The Poor Man of Toggenburg - Autobiography of Ulrich Bräker

To set down all of this in detail, however, would be quite superfluous, since I have already treated of it at length in my journal, which, I hear, is also soon to appear before the public

For therein I have carefully and in all honesty related what came to pass at this time, (for example comets, redness of the sky, earthquakes and thunderstorms), and also what followed: (great sickness, loss of many lives, and so forth). And so no more is to be done here than to record briefly and truthfully my own domestic situation and frame of mind in the aforesaid fateful years. For indeed I went into this subject from beginning to end in the said diary, but not always over-sincerely, for in many places I have made a great song and dance over my extraordinary trust in the divine providence, and this for the most part in exactly those moments when I was most lacking in faith. Today indeed I may say this much: that though my trust wavered from time to time, it was never completely broken; and I almost always found that my greatest sorrows were caused through my own fault, and that God's kindness often turned to good account much of the evil that I had brought upon myself.

Even in the years '68 and '69 when for two seasons in succession the hail flattened to the ground everything that grew in my garden, while I and my family looked on in dismay, yet I could still praise His mercy, who had spared our lives. And since then, in such disasters and others like them, when the price of victuals rose, whenever those around me wept and wailed, my first and last word was constantly: "It won't be so bad" or "Things will soon go better". For it was always my nature to trust and hope for the best at all times, it was, if you like, a consequence of my natural thoughtlessness. And because of this I could never bear to have others around me anxiously fretting, lamenting or bowed down by care, nor could I see what use it was always to expect the worst. But I have been gradually diverging from my story.

The aforementioned year, '70, was already tending towards disaster before spring was over. The snow lay above the seed until May, so that much of it was smothered. Through the summer we comforted ourselves with the hope of a fairly good harvest, then of a good threshing, but alas, all in vain. I had a fair quantity of potatoes in the ground, but many of them were stolen. During the summer I had two cows out on rented pasturage, and a few goats, herded by my eldest boy, but in the autumn I was obliged to sell all these beasts through lack of money and fodder for them. For business grew worse as the price of crops rose, and the poor spinners and weavers were obliged to borrow over and over again. Now indeed I might comfort my family and myself with my "Things will soon take a turn for the better!" as much as I could, but for that I had to swallow many a bitter pill which my bedfellow served up to me for my past behaviour, my carelessness and fecklessness, which I could not always bear with patience and equanimity. All the same, my conscience often told me that she was right - If only she had not dished it up so unpalatably."

The years between marriage and the beginning of the diary have already locked Bräker into a monotonous round of work and child-rearing, weaving in a damp cellar, supervising his outworkers and selling their products at Lichtensteig, Herisau and other neighbouring towns, with little distraction except the markets which offer too much drink and other temptations. The diary for 1770 shows that Bräker had a clear picture of his own spiritual life as a series of "snares" set by the world: the overriding necessity of making money even if - for example - it meant allowing his outworkers to transact business on a Sunday, or to see others celebrate the founding of the church with drunkenness and riotous behaviour. He also pictures the snares of the flesh, the frustrations of an unhappy marriage, a passionate, sensual nature and an over-vivid imagination, continually building castles in the air. Besides these, however, he writes of moments of sweetness, when he felt that the love of Jesus sustained him in his troubles. The rough, dogmatic style of the diary seems more than a generation earlier than the more sophisticated autobiography, possibly because the latter had undergone some editorial revision.

Bräker wrote this passage about twenty years after the events that he describes in it, when his autobiography and extracts from his diary were about to be published.