Shadows of My Father

by Christoph Werner

  In addition to the theft of money, which the cardinal wanted to punish, and which Schönitz had committed on the cardinal’s behalf and for his benefit, there was the thought in his mind that the main witness to his reprehensible ways had to disappear: from Schönitz’s house on the market to Moritzburg Castle, an underground passage allowed his servitor to provide a supply of new and healthy virgins for the cardinal’s love nest in the Moritzburg Castle. The cardinal was known to be a lustful deflowerer, for which my Herr Father angrily attacked him. The gist of this was that the worthy cleric had spent many thousands of guldens for his whorehouse on the Moritzburg, for which Schönitz was held responsible. But since this money could not be included in the official budget of the archbishopric, Schönitz was unable to justify himself.

  Here Father could well and gladly have mentioned the cardinal’s precious collection of relics in the Cathedral at Halle, for the completion of which vast sums were needed, which Schönitz must have helped procure. But perhaps he thought his writ “Against the Idol at Halle,” which together with the Ninety-Five Theses he had sent the cardinal with the request for the discontinuance of indulgences, would be enough, since his publication was widely known.

  I will insert here a small list of what was already there and attracted visitors from all over the empire, because viewing them shortened their time in purgatory through an “overspecial indulgence”: a piece of the body of patriarch Isaac; manna from heaven, which once fell in the desert; a piece of the burning bush of Moses, which once every hundred years rekindles; pitchers from the Wedding at Cana and a residual of wine that the Lord had changed from water; thorns from Christ’s crown of thorns; one of the stones with which Stephen was stoned; etc., in total well over 9000 relics. These represented a total of 39,245,120 years and 220 hours of indulgences.

  It will be clear to every reader that the cardinal could not spend enough hours in sinful whoring at Moritzburg to exhaust that amount of indulgences. But a Polish student who lived with us in our house remarked that it may be true, but one could certainly try.

  Many well-meaning people of the highest standing who wanted to keep the peace and preserve the Reformation and also out of personal reasons attempted to dissuade my father from publishing his work “Against the Bishop of Magdeburg.” But he had again his qualms of conscience, as at the imperial diet in Worms: “Here I stand, I can do no other,” and the document was printed by Hans Lufft.

  In the year 1536 in Frankfurt on the Oder, several members of the Hohenzollern family, to which Cardinal Albrecht belonged, gathered, among them Duke Albrecht of Prussia; his chancellor, Hans von Kreytzen; Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg; his brother Hans von Küstrin; Margrave George of Ansbach; and Johann Albrecht, coadjutor bishop of the Archdiocese of Magdeburg, and wrote a letter to Chancellor Brück of the elector of Saxony, in which the latter was asked to dissuade Luther from publishing his ruthless attacks against their relation, Cardinal Albrecht, thus bringing shame on their dynasty.

  One can see here what a great force our father represented in Germany when he responded coolly: One should not interfere with his writing but rather better ensure that their family member, Cardinal Albrecht, renounce the debauchery, fornication, and ostentation and similar sins, which sins, not Luther, bring shame to their family. And so the document, as mentioned, appeared and caused a great sensation.

  In his fury, Father could not see that Cardinal Albrecht was not purely an evil man. He was a humanist, highly educated and interested in the excellent paintings of Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Matthias Grünewald as well as beautiful buildings, some of which he left behind, among them the new market church of Our Dear Lady, the one in which Father was eventually laid out. And just at the beginning of my father’s reformatory activity, the cardinal was open to its ideas to such an extent that he even expressed the intent to marry, in which he was encouraged by my father. Albrecht’s goodwill subsided when he realized that Luther’s work was tantamount to the destruction of the entire Old Church, whether he wanted it or not.

  Chapter 5

  . . . relates what I can remember from my first years.

  Four siblings, Johannes, Elisabeth, Magdalena, and Martin, were born before me, and a year after me, Margarethe, who died in AD 1570 at only thirty-six years old, giving birth to her ninth child. Five years after Margarethe’s birth, Mother gave birth to a stillborn child and was afterward herself almost dead.

