Urban Community and Social Unrest: Semantics of Conflict in Fourteenth-Century Lübeck

Summary

In 1385 two Lübeck city councillors were dissatisfied with the historiographic situation in the town. The existing town chronicle (now lost) had not been updated for the past 36 years, that is, ever since the grote dode (the Black Death) hit Lübeck. In general, the councillors found the chronicle a bit brekhaftich, deficient. They ordered the Franciscan monk Detmar to write a new chronicle for the use of the town council. Detmar, a teacher in the monastery of St. Catherine in Lübeck, worked on the chronicle for the following ten years; after that his work was continued by unknown scribes until the year 1482. The result was two volumes of Lübeck and world history, later called the Detmar chronicle or Lübecker Ratschronik, a copy of which was jealously kept in the Wettestube of the town hall.

The author gives two reasons for the writing of the chronicle: the wish of the two councillors to resume chronicle writing after the disruption of the Black Death years, and the ‘grote jammer der vorretnisse binnen lubek’ (‘great misery of the occurrences in Lübeck’), which happened in 1385 and gave the initial reason for historiographic assurance. This jammer (‘misery’ or ‘heartache’) was the so-called butcher's uprising (Knochenhaueraufstand). A contemporary crisis should be mended by looking at the past, learning from it and making sense out of it, and both the crisis and parts of the past are described in highly emotional terms. Moments of crisis form innerurban communities or make them visible; in this case, the Knochenhauer and the city council. The standard interpretation for this kind of chronicle is a narrative of identification and identity, a reassurance for the city council that it has always been and is doing well. The two council members who gave the initial order for writing were those who had been responsible for interrogations and execution of the rebels in 1385, and it is assumed that they needed a kind of consolidation in the narratives of conflicts of the past – an imagined community of authorities who are also do-gooders in harmony with their subjects.

Lately Sascha Möbius has analyzed the entire late medieval and early modern historiography of Lübeck under these aspects.