Fire in Bochum

The Story of Johann Schriver

Childhood & Letters

Bochum was crooked lanes and timber houses with damp straw on the roof. Smoke trailed low, hens scratched in the mud, the marketplace churned with barter and quarrel. The boy Johann Schriver kept close to his father, once mayor of the town, and watched how silence could command. His father lifted a hand, and the air itself quieted. Johann saw: power did not always shout. Sometimes it spoke only once.

At home they ate porridge, beans, rye bread, the salt pork doled carefully. By firelight his father told of disputes—fences, strips of field, the bread that lay hidden in land. “Bread makes men fight,” he said. The boy’s eyes widened; he never forgot it. He began to hear quarrels in the marketplace differently, the voices of men weighed with hunger and fear.

One night a wax tablet was laid before him. The stylus was heavy in his hand. Make a mark, his father urged. Johann’s scratches looked like broken twigs. “Again,” said his father, never smiling, never frowning. And again, and again, until the strokes steadied into letters. When ink came, the tang of oak-gall filled the room. He bent over the parchment, hands ink-blotted, and at last he wrote a line that did not falter. His heart surged. Words remained when voices faded. He understood: letters were stakes in the ground, they kept a town upright.

Later he copied his father’s dictation: Anno Domini 1507, on the feast of Saint John… He shaped each line as though cutting stone. “Good,” his father said, one word of praise. The boy believed it meant: You will hold the memory of Bochum in your hand.

The Clerk of Bochum

Manhood came, and with it the office of Stadt-Schreiber. The chancery stood by the marketplace, a scarred table, a chest of parchments with leather straps. Townsfolk entered wary, knowing their quarrels would turn to ink under Johann’s quill. To them, the lines were spells. To Johann, they were bones and sinews—contracts that fed families, fines that cooled tempers, dowries that built new households.

He wrote of fields beside brooks, of hens struck in anger, of cows and coins and marriage beds. The parchment filled with voices. One farmer whispered in awe, “He draws the air, and it does not fade.” Johann smiled to himself. He was Bochum’s memory. At night, locking the chest, he knew he locked away the town’s beating heart.

Sometimes he lingered on the faces that bent over the bench: a widow clutching her shawl, fearful her land would be stolen; two brothers whose eyes slid away from each other as they divided inheritance; a bride with her dowry chest, her hands ink-stained from nervous touching. He came to know the town not only by its roofs and streets, but by its quarrels, its griefs, its fragile attempts at fairness.

Mayor of Bochum

Around 1510, esteem lifted him higher. The council named him Bürgermeister, alongside Dirik Syben. The chamber smelled of rushes trampled underfoot. Complaints swirled—brewers cursing the ale-tax, carpenters against stalls, farmers against dues. Fists struck wood, voices rose. Johann waited, calm as stone. When he spoke, the noise subsided. “We are one town. Bread is dearer than anger.”

At home his wife cautioned: “The people’s love is quick fire. Warm today, cold tomorrow.” He nodded. He walked the market square wrapped in his cloak, steady under their eyes. He was the son of a mayor, the hand that made promises binding. Now he was something more: the face to blame when want came knocking. A quill binds words, he thought; but who binds men?

He dreamed of fire and flood, of voices rising beyond his control. In council he spoke evenly, but in his sleep he clenched his jaw. His wife touched his arm, whispering that even the mayor is but one man. He answered only with silence.

The Fire of 1517

On Saint Mark’s Day, the year of Our Lord 1517, disaster ran loose. Supper had ended: bread, cabbage, the remnants of pork. The wind clawed at the shutters. Then a cry—sparks in the thatch. Flames curled above his head. “Water!” Johann shouted, his voice already drowned in panic. Buckets sloshed, children were dragged into the lane. The wind lifted fire like a torch and carried it from roof to roof.

