Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town Into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--And Started the Protestant Reformation (47 page)

A copy of this printed broadsheet came into Luther’s hands, and he promptly had it published with his own defiant attestation:

And I, Martin Luther, confess and witness with this statement that I received this furious story of my death on 21 March. I read it
gladly and joyfully indeed, except for the fact that such blasphemy is attributed to divine majesty. Otherwise I do not really care about it that the devil and his followers, pope and papists, are so hostile to me. May God convert them from the evil!
⁴³

Luther had lost none of his flair for exploiting the press, but now the spark was about to be extinguished.

Happily for his posthumous reputation, his followers had also had plentiful opportunity to prepare for the end; it was, after all, over a decade since he had experienced his first critical health episode, and his increasing debilitation had been there for all to see. It was essential that Luther should die well, and his colleagues ensured that it would be so. In the presence of his watching friends the reformer’s life slipped peacefully away at three o’clock on the morning of February 18. There was no roaring and no groaning. The Devil did not come to claim him, as his enemies had so gleefully foretold.

News was immediately dispatched to Elector John Frederick and Luther’s colleagues on the Wittenberg faculty. It was left to the theologians to bring the sad tidings to a distraught Katharina von Bora. Melanchthon shared the news with his lecture class: “Now has died the charioteer and chariot of Israel who guided the Church in this last age of the world.”
⁴⁴
In Eisleben, meanwhile, Luther’s body was laid out in St. Andrew’s Church in a simple white smock. A painter, Lukas Furtenagel, was summoned from Halle to sketch a last image of the reformer’s face, at rest and at peace. Justus Jonas, Luther’s faithful friend and companion, preached a sermon over the body. The following day Michael Coelius delivered a second sermon before Luther’s body began its final journey, from the city of his birth and death to his adopted home, Wittenberg.

On February 22, the reformer was laid to rest in the castle church, as the elector had commanded. Bugenhagen preached at the ceremony; Melanchthon followed with his own eulogy. These early reflections of Luther’s life and achievement were swiftly circulated in print, and they would play a crucial role in shaping interpretation of Luther’s life—and
death. Bugenhagen expressed the emotion of those who had lost a father or friend; for the faithful Johannes, Luther was a teacher and prophet sent by God. None should rejoice at his death, since his “powerful, blessed, divine teaching” lived on. Melanchthon, as was his wont, was more studied and forensic. He did not conceal his own intermittent discomfort at Luther’s polemical style. But Luther’s real legacy would not be this, but the theological insights: justification by faith, the Law and the Gospel, the spiritual and civil spheres. All this, of course, sat alongside the legacy of true teaching, nurturing the Christian people, along with the enduring monument of his Bible translation.

Luther’s dying was the last great triumph of his life; and it was, like so much that had made his movement, a collaborative effort. As on so many occasions in the previous three decades, Luther could rely one more time on the talent and forbearance of the exceptionally gifted group of colleagues who had gathered around him. Together, and in their different ways, they shaped the interpretation of an event unprecedented in the history of Christianity: the death of a man who had established a successful and enduring counterchurch within the family of Western Christendom. And as they had done at every stage of Luther’s movement, the printers played their part. In the course of 1546 alone, these funeral orations were published in over thirty editions. In Wittenberg, Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, and Justus Jonas all entrusted their work to Georg Rhau (a significant departure from Luther’s established practice of spreading the work around). Thereafter there was a flurry of reprints all around Germany. In the case of Melanchthon’s oration, editions were published in Augsburg, Frankfurt, Magdeburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Zwickau, with a Low German translation in Lübeck.
⁴⁵
Most of these established centers of Protestant printing also sponsored editions of Jonas’s and Bugenhagen’s sermons, with the significant additions, for Jonas, of Ulm, Regensburg, Wesel, and Hannover. Presumably, in these cases, they very often carried the first news of Luther’s death. The publications issued to mark Luther’s departure also included a verse lament, the work of Leonhard Kettner, with significant input by Hans
Sachs.
⁴⁶
The first editions were most likely from Nuremberg, with reprints in Lübeck, Erfurt, and Zwickau.

In this way Luther’s supporters, with significant assistance from the printing industry, laid claim to the narrative of Luther’s death. Not everybody would be convinced. Luther’s opponents were not to be cheated of their quarry, and hostile rumors continued to circulate. In response Philip Melanchthon penned a brief encomium of his friend to accompany a memorial selection of Luther’s works; Johannes Cochlaeus, the most dogged of Luther’s first detractors, countered with a far longer and predictably skeptical account of Luther’s life and career. Thus would be inaugurated the struggle for Luther’s legacy, a contest that would play a crucial role in shaping his church in the decades and centuries after his death. At first the debate over Luther would follow predictable, confessional lines. But all too soon, more tragically, the contest for Luther’s posthumous approval would embroil former friends in furious disagreement as his movement split into contesting branches. This, too, was a part of Luther’s potent, troubled legacy: a spirit too large, too restless, and ultimately too ambiguous to be easily confined within a narrow confessional straitjacket.

