My father once more answered clearly, “Yes.”
I, his son Paul, also acknowledge that I heard it and can testify to it, as did my brother Martin and all those present.
Then his forehead and face grew cold, as I noted when I laid my hand on him. Dr. Jonas did what he could to make him respond, but to no avail, even when he addressed him with his given name, Doctor Martin. He took a gentle breath and sighed and lay with folded hands. So he passed away in Christ, between two and three in the night.
We all broke into tears, so much so that Dr. Jonas could not himself write a report to our gracious elector but with uncontrollable sobs dictated it about an hour after Father’s death to Count Albrecht’s secretary, who noted it down without much emotion. This was not the first death he had encountered; under the rule of Count Albrecht many a person had lost their lives.
The lore about what happened at my father’s death is, understandably, somewhat varied. Even I myself, who was there, had to be reminded by a document from my own hand of what my father had said in dying. I found in the Bible of Lucas Furtenagel, who in Eisleben drew a portrait of my father, made his death mask in wax, and later in Halle created a plaster from it, an entry from me with the date 7th of August, AD 1582, and the place of Augsburg, in which I wrote that shortly before his blessed end, my father had said three times, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
When my father had sighed his last and had clearly passed away, there was genuine confusion and great turmoil. The body was not left in peace, but instead next to the deathbed three underbeds filled with feathers with towels over them were prepared, upon which the body was placed in the hope, as we all wished and prayed, that God would still have mercy upon him and not yet summon him to his throne. Today it seems to me to have been a genuine folly, because the doctors could feel no pulse; then, however, I hoped for a miracle and feared it at the same time. As it did not occur, the body was left lying for five hours, until nine of the clock. During that time, many honorable townsfolk came and, with tears and much crying, viewed the body. Also we boys received much attention, were caressed on the head and given comforting words, and Father’s cousin Frau Gutjahr stuck two pfennigs in my pocket (for which I now know a journeyman carpenter in summer must work a half day or for which one might get a meal in an inn). For her husband, Andreas Gutjahr, who had been indicted for counterfeiting the year before, my father had written a letter to the old Chancellor Brück. He condemned the counterfeiting but wrote that it was a pity that the small forgers were punished while the big ones got away.
I cried as much as possible, more than Martin, because it seemed that it was expected of me. Now that I was fatherless and an orphan, the tears came easily, and my pity for myself was great.
They then clothed my dead father in a new white Swabian smock and laid the body on a bed of straw until a pewter coffin had been cast, into which it was laid. In the casket he was viewed by many people, including nobility, both men and women, who for the most part had known him, as well as a great number of the common people.
My brother and I went to and fro between our chamber and the place of the laying out. I tried as often as possible to kneel at my Herr Father’s deathbed, lay my forehead on his cold hand, and cry sweetly, and lo, more pfennigs were slipped to me, of which I gave two to my brother Martin. One could see that I was in a muddle, both internally and externally. Externally by the constant coming and going, internally by a strange mixture of sadness, self-pity, shame, relief, and contrition over the relief, which contrition in its turn seemed to justify me, for which I again felt shame.
Chapter 3
. . . is about bringing my father home, how we encountered Mother, and is continued in chapter 4, which tells how my parents met and married.
It should be understood that at the time I could not appreciate the shock that my father’s death provoked in Saxony, the empire, and in all Europe. But I felt, rather than understood, above all in view of the noise and unrest that started in Eisleben immediately after his demise, that something big must have occurred. The old evil foe was himself not unaware of it and hastened to promulgate the myth that Dr. Martin Luther, out of despair, had taken his own life. This legend held on tenaciously and is even today adhered to by old believers.
For the rest of us, however, it was important to document all that had happened during my father’s death and preserve it in memory, as it was of paramount importance to protect his life’s work from the Antichrist and, in spite of the death of its main advocate, to secure and even to raise the Protestant cause in order to help the new Evangelism to ultimate victory. Later I became aware that all the events at the time—the death protocol (which in March AD 1546 was put into print and thus made available for the Christian public by Herr Jonas, Herr Coelius, and Herr Aurifaber by order of our Most Gracious Elector), the death mask, the laying out, the various sermons at certain stages on the return home to Wittenberg, and many other things—were meant to exactly serve the purpose mentioned above.
On the 19th of February at two of the clock in the afternoon, with great reverence and singing of hymns, my father was carried into the main parish church of St. Andrew. We three brothers—my brother Johannes had meanwhile arrived from Mansfeld, a rider having been sent with an urgent message—saw the princes, counts, and other noble men together with their dames and a great number of townspeople walking behind the body. In the church, Dr. Jonas preached a sermon with a warning to our adversaries that this death possessed great power against Satan and his forces and should not give them any premature hope.
I felt at once that Justus Jonas’s tone was very belligerent, and he called on the Christian community, after he had told all the details of the honored man’s death, not to be downhearted but to remain true to the teachings of the departed and to defend them against all enemies. His sermon was immediately printed and published, and I have it now before me as I write.
