Introduction

Summary

A typical, if old-fashioned, way to organize a biography is to write about a person's life and times. In fact, Georg Jenatsch: His Life and Times is the title, in German, of a massive study about Jenatsch published in 1936. After some background information about Jenatsch's family, the biography by Alexander Pfister begins with Jenatsch's birth and continues through childhood, school days, and events in his adulthood—concentrating on his rise to political influence—until it reaches his death. A brief reflection on Jenatsch's larger significance wraps things up into a neat package, into a story. Like most biographies, Pfister's provides readers with a single protagonist whose life has a beginning, middle, and ending—and so much the better if it is a dramatic ending involving an axe and a man dressed as a bear. Conventional biography reflects the way we experience our own lives as a single, relatively coherent thread of experience. This way of thinking about individuals' lives also reflects deeper tendencies about how Western culture thinks about the past. After all, most history books lay out their story in chronological order, as do many novels.

The life of Jenatsch calls for a different approach. He spent his life in a world divided by tangled and overlapping political authorities, riven by religious and regional differences, and suffering from agricultural crisis and multiple plagues. Conflicts in Graubünden swirled him into the greater crisis of the Thirty Years' War that tore Europe apart from 1618 to 1648.