled at me. Well, she wasn’t actually that nice, but cordial enough. And she spoke a little English. I’m leaving, I told her. Is there anything I have to sign? “The University took care of everything,” she assured me. I thanked her and lugged the bags outside, into the little courtyard. Maryann and the taxi should be here right soon. At nine, she’d promised me.

We had plenty of time to catch our 9:30 train, Maryann had claimed. We had our tickets. It’s ten minutes, to the station. But I insisted on leaving early. Get there, so you’re there. It doesn’t hurt to wait. That’s what I do at airports, too. The few times I fly, I mean. Get there early, and just hang out. Wait, make it tight, and who knows what will happen? A little traffic jam will make you miss your flight. Or your train. The taxi showed up right on time, and we were off. I looked out the windows, got my last glimpses of Luenberg as the taxi cruised down the deserted streets. Ascension Day. A holiday. Not a lot going on. I looked around and thought, this town sure has been good to me. It really has. And now I’m leaving it. You absorb one thing as it comes at you, you walk through it. Then it’s gone and the next one comes.

I don’t know how efficient it actually is, what with the government running it and all, but the train systems I saw in Germany and later in Switzerland were pretty astounding. The coaches are roomy and comfortable. The trains run on time. And if you miss the one you wanted, another train will come along, usually before long. Our train hissed in and stopped. People piled off first, then on. Maryann found the right coach, and I followed her on board. We found our reserved seats in a little walled-off room, by the windows. I want to see the land, I had told her. And she got us window seats. I pretty much just looked out to see what I could see as the train slid out, picked up speed, and swooped across the ancient landscape. Muenster, I said. I can’t believe it. Here we come.

It’s built to last, pretty much everything you see in Germany. Their building codes would drive me crazy, I’m sure. So many hoops to jump through. These people don’t even know what a pole building is, I thought. Back home, the buildings I sell, those poles are warrantied not to rot in the ground for forty years. Forty years around here, they’ve barely started using the building. They’d never construct something so, uh, temporary. If you build something, make sure it has a good chance to last for a good long time. Generations. Hundreds of years, if not a thousand. Or more. Doesn’t matter, really, what it is. Houses, office complexes, old churches. And they all flashed by as we rolled on and on. Farmers toiled in the fields on their tractors, tilling the earth. Just like back home, I thought.

And something else stood out that I surely hope won’t be around in a thousand years, although the Germans probably built them to last that long. They stabbed into the sky like giant aliens, great forests of them, hundreds of feet high. One of the ugliest atrocities ever devised by humans. Giant windmills, with those huge three-pronged propeller blades that never seem to be turning when you see them. I couldn’t believe the Germans got taken by that scam. Those things are just flat-out appalling, I grumbled to Maryann. Why would they install something so revolting? Gashes in the sky, is what they are.

It’s the price of buying into the political correctness of the “Green” gospel, those massive, abominable windmills. All to get away from traditional forms of energy, to “save the earth”, this Garden of Eden that humans have defiled. And are in the process of destroying. Within a few generations, the time will come when people will look back, aghast, that such an obviously devious scheme was ever foisted on the populace. That such atrocities were ever allowed to mar the natural beauty of their ancient landscape. They will tear them down, people in the future, they will tear down those monuments to colossal stupidity as if they never stood. And they’ll shake their heads in disbelief at this hopelessly naïve generation. They will. That time will come. I am convinced of it.

The train pulsed along. Maryann and I talked and talked, even though I was peering out the window most of the time. She told me of how it was, to live in Germany, her adopted country. How she first came over, years ago, as a student. And pretty much stayed on. She talked of the classes she taught in American Studies, about writing in general, and my book. Now and then, the train slid into some station along the way and stopped. Passengers got on and off. And after one such stop, she told me. “Muenster is next. It’s coming right up.”

And it stirred inside me, the nervous tension and excitement. Here I was, approaching the site of some really dark history from my people. Here, this is where all that terrible stuff unfolded, evil stuff that was never told and never taught. I can’t express, really, why it was so important to me. But it was. I wanted to see the church. I wanted to see the cages. Stand there and look at them. Stand on the ground where the evil had come down from all sides. Confront it. Speak it.

