Plague and urban riots

Plague and urban riots reshape Goldmund’s wandering into an encounter with mass death and the collapse of communal order. The epidemic empties farms and villages, while fear breeds isolation, scapegoating, and violence. Through the murdered family he finds in a farmhouse, the persecution of Jews, and his meeting with Rebekka, the catastrophe becomes a sustained test of compassion and of any belief that the world is governed by justice.

Outbreak and social disintegration

As the plague advances, some villages bar strangers while others leave their streets open. Goldmund and Robert approach one settlement only to be driven away by armed peasants; the next morning, an isolated farm offers a more terrible explanation for the villagers’ fear. The cow is still calling to be milked, but the household is silent. Inside, Goldmund discovers that five people have died: three in bed, a boy across the threshold, and an old woman seated beside the hearth. The fire retains faint sparks, but no one remains to tend it.

Robert recognizes the plague and tries to flee, fearing that Goldmund has been exposed. Goldmund holds him back, arguing that they share the danger and should not leave one another to die alone. From then on, Robert obeys Goldmund’s lead. Their experience becomes a recurring pattern on the road: abandoned farms, unburied dead, hungry livestock, and communities whose responses range from shutting out outsiders to allowing them through.

The two travelers find food and drink in deserted places, milk cows and goats, and sometimes kill livestock for a meal. Such abundance does not make the journey carefree. Robert remains terrified, repeatedly suspecting infection and checking his body for signs of illness; Goldmund is less afraid, scolding and teasing him as he moves through the stricken country. Their contrasting reactions frame the epidemic as both a physical threat and a different kind of inward experience.

Fear, violence, and the search for scapegoats

The devastation extends beyond disease itself. Goldmund encounters abandoned children, starving animals, unattended corpses, and survivors who have retreated into fear or frenzy. Some people avoid all contact; others gather to drink, dance, and pursue pleasure against the surrounding death. People accuse supposed enemies of deliberately spreading disease, and suspicion turns into lethal persecution. In one town, Goldmund watches the ghetto burn as a mob drives fleeing Jews back into the fire. Across the plague-stricken region, innocent people are murdered, tortured, and burned.

The cities, too, lose order. In the bishop’s city, the mob sets fire to a hospital and raids the houses of wealthy burghers. After the bishop flees, safety and authority falter until the Emperor sends Count Heinrich with soldiers to restore order. His rule brings its own grievances, and the citizens expect the bishop’s return. The account presents civic disorder not as a single riot but as a volatile succession of institutional retreat, emergency force, popular violence, and resentment.

Goldmund later tells Narcissus that he witnessed Jews being burned but did not prevent it. Narcissus uses this admission to press him on the limits of moral judgment: Goldmund had not stopped the atrocity, just as Narcissus says he himself might be forced to tolerate cruelty he lacked the power to prevent. The discussion keeps the violence concrete while exposing the painful gap between condemning injustice and possessing the means to intervene.

Rebekka and the human cost of persecution

Outside a small town, Goldmund finds Rebekka grieving beside rubble. Her father and fourteen other Jews have been burned to death by order of the town authorities. She has escaped, then returned in despair, blaming herself for surviving. Goldmund helps her gather her father’s bones from the ashes and bury them in a place of concealment. This act of assistance brings them close, but it does not erase the danger or the injustice that made her a fugitive.

Goldmund offers to protect Rebekka and tries to persuade her to travel with him. She rejects his courtship, accusing Christians of helping a daughter bury the father their people murdered and then expecting the daughter to belong to them. Her rebuke exposes the moral presumption in Goldmund’s approach: his offer of protection is entangled with desire, while her grief cannot be hurried into consolation. Goldmund recognizes that he has misunderstood her and acknowledges that she may be right.

When he later recounts Rebekka’s story to Narcissus, Goldmund’s anger at the persecution broadens into a protest against a world in which mass death, abandoned children, and the killing of innocents coexist with religious claims about justice and salvation. The plague’s violence thus enters his friendship with Narcissus as an argument about responsibility and the nature of the world, not merely as a sequence of dangers endured on the road.

Death, memory, and meaning

Goldmund does not understand plague death only as an enemy to resist. Having once faced a more immediate, resistible threat, he regards the epidemic as a force that cannot be fought in the same way. He continues through the devastated region with a grim curiosity, attentive to the ways people meet death and to the suffering around them. The catastrophe deepens his awareness of life’s transience without making him indifferent to those who suffer.

A painted Dance of Death gives Goldmund one image of the epidemic’s lesson: death leads people of every rank away while skeletal musicians play. He respects the painting, but feels it does not express what he has experienced. For him, death’s approach is not only stern and violent; it also carries a maternal, intimate call. This perception does not diminish the public horrors of plague and persecution. Rather, it reveals how the catastrophe enters his imagination, where mortality is bound to both grief and the pull of life.

The episode returns later as a moral and theological reckoning. Goldmund names the burned Jews, the mass burials, the bodies in streets and rooms, the looting, and the children left without care. Narcissus listens and distinguishes Goldmund’s anguished feelings from abstract arguments, while acknowledging that those feelings are real. The plague and riots therefore leave no easy resolution: they expose failures of compassion and order, shape Goldmund’s understanding of death, and remain a challenge to any claim that justice in the world is readily visible.