Arrival in Germany

Asher Kaufman, at 18, set out on June 28, 2025 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He spent the months of July, August and the first two weeks in September in France. He went on to visit Belgium, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, South Africa, Cameroon, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia and Italy. This most recent post highlights his arrival in Germany. Asher has a love of history which animates this post. Today is also the 1 year anniversary of the day he set out on this trip.

Upon my departure from Assisi, I had on Monday a multi-leg day of travel, beginning with a 5:20 a.m. ride from the Casa Papa Giovanni down to the train station. At 6:10, I boarded my train for Arezzo, where I changed trains and embarked on a Frecciarossa in the direction of Rome. From the Roma Termini station where I got off, I then used the Leonardo express to take me directly to Fiumicino airport where I had my flight to Amsterdam.

For this period of my trip, it was a bit unclear up until the last minute where exactly I would be visiting; however, a couple of weeks before, a very nice German priest named Fr. Ansgar Lammen who had started a Children’s Rosary in his diocese of Osnabruck some years before, told me I could come visit his parish and that we could go together to a Eucharistic Congress in Cologne called the Kommt und Seht conference. This is an annual event organized by the Archdiocese of Cologne with many priest and bishops from all over Germany attending. Thus, having accepted Fr. Lammen’s kind invitation, I decided to start by going to his residence in Osnabruck. This meant that upon my arrival in Amsterdam, I immediately got on a German train heading in the direction of Osnabruck. The train was one of Deutsche Bahn’s new fleet, and I must say that with its cushioned, comfortable seats, carpeted floors, thick insulation, spacious bathrooms, silent sliding glass doors, and restaurant car, it was a very nice train. After about nearly three hours of riding the train, we arrived in Osnabruck. The train station was a quint, brick structure, and it was my introduction to the beautiful architecture of Germany.

After hauling out my bags from the train and tripping down the stairs and onto the plaza, I took an Uber to Fr. Lammen’s parish. That day had involved quite a large number of trains, and I was just glad that I had not committed some silly mistake like I had done on the way to Cascia, for in this instance, even the slightest error could have caused numerous downstream problems.

Fr. Lammen was on hand to receive me, helped me move the bags inside, and gave me something to eat before going to bed.

The next day, I had a meeting with Fr. Charbel Obeid, a Lebanese priest working in Münster. Münster was a short distance away by train, and it turned out to be a beautiful city to visit. I took the whole day to do this, especially since Fr. Lammen was busy with pastoral work.

I arrived around 11:00 a.m. and met Fr. Charbel at the train station. We went together to Mass at the Münster Cathedral and then walked around the city a bit. I had been eager to meet Fr. Charbel since he is in charge of a number of Maronite parishes in Germany and in the Netherlands. He is based out of Münster, however, and he was very familiar with the city.

The downtown of the city is very charming and has the appearance of being quite historic, even though in fact it was mostly destroyed during the Second World War and had to be built back postconflict. I have included some pictures as it is a nice area for walking around and munching on a strudel.

The story of Münster is quite an ancient one, and one place to begin is with Liudger, a pupil of Æthelbert in York, a very important bishop and scholar of the 700s. Liudger was one of a number of missionaries that Æthelbert sent out into northern Europe, which was still pagan at that time.

He arrived in Münster around 793 and built his community on a little hill called Horsteberg. Since this community was a monastic one, the name “Münster” comes from the Latin term “monasterium.” For the next several centuries and throughout the Middle Ages, the city continued to be an important center of trade and commerce. It found itself in the Hanseatic League, a loose alliance of states and guilds that shared economic interests.

The city, however, was shaken as much of Europe was by the nascent Protestant reformation that burst out of the small town of Wittenberg, far to the east.

After 1521, when Martin Luther publicly burned the Papal bull from Pope Leo X urging him to recant his heretical writings, the Protestant reformation was set off in earnest. In the wake of this act of schism, there were several different directions taken by the newly liberated vanguard. Luther himself emphasized his belief that salvation came through faith alone and that only the Bible served as a reliable source of authority for the Christian life.

