Bartholomew Sastrow: Being the Memoirs of a German Burgomaster. Bartholomäus Sastrow

INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      If we wish to understand the pedestrian side of German life in the sixteenth century, I know of no better document than the autobiography of Bartholomew Sastrow. This hard-headed, plain-spoken Pomeranian notary cannot indeed be classed among the great and companionable writers of memoirs. Here are no genial portraits, no sweet-tempered and mellow confidings of the heart such as comfortable men and women are wont to distil in a comfortable age. The times were fierce, and passion ran high and deep. One might as well expect to extract amiability from the rough granite of an Icelandic saga. There is no delicacy, no charm, no elevation of tone in these memoirs. Everything is seen through plain glass, but seen distinctly in hard and fine outlines, and reported with an objectivity which would be consistently scientific, were it not for some quick touches of caustic humour, and the stored hatreds of an active, unpopular and struggling life. Nobody very readily sympathizes with bitter or with prosperous men, and when this old gentleman took up his pen to write, he had become both prosperous and bitter. He had always been a hard hitter, and at the age of seventy-five set himself down to compose a fighting apologia. If the ethics are those of Mr. Tulliver, senior, we must not be surprised. Is not the blood-feud one of the oldest of Teutonic institutions?

      I frankly confess that I do not find Mr. Bartholomew Sastrow very congenial company, though I am ready to acknowledge that he had some conspicuous merits. Many good men have been naughty boys at school, and it is possible that even distinguished philanthropists have tippled brandy while Orbilius was nodding. If so, an episode detailed in these memoirs may be passed over by the lenient reader, all the more readily since the Sastrovian oats do not appear to have been very wildly or copiously sown. It is clear that the young man fought poverty with pluck and tenacity. He certainly had a full measure of Teutonic industry, and it argues no little character in a man past thirty years of age to attend the lectures of university professors in order to repair the defects of an early education. I also suspect that any litigant who retained Sastrow's services would have been more than satisfied with this swift and able transactor of business, who appears to have had all the combativeness of Bishop Burnet, with none of his indiscretion. He was just the kind of man who always rows his full weight and more than his weight in a boat. But, save for his vigorous hates, he was a prosaic fellow, given to self-gratulation, who never knew romance, and married his housemaid at the age of seventy-eight.

      A modern German writer is much melted by Sastrow's Protestantism, and apparently finds it quite a touching spectacle. Sastrow was of course a Lutheran, and believed in devils as fervently as his great master. He also conceived it to be part of the general scheme of things that the Sastrows and their kinsmen, the Smiterlows, should wax fat and prosper, while all the plagues of Egypt and all the afflictions of Job should visit those fiends incarnate, the Horns, the Brusers and the Lorbeers. For some reason, which to me is inscrutable, but which was as plain as sunlight to Sastrow, a superhuman apparition goes out of its way to help a young Pomeranian scribe, who upon his own showing is anything but a saint, while the innocent maidservant of a miser is blown up with six other persons no less blameless than herself, to enforce the desirability of being free with one's money. This, however, is the usual way in which an egoist digests the popular religion.

      Bartholomew Sastrow was born at Greifswald, a prosperous Hanseatic town, in 1520. The year of his birth is famous in the history of German Protestantism, for it witnessed the publication of Luther's three great Reformation tracts--the Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, the Babylonish Captivity, and the Freedom of a Christian Man. It seemed in that year as if the whole of Germany might be brought to make common cause against the Pope. The clergy, the nobility, the towns, the peasants all had their separate cause of quarrel with the old régime, and to each of these classes in turn Luther addressed his powerful appeal. For a moment puritan and humanist were at one, and the printing presses of