Shaman of Oberstdorf | Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night | Studies in Early Modern German History
An Inside Look On A Popular German Book
Chonrad Stoeckhlin is a stall boy and is also the main character of this piece. He makes an agreement with his friend, Jacob Walch. Now according to the terms of the agreement, whoever died first between them, would return to tell about their life in the afterlife. No more than a few days had passed, and Jacob died.
The word and promise was kept, with appearances to Conrad being made five whole times. However suspicion grew, and upon close inspection Chonrad was found guilty of witchcraft. The book deals with popular culture, Germany, shamanism, and touches subjects such as fortune telling. If you like stories such as The Crucible, you will like this one. Listed below is the first page of Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night Studies in Early Modern German History.
"One evening, eight days before Shrovetide, Chonrad Stoeckhlin and Jacob Walch were sitting together. Both of them were herdsmen, the horse wrangler and oxherd for the town of Oberstdorf, in the mountains of Allgau, and they were drinking, which was a reckoned "manly" pleasure. Although more or less on the margins of their rural society, they were still able to afford wine. There was little work for herdsmen in winter, and so they were swapping tales, and not just trivial stories about the events of the day, or ordinary village gosip. Instead they were discussing serious topics, metaphysical matters,-- specifically the "last things" in a person's life. Their conversation veered far from what faithful Catholics or Protestants, or any manner of Christians for that matter, were supposed to believe in that age. One of these men wound up paying for these stories with his life. And with him were executed a large number of other inhabitants of the Oberstdorf valley. These stories were no simple children's fairytales. These words were deadly.
The place and the actors in this history are easily sketched. Oberstdorf in the Allgaue belonged to the judicial district of Rettenberg, the most southern of the sixteen administrative districts of the prince-bishorpric of Augsburg, a territory belonging to the prince-bishop of Augsburg. This little principality of roughly one thousand square miles had fewer than a hundred thousand inhabitants, stretching along the rivers Lech and Iller from the alpine Oberstdorf Valley in the south to the banks of the Danube in the north. There it bordered on the principality of Palatinate-Neuburg; to the east was a great duchy of Bavaria; and to the west and north lay a scattering..."
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