The train slowed and stopped. We struggled out of the little compartment with our luggage. Walked out onto the platform and down the steps. A stranger in a strange land, I stayed close to Maryann as we plunged through the crowds and headed toward the station entrance. Outside, we approached the line of taxis, and boarded the first one. Maryann told the driver the name of our hotel, and off we went. Less than ten minutes later, we unloaded in front of a classic old hotel close to the old town section. We walked in, and signed in. I pulled out a roll of Euros and paid up front for our rooms. Might as well get rid of some of these Euros Sabrina gave me, I figured. I can’t spend them back home.

Half an hour later, after unpacking and settling in our rooms, we headed out. A beautiful perfect day. My trusty messenger bag was strapped across my shoulder, as always. With my passport, some cash and my iPad, to take some pics. And a copy of my book. I always carried one of those in my bag, just for anyhow. “The old church is right over there,” Maryann pointed to a steep Gothic steeple piercing the skies. “That’s where the cages are.” OK, I said. Let’s go. I can’t wait to see them. We walked down the worn brick sidewalks. All the stores were closed for Ascension Day. Crowds of holidayers strolled about. Down the sidewalks we walked, around a curve. The old church loomed. I scanned the steeple. No cages, from this direction, I said. “I think they’re on the other side,” Maryann replied. We walked on.

Approaching the “cage church”.

It was a huge, looming, gloomy church, with a tall, tall black steeple. We walked past the front, around to the courtyard on the other side. And Maryann stopped, and pointed up. “There they are,” she said. And I stood there and looked up. And there they were. The cages of Muenster. Right there, above the huge steeple clock. Hanging there, where they’ve hung for almost five hundred years. I stood there and looked and looked. Stared and stared. The cages. There are the cages. You don’t understand, I said to Maryann. This is part of my history they never told me. They never taught it. Anabaptists were always poor innocent people, in my world. Always persecuted because of their faith. Always hunted like animals. They never told me this story. They never told me of the dark side. That’s why it’s so important for me to see for myself.

In the presence of the cages.

The cages up close.

I stood there on those ancient bricks in the sunlight and absorbed the place. For a long time. This, then, is where it happened, that dark chapter in the history of my spiritual forefathers. Back in those turbulent, turbulent times, back when people pretty much from every side had blood on their hands, one way or the other, in some form. This was the spot. Anabaptists. Rebaptizers. They rose up in this city, and they hung up there in those cages, I thought. Wiedertaufer, the Germans call them. It’s a dirty word, in mainstream church history. From both Catholics and Protestants.

And I thought, too. Because of what happened here, maybe that’s why the Martyr’s Mirror has so many stories of persecution and death. Because you can bet the powers that be went after the Wiedertaufer with full force, after what happened here. Didn’t matter if they claimed to be nonresistant, as in fact a great many if not the majority of them were. They were deeply tainted by Muenster. And I can understand why. Not from today’s perspectives. But from a tiny glimpse of the perspectives of the times. We can’t judge history that far back by our standards. We can say with absolute certainty that certain actions were wrong. But we can’t actually judge those people, not without taking into consideration the times in which they lived. Had we been there then, would we have been any different? It’s simply hubris, to claim we would have been.

The cages are completely empty. No shreds remain of the bodies that were encased in them. They have decomposed completely and scattered to the winds. Someone once told me that in the early to mid-1800s, some sun-bleached bones could still be seen in the cages. But time and the elements have claimed even those. Jan von Leiden and his two thug henchmen have been wiped completely from the face of the earth. Only the stories remain, of who they were and what they did. That, and the cages, silent specters, witnesses to the awful fate to which they were condemned.

After twenty minutes or so, we slipped through a little side entrance into the old church. The interior was just huge and breathtaking. Off in one corner stood an elderly nun, at a little information table. She was chatting with another tourist. We waited our turn respectfully. After the tourist wandered away, we approached. She smiled at us in welcome. Her name was Sister Huberta. Maryann spoke to her and the two of them rattled back and forth in German so fast that I hardly understood a word. “The cages,” Maryann told her. “This man is a descendant of the Wiedertaufer. He came to see the cages.”

