The Plague

The Plague is the epidemic that transforms Goldmund’s travels into an encounter with mass death and social breakdown. It empties households, interrupts the routines that sustain life, and drives communities toward flight, abandonment, and violence. For Goldmund, the catastrophe is at once a concrete crisis of survival and an experience through which death becomes inseparable from questions of beauty, suffering, and human responsibility.

Outbreak and Recognition

As Goldmund and Robert approach a village, armed peasants block their way and threaten them; when Goldmund asks what is happening, a stone strikes him, and Robert runs. The villagers’ hostility initially offers no explanation. The next morning, at an isolated farm, the travelers find a household gone silent. A cow lowing in the yard has not been milked, and the stable and barn are abandoned. Inside the dark house, Goldmund discovers an old woman dead beside the hearth. Further inspection reveals five dead members of the family, including a boy lying across the threshold. Robert recognizes the cause: plague. He fears that Goldmund may have been exposed and tries to leave him, but Goldmund holds him back, insisting that they face the danger together rather than abandon one another to die alone.

The deserted farmhouse establishes a recurring pattern across the country. The travelers encounter villages that bar strangers and others whose streets remain open, abandoned farms, and unburied bodies in fields and houses. Animals are left without care: cows low in their stalls, while other livestock roam free. Goldmund and Robert milk and feed some animals, and take food from unoccupied farms and cellars. Such abundance does not make the journey carefree. Robert remains terrified, examines himself for signs of illness, and holds his head and hands in campfire smoke because he believes it may prevent infection. Goldmund does not share his fear, but the dead and the breakdown of ordinary life weigh heavily on him.

Death, Fear, and Social Breakdown

The epidemic changes not only where people can travel but how they treat one another. In some places, frightened survivors flee alone and avoid contact; elsewhere, people gather to drink, dance, and pursue pleasure in defiance of death. Parents and spouses abandon relatives who fall ill. Others loot empty houses or remove the dying before their last breath. Fear also produces accusations: people blame the poor, the French, doctors, and Jews, and claim that supposed enemies have deliberately spread disease by poisoning wells, cattle, or household surfaces. Suspicion becomes a threat of punishment, as the accused may be condemned by law or by a mob.

In one town, Goldmund witnesses the ghetto being burned while a mob prevents people from escaping. The persecution gives the epidemic’s atmosphere of collective terror a specific human consequence: Jews are made scapegoats and innocent people are murdered. Goldmund watches with rage and revulsion. The catastrophe is therefore not simply a landscape of unattended death; it is also a crisis in which fear provides a pretext for organized cruelty and the collapse of solidarity.

The handling of the dead makes that collapse visible. At the gates of a fortified town, a priest leads carts piled with corpses toward a huge pit dug in the heath. Goldmund follows and watches the bodies thrown in with hooks and staffs; the priest makes a sign with his cross, and men light fires around the grave before returning to the city. No earth is thrown over the bodies. The scene makes death a public, hurried burden, managed at a distance rather than through the care normally given to the dead. Robert cannot bear to enter the town, but Goldmund goes in alone, drawn toward the horror he has come to recognize throughout the plague-stricken land.

Lene and the Human Cost

The epidemic’s destruction continues beyond the abandoned farms and public death pits into Goldmund’s intimate relationships. After Lene dies, he recalls the fish he had pitied in the market: her final quiver recalls theirs, and the comparison makes the event part of his sustained attention to the physical fact of dying. He stays beside her, then releases the goat they had kept and sleeps beside it. In the morning he returns to the hut, gathers dry wood and brush, and sets the dwelling alight; he takes only the flint and leaves the goat alive. The burning marks both a practical farewell to the dead and another departure into a country still overwhelmed by death.

The plague’s aftermath is not only a tally of bodies. Goldmund encounters abandoned children, isolated fugitives, looters, and survivors whose fear has become a force shaping every relationship. Some people recoil from contact; others seek intense company and pleasure. His own response differs from Robert’s: he does not expect to defeat the plague through precautions, and his curiosity keeps him moving among scenes of illness and loss. He carries a hungry young boy for several days until a peat digger’s wife takes him in, and he receives the companionship of a stray dog. These brief acts of care coexist with the broader breakdown around him, showing that mutual assistance remains possible but precarious.

Rebekka, Persecution, and the Question of Evil

The plague’s terror becomes inseparable from anti-Jewish violence when Goldmund finds Rebekka crouched beside rubble outside a town. She is mourning her father, one of fifteen Jews burned to death by order of the town authorities. Rebekka had escaped, but returned in grief and blamed herself for not having died with the others. Goldmund helps her gather her father’s bones from the still-warm ashes and bury them in a hiding place in the field. His assistance offers a private act of care amid public persecution, but it cannot undo the killing or the fear that has made a survivor believe she should have shared her father’s fate.

When Goldmund later recounts Rebekka’s story to Narcissus, his anger opens into a larger accusation against the world. He joins her loss to the burned Jews, mass burials, abandoned children, and bodies left in rooms and alleys, and asks whether human beings have been born into a hopeless and cruel world. Narcissus distinguishes Goldmund’s anguish from abstract argument: it is a feeling formed by witnessing suffering. The exchange preserves the tension at the heart of the plague narrative. The epidemic supplies no simple explanation for human cruelty, but the fear and misery surrounding it repeatedly become grounds for scapegoating and violence.

Return and the Meaning of Survival

When Goldmund reaches the bishop’s city again, the plague has subsided. He learns that it had struck there too, followed by riots and disorder; the bishop fled, and the Emperor sent Count Heinrich to restore order and protect life and property. The city is preparing to resume its accustomed routines, and Goldmund is struck by the speed with which ordinary life returns: butcher boys joke with a maid, while the streets and marketplace appear untouched by the recent catastrophe. Yet his sense of homecoming does not erase what he has seen. In his later conversation with Narcissus, he recalls Rebekka, the burned Jews, mass burials, abandoned children, and animals left to starve, and asks how a world containing such suffering can be endured. The plague thus persists beyond its immediate outbreak as a moral and emotional experience, testing the distance between ideals of justice and the cruelties people commit under pressure.