It’s not every day that the Catholic News Agency begins a feature with the joking, even brash line of verse “Everything has an end, only sausage has two.” Now she did it, with the restriction that it was about several sausages, but only about one end: the “end of western church unity 500 years ago”. The sausages, however, were those that were served with highly provocative ulterior motives in the apartment of the Zurich book printer Christoph Froschauer, a man whose life traces back to the Altötting area.
With this sausage dinner – today one would probably speak of a sausage synod – it had the following circumstances. On March 9, 1522, the Sunday “Invocavit”, i.e. the first Sunday of Lent, a number of Zurich dignitaries, among them the people’s priest and later reformer Huldrych Zwingli, met at Froschauer’s for a high-risk snack, as the consumption of meat by the church authorities was strictly forbidden; violation of these rules used to result in severe penalties. Nevertheless, after harmless carnival chüechli, thin slices of smoked sausage were served, and there was no thought of keeping the outrage under wraps. On the contrary, it was ensured that the city council got wind of the matter and the matter itself got an official coat of paint.
After all, it was Zwingli’s concern to convict the fasting rules of instability. He himself had not eaten any of the sausage, and Froschauer defended himself by arguing that his hard-working people could not be sustained with “mus” (porridge) alone. The consequences of the spiritual and culinary happenings were serious. Zwingli hastily wrote a treatise on the free choice of food (“Von Erkysen und Fryheit der Spysen”), a treatise which Froschauer did not hesitate to print. Negotiations, disputations and unrest ensued, and the affair finally ended in the splitting off of the Reformed Church, as Zwingli had in mind. With regard to this lasting effect, Zurich’s sausage eating is often compared to Luther’s posting of theses in Wittenberg.
Froschauer was born the son of a farmer’s maid
At that time, the host was the book printer Christoph Froschauer the Elder, who was valued throughout Europe for the quality of his work. He was probably born in 1490 and learned his profession in Augsburg. There is evidence that he was in Zurich around 1515, where after the death of his employer he married his widow and took over the printing business. This marriage, like a second one, remained childless; In 1564, Froschauer succumbed to the plague. Today’s Zurich printing and publishing house Orell Füssli ultimately grew out of his business.
And the trail into the Altötting area? It is about the small community of Kastl, not far from Altötting. It is believed that Christoph Froschauer was born here as the son of a peasant maid. As Mayor Gottfried Mitterer once wrote in the municipal information sheet, his birthplace is said to have been the “Hackstockhäusl”, which had to make way for a new road in 1974.
For a long time, this attribution competed with the opinion that Froschauer’s hometown was Neuburg. In the Brockhaus from 1884, for example, one reads “born in Neuburg near Ötting in Bavaria”, whereas Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon (1731 to 1754) is content with the information “born in von Oettingen”. As it appears, this Neuburg, which is not to be found in the Altötting atmosphere, was brought into the world by a letter that the evangelical clergyman Leonhard Soerin, who was once an assistant teacher in Altötting, wrote to the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger. In it he not only praises Froschauer for his excellent Bible prints, but also as a compatriot, and in this context the supposed place name Neuburg is mentioned near Ötting: “Neapolis castellum … propinquum Veteri Oettingae.”
In 1940 and 1942, the teacher and local researcher Heinrich Nuber, who came from Kastl, wrote about why “Neapolis castellum” should not be translated as “Neuburg” but as “Kastl” in the journal specializing in the history of Protestantism in Switzerland Zwingliana spread. He refers to Paul Leemann-van Elck, a Swiss collector of valuable book prints, and comes to the conclusion after extensive discussions of Kastl’s past and name that “Neapolis castellum” means nothing other than “the newly (founded) castle (city) Kastl in the sense of a legally binding ecclesiastical and secular citizenship system that has settled on the grounds of the old Roman fort”.