Rammelsberg 1376 Und Andere

This article attempts to explain the mining disaster in the Rammelsberg mine in Goslar in 1376, which is almost impossible to grasp in terms of real history and must also be considered highly improbable. But, nevertheless, it has endured for centuries as a mythical portent. The disaster and its date can be understood as a cipher in which concrete events and longer processes of experience have been condensed into a kind of ‘super catastrophe’. The cipher indicates a way of dealing with catastrophes and the associated losses and processes of impoverishment through storytelling. This form of ‘punctualisation’ is developed as a processing scheme, in contrast to other forms in which catastrophes are fixed, narrated and remembered through legends and folktales with the help of temporal indices.