Dr. Jonas used the soon-to-be-familiar metaphor of the goose and the swan: at the point of being burned at the stake, the Bohemian preacher Jan Hus prophesied that after him, the Goose (such is the translation of the name Hus), would soon be followed by a Swan, and it would better and more successfully sing. And then Dr. Jonas repeated the message of my dead father about the Roman Church: “Living, I was a plague to you, Pope; in death will I be your death.” After the sermon, the casket was soldered up.
Afterward ten citizens watched over the body through the night. The counts of Mansfeld would have liked to have my father’s gravesite on their lands, but our Most Gracious Elector had other wishes and refused their request forthwith. Today, with hindsight, the request of the counts seems to me to be rather simpleminded in view of the significance of my father’s death for the survival of the Evangelical cause and the disputes in Europe.
So on February 20th, Saturday afternoon after Valentine’s Day, a sermon having been preached early, this time by Magister Michael Coelius, the body was taken, with reverence and hymns and many tears and lamentations, out of Eisleben.
We brothers sat in the shaking wagon but had the honor of being accompanied by forty-five horsemen and the counts themselves. When we, in spite of our winter clothing, with which Mother had abundantly provided us, became too cold, we would get out and struggle along the rough and furrowed road beside the wagon. The tracks in the mud were frozen, and although we often stumbled, our feet at least stayed dry. As provisions for the journey, friendly Eisleben townspeople had sent along bread and smoked sausage, also for everyone a piece of cold roast, and a sachet of salt from the salt market in Halle, all of which we heartily fell to, feeling the sharp hunger that befalls one in mourning.
Johannes told us along the way that those Mansfeld counts who still adhered to the old belief had encouraged the apothecary Johannes Landau to prepare a divergent death report, which was intended to show Father’s death as not clearly Christ
ian.
In the evening we arrived in Halle. Ready to receive us, or rather much more to receive my father, at the Klaustor Gate were numerous citizens and women, as well as the schoolmasters, ministers, and the town council. There was such a crowd of people jamming the streets that it took over an hour for the funeral procession to go from the Klaustor Gate to the Market Church of Our Dear Lady. The pewter coffin was brought into the church, during which there were sobs and tears from the congregation. “Out of the Depths I Have Cried unto Thee, O Lord” was sung, a text from the 130th Psalm Father had set to music. He was laid out in the sacristy, and during the night the people of Halle could bid their farewell.
My father, after his homeland of Mansfeld, had loved the city of Halle for the sake of its faith and his friends there: “Oh, Halle, you worthy city, the Merciful God preserve you, so that you do not founder. You have always loved God’s word; therefore He will preserve you.”
We lodged again with Dr. Jonas, who preached once more. Then we continued on to Bitterfeld, where a squadron of riders from the Saxon electorate under the leadership of two counts awaited us, who conducted us first to Kemberg. There the casket rested in the town church with a guard of honor. In all the towns and villages that our procession touched, the bells rang out. In spite of the great cold, mourning people everywhere walked along with us in order to say farewell to Dr. Martinus, or more accurately his coffin.
Before the Wittenberg Elster Gate, the rector and all the professors of the university had gathered, along with the students, the town council, and the citizenry. All the bells rang out, and we passed by the Black Monastery, our home, along the Collegienstrasse, over the market square, and through the Schlossstrasse to the castle church. In the church the casket was placed on the right of the pulpit, and Bugenhagen and Melanchthon gave the mourning sermon, during which our mother with extreme effort maintained her composure. Throughout her life, people had observed her with jealousy and resentment, which will be discussed later, and she wanted the envious, who believed her now, without Father, to be defenseless, enjoying no triumph.
The pewter coffin was placed inside a wooden one, after which chosen magistri lowered it into the vault.
Johannes, Martin, and I had only been able to greet our mother in front of all the people. She sat with some women and our sister, Margarethe, in a carriage that joined the procession. Now that Father, who was her beloved master and also her protection and shield, was no longer there, she would have to struggle along alone, with the help of the oldest, Johannes and Martin. Before me is a letter that shows so clearly the greatness of her loss. I borrowed it from the estate of her daughter-in-law, Christine von Bora.
Grace and peace from God, the father of our dear Lord Jesus Christ, dear and kind Sister of mine. That you bear a heartfelt pity for me and for my poor children, I easily believe. For who would not be aggrieved and distressed, losing such a wondrous man as has been my dear husband, who greatly served not only a town or country but also an entire world. Therefore, I am truly very sad that I cannot tell any man the great suffering of my heart, nor do I know myself how I am deep in my soul. I can neither eat nor drink, also not sleep. And if I had lost a principality or an empire, I should not have cared, had I only kept my husband, who was taken not only from me but from all the world by our dear Lord God. When my thoughts dwell on it, I can, from sorrow and tears (which God well knows), neither talk nor write.
When once again I read this letter now, the entire hard though influential and powerful life story of my brave mother returns to me renewed, though she must have felt somewhat consoled by the sympathetic letter our gracious prince the elector sent her, implicitly expressing his great grief at the loss she had suffered.