Of course, another major sect of the nascent Protestant movement were the followers of Jean Calvin, a French theologian living in Switzerland who emphasized the doctrine of predestination, that is to say, that one is saved completely by God’s grace.

However, there was another group of Protestants, which are sometimes termed, perhaps unfairly, radical Reformers. These are probably best known by the figure of Heinrich Zwingli. The followers of Zwingli came to be known as Anabaptists. They were perhaps best known for their rejection of infant baptism. The Anabaptists sprang up in various of the more Protestant-inclined regions of Europe, such as Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, but one of the most notable stories of their early years comes from Münster.

In 1533, John of Leiden, a Dutch Anabaptist leader came to Münster with his religious mentor, Jan Matthys, and the two quickly gained notoriety for their speeches and writings, even being regarded by some as prophets.

On Easter Sunday of 1534, they rose up in a rebellion against the established leaders of the city. Matthys was killed, but the rebellion was successful, and Johann became the leader of the city.

For the next year, Münster underwent several quite radical measures under John’s leadership. Polygamy was not just permitted but normalized. Redistribution of wealth was taken to an almost proto-communist level. Citizens were even required to be naked to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ.

However, the new Anabaptist theocracy was short lived. By the next year, a German prince named Franz von Waldeck defeated John’s army and stormed the city, and its leader was captured. What ensued was a really quite regrettable series of tortures and executions, not just of John of Leiden but also of Bernhard Krechting and Bernhard Knipperdolling, two other accomplices and leaders of the city. The three men were ripped apart with red-hot tongs while being held in place by an iron-spiked collar and were then run through the heart with daggers. This was all done in the central square, and once that was finished, their bodies were hung up to the steeple of St. Lambert’s Church in cages. Though the bodies have long since been removed, the cages remain hung to the church steeple to this day and can still be seen. I, unfortunately, did not get the chance to visit St. Lambert’s Church while I was in Münster, but if I had, I would have been able to see the grim sight.

Just over a hundred years later, however, the city of Münster again made its way into the history books in a perhaps much more notable case. Another name for the city is Westphalia, and indeed the Peace of Westphalia was signed in this very place.

To understand the import of something like the Peace of Westphalia, it is absolutely essential to understand the conflict that preceded it, namely the Thirty Years’ War. The Thirty Years’ War was likely one of the bloodiest and most brutal conflicts Europe had known up until that time, and it involved almost all of the major geopolitical players of its time. 

To properly understand it, one must begin with the state of the Holy Roman Empire at the dawn of the seventeenth century. At that time, the Holy Roman Empire (roughly Germany and Austria today) was in a state of political and cultural disarray. It had still a rather decentralized political structure as compared to the ascendant absolutist monarchs of France, England, and certainly Spain. The number of Lutherans and Catholics were almost evenly split in the empire, and the Peace of Augsburg from the 1550s left local towns to decide which church they would follow. For example, in Fr. Lammen’s region, the towns were a patchwork of Catholicism and Lutheranism, even within a few kilometers of each other. By the early 1600s, small rival leagues had formed amongst the different little principalities, divided along religious lines. Culturally, Italy had been the center of the Renaissance a century before and had retained a place as a center of art and literature. The Northern Renaissance had emerged out of the Netherlands and Belgium, and the Elizabethan era had led to a flourishing of English artistic expression, such as the works of Shakespeare. All of this left the Holy Roman Empire quite behind politically and culturally.

By the 1610s, a new religious sect appeared on the scene, the Calvinists. These had not previously been in the empire, and their existence posed a threat to the already tenuous peace between Lutherans and Catholics.

Around this time, a particularly ambitious new emperor arrived on the throne, Ferdinand II. He wished to unify the empire along religious lines and reassert Catholicism as the dominant church within his realm.

