5 stories from this place.
Mass psychogenic illness — the modern medical term for what older eras called collective madness — has been documented continuously across Europe and the rest of the world for at least seven hundred years. The clinical pattern is the same. The cultural framing changes.
Read the story →In the spring of 1096, before the First Crusade reached Asia, an army of pilgrims spent six weeks killing the Jewish communities of the Rhine.
Read the story →In July 1374, after a major Rhine flood, hundreds of people in Aachen began to dance in the streets and could not stop. The plague moved with them up the river.
Read the story →Cologne's Jewish community had stood since the fourth century. On the night of Saint Bartholomew, August 1349, a mob ended it in a few hours.
Read the story →Five weeks before the Strasbourg massacre, Basel built a wooden house on an island in the Rhine, locked roughly six hundred of its Jews inside, and burned it.
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