Germania

by Simon Winder

  By sheer bad luck I was in Eisleben for the annual festival celebrating Luther’s birth. Around the chunky statue of the man himself in the market square the usual cast of figures dressed in sacking drank mead and listened to minstrels singing rude songs very roughly of the right period. The feedback from the stage speakers would certainly have woken up the infant reformer in his cot. Sometimes it seems as though the entire generation of German students who had vaguely sympathized with the Baader-Meinhof Gang back in the ’70s are doomed to act out the rest of their lives as blacksmiths, tumblers and flagoneers at these sorts of witless festivals, travelling from town to town in a constant, anxious quest for marginal anniversaries at which to sell candles, honey and fruit brandies. Curiously, another entire generation seems to now also be following in the footsteps of their elders – perhaps as part of an ever-burgeoning government protection programme where reformed terrorists and now former GDR narks keep their freedom but are forever cursed to work as minstrels or town criers. A grim, completely fed-up-looking man dressed as Luther sat off duty, drinking in the hotel bar.

  Luther’s links with Eisleben were fairly tenuous, then. Despite this, Luther always acclaimed it as his birthplace and at the end of his life came back to adjudicate a land dispute, give a final set of sermons in the beautifully gnarled and imposing church, and die. This means that as a ‘combi-ticket’ you can buy discounted entry both to Luther’s ‘birth-house’ and his ‘death-house’ while not walking more than a hundred yards. Given how Luther-related sites, some fascinating, some not, sprawl across Germany, this has a real soup-to-nuts attractiveness to it. Of course, by the time of his death Luther was very famous, so the ‘death-house’ is, while wholly fraudulent too in its furnishings and lay-out, at least the real thing, and as such less fun.

  At the time Eisleben was part of the County of Mansfeld, one of Europe’s industrial hubs, churning out copper and silver dug from mines of amazing, suffocating nastiness. Luther’s father had a senior role in these mines and there has been endless and in the end useless speculation as to how important Martin’s unusually capitalist background was in shaping him. There is also the curious and again irresolvable backdrop of printing as a mature business. Is Luther feasible without printing? Jan Hus, a great but ultimately unsuccessful and executed reformer, had in the early fifteenth century been without access to printing. But there are simply too many variables to say what the key differences were, or what it was about Luther’s lifetime that made such a huge change in Europe’s religious existence feasible.

  The problem is that the entire nature of Luther’s work – and of those around him or influenced by him such as Zwingli, Melanchthon and Calvin – cannot be viewed with neutrality. The assumption for many generations of Protestants that somehow Luther represented the future and that Protestantism was inherently progressive and dynamic continued to create a gravitational field of great persuasiveness until very recently. The Germany unified after 1871 was then almost torn apart by Bismarck’s feeling that the southern, Catholic parts of the country were in some sense backward and unpatriotic, despite Baden, for example, being as dynamic and clever as anywhere. Weber’s famously idiotic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism assigned specific virtues to Protestantism even as places such as Catholic Belgium appeared suspiciously able to handle heavy industry, research, financial planning and colonialism. The great majority of the world’s Christians – who of course always remained Catholic or Orthodox – looked on with mixed amusement and irritation at the mad conceit of Protestants.

  So powerful remain the original roots of Luther’s appeal, however, that it is almost impossible to shake off this providential story: of a Germany mired in backwardness and corruption snapping suddenly into black-clothed, unshowy modernity. Catholicism itself of course furnishes so much of the critique itself. The principal church of Halle, for example, was built by Albrecht von Hohenzollern, one of the most powerful men in the Empire: Elector of Mainz, Archbishop of Magdeburg, brother of the Elector of Brandenburg. This church was built to mark the triumph of Catholicism over Protestantism (it went Protestant shortly thereafter). The church now features two marvellous Cranach workshop paintings on the altar, both prominently showing Albrecht himself interacting genially with a selection of saints, each helpfully holding their usual symbols: St Christopher with baby Jesus, St Catherine with the wheel she was broken on and so on. Given how many of the figures are young women who were either friends of Jesus or who died terribly martyred in his cause, it is fun to see how the painter follows the Cranach inability to paint women as anything other than erotically depraved. In any event, Albrecht looks the very model of jewelled-glove Catholicism, barely able to stand beneath the weight of vainglorious doodads – sufficient in himself to provoke the Reformation. That Albrecht was in fact a clever and ambiguous figure stands no chance in the face of this sort of association with silks and loose women.

