The Billion Dollar Sure Thing

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IT was just after seven in the evening of Monday, October 27. The fall weather had been fantastic all over Europe that year, and was still holding. The trees in the small park adjacent to the cathedral had not yet lost all of their leaves. But the brown leaves that remained rustled in the light breeze coming over the Rhine from the hills of the Black Forest, darkly brooding on the horizon.

The cathedral of Basel did not rank among the most famous of Europe. Its interior had been completely gutted—including even the stained-glass windows—in the hurricane of the Reformation which had swept through in 1529. But the church’s twin towers and ancient red stone façade remained a symbol for the city which, since medieval times, had served as a metropolis of trade and culture for the Germanic peoples in the surrounding area of the upper Rhine basin. Today these people live in three different countries—Switzerland, Germany, and France. And Basel, the centre of the Christian world during the Council of 1431, later the cosmopolitan home away from home of Erasmus of Rotterdam, of Hans Holbein, of Nietzsche, had sunk into provincialism. In fact, the last of the city’s greats, Karl Barth, had claimed that his fellow citizens were about to become the village idiots of Europe. (Sic transit gloria Basiliensis.)

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