What is the significance of the plague in the novel, Tyll?

Tyll is a novel about the implications of living in a pandemic. Against the backdrop of the harrowing consequences of a war that defies time and space, that has without clear purpose come to engulf the entire European continent, the novel uses the growing threat from the return of the bubonic plague to symbolize the threat of a natural world humanity cannot begin to control or understand. The Black Death less than a century earlier had decimated Europe and Asia. Theologians see nature as Creation, a complex but harmonic construct to be appreciated; scientists see it as a puzzle to be solved. The plague upends those assumptions. After all, the Thirty Years’ War, for all its evident barbarity and the suffering it has visited on Europe, had a logic, a reason that it was called into being, logic that Tyll mocks and that Elizabeth comes to reject but logic that nevertheless sustains the belief that the war, for all its devastation, was serving some grand purpose. The plague that is spreading across central Europe offers a darker vision of the natural world. A virus, stupidly, blindly, destroys the body that keeps it alive. There is no purpose. There is no logic. There is only fear, vulnerability, and helplessness. The death of Friedrich from the plague is a reminder of a natural world that refuses to define purpose or sustain meaning.