  The devil’s bagpipes

  Protestantism and the Papacy spent centuries in a sort of mutual death grip across Central Europe and to a strange degree they supported each other. For example, it suited both sides to view the Pope as a figure of eternal and superhuman authority who had enjoyed unquestioning authority until undermined by a renegade Wittenberg monk. The Catholic fight-back then became the struggle to re-establish this ancient and God-given role in the face of devil-inspired heretics – the idea behind one of the most famous of all pro-Catholic cartoons with Satan playing a bagpipe shaped like Luther’s face. For Protestants in turn it added a sense of bravery and style that they should be taking on such an implacable Monster of Corruption, lounging in hypocritical luxury in Rome guarded by zombie trooper monks. In practice the Pope had always had to deal with challenges to his authority with heretics, anti-Popes, fresh and disturbing innovations. Indeed the hundred and fifty years running up to the Reformation were plagued by great clouds of bizarre ideas, unstable sects, feverish visions, witchcraft, demented processions. Bohemia was torn apart by battles against a series of picturesque heretics, part of a long tradition of defiance of papal authority. After a while the Pope must have dreaded the arrival of the next postal delivery – or rather the Popes must have, as quite often there were two rival ones. So, oddly, the threat of Protestantism opened the way for a much more shrill and genuine Papal harshness than had been possible before. As Protestantism became more entrenched, Catholicism reacted with ever greater violence.

  The Reformation itself famously began in 1517 in Wittenberg – today a small, quiet town but then the site of a new, freethinking (or relatively freethinking) university of just the kind that was sure to cause trouble. In a good example of how later periods improve on the past the most striking feature of Wittenberg (aside from its poisonous ‘Jewish sow’ statue on the side of a church) is a nineteenth-century addition to the rather plain original palace chapel to the doors of which Luther nailed his ‘Theses’. This huge, completely mad tower, with massive Gothic letters running round it screaming out ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, makes Wittenberg startling and impressive in a way that none of the real buildings do. A stream of Lutheran tourists pours through the town, providing its only visible source of income. The famous doors are overwrought replacements (the originals finally coming to grief during the Seven Years War) but despite all these embellishments there is something exciting about the sense of this small town really breaking Europe apart. The wood-panelled rooms in which, whenever Luther was in town, he and his wife held court to their many visitors have been preserved and been tramped through by the curious and pious ever since (most wonderfully Peter the Great’s signature is still visible on a piece of woodwork).

  In the end it is impossible to disentangle the drama of the Reformation from the events it seemed to provoke: no doubt political events, particularly the usual rows between princes and the Emperor, would have occurred anyway, but from now on all these had a fresh, religious tinge. Once Luther had established a convincing critique of the Pope and one whic
h various German princes would support, for reasons both religious and cunning, anything could happen. Protected by these princes – most crucially by the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, in his palace fortress outside Eisenach – Luther became a force of nature, pouring out pamphlets and translating the Bible into German (and thereby establishing the idea of German as a written language rather than just a mass of peasant dialects).

  Protestantism mutated rapidly into many forms, some uncontrollable by Luther himself but digging into a rich mass of previously existing anarchism, peculiar private religious practices and so on. All subsequent events became seen as something to do with Luther. The most important of these events centred on the Thuringian town of Mühlhausen, one of the key bases of the Peasant War but much later also birthplace of Johann Röbling, the architect of the Brooklyn Bridge – although he left when he could.

