Main board: The Rebel (Der Frondeur)
Halfway up the hill, people stepped out from under the canopy of a farmhouse. They walked along a narrow path along the edge in single file. Old men with wreath beards, young strong lads, women, a long, long line. The people from the house Turnälle looked at them in amazement. They spread out and disappeared one by one.
"I know what they are", said the Lord Heros. "They are Anabaptists. They most likely had a gathering. Who knows if those back there don't understand better what the good Lord has to say to them than we do in our churches, where the preachers sometimes know better what the Bible says than God Himself."
More Information:
Tavel’s «The Rebel» is also called an Anabaptist novel in literature, but in the course of the narrative the Anabaptists rarely appear - only towards the end of the novel they become important and their practical help causes a conversion of the main character, Lord Heros Herbort.
Heros, who had been in foreign military service before, wants to lead his subordinates in his own imperious way. But he also sympathizes with the peasants and Anabaptists and is rather critical of the Bernese - he sees himself as a "Frondeur", a kind of rebel.
He leaves his family and becomes a mercenary captain in Venice. There he ends up in prison for standing up for his Anabaptist neighbors, who are to be taken to the galleys. When he returns, his wife has died and he finds his son dying - poisoned by a girl he has seduced. Finally, it is the Anabaptists who save him:
In the Würzbrunnen cemetery, nearly mad, he stays by the graves of his wife and son. The Anabaptists of the area bring him food. He experiences a purification, asks for mercy and baptism - and finally the daughter appears with his little son and takes him back to the court.
Halfway up the hill, people stepped out from under the canopy of a farmhouse. They walked along a narrow path along the edge in single file. Old men with wreath beards, young strong lads, women, a long, long line. The people from the house Turnälle looked at them in amazement. They spread out and disappeared one by one.
«I know what they are», said the Lord Heros. «They are Anabaptists. They most likely had a gathering.»
«Isn't that forbidden? » Gideon asked eagerly.
«I guess it is.» the dad answers him. «They are playing a dangerous game. But look, when you've seen and experienced what I have, you let people do their thing. Who knows if those back there don't understand better what the good Lord has to say to them than we do in our churches, where the preachers sometimes know better what the Bible says than God Himself. — And that they are baptized in the mountain stream — why not? That's just what I like. That is part of it. It is all so true and pure with them.»[1]
Heros mourns the loss of his son and wife at Würzbrunnen Cemetery:
Day after day he brooded away. Again and again his thoughts returned to the Anabaptists, he pondered how they were baptized in the mountain stream, how the wild water washed away their burden of sin and how they rose with faith in a holy new life. I also need a baptism, he tells himself, if I am to continue living. Either I am going to perish completely or there will be salvation. A baptism with fire and water, with the water that waters and blesses our soil.[2]
Now he knows that he has looked deeply enough into the mirror of his life and has found nothing good in it, nothing at all. It was not the lightning that struck him, but he had heard the fir tree that had been struck by lightning crying out to be shattered. He put my life back into the slope, a new life.[3]