“Oh, yes, the Wiedertaufer and the cages,” Sister Huberta was all smiles. Genuine smiles, too, considering where I came from. She opened a folder and showed me. Sketches of the evil Jan von Leiden and his two main henchmen. And she told us. “They ruled the city for four years, from 1533 to 1536. This church is where he preached and ruled. Things were not good. He beheaded one of his wives.” A fact I had read, and knew to be true. I chatted with Sister Huberta, through Maryann. Any chance I can get up in that tower and actually look at those cages close up? Her face fell a bit. “No, because of legal issues.” Maryann translated. That figures, I thought. Legal issues. I smiled at Sister Huberta. Then I asked. Would you take a picture with me? “Of course,” she told Maryann. “But not inside the church. I’ll walk outside with you.” Do you think she’d hold a copy of my book for the pic? I asked Maryann. I have one right here in my bag. So Maryann told her. “This man comes from the Amish and wrote a book about it. Would you hold it for the picture?” Of course she would, she beamed.

Jan von Leiden as depicted in Sister Huberta’s folder.

Maryann, Sister Huberta, and me.

Catholics are supposed to be all guilt-ridden, I know. Amish guilt is very close to Catholic guilt, and I’ve been there, done that. But Sister Huberta exuded mostly joy, not guilt. She was simply welcoming and joyful, even to a descendant of the despised Wiedertaufer. She chattered right along with Maryann, then smiled and wished us well and took her leave. Walked back to her post inside the church.

We strolled back into the church and looked around. The pulpit tower was still there, the spot where Jan had stood and preached. That, and the remnants of the bases of many statues of saints he and his rabid iconoclastic followers had smashed. Off to one corner stood a couple of tables with candles. A stack of unlit candles off to one side, by a little collection box. For a small donation, you could light your own candle, say your own prayer. I clinked a few Euros into the little collection box. Then Maryann and I both lit candles and stuck them on the tables with the others. I didn’t think to say a prayer, so I didn’t. My prayer was in my heart. And before the Lord, the heart speaks powerfully without words, whatever its condition, whether you want it to or not.

Jan von Leiden preached and ruled from this pulpit.

Maryann planting her candle.

Our adventures with the cages weren’t quite done, though. We strolled on out to the courtyard toward the old shops lining the streets. And an elderly gentleman approached us. “You are from the Wiedertaufer?” he asked. I don’t know how he knew that. Maybe he’d been watching us, or maybe he had been inside the church and overheard our conversation with Sister Huberta. “Yes,” Maryann responded, motioning at me. “He is.”

“I live here in Muenster,” he said proudly. “Back in such and such a year (It was in the 1990s sometime), Muenster was voted the most beautiful city of its size in all the world.” He beamed. We beamed back. How nice. But he had something more to tell us. “Right here,” he said, pointing down to the bricks on which we stood. “Right here is the spot in the public square where they tortured and killed the three Wiedertaufer leaders, before they hung them up there in those cages.” I looked down. And there was a little plaque, inserted among the bricks. Marking the spot where the scaffold had stood. And again, I just stood there in awe, absorbing this moment and this place.

“You’ll want to go to the Museum,” the man said pointing. “It’s just over there, a few blocks. They have some displays of when it happened, there. With real things from that time in our city.” Maryann chatted with the nice man for a few more minutes, then he turned and strolled away, quite satisfied with himself. I looked at him as he walked away and marveled. He was the only person on the whole trip who popped out of nowhere to speak to me like that, then just disappeared. It was more startling in retrospect than it seemed right at the moment. Later, I thought about it. He was waiting for us. What chance was there that he would show up to show us this spot? And direct us? What chance was there of that?

The stranger who showed up to guide us.

After a quick bite of pizza and a glass of beer in the courtyard right below the cages, we set off for the museum. There were a dozen or more rooms of displays. Numbers six and seven dealt with the Muenster Wiedertaufer rebellion and the cages. We walked through slowly, I drank in every display. The information signs were all in German. I pestered Maryann. Was sagt Das? Was sagt Das? What does this say? And she cheerfully translated for me. They had exact replicas of the three cages, hanging there. Odds and ends of this and that, including a set of torture tongs. The sign said these were likely the actual tongs used to tear chunks of flesh from Jan von Leiden and his two deputies. They hung there, on the wall. There were many other stern signs, too. In English and German. Do Not Touch. But I touched those tongs. And a few other forbidden items. I think Maryann was a little horrified at me. It didn’t matter. I was here. And I was going to experience this all the way.

