Even if we have grown sceptical of the proliferation of alleged ‘turning points’ in history, Luther's departure from this life on 18 February 1546 really can be judged to have made a religious and a related political difference in the German-speaking lands. To the Reformer's death cannot be solely attributed the outbreak of the Schmalkaldic war, the alienation of the Ernestine and Albertine branches of the Wettin Saxons and the deepening theological divide between the followers of Philipp Melanchthon – who saw him as Luther's successor as the arbiter of truth – and others who cursed him as perfidious and sometimes do so even today. Nevertheless, the charisma of the leader was noticeably lacking. Both princes and theologians had to reorient themselves.
This volume contains the proceedings of a conference on Luther's demise held at the Museum Luthers Sterbehaus in Eisleben in 2013. The eighteen participants whose work is included here, mainly but not all church historians and not quite all male, explore numerous ramifications of the great man's departure, ranging in time from the culture of the good death at the end of the Middle Ages to the persistent implacability of certain Catholic scholars in the twentieth century. Each author brings extensive research to the articulation of a focused thesis. This overall high quality justifies a brief summary of each chapter here, in the hope of stimulating greater interest in the entire hard-bound anthology. Historians should note that only twenty-five of 1,278 footnotes contain references to non-German and non-Latin sources. I include in the twenty-five citations of Lyndal Roper's Germanophone writings on Luther that originally appeared in English.
In his introduction, Armin Kohnle, the editor, weighs the reliability of the earliest eye-witness accounts of Luther's dying. The descriptions all vary somewhat, and the building of legends (Memorialkultur) soon set in, not only on the Catholic, the negative, side. Harald Schwillus describes the transition in evangelical ranks from the ars moriendi to a Protestant advocacy of dying well. Luther's own Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben (1519) played a part, followed by a stream of both given and published sermons by others. The new genre of funeral sermons promoted a calm, confident departure. Volker Leppin examines Luther's own experience of death. The father was deeply affected by his daughters’ deaths. His reaction to the story of Hans Luder's peaceful death, and his letters of consolation to bereft friends reveal an ongoing quest for a ‘good’, a quiet and firmly faithful, decease. Still, he integrates his experience into his theology of dying.
Heiner Lück compares the three principal documents (1537, 1542, 1544, texts provided) that are regarded as Luther's last wills and testaments. Unfortunately, Saxon law did not permit a widow, Katharina, to forgo a guardian (Vormund), but she was allowed to keep her young children with her. Lothar Berndorff discusses Luther's efforts to mediate among the three lines of the counts of Mansfeld. He sought to establish a church ordinance that all would agree to uphold. This was accomplished thirty-four years after the famous native son's death. Sabine Kramer recounts the unhappy twists of fate that drove the widowed Katharina von Bora hither and yon. She provides the details of provisions made for Katharina and her children, but war and the elector's capture left this desolate woman with no effective champion and no safe haven. Christoph Spehr continues the Luther children's story, insofar as extant sources allow its reconstruction. Competing groups of Luther's followers sought to attract his and his close colleagues’ sons to their positions and to the territories where they dominated.
Jochen Birkenmeier traces the evolution of the officially approved ‘final’ account of Luther's demise by Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius, the latter drawing partly on Johannes Aurifaber. The published version of about 15–16 March 1546 had gone through several developmental stages. The two men's descriptions underwent a certain harmonisation. Christine Mundhenk examines Melanchthon's rhetoric concerning Luther's death in an effort to reconstruct his own appropriation of leadership among the dead Reformer's followers. She uses three main texts: Melanchthon's announcement to his students of 19 February; the oration that he gave at Luther's grave on 22 February; and his preface to the second volume of Luther's Latin writings, which Luther himself had not managed to compose before expiring. Melanchthon referred to Luther as ‘noster Elias’, a prophetic epithet that gained in popularity.
Stefan Rhein has collected the flood of grieving and adulatory poetry that emerged almost immediately from learned pens. He includes Franz Scharschmied, Johann Walter, Johann Friedrich Petsch, Leonhard Kettner, Erasmus Alber and Hans Sachs, among others. Heinrich Dilly takes up (again) the fraught problem of providing an image of the dead Luther's facial features. Not only did this have to argue to Catholics that the leader's departure from earth had not taken him to hell, but good Evangelicals needed (Bildbegehren) an image on which to focus and sustain their memories. Dilly constructs a list of known precedents, which places Luther's death mask, if it was in fact made, as ninth. Ruth Slenczka considers the bronze memorial tablet made for but not immediately erected at Luther's grave in the castle church in Wittenberg. She not only tells its story – affected by the outbreak of the Schmalkaldic War and the demotion of the Ernestine Wettins from the electorate of Saxony – but treats it in relation to the princely and professorial images that stand there.
Michael Beyer expands this volume's narrower undertaking to include the concept of the proper Reformer's death. He gathers the more plentiful sources on the death of Melanchthon and the scarcer information on that of Jonas and of Bugenhagen. These men contributed to a normative, evangelical culture of dying. Siegfried Bräuer studies Cyriakus Spangenberg's reworking of Georgius Macropedius’ play Hecastus for use in Mansfeld's and potentially other grammar schools. For the play to be usable, however, it had to be made to conform to the Lutheran theology of justification by faith. Ultimately, it embodied Spangenberg's programme for preparing for a pious death.
Stefan Laube pursues the desire of Lutherans for material objects pertaining to their Reformer – the metal grip from Luther's sarcophagus, the so-called Elisabeth Glass, Johann Tetzel's indulgence chest. This interest in ‘relics’ may have promoted the long-posthumous construction of plaster images of Luther's face and hands. Wolfgang Flügel looks into later recollections of Luther's death, especially around anniversaries and jubilees, and especially reflected in sermons. The Lutheran culture of remembering (Gedenkkultur) grew slowly at first but then took off under the stimulus of the establishment by Friedrich Wilhelm iii of a Totensonntag, a memorial Sunday.
Martin Steffens outlines the vicissitudes of the house in which Luther actually died and the transfer of memorial to the building that today contains the Museum Luthers Sterbehaus. Visitors originally cut off and took with them splinters of the bed in which the Reformer may have died. The present museum contains only style-appropriate furnishings. Klaus Fitschen summarises Catholic efforts during the Kulturkampf to discredit the positive nature of Luther's death. Men like Gustav Kawerau, Theodor Kolde and Julius Köstlin returned fire.
As a group, these high-quality essays underscore better together than they could have separately the inner and outer impact of Luther's absence from the scene. All specialists in the European past will find matters of interest here, as well as issues obliquely raised that we all must consider.