However, the Holy Roman Empire did not operate along absolutist lines. The emperor was elected by seven princes from different regions. One of these regions, Bohemia, was largely Protestant and flatly rejected Ferdinand’s authority. They elected their own emperor, Frederick V, a Calvinist.

In response, an army loyal to Ferdinand marched on this rebellious province and defeated Frederick at the Battle of White Mountain.

However, as would happen often throughout the Thirty Years’ War, the hostilities did not cease as soon as they might have because Ferdinand overstepped his cards. He had the nobles disloyal to him stripped of their lands and the holdings passed over to his own henchmen, thus disenfranchising a whole faction of his empire. This would not hold.

While the German Protestants were still licking their wounds, many other states in Europe reacted in alarm to the new ascent of the Holy Roman Empire. King Christian IV of Denmark, a Lutheran kingdom to the north of the Holy Roman Empire, seeing an opportunity to step in on behalf of his vanquished fellow Lutherans as well as to seize additional territory for his kingdom, marched south to try to roll back the armies of Ferdinand II. In fact, Christian IV was also the Duke of Holstein, a northern German bishopric, and thus he was tied up in an alliance with Brandenberg and Saxony, two other Protestant regions whose dukes were concerned about the prospect of increasing Catholicization under Ferdinand II. The English, Dutch, and indirectly the French as well agreed to fund this new campaign in a bid to knock Ferdinand II off of his newly empowered position. Thanks to the support of this newly-bubbled up alliance, Christian IV planned a rather complex three-pronged attack south into Germany that would attack Magdeburg, Brandenburg, and Pomerania.

However, unfortunately for all of them, Ferdinand contracted the assistance of a powerful ally of his own, a mercenary general named Albrecht Wallenstein. Wallenstein proved more than a match. He was one of those highly intelligent and analytic but also quite ruthless calculators who often found ways to victory even if he incurred heavy losses.

Christian’s vaunted three-pronged invasion collapsed after defeats at Dessau Bridge and Lutter. Wallenstein pushed north and captured territory as far north as Jutland.

However, it was precisely at this point when Ferdinand had beaten back the nascent alliance just burst forth from the womb of political alliances to oppose him that he made perhaps the greatest diplomatic blunder of the whole conflict. He passed the imperial Edict of Restitution without consultation with the electors or dukes of the empire. The Edict required all Catholic lands to be returned to the Church and that all the state boundaries be brought back to the way they had been in 1555 and that many of the Protestant principalities become officially Catholic again even though they had not been so in many years. The edict was an imperial decree that did not need the approval of the local rulers, but here Ferdinand was dangerously overextending his political clout. He was also overextended militarily since had committed troops in Italy to aid the Duke of Guastalia to claim rule over Mantua. Not only this, but Ferdinand’s main ally, Spain, was rapidly losing ground in its war against the Dutch rebels in the Netherlands. Recall that until this point, the Low Countries were controlled by the Spanish. There had been a conflict going on for many decades known as the Eighty Years’ War in which these largely Protestant kingdoms attempted to gain their independence from Spain. In the 1620s, they had scored victory after victory against the Spanish, forcing Philip of Spain to play more conservatively with the German Protestant princes.

Smelling copious blood in the water, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, another Lutheran kingdom, decided to throw his hat in the increasingly crowded ring. He had just been freed from a war against the Catholic Poles by a diplomatic treaty in part brokered by the ever-active Cardinal Richelieu of France. However, Richelieu did not stop there. In order to grease the gears of alliance between Gustavus Adolphus and the German Protestants, Richelieu committed to extensive funding of the Swedish offensive. A whole separate sidenote is likely warranted on Richelieu, one of the largest figures in statesmanship and manipulation Europe has known. I speak of him as though he were the ruler of France. Some of you might have already remarked that the official ruler of that country at this time was in fact Louis XIII, but Richelieu is often considered to be the real kingmaker behind French politics, someone who lived through more than one king and who was one of the most powerful men in Europe at the time. His dogged rather realpolitikal promotion of French interest above all else did much to contribute to modern European nationalism. To understand why the French, Catholics as they were, would play such a critical role in the support of Protestant interests, it is important to see that the Bourbon rulers of France and the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain were consummate rivals, despite the Catholicity they shared. In fact, I would argue the Thirty Years’ War was far more about dynastic warfare rather than religious warfare since nearly every actor that entered the war did so for his own political and economic interests primarily.