  I counted then seven springtimes and can remember how the midwife and the doctor said that Mother was nearer dead than living. She was already forty years old, not an auspicious age to be giving birth. As a doctor, today I say that my parents had probably not taken sufficient precaution when they embraced each other in love, as there is first Onan’s method. Though about this Father had ranted in a lecture on Genesis: “To produce semen as the Old Testament Onan, to excite a woman, and the same moment to frustrate her is one of the worst sins.” Second would be the suggestion of Soranus of Ephesus (a little older), who recommended that after the ejaculation of the man the woman should withdraw, go into a crouch and sneeze. Additionally, she could try to use a handkerchief to wipe the semen from within her body. This method seems to me to be somewhat uncertain, as sneezing in a squatting position after having physical pleasure is not easy to bring about. Third relates to the use of an herbal bouquet impregnated with various essences, of which there are acacia juice, honey, olive oil, lead ointment, or frankincense. This method has the advantage that if the husband makes the introduction and the removal of the bouquet, taking the proper time, it can easily lead to pleasure for both. Fourth relates to the heating of the testicles of the man through their plunging into hot water before coupling, which should weaken or kill the semen already in storage or in its place of origin. This method is awkward and uncertain because of the preparation of the water and keeping it hot and also does not raise the pleasure of the man for the approaching coupling. Under fifth would be recorded that during lactation the woman is said to be infertile, but at the same time intercourse should ordinarily be avoided because the mother is still recovering. So one can be of two minds about this method.

  In recent times there have been coatings made from animal gut, sheep or hog, actually intended to prevent diseases but also pregnancies.

  I have again been deviating here somewhat, because I cannot refrain from lecturing and telling people what is good for them, but will now return quickly to Mother. After the stillbirth of the child, she often fainted and became more and more ill. We children were sent out of the room, soon creeping back—unnoticed at first—to the bed. Father did not move from her side, even canceled an important trip to Schmalkalden ordered by the elector, and attempted through incessant prayers to keep Mother alive. Magister Philippus also prayed for her and begged his friends likewise to pray. Everyone knew what the beloved woman meant to Luther and their children. Other friends cared, and the worried elector on the 10th of February sent a deer to her as a gift.

  All this concern, including prayers and gifts, along with Mother’s own strong will, led in the end to a gradual recovery. A repeated bloodletting on the pale and deteriorated patient, in my current medical view, certainly did not help. She left her room on the 26th of February but could at first only slowly move throughout the house, during which she would have to lean on a chair or a table for support. Only on April 8th could Luther report to Magister Philippus that his wife had finally recovered.

  At last the large household, to whose description I will soon come, could resume its regular course. And also the children, not just my siblings and I, felt again the very necessary hand. Besides Father’s own children, nieces and nephews were to be found in our family. When Father’s sister Katharina, married name Kaufmann, and her husband had died prematurely, the five orphans, Cyriak, Fabian, Andreas, Lene, and Else, had been taken in to our household.

  Additionally, there were the four children of my deceased Aunt Margarethe, Father’s sister, two other nephews of Father’s
, and a grandniece of Mother’s. The people of Wittenberg shook their heads at the generosity of my parents, who soon had a number of children in their house who were not easy to oversee. Then there was the further addition of Anna Strauss, the granddaughter of another sister of Father’s, as well as Hans Pollner, another sister’s son. There was also anger, mainly with the niece Lene, who behaved so unreasonably that Father threatened to marry her to a soot-covered foundryman instead of cheating a pious man with her.

  One can imagine what turmoil at times ruled in the Black Monastery, so much in fact that Georg Helt from our town disadvised Prince George of Anhalt from quartering at the Luther house because the hubbub was so great that it was detrimental to serious study.

