Summary

It is nearly fifty years after the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Martin von Wolkenstein, an academic formerly of the court of the Kaiser in Vienna, is now approaching death from old age and syphilis. He pens the memoirs of his experiences in the closing year of the catastrophic war. He focuses specifically on when the Kaiser charged him, along with several others, to depart the safety of the court at Vienna and travel across war-ravaged Germany to the half-ruined Benedictine abbey at Andechs to fetch back to the court the renowned jester/juggler Tyll Ulenspiegel, rumored to have taken refuge among the monks in the abbey.

As he recalls now in his memoirs, for von Wolkenstein, then a 20-something, slightly overweight minister in the Kaiser’s court, the mission is critical for his career trajectory. The war, despite the decades it has...