My life long as an adult have I never lost the awe for the spiritual and physical pain that my father was exposed to through his quest for the righteous God. And I began to understand, though not to approve, that from these agonies of conscience probably at times arose blind, hateful, and today in my eyes quite unchristian or unevangelical raging against all he viewed as enemies of his work.
Or was this actually unchristian and unevangelical? Father was a very knowledgeable man, though not seldom of crude behavior and talk; was is possible that he did not see the discrepancy between Christ’s commandment of love and his own actions? In the next chapter we will see how he did not see this as a discrepancy at all.
Chapter 6
. . . is a significant deviation from the chronology of my report, as it will occur again, but which here is very important because my life was decisively influenced by it.
We will take first Thomas Müntzer and the peasants. In the beginning, as Father on his inspection tour in the spring of AD 1525 was shown the “Twelve Articles of the Christian Association of the Memmingen Peasant Meeting,” he recognized the justice of the peasants’ cause and criticized their lords without restraint:
They have established the Twelve Articles, among which are some so righteous that they put you, the lords and landowners, to shame before God and the world. It is, God knows, unbearable so to endlessly tax and maltreat the people. Such filth and turmoil on earth we owe to you alone, princes and nobles, unseeing bishops, mad priests and monks, and now behold that some of the Twelve Articles of the peasants are so fair and equitable that before God and the world you could accept them without shame to your reputation.
He praised the Christian character of the peasants’ demands but instructed them at the same time that it is equally wrong to respond to even such ghoulish injustice of the authorities with similar violence. The Christians, so he wrote, fight for themselves not with the sword or the arquebus but rather with the cross and suffering, just as Christ did not take the sword but rather hung on the cross.
What Father demanded here was beyond human. The peasants were maltreated, forced into compulsory labor more than agreed upon in the law of the land, bled white from taxes, had the common land taken from them; the men were put in bondage to the nobles and oppressed by the church with large and small tithes; they always had to remain in the same village, could marry only upon the approval of the noble, and much more. If the harvest was ripe and threatened by rain or thunderstorm, they first had to harvest the noble’s land. If wild game came into the fields and destroyed the crop, they had to put up with it.
One can imagine the peasants coming from the noble’s fields to find their own field ravaged. One can imagine the young peasant swain who sees a maiden at the village well, falls in love, and may not marry or mate with her. And if finally he is granted the marriage, he must suffer his lord to sleep with his newly married wife and deflower her according to his jus primae noctis, or right of the first night. Or he has to give his lord compensation in money.
And all of this, according to my father, they should endure or challenge only with words. I call that requiring something beyond human. The peasants, however, were not beyond human but resisted at times in a very fearsome, brutal manner. The murder of Count Ludwig of Helfenstein and another fifteen knights, who had to run the gauntlet until they were all dead, is still in memory.
This and other events induced my father, who feared for the Gospel, to issue his most outraged invocation: “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.”
Of course it should not be forgotten that Helfenstein had previously ordered his men-at-arms to slaughter the peasants’ rearguard and had threatened the peasants with burning if they did not desist from their siege of the city and Castle Weinsberg.
The malignancy of Rohrbach, who cooked his private soup using the misguided peasants, is proven and drew upon him the terrible punishment of slow burning, as pronounced by the Steward of Waldburg. Many other peasants were tormented and killed although they had renounced Rohrbach and his deeds. Still the nobles showed no mercy and acted as Father had told them (however, even before his missive went out):
Therefore, dear Lords, redeem here, rescue here, help here. Whoever can, stab, beat, strangle. Should you die here on the field, all the better. A more blessed death you can never gain than to die in obedience to God’s words and commands, and in the service of love to rescue your neighbor from hell and the Devil’s bond.
Especially severely he deals with Thomas Müntzer, an equally forceful and brutish orator, who enticed the peasants with his vision of God’s kingdom on earth and thereby led many to their death.
Father in AD 1525, on his trip through the land, preached in Wallhausen, Stolberg, and Nordhausen, in Weimar, Orlamünde, Kahla, and Jena. In many places he aroused opposition and loud protests and also had to fear for his life because for many people he had become the princes’ faithful servant who had betrayed his own Gospel. They wanted, like Müntzer, to erect the Kingdom of God on earth, by violence, if required.
Who would wonder that he found himself full of doom and gloom, especially when he learned that the Electoral Saxon government and also the Wise Frederick’s successor, John, hesitated to use force against the peasants? Frederick was at the time at a hunting lodge in Lochau on his deathbed and urged the living: “Go about everything with kindness.”
Father feared for his work. Since the divine order was endangered by the peasants, the Christian authorities were obliged to take up the sword and to protect the godly order here on earth. That was the condition for the victory of Christ over the powers of darkness and chaos, over Satan, who wanted to destroy the new Gospel by means of rebellion.
