Katharina and Martin Luther

by Michelle DeRusha

  A Growing Family

  Luther and Katharina eventually had six biological children along with as many as eleven foster children living with them under the roof of the Black Cloister. Eight months after Hans’s arrival, Katharina became pregnant again. She gave birth to Elizabeth during an outbreak of the plague on December 10, 1527. Magdalene, nicknamed Lena, arrived on May 4, 1529, followed by Martin on November 9, 1531, Paul on January 28 or 29, 1533, and their last child, Margarete, named after Luther’s mother, on December 17, 1534. Elizabeth and Lena both died in childhood, Elizabeth at eight months old and Lena at age thirteen. (It was not unusual during this time period for a family to lose more than one child. Approximately one-quarter of all babies born alive during the early modern period in Europe died in infancy, and another quarter died before reaching puberty. Nearly one child in two in early modern Europe failed to live to the age of ten.)24 The Luthers’ other four children lived into adulthood.

  When Luther’s sister and her husband died young, their six children—George, Cyriacus, Andreas, Fabian, Elsa, and Lena Kaufmann—came to live at the Black Cloister. Likewise, Luther’s nephews Martin Luther and Hans Polner, along with Anna Strauss and Hanna von der Saale, poor relatives of Katharina, lived with the Luthers. So many people, in addition to the students, guests, and other boarders, made for a chaotic environment, and Luther and Katharina had their hands full managing some of their more rebellious foster children.

  Andreas, for example, whom Luther called Enders, was terribly lazy and spent most of his time shirking his chores and napping in the clover fields outside the Black Cloister. He also got secretly engaged when he was still a student at Wittenberg University, which, for obvious reasons, infuriated Luther.25

  Hans Polner studied theology at Wittenberg University, but he had a drinking problem and was prone to impulsive anger.26 For a time he was Katharina’s biggest headache when Luther was traveling, and several of Luther’s letters mention Polner by name, along with advice for how to control his erratic behavior. Eventually Polner matured and became a schoolmaster and later an ordained minister.

  Luther and Katharina’s nieces, particularly Lena Kaufmann, were a handful as well. As a young teen, Lena set her heart on marrying another of Luther’s houseguests, the young theologian Veit Dietrich, but Luther adamantly believed Lena was too young for marriage and refused to approve her engagement. She eventually married the widower Ambrosius Berndt, but when he died just four years later, Luther and Katharina took Lena back under their roof, where she took up with a twenty-year-old medical student. The two got secretly engaged, but Luther so vehemently opposed their union (he suspected the suitor was only interested in Lena’s small fortune), they didn’t dare marry until after Luther’s death.27

  In some ways, it sounds much more tumultuous than it actually was. With all those children and guests under one roof, life was hectic and chaotic to be sure, but as Ernst Kroker points out, “Based on the amount of material that has come down to us, we learn more of the exceptions than the regular routine of family life in the Black Cloister.”28 In other words, those gathered around the Luthers’ table likely only recorded the extraordinary events and interactions, the ones that stood out—the arguments, the snarky comments, the sass—rather than the everyday, ordinary comings and goings and conversations of the Luther family. “If Luther had to punish or scold,” Kroker acknowledges, “they eagerly wrote that down and preserved the offense of the little sins for posterity.”29 What’s more telling, says Kroker, are the numerous occasions in which Luther praised marriage as a blessed state and parenting as both a holy and a delightful endeavor, even in the midst of its challenges.30 As we’ll see in the next chapter, the Luthers delighted in their children and truly enjoyed them, but they also believed that God had ordained them to be parents. Luther and Katharina approached child rearing as nothing short of holy work.

  15

  The Noblest, Most Precious Work

  A circa 1875 oil painting by German artist Gustav Adolf Spangenberg titled Luther Making Music in the Circle of His Family hangs in the Leipzig Museum. The portrait depicts Luther sitting in a chair with Katharina next to him, a sleeping Margarete in her lap. Luther holds a lute in his hands, the stringed, guitar-like instrument popular during the time. Standing before the couple are their four older children, singing as Luther strums, while in the background, Melanchthon looks on, a slight smile on his face. It’s a tender scene that conveys a quiet joy and comfort—the family together in the home, music filling the air.1

  The scene portrayed in this painting may seem unrealistically idyllic, but this little musical quintet and its audience was, in actuality, a familiar occurrence at the Black Cloister. Many evenings the family would gather in the dining room as the lilting notes of Luther’s lute accompanied the sweet voices of his children. Martin and Paul were especially musical, little Margarete sang religious songs from the age of five, and every Christmas Eve the whole family participated in singing “From Heaven Above to Earth I Come,” the Christmas hymn Luther composed in 1534 for his children.2 Luther enjoyed nothing more than gathering his family around him for an evening of musical entertainment.

  For a long time, contemporary historians assumed that parents who lived during the early modern period had a markedly different relationship with their children than we do today. It was thought that because of the high mortality rates of infants and children, parents distanced themselves from their offspring and limited their psychological involvement.3 This assumption was based in large part on the work of British historian Lawrence Stone, who in 1977 published his seminal book, Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800.