  Answering Luther’s call for reform, peasants, farmers and clergy across a broad band of central Germany, convulsed by intense religious feelings, rose up and started massacring the authorities. Similar disturbances had occurred before but the divisive religious issue gave these riots a new sort of momentum and it is not an exaggeration to say that this was the single greatest revolt in Europe before the French Revolution. Scenes of scarcely credible savagery engulfed region after region. Mühlhausen became the headquarters of one of the leaders of the war, Thomas Müntzer. A mystic and thoroughly impractical figure prone to visions, he was never really in charge – but Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels noticed him centuries later and decided he was a good communist stand-in despite his top-to-toe religiosity. This meant that the German Democratic Republic loved him – here was a German who could give Germany an impeccably communist pedigree. The lucky chance of his having fought on communist-controlled territory and the anniversary of his birth falling in 1988 provided a last gasp of excitement for the GDR, with Mühlhausen being turned into a sort of secular shrine to him. Some of this has now been cleaned up, but Müntzer remains an oddly omnipresent figure – and a fascinating example of how rapidly (only eight years after Luther’s theses) the Reformation began to run completely out of control. Müntzer was only squatting in Mühlhausen as he had already been kicked out of more mainstream cities such as Prague. The Peasants’ War really lasted so long because Imperial troops were away in Italy with Charles V thwarting a French invasion. As soon as the devastating Battle of Pavia had crushed the French, troops began to be moved back over the Alps and were available to dispose of Müntzer and his ragged, desperate supporters at the massacre of Frankenhausen. The GDR commissioned the totally ridiculous, if compelling, largest oil painting in the world at the site of the massacre, created in the 1980s in a vaguely sixteenth-century style but having more of the atmosphere of a Terry Pratchett novel. Under the sort of numbing title that now makes the GDR sound so quaint the painting was called The Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. The fighting ended with the proto-communist yet oddly religious revolutionaries chopped to bits. Müntzer was captured, tortured and executed in Mühlhausen, his decapitated body left on display as a reminder to the town’s surviving citizens to behave.

  If the Pope dreaded hearing of more setbacks, Luther himself wound up fairly inured to bad news. What he had seen in conservative and measured terms soon turned out to have unleashed a crazy mass of individuals, many working on the basis that the Second Coming was imminent. Luther hated the Peasants’ War and ended up a violent supporter of the status quo and thereby, perhaps inevitably, made Lutheranism into only a single if important strand in an ever-wackier patchwork of belief.

  The ruler of the world

  A complicating fact in the Reformation was the new Emperor, Charles V. This extraordinary man is now a rather dim figure but he holds a place in the sixteenth century comparable to Napoleon or even Hitler – in the sense that his decisions and actions held a sway across Europe of a quite exceptional range: until the arrival of Napoleon there were no figures of such grandeur and reach, with even Frederick the Great being a sort of provincial amusement in comparison.

  A Burgundian from Ghent, Charles had a rise to power that was madly vertiginous. In a sequence of dynastic accidents, Charles first inherited the Burgundian lands in 1506; then became King of Spain with places like southern Italy and America thrown in; then on the death of his grandfather Maximilian he also inherited all the Habsburg lands in Austria, followed by picking up the role of Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 through outrageous bribery. In a series of moves therefore he became over some nineteen years quite incalculably powerful, with Mexican loot pouring in and a messianic sense of being the God-given ruler of the whole Christian world.

  Charles was thoughtful, well educated and brave and even spent his spare time wisely – for example sleeping with a Regensburg innkeeper’s daughter, who subsequently gave birth to what turned out to be Don John of Austria who destroyed the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, a sex act somewhat uneasily commemorated with a statue and plaque in Regensburg today. Charles marks, through changes in styles of portraiture (which are of course completely deceptive) but also through the nature of his education and his own aspirations, something new and a bit more modern. His predecessor as Emperor, Maximilian I, has the same air of Burgundian, fifteenth-century chic as the English kings Edward IV and Henry VII – rather remote and hard to fathom. In his great portrait by Dürer, made shortly before his death, all gloom and furs, Maximilian seems like a medieval wizard. Charles gave the impression of being very different – an impression greatly enhanced by his firmly new-fangled portraits by Titian. He spent his entire reign on the move – there is it seems hardly an inn on an attractive town square anywhere in Germany where he did not take up residence at some point or other. Motivated, well financed and tireless, he patrolled his varied inheritance, which in Europe stretched with some minor gaps from Gibraltar to Transylvania. He fought everyone and everything – he carved out a new substate in north-west Europe from a mixture of inheritance and conquest, thereby unwittingly inventing the Netherlands just in time for it to rebel against his successors; he battled the Turks, he battled the French.

