The Wedding of Magdeburg: A Novel

The Wedding of Magdeburg is no ordinary wedding. Germany, 1631: a world turned upside down by the Reformation. In the Free Imperial City of Magdeburg, one young bride is jilted on the eve of her nuptials, but as she waits for her groom to return, an even darker cloud looms: the Holy Roman Empire stands at the gates, ready to take the Protestant city as its own political “bride”. Will Magdeburg accept the proposal for the sake of peace, or will she rebel—and risk losing the battle altogether?

This masterpiece by Nobel Prize nominee Gertrud von le Fort, elegantly translated by Chase Faucheux, has never before appeared in English. At once love story, political thriller, and historical study of war in the seventeenth century, it follows the Sack of Magdeburg, the tragic battle now considered one of the greatest massacres of the Thirty Years’ War.

Le Fort, acclaimed author of The Song at the Scaffold, takes a magnifying glass to the line that runs through every human heart—whether Protestant or Catholic, winning or losing, conquered or conquering. How do we find hope in the midst of destruction? How do we find freedom in total surrender?

With wisdom, riveting storytelling, and incredible psychological subtlety, The Wedding of Magdeburg tabulates the spiritual cost of war and shows how grace can dramatically imbue even the darkest moments of history.

“Historians have struggled to give an account of the Thirty Years’ War, this tangled, fratricidal, barbaric conflict that claimed the lives of some eight million Europeans in the seventeenth century. Its impact on the continent continues to this day. Better than any historian, Catholic storyteller Gertrud von Le Fort brings her unique genius for laying bare the human heart in making sense of and finding redemption amid the horror of human suffering. She stands with Gironella and Manzoni in this regard—and ahead of Dickens!” —Christopher Check, President, Catholic Answers