  This circa 1875 painting by Gustav Adolf Spangenberg is entitled Luther Making Music in the Circle of His Family. [Gustav Spangenberg [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

  Today, at least in industrialized countries, infant death is considered highly unusual, but this was not the case until well into the eighteenth century, when infant and child mortality rates finally began to decline. Prior to the eighteenth century, the most dangerous period in a person’s life was infancy and early childhood. One out of every four or five infants failed to survive the first year.4 Child mortality between the ages of one and five also remained very high; about 50 percent of early modern mortality occurred before age ten.5 Children died; it was a brutal fact of life. Because of this, Stone claimed, parents couldn’t risk getting too attached to their offspring.

  Stone’s theories about parental detachment have largely been disproved in recent years. Primary sources like letters and journals offer substantial evidence that parents were not only emotionally connected to their children but that they also genuinely enjoyed being around and spending time with them, despite the very real risk of losing them at a young age. Luther’s letters and comments around the dinner table illustrate that he and Katharina were no exception.

  Doting Parents

  We hear the most about Hans. As is often the case with firstborns, when everything about the infant and parenting is brand-new, Luther couldn’t help but gush over every little detail, boasting like a proud new father about many of his young son’s milestones and accomplishments. We learn, for instance, that Hans was teething at seven months. Soon after he learned to stand, walk, and babble and was affectionately called “homo vorax et bibax”—“a little man who heartily gobbles and gulps.”6 Luther’s letters even detailed Hans’s escapades, including his naughtiness. In a letter to Justus Jonas on October 19, 1527, Luther reported that Hans had crawled around the entire room, as was evident by the unmistakable traces he’d left behind—alluding, perhaps, to a diaper malfunction, or simply to the fact that a crawling toddler leaves chaos and destruction in his wake.7

  When Luther was away at the Diet of Augsburg he penned what became a famous letter to his son on Hans’s fourth birthday, encouraging his “Hänschen” [Hansen] to “study hard, pray diligently, and be in good order” so that he would be invited into the imaginary fantasy
world Luther described, a beautiful and cheerful garden complete with singing, dancing, merry children, and “nice ponies with golden reins and silver saddles.”8 The letter is sentimental, sweet, encouraging, and creative, and one can easily see how it would have delighted Luther’s young son.

  We see, too, how much Luther worried about his children’s health and well-being. For example, he wrote about the twelve-day period during which Hans was bedridden from teething, unable to ingest anything but liquids.9 Teething was thought to be dangerous for children, but in actuality, it was the popular remedies of the time—which included lancing, blistering, bleeding, and placing leeches on the gums—that caused the harm, sometimes even death from infection, rather than the physical process of teething itself.10 Luther’s mention of Hans’s struggle with teething illustrates his awareness of the dangers associated with this childhood milestone, and he was genuinely relieved that Hans survived the ordeal largely unscathed.

  Luther’s love and affection for his children and his wife are clearly conveyed in the tender expressions peppered throughout his letters to Katharina. He often included a sweet sentiment and a prayer in the valediction of his letters: “Kiss the children for me. . . . With this I commend you to God, together with our young ones and all the members of our household. Amen.”11 He missed his family when he was away, and no matter how important the business matter at hand, he was always eager to return home. In 1530, when Luther was away for months in Coburg, working with his colleagues and officials on the Augsburg Confession, Katharina sent him a tiny portrait of Magdalena to ease his homesickness.12 A few weeks later Luther’s friend, Veit Dietrich, who was with him in Coburg, wrote to Katharina to tell her that the picture, which he had fastened near the table in the dining room, had lifted Luther’s spirits.13

  It’s also clear from his letters that Luther doted on his children to the point of spoiling them. “I have for Hansen Luther a big fine piece of sugar [candy],”14 he wrote to Katharina from Coburg. In the letter to Hans on his birthday, Luther promised to bring him home “a nice present from the fair” (literally translated as “bring along a beautiful fair for you,” it’s assumed Luther meant a gift from the fair, and not the entire fair itself).15 On another occasion Luther complained to Katharina that he had been unable to buy any trinkets in the town he was staying in to send the children. He instructed his wife to purchase some gifts and have them ready for him to present to the children as his own when he returned home.16

  We also know by how often they were mentioned in the comments recorded in Table Talk that the Luther children weren’t removed from their parents’ day-to-day activities but were very much present in the daily comings and goings at the Black Cloister. When they were old enough they often dined with Luther and Katharina’s guests, and even as toddlers and young children, they were not sequestered in a nursery but were generally underfoot. Luther wrote about one instance in which Hans was playing and singing in the tower study as Luther tried in vain to work. In spite of his father’s attempts to silence him (Luther, like most parents of young children, lost his patience from time to time), Hans continued to sing, albeit more quietly under his breath, glancing up at his father to gauge whether his singing was still annoying him.17 The children were part of daily life, and Luther was an active and engaged participant in nurturing, disciplining, and raising them.

