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  • Der Reformator Martin Luther 2017: Eine wissenschaftliche und gedenkpolitische Bestandaufnahme ed. by Heinz Schilling
  • Jonathan Mumme
Der Reformator Martin Luther 2017: Eine wissenschaftliche und gedenkpolitische Bestandaufnahme. Edited by Heinz Schilling. Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Kolloquien 92. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 309 pp.

Amidst the pre-2017 publication flood, this collection of essays aims to appraise the meaning and significance of the celebrations and memorial culture surrounding the Reformation's five-hundredth anniversary. The contributors, including former stipendiaries of the Historical College in Munich that sponsored the 2013 conference behind the volume, pursue their objective almost exclusively as historians, and all but three are German. The project seeks to bridge a perceived gap between the politics of commemoration and academic interpretation of the Reformation. Not least in view of oft-distorted but popular appropriations of Luther, the volume portrays Luther's increasingly foreign world, as such, in order to contextualize the reformer's thoughts and actions, and—in somewhat archaeological fashion—to dig through and analyze an ever larger accumulation of receptions and remembrances of him. Having thus deconstructed layers of myth, misappropriation, and misinterpretation, historians, with an "academically founded interpretation," contribute now to "a reformation anniversary rationally guided by the science of history" (X). This ambitious and rather idiosyncratically German objective seeks realization through three sections of the volume. A first group of essays examines Luther in his original context as quite dissimilar to our contemporary context. A second group takes up the effects and repercussions of Luther's teaching and the Reformation, especially in and for Germany. A final section considers facets and stages of the commemoration and memorialization of Luther and the Reformation.

Götz Rüdiger Tewes, demonstrating a late-medieval "fiscalization" (6, 29) of the curia under shadow banking conglomerates that disadvantaged German dioceses, offers a fascinating contextualization of the indulgence controversy in view of the Medici pontificate of Leo X. Presenting a host of reform-resistant factors, Eike Wolgast portrays largely failed attempts at internal reform of metropolitan [End Page 226] provinces in Germany, which resulted in the external reforms undertaken by secular authorities during the Reformation. Adding to the first section's strength, Thomas Kaufmann takes up Luther's view of Judaism with his usual expertise, comparing here Luther's impressions of Islam. Expanding previous work on the historicity of the Ninety-five Theses' posting, Volker Leppin offers a historical analysis of the building of what he considers a Reformation myth. Natalie Krenz provides a "micro-historical" (111) window into the local establishment of Luther's Reformation with consideration of symbolical action, ritual, and tradition as communicative processes of power negotiation in Wittenberg, while Ruth Slenczka makes a case for Lucas Cranach the Elder as a reformer in his own right.

In the second section Georg Schmidt probes the nebulous reception of "the German Luther's" thoughts on obedience and freedom in the constitutional development of the empire and for the German nation. Tracing German versus non-German Marxist interpretations Thomas A. Brady Jr. advances three distinct pictures of the reformer from the 1830s to the 1990s. Finally, in a lone systematic-theological contribution, Notger Slenczka argues that Luther, following Bernard of Clairvaux, shifted the subject of theology from God to man, thereby fundamentally reorienting the task of subsequent Protestant theology and making it capable of modernity.

In the volume's closing section Peter Blickle uses recent scholarship and commemorations to ask whether a reinvestigation of the Peasants' War, whose dominant interpretation Luther himself offered, is not now necessary. Stefan Rhein looks at the ever-unfolding phenomenon of "monumentalizing … the reformer through museumizing" (249). In a survey of previous anniversaries' celebrations Dorothea Wendbebourg expands her previous investigations to include here an assessment of Reformation-related celebrations in the Nazi era and subsequently in a divided Germany.

The weakest point of the volume is the English summaries of the articles. It appears that no native English speaker reviewed most of them, leaving a few rather unintelligible.

The notion that "academic" and "scientific" historical analysis today is somehow immune to the pitfalls of socially, politically, and [End Page 227] ecclesiastically motivated misappropriation, as well as to the tinged memorialization of previous centuries, may come...

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