ALL THINGS TO GERMAN MEN

New attempts are under way to patch up the

Reformation divide, but Anne McElvoy finds

Germany has its own plans for Luther

Lutherstadt-Wittenberg FOUR and a half centuries after his death, Martin Luther, the reformer who railed against the Church's accretion of riches, has become Wittenberg's nice little earner. The town in the former East Germany, which changed its name in the mid-1980s to identify itself with its spiritual forebear, has spent the last year deep in Luther-wor- ship — very little connected with his Reformation creed or writings. Commem- orating the man who declared, 'The righ- teous man shall live by faith alone' filled the municipal coffers nicely during 1996, the 450th anniversary of his death. The council has just announced on its balance sheet that `Luther-Year revenue' exceeded the projected income from tourism of DM80 million (f35 million).

The Lutheran Church was in high spirits as the anniversary year ended. A papal encyclical Ut Unum Sint ended the formal division between Rome and the Nordic and Baltic branches of the Lutheran Church. This new Common Market in reli- gion does not, however, include Germany, whose Lutherans remain closer in spirit and doctrine to Catholicism than their sis- ter churches to the north. When the town's citizens gathered for their Christmas ser- vices featuring readings from his works and the hymns based on his writings, they looked back on a year which saw renova- tion of its fine old buildings, sorely neglect- ed by the East German state, a sturdy expansion of hotels and restaurants and a boom year in the shops, paid for by a stream of visitors. Germans adore anniver- saries, and in Wittenberg, where a fifth of the workforce is unemployed after unifica- tion, they also needed the money. In contrast to the rather sad region south of Berlin which still bears the hall- marks — run-down factories and gastro- nomic inadequacies — of the communist East, the town is booming. Well-heeled matrons hurry to Sunday services in the Burgkirche, where the most famous of Lutheran hymns, `Ein fester Burg ist unser Gott' (A safe fortress is our God), is inscribed above the altar.

Legend has it that Luther pinned his 95 theses to the door here in 1517, declaring, 'Here I stand, I can do no other.' This refrain is so popular in German politics that even the former communists, the Party of Democratic Socialism, have taken to using it in their literature. In the exhibi- tion devoted to his life, a child wanders amid the glass cases and asks his mother, 'Who was Luther?' She replies, 'He said that the Church had become greedy and that it was run to please men. He wanted to give it back to God.' But another ques- tion forms in the mind: who is Luther now, the most variously interpreted and instru- mentalised figure in German history?

There is a telling line about Germany's dealings with past giants, famous and infa- mous, in the German film Schtonk, a satire on the faked Hitler diaries. The editor of the news magazine which has bought them wonders what feature articles he will print alongside them. 'We could start with "Adolf Hitler — a man like you and me",' he says brightly. This is pretty much the approach today's Germany takes to Luther. The potted biographies on sale in Wittenberg emphasise his commitments to universal education and shared responsi- bility for the welfare of the needy, while dismissing his anti-Semitism as a vagary of the times. He has been given a makeover as 20th-century hero. His stern features, encased in monastic habit, are reproduced on commemoration T-shirts. There is a specially produced Luther beer, there are matchboxes, liqueurs, playing-cards and chocolate bis- cuits (regardless of the fact that chocolate was unknown in 16th-century Germany). No one could accuse the German Tourist Board of understatement.

Jorg Bielig from the town hall is shame- lessly cheerful about the hype. 'We all know that the tourist trade invented Luther Year,' he says. 'But the Church fol- lowed meekly. It's in everyone's interests to celebrate the son of our town.' In fact, Luther was born and died further south, in Eisleben, and some 30 German towns claim a link with him. And it might fairly be said that the Evangelical (Protestant) Church in the region has got more than it bargained for with the celebrations — the local bishop condemned 'tasteless and irrelevant' souvenirs. Not that this stopped the workshops producing them or the (mainly West German) tourists buying them.

Strains between the tourist authority and the diocese came to a head in the summer, when Wittenberg staged a reconstruction of the monk's wedding in 1525 to Kathari- na von Bora, a nun who had escaped from a Cistercian convent. The Church protest- ed. 'We had to tone down the celebration,' said Herr Bielig regretfully. 'They did it without exchanging rings in the end.' Christmas was conducted more traditional- ly. 'I have to say that it is a relief to see the back of Luther Year,' says Friedrich Schor- lemmer, a Wittenberg theologian who played a leading role in the reform move- ment of 1989. 'It has been a constant war between good and bad taste — and you can imagine which side triumphed.'

But Herr Schorlemmer also lives off the Luther legend — his prose style is similarly hortative, and in 1989, as the communist regime tottered, he nailed his own set of theses to the Burgkirche door, demanding freedom of expression and democratic reform. These days he condemns the 'new princes' of the free market, just as before he taunted the communists by comparing them with the well-fed, small-minded, self- ish barons of the Holy Roman Empire's principalities.

