A Safe Conduct by Peter Vansittart
A book review
A Safe Conduct is a brilliant novel that not every reader will appreciate. It was inspired by the historical Hans Bohm, a fifteenth-century German peasant who, after experiencing a vision of the Virgin Mary, began preaching on equality. The earth's resources belonged to all, he insisted, and no one should pay rents, taxes or forced labor to the nobility. Bohm’s preaching sparked a peasant revolt, and he was burned as a heretic on July 19, 1476. The novel's Hans is not Bohm, but an apolitical dreamer; the setting is closer to the year 1500. The story nevertheless explores the conditions that caused both the 1476 revolt and the more widespread 1525 revolt sparked by Martin Luther's teaching.
Written from a wryly distant omniscient point of view, A Safe Conduct offers a fly's-eye perspective of life among the peasantry and petty nobility, both of whom were brutishly ignorant. While evoking sympathy for the peasants' lot, it makes no attempt to create sympathetic individual characters. The orphaned shepherd Hans comes closest, dull-witted when not telling his strange stories, tearful when an animal is hurt, said to be the creation of an "unclean goddess ... not from honest-to-God spunk but from a mandrake, the man-shaped root growing from clay oozing beneath a gallows."
An aging nobleman in his crumbling castle seems to have starved his wife to death; he is deeply suspicious of the written word. "Words, he mused, could mean both more or less than themselves, must be snared in their constant movement: each was susceptible to the past, was shadowed by the future." In the novel, it is not Hans who instigates the rebellion but an enigmatic young aristocrat who nudges the peasant children to turn a burned barn into a "Troy" to defend. Although not easy reading, A Safe Conduct immerses readers in Vansittart's insightful and grim view of fifteenth-century Germany. It offers a richness of ideas to ponder, couched in dense, lushly poetic, intricately crafted prose. (1995; 184 pages, including a brief preface about Hans Bohm)