To return, however, to Gustavus Adolphus, he encountered victory after victory in Germany, pushing as far south as Bavaria. However, in the Battle of Lutzen, Adolphus was killed by the imperialist forces. Wallenstein’s days were numbered too. He had always been a mercenary soldier, and his personality and constant absence from court had enabled negative rumors to begin to spread about the empire. The Spanish Habsburgs did not care for him as he had done nothing to help them in the Eighty Years’ War, and Ferdinand was dissatisfied with his repeated losses to the Swedes. Having made his decision to flee to the Swedes, Wallenstein sealed his fate. A dragoon of Scottish and Irish soldiers were sent to kill him, and so they did.

Left without their respective commanders, the Swedes and Austrians continued their campaigns, with the result of a Habsburg victory at Nordlingen in 1634. By 1635, the Peace of Prague is signed promising peace and re-unification of the Holy Roman Empire.

However, this peace did not please the French at all since it left the Holy Roman Empire in a strengthened position. Throwing his hat in the ring, Louis XIII sent in French troops to take on Spain and the Habsburgs.

The result brought about a great strengthening of the Dutch position to the point that by 1644, their independence seemed all but inevitable.

In Germany, the result was a bit harder to decipher. At first, it seemed the Habsburgs would win, scoring important victories at Tuttlingen and Herbsthausen. However, by 1646, the French and Swedes struck afresh as far as Bavaria and by May 1648 decisively defeated a Bavarian army at Zusmarshausen.

At this point, Ferdinand III (Ferdinand II had died some years before) realized that to continue fighting was futile. His cousins in Spain, beaten back after a pitiful campaign into Flanders that year, came to the same conclusion. With the Swedes and French riding high, peace was sued for.

The peace negotiations to such a long and complicated war, really a convergence of several wars, took years and involved literally hundreds of delegates and meetings. Recall that there even was an Italian theater to this conflict which I hardly described.

In the end, the lasting implications of the agreement meant that the Holy Roman Empire became more decentralized than ever. The power of the principalities was bolstered, and Germany was put in a weaker position than ever. Further, the empire was forced to recognize Calvinism as a co-official religion next to Lutheranism and Catholicism. Additionally, the Swiss Cantons as well as the Netherlands gain their independence, carving out two new small Protestant kingdoms in Europe, one split away from the Holy Roman Empire and one from Spain.

This would enable the Dutch commercial endeavors of later decades and even begin setting the fodder for the political context that would lead to German nationalism many centuries in the future.

(Source: Wiki Commons)

And a large part of those negotiations took place in Münster at the Peace Hall which is pictured above. If you have survived with me as far as here, hopefully you have an appreciation for the enormous importance of the Peace of Westphalia and thus of the city of Münster in tying together one of the most significant wars in European history.

Having given so much space to the Thirty Years’ War, I fear none is left for Münster Cathedral, and thus I leave it to the reader to do the corresponding research on that splendid structure.

After walking around a bit with Fr. Charbel, we made an arrangement to see each other again at one of his parishes on that Saturday afternoon, and I headed back to Osnabrück.

I arrived back at Fr. Lammen’s house just after he arrived that evening, and we had dinner together.

The next day we spent visiting some of the other churches of his parishes, and then we headed off to Cologne for the Eucharistic conference held there that week. Both of those events along with my meeting with Fr. Charbel and my subsequent trip into the Netherlands will be covered in the coming posts.

To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE