Review
Impressive and impeccably researched, says Sean McMahon
- Magdeburg
- Lagan Press
Holy War?
Of all the events of the seventeenth-century Thirty Years War the sack of Magdeburg was the bloodiest.
In north Germany on the Elbe it was close enough to Wittenberg to have fallen under Luther’s spell in the previous century and become Protestant. Because of its geographical position it was an obvious target for Count Tilly’s Counter-Reformation army as he marched to meet the Protestant forces of Gustavus Adolphus and so typical of the unholy mixture of religion and politics of both sides that in 1631 its population of 20,000 was reduced to 400.
It is against this bloody backdrop that Heather Richardson, herself from Belfast and osmotically aware of sectarianism, tells the story of Christa Henning and her family, printers in the city. The historical research is impeccable and the bloody facts of death, theft and rape and enslavement of women that characterised the relentless violence of the period are given without prurience. The only flaw in the author’s management of her large cast of characters is that their Protestant/Catholic capacity for extreme suffering makes them seem just a little wooden. In spite of this flyspeck it is a very impressive novel.