12.

L
EGACY

N
F
RIDAY,
O
CTOBER 31, 1617,
all over Protestant Germany, citizens were called to church for a special service of thanksgiving. This was the day chosen to mark the centenary of the Reformation, one hundred years to the day when, it now suited the church’s leaders to recall, Luther was believed to have published his ninety-five theses. The sermons chosen for this day differed from place to place. The city of Ulm chose indulgences; Electoral Saxony, keen to reclaim its special place in the Reformation narrative, chose to place more emphasis on the life and work of Martin Luther. In many places celebrations and special events continued for some weeks, in the case of Strasbourg all the way to Christmas. To the pious population this may have been increasingly burdensome. Although they had flocked to the sermons of October 31 in large numbers—Ulm had laid on extra clergy to hear confessions in the weeks leading up to the great event—the stipulation that inns and taverns remain closed during the festivities may have tested this enthusiasm to the limit.
¹

The careful arrangements made for the jubilee celebrations reveal that this was far from a spontaneous outpouring of popular enthusiasm. The planning, down to the last detail, was exclusively in the hands of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The celebrations were conceived
both as an opportunity to reinforce community solidarity and as a major pedagogical tool. Plays were written to be performed in public or in the schools, reliving the dramas of the Reformation and the events of Luther’s life. Special prayers were printed to be distributed to all the churches; children were to learn them by heart. In return for this dutiful service the children were presented with a specially minted medal: Ulm printed 4,000 copies of the jubilee prayer and distributed 2,250 medals.
²
Many territories had such medals struck, most bearing images of Martin Luther and references to the Reformation drama or its key theological precepts.
³
This medal culture was the innovative cornerstone of a veritable media blitz. Not surprisingly, the printers played their part. In addition to the printed prayers, sermons, and official ordinances prescribing the ceremonies, the year 1617 also produced a notable outpouring of commemorative broadsheets, intended to be exhibited on the walls of public places or in private homes. In woodcuts or utilizing the increasingly popular technique of engraving, these images revived the familiar tropes of the Reformation decade: the pope toppling from his throne, the hapless indulgence seller vanquished by the evangelical light.
⁴
Above them all towered the figure of Martin Luther, simultaneously the calm patriarch (revisiting one of Cranach’s most famous images) and the warrior for Christ. Luther’s omnipresence was a reminder of better, more innocent days; in 1617 it was as if he had never been away.

The Reformation Jubilee was a vast act of communal solidarity; it was also an intensely political event. The initiative had come not specifically at the prompting of the evangelical ministers of Saxony, as might have been expected, but as a suggestion of the leader of the Protestant military alliance, the Protestant Union, Frederick V of the Palatinate. The union had been formed in 1608 as a counterweight to the increasing militancy of Catholic forces in the empire. Frederick, a committed Calvinist, was met by considerable suspicion from the major Lutheran princes as he attempted to weld the divided Protestant powers into a coherent force. The Luther commemoration, conceived at a meeting of the union in Heilbronn in April 1617, was a gracious and canny contribution
to building this Protestant solidarity. Even the choice of title for the commemoration, “Jubilee,” was one freighted with meaning, since this, of course, was the name given to the special years of grace and indulgence celebrated by the Catholic Church every twenty-five years.
⁵
The distribution of special medals during the Reformation commemoration also mimicked the Catholic custom of jubilee coins, with a nod to the more ancient tradition of pilgrimage tokens. But the Reformation commemoration, as was emphasized in numerous pamphlets and sermons, was no mere echo of such tawdry rituals, but a true evangelical jubilee.

The Reformation Jubilee was a remarkable act of communal remembering, improvised at remarkably short notice and drawing on all the theological and media weapons developed over a long century of confessional division. Its consequence was to canonize 1517 and the posting of the theses as the key date of the Reformation, a status it had never before held, to judge by the numerous alternative dates previously celebrated in Lutheran territories as local days of remembrance. From this point on the posting of the theses would be the acknowledged point of beginning, a point rammed home by one of the most widely produced of all the polemical broadsheets of the year, the so-called dream of Frederick the Wise.
⁶
In this complex allegory, Luther writes on the door of the castle church with a giant quill. Its elongated stem passed through the ear of an enraged lion (for Pope Leo), before knocking the papal tiara off the pope’s head. There is even room in such illustrative woodcuts for the unfortunate Tetzel, once again invoked as the pantomime villain of the movement: quite literally so in Heinrich Kielmann’s
Tetzel Peddling,
one of several new plays written for the jubilee celebrations. In other images, and rather in defiance of chronology, sinister Jesuits also make their appearance.
⁷

D
REAM OF
F
REDERICK THE
W
ISE

One of the most widely disseminated of the broadsheets published during the jubilee year 1617, this complex image helped canonize the posting of the theses as the moment the Reformation began.