The town howled. Beams split and fell, cattle tore their tethers, dogs ran shrieking through smoke. Mothers clutched infants, men shouted orders no one heard. Chickens scattered, feathers catching fire in mid-air. The bell tolled once, twice, then silence: the tower collapsed in fire. Smoke turned night into a blind suffocation. Men fell gasping, women screamed names that found no answer. The square was a storm of sparks, roofs tumbling one by one, every narrow lane a furnace.

Johann’s own house crackled behind him. He gripped his son’s hand, felt the skin sear with heat. His wife’s voice was thin against the roar. He saw neighbours staring—fear in their eyes, and something else, a hard glint: blame. As the sky reddened, whispers rose, harsh and quick. It began in his house. God’s wrath has found him.

He shouted accident, pleaded with hoarse voice, but already the words were lost in the roaring. By dawn, Bochum was ash and smoke, its bones lying stark against the pale sky. The people turned upon him with hollow faces. Some spat. Others wept and would not look at him. “Bürgermeister? He is ruin-bringer.”

The children pressed against his cloak, his wife clutching what little they could carry. He understood then: a leader is not forgiven. He was not a neighbour among neighbours, but the one they must hold responsible. And so, in shame and fear, they fled. Each step away from Bochum felt like tearing sinew from bone.

Exile in Blankenstein

In Blankenstein he found refuge, made steward in a noble house. Rent-books filled beneath his hand, tidy lists of hens and oats, lambs and flax. The work kept bread on the table, but each night he stared at the page, quill hovering, mind straying back to Bochum: the square, the bell, the neighbours’ eyes. His wife whispered of forgiveness, but he answered only “Perhaps,” eyes fixed on blank parchment.

Exile was not only absence of home; it was the daily small humiliation. Townsfolk of Blankenstein looked at him with curiosity, whispered of the man who had burned a city. At market stalls he heard laughter die when he passed. He bore it with clenched teeth, returning to his ledger where every line was neat, though inside he felt untidy and broken.

His children grew in exile, picking up new words, new games. They forgot the ashes; he could not. He walked the streets and saw shadows where Bochum’s lanes should be. Even in laughter at his table, he felt the gap: he was guest in another man’s hall, a servant of another man’s books. His pride was paper-thin, ink-thin. Seven years wore him hollow.

Return to Bochum

In time, Bochum rose again: hammers rang, beams were raised, plaster whitened, thatch crowned the roofs. Trade returned to the square. And in 1525 word came—peace had been brokered, Dirik Syben himself had offered apology, the council invited Johann home.

That spring he walked once more through the gates, along lanes bright with new shoots. He smelt lime and fresh timber where ashes had lain, heard children laugh where smoke once suffocated. Faces turned aside, but others softened. An old neighbour placed a hand on his shoulder: “It was a hard time. Welcome home.” Tears came unbidden; seven years he had waited.

The reconciliation was not only spoken. A document still survives, in which the people of Bochum, through Dirik Syben and the bailiff of Hattingen, formally apologized and pledged that never again would Johann or his family be accused of the fire. That parchment—rare survivor of flame—is the reason his story reaches us in such detail.

He was not restored as mayor, but his name was cleansed. Once more he was citizen, husband, father. The town of his ancestors had opened its gates.

Legacy

Johann lived quietly. Each lane recalled flames, yet also renewal. His son took the quill, sat at the scarred table, wrote the town’s bones again—contracts, fines, betrothals. The name Springorum reappeared, not in disgrace but in service.

At night Johann woke to the sound of timbers splitting in memory, to the stink of smoke. He carried that scar. But he also carried knowledge: that from ashes, he had come home. His children, and theirs, told the tale. They knew him as the man who had been cast out, yet walked back. His story lived not only in beams burnt black, but in ink, and in the town rebuilt.

Epilogue

The fire took more than roofs. It devoured the very memory of the city—parchments written by Johann and those before him, gone in smoke. What we know survives in fragments, and in the silence left behind. His son’s ink, the faint records, the town’s persistence—these are what remain. Johann Schriver’s life is written not only on paper, but in the gap where whole volumes should have stood. History leans on his shadow, and the memory of a town once burned.