  Above all, at the Diet of Worms in 1521 he listened to Luther’s arguments about reform: and rejected them. This may have been a delusion, but it had been felt at least possible that Charles, with his immense power and prestige, could have brokered a deal which would have reformed the Papacy (something which many faithful to the Pope would have been happy with) and involved Luther in the process. But instead he opted for repression. Luther had been present at Worms under Imperial protection and he now fled to the safety of the Elector of Saxony’s Schloss.

  Charles’s decision to root out Protestantism split Europe (although this may have already been inevitable – we can never know) and ensured his own failure. It is one of the very odd facts of life in far western Eurasia that nobody has managed to unite Europe in the way that the Chinese emperors or Ottoman sultans did their lands. It is perhaps one of the strongest arguments for being sceptical even about the very idea of a ‘European’ culture, that anyone who has attempted to create a single political culture seems to have provoked an almost unconscious, automated counter-reaction that foils him. Charles certainly felt that he was on a mission to unite Europe and then destroy Islam – the marriage of his son (the future Philip II of Spain) to Mary I of England should have resulted in England being added to the Habsburg domains (a plan only foiled by Mary’s failure to have a child and then her death). But it does seem that, whatever the stated motives of those involved, there is a supra-dynastic element in European life that steps in to dispose of anyone wishing to rule a single, unified, giant land. For Charles the nightmare was the French, whom he repeatedly thrashed (most gleefully at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, when he even managed to capture the French king) and from whom he picked up Milan as a further piece of property, but who just kept on coming and ultimately exhausted and humiliated him.

  It is here that the Reformation becomes most murky and interesting. Clearly religi
on was a magnificent weapon in any fight with Charles V. The Holy Roman Empire crawled with princes and knights who were horrified by the possibilities open to Charles – the most powerful ruler since Charlemagne. We simply cannot attribute clear motives for anybody involved (although one can point to certain rulers who manoeuvred in a more shockingly cynical way than others), but a break with Rome was a clear way to keep Charles at bay. Equally, in a society soaked to the top of its head in religion, the immediate appeal of Luther was to many individuals genuine and overwhelming. The speed of events is amazing, from Luther hammering up his theses in 1517 to the Edict of Worms in 1521 which outlawed Luther and his views and started the process of killing people.

  *

  Important switches to Protestantism were everywhere in the same years, including one odd convert, the gnarled old reprobate Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg, a chaotic, brutal and nasty murderer, kicked out by his disgusted subjects, who converted to Reform and, despite an almost incredible further series of demeaning and half-baked adventures, died in charge of his old duchy and safely succeeded by his son. Württemberg is a fun state as it seems so often to represent everything grotesque about Germany: its dukes and then kings were a picturesque lot and the core of Stuttgart and their other castles and palaces are fine backdrops to the world of a medium-to-small state that was both buffeted by fate and yet also had its fate made far worse by its rulers’ ineptitude. But whatever its future travails, here was a genuinely Reformed state – home in the Old Schloss in Stuttgart to perhaps the earliest purpose-built Lutheran royal chapel, a simple, grave, magical little place created by Ulrich’s son, where I worshipped once with three or four elderly parishioners, the scarcely breathing residue of a religious movement that tore Europe apart for centuries. The boggling Ulrich’s motives can never be plumbed, but the end result of his decisions – and those of more serious figures such as Frederick the Wise – was a split within Europe that became permanent.