The Poor Man of Toggenburg - Autobiography of Ulrich Bräker

ravishing view! Above me the sky, as bright as a mirror, and the lovely sun, below me a sea of mist, in which our mountains formed the most beautiful islands."

"All kinds of flowers are still blooming on this meadow, as beautifully as in summer. I even plucked blackberries and strawberries and the like, to my heart's content. Wondrous Creator of nature! How green the mountain pastures are still! Not a fleck of snow upon them. Only here and there a hill begins to turn red and yellow - how ravishingly it delights the eye!" [Chronik, p 134]

25th Dec. From Füssli: "Christmas again - but everything else just as it always has been! A fair number of communicants in church even in this fierce frost of winter, and clad in the old costume, with their usual devout gestures and attitudes, though all of them nearly sky-blue in the face and shaking with the cold, which was greatly to the detriment of their outward devotion. In the preaching also the same old tone; save that, in the opinion of a poor layman like me, mildness and warmth are going out of fashion - and in the end one people will only read the history of them." [Chronik, p 136]

In 1777 Bräker began a book called "Dramatisches" which was completed in 1780. (Voellmy, v 1 pp 17-18). It included a dialogue on "Book-reading and outward piety". Voellmy quotes (v 2 p 27) the full title: sketches of his neighbours': "Observations which I made some time ago in my neighbourhood of the different ways of thinking of us farmers, and how things in general, and so also concerning reading books and other practices done in God's service, have set me on to prove how I succeeded in sketching some characters and different opinions, which I know well that one thinks to set down..."

"Ha, now I know, you are laying so much to my charge because I have read a few theatrical works. Haha, you would never believe me if I told you that I gain more edification from them than I ever had from Böhm and Bourrignon. I am humble and fearful enough without needing to be deranged in my brains as well. I see the same in my child, who is often more use, when one laughs heartily at him for his faults, than when one shouts and scolds at him all day".

Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) of Schleswig, a mystic and one of the authors most widely read by the Pietists. Antoinette Bourignon (1616-1680) is described by the Chronik [p 145] as "a religious enthusiast and authoress".

This series of dialogues [Chronik pp 145-6] includes two rare and therefore interesting attempts to examine the point of view of a wife who protests against the lot of women in general:

"Always on with your Paul, like all men, Paul, Paul [Eph. 5 v 24]. Paul was a human being too, but not a woman, or he would certainly have written otherwise, and he had no wife, or she would have told him what's what... Are we slaves, then, is it not enough that a man has the right to give me a sickness lasting nine months, which can kill me; is it not enough that I should bring a child into the world with great pains, rear it in sorrow and anxiety and be exposed to many trivial illnesses? Must I then be told: obey, be subject? Is it not enough that I rise every morning at five, and work the whole day for the good of my family? Is it right for the husband to sit on the settle and leaf through books; and then say: obey? Just because he has hair on his chin and heavier fists than mine, shall he be my master?

But as a portrait of Salome this passage, from Böning [p 101], rings truer, if less elegantly:

"You, you, gallows'-bird, bear-keeper, skinflint, rascal, you, you lout, you sluggard - I must work; and you hunker there, well in the shade, with your red nose stuck into those miracle-books; you want to know everything from the whole world over; you boor, you should be feeding your wife and children, eat your bread in the sweat of your brow... Yes, yes, there he sits, the gentleman, the philosopher, all nice and comfortable, not a care in the world - the squire, the