Dear Beloved,
We do not doubt that you have learned by now that the venerable and highly learned, our dear and pious Doctor Martin Luther of blessed memory, has left this vale of tears in Eisleben on Thursday in the morning between two and three of the clock, accompanied by godly words from the Holy Scriptures, and departed from us, which We have been told and received deeply distressed and aggrieved. The almighty God, We do not doubt, will be gracious and merciful to his soul. Though We can imagine that your dear master’s departure will hurt and make you suffer very much, God the Almighty’s will, who has so generously and Christianly endowed him, may not be opposed, but it is God whose right it is to order such. Therefore, you should not be too aggrieved but be consoled about his departure, as it is God’s will. We are graciously inclined for the sake of your dear master, whom We honored and were well disposed of, to take good care of you and your children and will not forsake you. This We graciously want you to know and to take to your heart.
Duke Johann Friedrich, Elector
Torgau, Saturday after St. Valentine’s Day 1546
Chapter 4
. . . continues the story of chapter 3.
My father abominated the idea of girls and women being kept in nunneries and said, “I am, however, of the opinion that maids who are forced to live a spiritual life before they can rightly know what flesh and blood is should be extricated from behind the high convent walls, where the words of the dear Gospel are seldom if ever heard these days. The banishment of young maidens is a tyranny and terrible hardship; the weeping of children, who are neither wooden blocks nor dead sticks, must arouse pity in anyone, even if the maidens diligently sing the Regnun mundi, pray without ceasing, ask all the saints to intercede for them, fast, confess, and by day and night torture their souls about how to do righteous deeds, as if our heavenly Father lets himself be paid by such.”
Already, as she had fled from the Cistercian Cloister of Marienthron in Nimbschen near Grimma in a covered wagon (or voluntarily had allowed herself to be abducted with eight other nuns) and had moved to Wittenberg on the 9th of April, 1523, our mother, despite great sympathy or rather mere curiosity of the crowds of townsfolk and students, must have realized for the first time the enormity of what she had undertaken. For there were other examples of escapes from the convent, for example, the one of Florentina of Oberweimar, whose escape plan came to light and who was punished with beatings and incarceration. Or, even worse, the case of Heinrich Keller from Mittweida, whom Duke George of Saxony had ordered to be beheaded because he had helped a nun flee from the Cloister of Sornzig or at least had planned her abduction. And this execution at that time was quite legal, as it was done in accordance with ecclesiastical and secular law, which called for the death sentence in such cases.
For the escape, Father had sent a covered wagon for her and the other nuns driven by a merchant and friend of his, Leonard Koppe, councilman in Torgau, who had often brought herring and dried cod to the cloister as Lenten fare.
Among my papers I found a letter my father sent to Leonard Koppe, which has since been made public and shows how he explained the escape of the nuns, justified it, and claimed responsibility.
From this letter can be seen that the nuns had not spontaneously deserted the cloister but had obviously carefully planned the escape. The nuns wanted to return to their families, which, it seems, the families did not want. The nuns, however, had evidently made Father’s judgment of the monastic vows their own and were strengthened by secret imaginations of a worldly life. Some of them hid behind the fish barrels, others even in them, as I read in the letter: namely, “in each barrel a virgin,” in which they could comfortably crouch, which is why during the successful flight, having had the need to relieve themselves while in their hiding places, they smelled strongly.
Still, as they came through Torgau and arrived in Wittenberg, and after they had bathed and rid themselves of the fishy smell, people asked themselves what to do with them now. The property the nuns had brought to the cloister was no longer there or could not be used. That meant men had to be found willing to marry them, or they would have to be sent back to their families or relatives. But the families were not happy because they had sent their daughters to the convents in the belief that they, for
the rest of their lives, had safely and piously been got rid of. As it happened, safe accommodation was found for all the nuns but Mother. For her it took somewhat longer.
She fell very much in love with Hieronymus Baumgartner from Nuremberg, the son of respectable parents. When Baumgartner left Wittenberg, some claimed Katharina von Bora became so very ill from thwarted love (presumably it was, however, the English sweating sickness, sudor anglicus, which at the time was going around). Things got so alarming with her that my father himself turned to Baumgartner in a letter: “To Hieronymus Baumgartner, who in piety and education is a most excellent young man in Nuremberg, from your dear friend in Christ: By the way, if you desire to keep your Käthe von Bora, you must make haste before she is given to another who is at hand. She has not yet overcome her love for you. I would be very joyful if both of you were joined. Farewell. Wittenberg on the 12th of October, 1524. Martin Luther.”
“If you desire to keep your Käthe”—that can only mean that Baumgartner, so to say, had already had her; otherwise he could not keep her. Apparently that was the picture that people in Wittenberg and also my father had of her and Baumgartner.
The letters and stories seem to suggest that the patrician family of the Baumgartners could have had no interest in their son marrying a poor, runaway, and possibly sinful nun. So for my mother nothing came of this affair other than rumors that she was not a virgin when she married my father.
Father now proposed as husband the Wittenberg doctor of theology and preacher at Orlamünde, Casper Glatz, whom my mother under no circumstances wanted to marry—he was cantankerous. She would rather have had Nicolaus von Amsdorf or, if there were no others, Luther himself. The last name she would have said with a mischievous smile.
Shadows of My Father Page 3