Terrible was the action the authorities took at Frankenhausen against the Müntzer-led peasants, whom he had promised victory. Thousands of people had gathered to him, not only peasants, also miners, craftsmen from the towns, clerks, and clergymen. Five thousand were left on the battlefield, while the princes’ army lamented six dead. One sees the inequality of the weapons and might. Luther regretted the many dead but, with Matthew, contended: all that take the sword shall perish with the sword. (Naturally, not the nobles, who as the God-appointed authority were to take the sword.) It were better if all the peasants were slayed than the princes and authorities, because the peasants had taken up the sword without the power of God. His theology told him that the Gospel distinguishes between two realms, one spiritual, which is the Kingdom of God, where compassion and mercy reign, and the other an earthly realm in which rules God’s wrath and the relentless need to struggle against evil. And again his demands on the Christians were beyond human:
“Though the bloodhounds and the sows among the princes were ignoramuses, still one must endure them if God chose to plague us through them.”
Later it was probably clearer to him that he had proceeded too hard, and he decided to remain silent in such troubled times.
Still, the suffering of the peasants, even if it seemed self-inflicted, did affect him. To Nicolaus von Amsdorf, toward the end of June AD 1525, he wrote with concern that in Franken eleven thousand peasants had been slaughtered, in Württemberg six thousand, ten thousand in Swabia, two thousand in Alsace. So the poor peasants were slaughtered everywhere. Now one must let mercy prevail; otherwise you tear the bag on both sides. However, for Müntzer, whom he considered the originator of the turmoil and a creature of the Devil, he found no mercy, although at a table talk in the year of my birth, AD 1533, he remarked that the death of his false brother, as he called Müntzer, lay heavily on his, Luther’s, neck. But then he clarified quickly that he had desired Müntzer’s death because Müntzer had wanted to kill his Christ. A curious judgment for, strictly speaking, it contains doubts about the ultimate victory of Christ. Anyway, I do not understand it, being excused since I am no theologian.
As evidence that my father championed the imitatio Christi to such an extent that the normal man in his weakness could no longer follo
w, Hans Kohlhase may be mentioned, an honest man with a sense of honor like a gold balance. Kohlhase took his right in his own hands and attempted to create his own justice because the authorities did not protect him. The junker Günther of Zaschwitz, or rather several of his people, had encountered Hans Kohlhase in front of the inn in the village of Wellaune. Kohlhase was a horse trader from Cölln near Berlin and therefore a Brandenburg subject, who was en route to the fair at Leipzig. They took from him two horses because they believed or claimed they were stolen.
Out of that came a tremendous year-long dispute, which ended with the execution of Kohlhase, who too blindly and with arson and kidnapping and murder had insisted on his rights.
Father wrote about the arson in Wittenberg, clearly with a reflection on the margrave and elector Joachim von Brandenburg, who at the time had not yet converted to the new Gospel and at first protected Kohlhase:
We live here between flames of fire, uncertain every hour if we will burn down. Some villages in the neighborhood have burned, and four times we have had fires in the town. The first consumed four houses. The other fires were passably extinguished. Surely this was caused by an enemy, because tinder, torches, gunpowder, and detonators were found. I have great suspicion that such has happened by the wickedness of Margrave Joachim, and I almost believe this devilry will hasten his end, and his iniquities will drive him to ruin.
Father here was obviously the victim of his own aversion against the then-Catholic margrave, because clearly the latter had nothing to do with the arson, which was committed by Kohlhase.
The execution of Kohlhase took place in Berlin, AD 1540, on the Rabenstein, the city’s favored place of execution, through the wheel. The news reached Wittenberg, and though I was but seven years old, I remember the conversation at the table where the divergent opinions over Kohlhase were warmly debated.
In the Year of our Lord 1534, in a letter, Kohlhase had turned to my father, some saying he had actually come secretly into the Black Monastery and had asked Father in person for advice and help. My father had responded in the following way in a letter that was publicly displayed in many places:
It is certainly true that you suffered damage and shame and that it is your right to seek justice, but not with sins or injustice. Where you can find justice, seek it, as Moses said. Injustice does not become justice through another injustice. But can you not gain justice, so there is no other advice other than to suffer the injustice. Therefore, if you desire my advice (as you have written), so I advise you to take peace wherever you can, and rather suffer in property and damaged honor than to continue in your current doings.
It is understood particularly well from this that Father lived for heaven and put God’s mercy and Christ’s suffering and death for our sins over all mankind’s searching after earthly justice. However, it is the example of Kohlhase that again makes clear how difficult, if not nearly impossible, it is to lead such a life. And had he not himself, when he believed an injustice had been done to him, per exemplum, through Henry VIII or through the Papists, struck out at them, and threatened them with hell and damnation? But again, I am not a theologian and do not understand the difference.