  Father, fortunately, had a measure of peace in his study, situated southward in the building in a tower. However, he was angry when the construction of the city wall, which was being fortified, came too close to the house and garden, so much so that at the end of 1541 he wrote an irate letter to Friedrich von der Grüne, the elector’s master of ordnance and fortress engineer. I present the letter here in a shortened form:

  My Dear Master of Ordnance,

  You know that you are forbidden by my gracious Lord from building too close or too injurious to me. Now out of your own obstinacy and iniquity, you buried the middle chamber up to the trelliswork, which without doubt the Devil has commanded you to do.

  It is plain to everybody that it is not your wall construction that concerns you but this house. You want to drive me out and drag the princely letter and seal through the mire. Therefore I desire that as soon as you receive this letter you will clear the rubble away from the other chamber, since I do not want it there, and this wish you must carry out immediately; otherwise I shall report you to our gracious Lord the Elector. Now God be with you, and may He make you see the light, because otherwise you will soon go to hell. Your sin and wickedness are entirely your own responsibility, and let this letter serve you as a warning. There have been much worse devils and tyrants than you, but they all had to relent and never saw the sun again.

  One can see how Father’s anger increases, and he threatens with hell. Since the letter was of no use, and the threat to invoke the prince did not effect any reaction, the damned-to-hell engineer was evidently acting with the approval of the elector, who wanted Wittenberg strongly fortified. Not for the first time did Father use the threat of hell to enforce his purely earthly will.

  It was a great relief, especially for Mother, that our Aunt Lene was in the house to assist in the household and help keep the children in hand. She was Mother’s aunt and had escaped the convent one year after Mother. She died in AD 1537.

  It will be appreciated that so many children cannot constantly behave themselves. I had, for example, a great quarrel with my cousin Florian von Bora, who had taken my knife away and never returned it. I lost the fight and greatly fretted, especially because out of cowardice I had not fought long enough to recover the knife. That was in the summer AD 1542. And then entered my father for me. At that time Florian, together with my brother Johannes, was attending the school of Father’s good and trusted acquaintance Marcus Crodel in Torgau to study Grammatica et Musica. He wrote angrily to Marcus that he might give Florian a triple spanking, since he not only had taken my, Paul’s, knife but had also had the cheek to claim that he, Martin Luther, had given it to him as a present.

  One can imagine with what satisfaction I heard Johannes tell how Florian was vigorously laid upon and with loud screams received the strokes of the cane. Out of sheer friendship to my father, Master Crodel applied the cane in person.

  On the whole, my and my siblings’ childhood years, in comparison to those of other children, were joyful, disturbed for me only through fear of my father. We had the garden, the yard, the cattle, the bees, the orchard, the fishpond nearby, the many housemates and students, who always tried to keep on the right side of us, many visitors, and many people of high rank, who would pat us on the head and bring gifts along. Also, we roamed with our parents in the region, and Mother would carry along a heavy basket full of food and drink while Father praised God’s beautiful nature.

  On the way home, when the basket was empty, mushrooms and berries would be gathered. In passing we would meet hunters with crossbows and pikes who had been hunting deer and wild pigs. Other children we encountered on the lanes were unable to go to school because they had to oversee their small brothers or sisters, help at the spinning, tend to the geese, work in the gardens or houses or in their fathers’ shops or on the land, run errands, and many other things. At twelve years old, one could already become an apprentice and sometimes by fifteen a journeyman. As an apprentice, one had to work hard in the household of the master’s wife and as a journeyman even harder, and most had little hope of ever becoming a master.

  I know that I spent these innocent years (I believe I was only six or seven years old) already interested in things of nature and its phenomena. So I could stare long into the hearth, thereby disturbing our Aunt Lene and the cook at their work, and wonder how the wood, crackling and smoking, turned into something else that looked so different from the wood. Could one perhaps convert other material, I asked myself later, and even change it from a lower level to a higher one?

  Also, I collected various stones from the garden and the banks of the Elbe River and arranged them according to weight and appearance. Once I took a newly hatched chicken by the neck and held it in the air until it no longer made any movement because it could no longer breathe. I counted in order to determine how long it could remain alive without air. Then I held my breath and tested it on myself. The chick, by the way, lay in the grass for quite a while and did not stir. I blew air into its beak, and lo! it stood up and ran away. According to the numbers, the chick had been able to hold its breath longer than I.