The process of turning a reformer into a role model began long ago, even before Luther's death. It was cultivated by the man himself, who allowed Cranach to paint him as the 13th disciple in the church altarpiece of the Last Supper, and by his circle of supporters in Wittenberg, who used the new invention of printing to dis- tribute broadsides. The Catholic theolo- gian Johannes Cochlaeus responded with his own hostile work, portraying Luther as a self-aggrandising heretic.

By the Enlightenment, Luther had been transformed into the harbinger of reason, his superstitious side neatly forgotten. His bloodcurdling writings on witchcraft and the devil and his works re-emerged only when folldore was repopularised in the lit- erature of the 19th century. The last centu- ry, in its attempts to forge a nation out of a national cultural consciousness, found in Luther the keystone of national mytholo- gy. The Reformation began to be celebrat- ed as the earliest manifestation of pure German nationhood — despite the fact that, as a child of the Holy Roman Empire, Luther's consciousness of nation- ality (first expressed at the Imperial Diet of Cologne in 1512) would have been vague indeed.

His uneasy role as national hero is underlined by the cautious treatment meted out to the 1996 anniversary by Ger- man politicians. The German President, Roman Herzog, marked it by drawing attention to Luther's universality and the desirability of his achievements being recognised by all denominations. This was delivered more in hope than in expecta- tion in a country where the cultural divi- sions between the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and south, and the Protestant north and east have withstood the political upheavals of the century.

Today's Lutherans are apt to skirt his robust anti-Semitism, but it was not always thus. In the Third Reich the Deutsche Christen (the Nazi Party at Prayer) cited the splenetic tract Jews and Their Lies which favoured the expulsion of converted Jews from the Church.

The cultural power of the Luther image has been recognised and mocked since by the Dadaists after the first world war. For some of them, Luther was an authoritarian figure, akin to Hegel and Bismarck, whom they also blamed for German militarism. Hugo Ball complained that Luther had contributed to 'the systematisation, the cretinisation of Germany' and blamed the refusal of Germans to embrace art and life (one is tempted to add his ideas of art and life) on the prominence of the written word in the wake of the Gutenberg Bible. In 1918, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung fea- tured a photo-montage of Hindenburg's head above a Lutheran collar after an engraving by Cranach. Luther also fea- tured as an infantry soldier with an Iron 'It's a side-effect from giving up booze.' Cross on his breast. Yet no German, then as now, can escape the influence of Luther. Nietzsche derived his prose style from the Lutheran Bible, and his lusty delight in describing bodily functions is recreated in some of the novels of Giinter Grass.

The Dadaists, strongly influenced by the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik theories of collectivism, would have been intrigued by the fate of their villain in East Germany. The communists were unenthusiastic about commemorating any religious figure in German history in an atheistic state. But Luther's image as a brave, anti-authoritari- an figure remained a powerful one, and after the foundation of the German Demo- cratic Republic in 1949 the Lutheran Church became a focus of opposition to the state.

In an ingenious attempt to dilute his influence, they adopted Thomas Muntzer as the 'correct' Reformation hero because he sided with the peasants in the Peasants' Revolt. Muntzer was honoured as a 'social revolutionary' by having his picture on an East German banknote. By 1983, however, the confidence of the East German state was in decline, the belief that the 'second Germany' would come to be seen as the natural repository of all that was good in German history had evaporated. When there were protests from the Church about the refusal by the state to allow official cel- ebrations of the 500th anniversary of Luther's birth, Erich Honecker's regime decided to change course and produced a warm appreciation of Luther, explaining the volte-face as a 'further development in socialist thinking'. The fact that Luther's revolutionary individualism had succeeded against the might of the papacy because he had exploited the new technology of print- ing presses was used as a paradigm of com- munism's need to master the 'scientific-technological revolution'. At the same time as a statue of Frederick the Great was allowed back onto Unter den Linden, Luther was officially rehabilitated as 'a model for our young people'.

The image of Luther peddled in Ger- many now is no less representative of the current requirements of a German state — this time, one which is still accustoming itself to a unified existence. For a German political class seeking to reach a new, acceptable understanding of national iden- tity, he is the ideal hero, removed far enough in time for his virtues to be cele- brated and those traits and views less acceptable to modernity to be air-brushed away with barely a protest.

A century ago, the Swiss writer Jakob Burcldiardt complained about the attempts to put Luther to work in the service of any cause. 'Who are we to demand of Luther and the other reformers that they should fulfil our wishes?' he wrote. 'This is the Luther who existed. We must take him as we find him.' The experience of the last 450 years suggests that this is the one approach with no hope of vindication.