Anyone visiting the small Westphalian city of Münster in north-west Germany may notice three man-sized cages hanging from the handsome St Lambert’s Roman Catholic Church in the city’s main square, the Prinzipalmarkt, and wonder about their provenance. The cages are one of the last visible relics of an episode in which society took leave of its collective senses and went quite mad. It is my impression that the western world is currently undergoing just such a convulsion.
Where the 16th century had their crazed prophets crying down destruction on a doomed civilisation, we have our furious activists vying for their 15 minutes of fame
In Münster’s case, what the Germans call massenwahn (mass madness) took place in 1534 after Martin Luther had triggered the Protestant Reformation and torn Christendom apart. An extreme millenarian sect known as the wiedertäufer (Anabaptists) seized control of the city and set up a Christian primitive communist mini state.
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