Especially the peasants’ revolt, but also the contention and bickering with Erasmus, Huldrych Zwingli, Bodenstein called Karlstadt, and many others worried my father so that from time to time he believed he should give everything up and, rather than theology, find a different way to earn a living for himself and his family. Therefore in AD 1527 he requested his former schoolmate from the time in Magdeburg, Wenzeslaus Link in Nuremberg, to send him woodworking tools because he wanted to learn the craft. Our mother told us how he diligently used the plane and fiddled with the lathe and rotating iron. After he twice had soundly drilled into his own hand, which brought back his mental balance, he gave up the craft. At home, anyway, I found nothing that was made by my father’s hand.
Chapter 7
. . . describes how we celebrated Christmas.
Christmas, and the end of the year, was a time full of wonder and also full of fear, however, mostly of wonder. The Lord God did not consider it a crime to let the sun go down so early with everything covered in snow and the land icy cold. Often the Elbe was frozen, and the fishermen had to hack holes in the ice in order to do their fishing. Our father told us that it was not always so cold in Germany so that God must have sent this weather to punish us people. Or perhaps it was the Antichrist in Rome who was guilty.
In the afternoon when I returned from Magister Philippus’s instructions with red hands and frozen ears—because even though it was not far, the magister did not keep his house properly heated—then was it so pleasant and warm with the smell of roasting and baking at home. Father was in a good mood when he came down from his study for dinner. He would joke with us, and it was often so cheerful and fun. On such an occasion Father told us a funny story about the fool Albrecht from Torgau, who did not want to go up to heaven because it must be very cold there with rain and snow, but much preferred being in hell, where one could roast fine apples and pears in the heat. And indeed, for a moment I could almost understand the fool.
When dinner was over and our Aunt Lene and the maids had cleaned the kitchen, and the fire for the next morning had been prepared, then the women would get out their spinning wheels and work by the light of the tallow candles, because all the wool must be spun by fastnacht, and in the badly lit kitchen they would tell scary tales like the saga of the Wild Hunter, which I always wanted to hear again even though it greatly frightened me. Did not the saying go that if you were not careful and tried to seek protection quickly when the Wild Hunt raced near, the Wild Hunter himself would dive down, grab you, and take you up with him into his cursed realm?
But if the faithful Eckart went ahead and warned the people, they were able to seek safety. Only one should be sure not to stick one’s head out the window from curiosity as the hunt went by. Then one’s head would become so big it could not be drawn back in again.
I was very fond of the faithful Eckart because, in another tale, he dealt so gently with the boys and their pitchers of beer, which they had bought at the tavern. Once the Wild Hunter with his raging band went through the town of Schwarza in dark Thuringia. The faithful Eckart went ahead and told the people they must get out of the way. As the army raged through the town, two boys came along. They carried pitchers full of beer they had gotten from the tavern. The faithful Eckart bade them step aside. But the Wild Hunter, who had a great thirst, seized the pitchers and drank the beer. The boys were then miserable, because they feared the beating they would get when they arrived home without the beer. The faithful Eckart, however, said, “Be of good cheer, you boys. It was good that you allowed the Wild Hunter to drink all the beer. Go home now with your beer pitchers, but for the next three days, be silent about what has happened here.” So the boys went home, and as they arrived they found the beer pitchers full of beer. And yet, how long can boys remain silent? They soon told of their experience, and from then on the beer pitchers remained empty. Of course, nobody had witnessed such ghostly events, but all had heard people whisper about them.
At other times, I would stare out the windowpane at the clouds being driven across the sky and hope to see my sisters Elisabeth and Magdalene, because it was said that in the Wild Hunter’s band, children could also be seen who had died an unnaturally early death. My father would advise me in the strictest terms against such superstition. These tales were only the remnants of an old heathen worship, and the Wild Hunter was just the heathen god Odin, and the old woman Frau Holle riding with him in the wild army was really the goddess Frigg. And my sisters were with their Heavenly Father, where they had been brought by God’s will to make them happy.
If my mother was not in the kitchen, having other things to do, the story of the sinful nun and the bridge would be told.
On the 9th of March, 1488, the bridge over the Elbe was almost completely washed away by high water, and the carpenters whom the elector had
commissioned to rebuild it superstitiously believed, as a passing monk had warned them, that they must bury a living thing, a small child, on the bank near one of the pillars. And he, the monk, would send them the child. On the next day, as the carpenters were just finishing their work, a wagon, in which a nun and a child sat, came down to the riverbank. The nun gave the carpenters the child, and even though they suspected the child had been gotten by the monk and the nun in a sinful act, they proceeded with burying it anyway. After the bridge was completed, it survived the next flood of the Elbe and other floods to come and thus proved to be solid and stable. But the misdeed of the carpenters brought them no happiness. The elector learned what they had done, put them on trial, and condemned them to death by the wheel. But, he said, since they were victims of their own superstition, to which many were still adhering, he would grant them the clemency of the ax instead. And from then on the nun appeared on the bridge at midnight during every full moon and mourned her dead child. One should take care not to meet her, because her suffering and lamentations are so great that she tries to reduce them by transferring them to others.
Shadows of My Father Page 6