  Once a fisherman on the Elbe, instead of throwing a fish back in the water, gave it to me because it was too small to eat. I took my little knife and clumsily cut it open because I wanted to see how it looked on the inside. It was all mushy, but I could at least recognize the swim bladder, which I had already heard about. I attempted to blow it up, but I did not succeed.

  My experiments did not always go off lightly. As I one day observed the chickens in the chicken coop and the sparrows, which were thievishly serving themselves in the chicken feed and then quickly flying away again whenever one came near, I wondered why the chickens, which counted themselves among the bird species, did not properly fly. Perhaps they did not have the desire or they had not had the practice.

  So I took one of the chickens and quietly stole up to the tower. There in the tower room I opened a window and threw the chicken out. It cackled loudly, fluttered, and hurtled down, landing pretty hard. I got a big fright, descended quickly, took the chicken, which gave me a reproachful look and whose leg pointed outward at a strange angle, and hastily brought it again into the chicken coop. It was not long before Father learned of this prank. He took a cane that hung on the door in the kitchen and took me up into the tower room. He sat down, looked at me sadly, and said, “You are big enough to understand that God has commanded me to punish you. The chicken limps and does not lay eggs anymore, as your mother said to me, and also you have desecrated this room, which for me is full of profound memories.”

  Then his sadness changed into anger, and without any connection to my prank he shouted, “How can I love you and make you an heir of what I possess or of my spiritual goods? Shitting, pissing, crying so that the house is filled with your noise—shall all this induce me to care for you?” And thus he succeed in increasing his anger and in achieving the proper mood for the punishment. He seized me by the collar, laid me over a table, and struck me with the cane, which on the bare legs especially hurt. I screamed and called, “That’s enough, it’s enough,” until Father stopped. Then he ordered me every day to take care of the chicken until it once again laid eggs. And I did so, turning over many stones looking for woodlice and worms, which I let t
he chicken eat. It became accustomed to it and came more quickly than any of the others, hobbling and flapping its wings, whenever I went into the chicken coop. However, it never again lay eggs but became fat and was soon slaughtered. So it is obvious the Devil takes one if one is spoiled and not beaten, as Father said.

  After years it became clear to me what my father meant by the “desecration” of the tower chamber. He had there his tower experience, as he himself designated it, and I beg the reader’s indulgence here for the long quotation, as it contains the spiritual foundation of the new church.

  It is true that formerly I was a pious monk and was so strongly attached to my order that I would dare to say: if ever a monk came to heaven through the monkhood, I would be one of them. All my fellow monks could testify to that. If it had lasted longer, I would have tortured myself to death with watching and praying, reading and other work. Because if only a small temptation to sin came to me, I found no consolation, and neither baptism nor monkhood could help me.

  Christ and his baptism I had in this way already long wasted. There was I, the most miserable monk on earth, day and night with lamentations and despair from which no one could preserve me.

  I not only did not love—no, I hated the just God, who punished sinners as if it was not enough that the miserable sinner was eternally lost through original sin and who through every conceivable hardship was oppressed by the Law of the Ten Commandments. And had God not added through the Gospel pain upon pain, and by His Gospel threatened us with his righteousness and his anger? So I raged in my wild and confused conscience and tried frantically to understand that passage of Paul, Hebrew 10:38, for I was burning to know what St. Paul wanted. Until God showed mercy, and I, who had been thinking day and night, understood the meaning of the words, namely, “The just shall live by faith as God’s gift.” Here I felt that I was completely reborn and that I had entered through the open gates into Paradise itself, and it seemed to me that I saw the Holy Scripture in a completely different light and had before my very eyes the works of God through which He makes us powerful, the wisdom of God, through which He makes us wise, the strength of God, the holiness of God, the glory of God. And as much as I had hated the righteous words of God, so much more now I raised up these sweet words in my love so that those passages of Paul became my gate of Paradise: “Now the just shall live by faith.”