By late afternoon, we returned to our hotel. My room was small but very nice. You could open up the window from the third floor and lean right out over the street. Where I come from, you could never do that. But right that moment, I couldn’t appreciate my surroundings much. I was just exhausted, physically and emotionally. After a brief nap, I met up with Maryann and we walked back out to find dinner. We stopped at a very nice little outdoor café. And afterward, we strolled through the lit streets and sidewalks of the old town, window shopping. The whole setting was just surreal.

Night walk. Window shopping. Muenster. Duetschland.

The “cage church” at night.

The next morning, after a scrumptious breakfast in the hotel dining room (European hotels got breakfast down, big time), we took a last quick walk about the old town. Past the dark old church where the cages hung, a few blocks to another huge church. I shudder a bit to think where all the labor and materials came from, to build those huge old monuments of churches, centuries ago. Taxing the poor peasants to death, probably. That got the materials. And I don’t know, but I bet the laborers were pressed into service for the church, when they would have rather been out there working for themselves. I don’t know that. But I suspect it was so.

We walked into the massive old stone church. A huge statue stood there, toward the front, towering over everyone who walked in. “St. Christopher,” Maryann told me. “The patron saint of travelers.” Great, I said. This is an apt place to come, the morning I take off on my own for the first time. I felt the tension inside me from that. So far, someone had always been with me, to guide me, to take me, to show me. This morning, Maryann was heading back to Luenberg, back to her work and school. This morning, I was heading on over to Mainz, to speak at Johannes Gutenberg University that night. I could do it, travel alone. It was all set up. My hotel in Mainz was just across the street from the train station, they told me. Simple. Just walk out, look for the King Hotel, and go in. They’ll be expecting you. Still, I figured this little stop to see St. Christopher was a good thing. Can’t hurt, to cover all your bases. We each lit a candle in that church, as well.

St. Christopher and the Christ child.

Planting my candle.

Back, then, to the hotel, to pack up to leave. And right on time, the taxi pulled up outside. We loaded our luggage, got in, and headed to the train station. I thanked Maryann over and over, profusely. Thanks for bringing me, for taking the time when you had a lot of other very important things that needed your attention. Thanks for realizing how important this was to me. And she gave me a hundred detailed instructions about trains, train schedules and such. We walked out to the platform. Our trains were departing minutes apart, going in opposite directions. Mine pulled in first. “Good luck. You’ll be OK,” Maryann assured me. We hugged good-bye. And I stepped onto the train for Mainz. All by myself.

A stranger in a strange land, I had seen and lived wondrous, wondrous things. And where I was going, there would be many, many more.
**********************************************

A couple of housekeeping notes. First, my last blog post was too long. I apologize for that. I wanted to cram in at least the first four days, the traveling and the Leuphana experience. It was too much to condense any more. And before I knew it, there were eleven pages of writing. Plus the pics. It was about as bad as an Amish preacher who doesn’t know when it’s time to shut up and sit down. Y’all come here to read a few pages on a blog, not a freakin’ chapter in a book.

And that’s why I broke this blog down to the single experience of Muenster. It would have been too much, to try to cram Mainz and its aftermath into this narrative. I figure there’s probably two more blogs about the trip. One for Mainz and beyond (still in Germany), and one for my week in Switzerland. I may wander off onto other trails before they all come out, but I’ll get them written eventually. Bear with me. And I promise. No more long-winded blogs.

I had planned to travel up to Aylmer to see my parents before my trip to Europe, but somehow it didn’t work out. So I told Dad I’d come up sometime in June. It’s looking like it might happen next weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing him. Just talking to him. I haven’t seen him since he’s read the book. And I want to print out and show him a few color photos of scenes from the trip. He’ll like that a lot, I think.

We’ll see how it all works out, and how the writing of it will come.