  God and His Angels Are Smiling

  Parenting during Reformation times was a surprisingly equitable affair. Luther himself declared more than once that fathers should not be mocked for participating in the holy work of parenting, no matter how menial the task. “Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool—though that father is acting in the spirit and in Christian faith—my dear fellow, you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other?” Luther declared in The Estate of Marriage. “God, with all His angels and creatures, is smiling—not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.”18 Whether Luther actually ever changed or washed a diaper himself we can’t be sure, but there’s something to be said for the fact that he championed a father’s participation in such chores.

  Traditionally mothers took the lead in parenting the child from infancy through toddlerhood. A major factor in a child’s survival was whether a mother was able or willing to breast-feed. Despite the fact that medical experts touted the benefits of mothers nursing their own children, many upper-class women hired wet nurses, both so that they didn’t have to be burdened with the chore of nursing and so they could get back to the business of producing heirs (nursing has a contraceptive effect, virtually preventing a new pregnancy for at least six months after a birth). A wet nurse was selected carefully, for it was thought that the quality of a woman’s milk depended on both her physical health and her moral character, and that she passed some of her own qualities to the child through her milk.19 However, because wet nurses were usually poorer than the families that hired them, and because they also regularly nursed their own child or other children at the same time, a child handed over to a wet nurse for feeding was much less likely to survive than a child breast-fed by his biological mother. Modern studies indicate that wet nursing doubled infant mortality in cities.20 And cow’s or goat’s milk was absolutely out of the question. The survival of a child raised on cow’s milk was considered a miracle, which is why that detail is often mentioned in the biographies of saints as a sign of their chosen status.21

  Because the Luthers were not wealthy enough to hire a wet nurse, Katharina breast-fed each of her six children herself, in some cases well beyond the twelve months recommended by modern-day pediatricians. Luther was involved even in this aspect of child rearing, at one point offering Katharina advice on when to wean their daughter Magdalena. “I think it would be good if you want [to stop nursing her], [but] gradually,” Luther wrote to Katharina in 1530, when Magdalena was just over a year old, “so that at first you omit one feeding per day, then two feedings per day, until [the child] clearly stops [nursing by herself].” Luther, it turned out, had been chatting with an acquaintance, Lady Argula von Grumbach, about parenting over dinner and passed on her advice to his wife.22 It’s worth noting that Luther did not consider it beneath him to confer with a female friend on a topic typically relegated to the realm of women. At one point he even debated the merits of breast milk with his students and colleagues around the dinner table, concluding that infants benefited from long-term nursing; that a pregnant woman shouldn’t nurse an infant because a fetus draws all the nutrients, leaving little for the nursing baby; and that “large and flabby breasts cause unhappiness because they promise much but produce little.”23 Katharina was surely present for this conversation, but her comments, if she indeed made any, were not recorded.

  Like most fathers of the time, Luther’s involvement in day-to-day child rearing intensified as each of his children reached the age when they were considered capable of mortal sin and thus could also begin to respond to discipline (usually around six or seven years old).24 Luther’s disciplinary measures aligned with the popular theories of the time; in other words, he was strict, and he also employed physical punishment if he felt circumstances necessitated it. Sixteenth-century moralists generally believed that too little discipline was more harmful than too much,25 and thus, while the housefather books of the time (which were typically written by educators and moralists to offer child-rearing and disciplinary advice to the heads of households) considered corporal punishment a last resort, it was also not altogether unusual.26 In his Table Talk comments Luther referred to a few incidents in which he punished his children and foster children, sometimes harshly. At one point he became so angry with Hans, he refused to see the boy for three days, even after Hans had asked his father in writing for forgiveness. “I would rather have a dead son, than an ill-mannered one,” he stubbornly declared when Katharina, Melanchthon, Jonas, and another friend
interceded on Hans’s behalf.27 Another time he beat his nephew Andreas Kaufmann with a stick when the boy uttered a foul word at the table.28 Likewise when Katharina’s nephew Florian stole a knife from the Luthers’ son Paul and then denied it, Luther ordered three days of corporal punishment for the boy at his boarding school.29

  However, the parenting manuals of the day also instructed fathers to refrain from punishing to the point at which the child became terrorized, embittered, or moved to anger against the parent himself.30 Likewise, city officials urged teachers to use moderation in the classroom. “Confine your punishment to words and a few strokes of the birch,” instructed the governments of Strasbourg and Ulm. “Don’t beat them about the head, never use your fist or bare hand on them, and don’t pull them by the hair.”31

  As we’ve already seen, Luther had strong opinions about both parents’ and teachers’ use of corporal punishment. He was critical of his own parents and teachers for beating him as a child for what he considered minor infractions. More importantly, he argued that parents and teachers should understand a child’s temperament before instituting punishment. “They weren’t able to keep a right balance between temperament and punishment,” Luther said about his own parents. “One must punish in such a way that the rod is accompanied by the apple. Whatever method that’s used, it ought to pay attention to the difference in aptitudes and teach in such a way that all children are treated with equal love.”32 If the records are accurate, we can count on one hand the number of times Luther used corporal punishment with his children and foster children. Clearly, despite the fact that the moralists condoned its use, he was reluctant to use physical punishment as a disciplinary measure, preferring a more measured verbal scolding instead.