Shadows of My Father

by Christoph Werner

  I was only ten years of age, but I felt the magic of my grandfather’s words and resolved to keep them in my heart and trust them to this paper.

  “What day is it today?” asked Grandfather, though he certainly knew.

  “Today,” I said, “is the 2nd of July, AD 1505.”

  “You see,” said Grandfather, “day and the hour are of importance. We are in the zodiac of Cancer, to which since ancient times the god Mercurius is assigned. The 2nd of July is an important day.

  “On the 2nd of July at noon, half of the year has passed. On the 2nd of July in the year 311, Miltiades became bishop of Rome. Under him, who was not yet called pope, the persecution of Christians in Rome ended. And today is Wednesday, dies mercurii.”

  Interrupting his reading, the student said, “Today one can add that the famous Nostradamus died on a 2nd of July.” Then he continued reading.

  “These important coincidences allow us to assume,” said Grandfather, “that the sky stone was meant to give us a sign. And also Martinus Luder. Now let us with care and respect take up the stone.”

  This we did.

  “Look here,” said Grandfather, “a sign. It is the symbol of Mercurius. Do you see the circle with the cross below and the wings above?”

  Something similar I could indeed detect on the stone, formed by little iron-gray strands.

  “This stone,” Grandfather said, “came to us from Mercury.”

  The student stopped reading again and said, “Here is the stone.” Like a magician, he suddenly had in his hand a stone, and I did not know whence it had come.

  I was so surprised that I took a step back.

  “No, wait,” said Victorius, “the stone is yours, and after I finally found you, I can follow my father’s order. He had said, ‘This stone belongs to the great Reformer, and I hand it to you so that you can give it to his heirs, because he is no longer among us.’

  “This happened when my father lay on his deathbed and I had hurried over from Jena, where I was a student at the university, to be near him. In Jena I was also told where I could find you, Dr. Paulus Luther. And now I am glad that I have finally done what I was told.”

  With this, he handed me the stone, roughly the size of a fist.

  I got into a strange mood. The voice of the student, who talked about what he had planned for his life, came to me from a great distance. It seemed as if the stone exuded a great force that spirited me away from the present and the people. For a moment I did not know where I was.

  “Dr. Luther,” I heard the student say, “come around.”

  I awoke from my distance and looked at the student.

  “What do you want for the stone?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It is yours by right. And its effect, which I notice by your reaction and which my father predicted for the rightful owner, is proof of that.”

  I thanked him, bade farewell, and left the tent.

  On the market I could see the usual bustle, but that day my only interest was the stone. I hurried home to my laboratory, not the one of the elector but my private one, because what I wanted to test nobody should know.

  I threw off hat and coat, asked my wife and the servants not to disturb me, and locked myself into my laboratory. Here I took a hammer and knocked off a small chip from the stone. This I hammered on an iron plate until I had a fine powder.

  How I won from this powder the Lapis philosophorum, I cannot entrust to these records. I stored the recipe safely, and after my death my youngest son, Johann Friedrich, will get it and store it safely, too. It may be said, though, that this powder helped me to make a small amount of gold without the powder becoming less. Its mere presence and close contact with the less noble metal, which need not necessarily be quicksilver, was sufficient.

  Now the reader will ask why I did not make enough gold to become rich.

  In this I did not succeed because I could not exactly repeat the conditions under which I had made the first batch. And as much as I tried, distilling, rectifying, calcinating, mixing, and shaking, as much as I included the positions of Mercury and moon and concentrated my mind and my will on the success of the experiment, I failed. Now I hope that someday there will be an alchemist and astrologer among my descendants who is able to recreate the right conditions for making gold with my powder. Therefore, I leave the powder and the recipe behind. Of course, I did not tell the elector about my little success.

  At the moment he would not have been interested anyway, because he had time only for his new wife, with whom he wanted to be together day and night, though he had already reached his sixtieth year.

  On a cold January day about two weeks after his marriage, I plucked up courage and tried to warn him against excessive copulation. We were alone in his study, which was well heated. Outside lay a thick layer of snow, and an icy wind blew around the castle. The Elbe was almost completely frozen, and the ships lay still in the harbor.

  I felt the prince’s pulse and put my ear to his bare chest, which was completely covered with gray hair.

  “Your Grace,” I said, “knows that Your Grace’s heart is no longer what it used to be. I notice that it does not beat regularly, and Your Grace’s pulse is too quick. This can also indicate a weak heart. If now Your Grace meets your wife daily in the heat of love, this can be very taxing.”

  Here the elector turned pink in the face, got agitated, and said, “I hope you are not going to prescribe to me that I do not cover my wife anymore?”

  Here I add that the elector was a horse fan, who liked to borrow his words, including the intimate ones, from horse language.

  “No, Your Grace, in no way,” I responded. “I would only advise to reduce the number of the coverings. Perhaps Your Grace could be happy with three times a week. More is dangerous for Your Grace’s heart. Your Grace knows how the heart races shortly before the highest pleasure and how quick the heart beats during such. Moreover, we must not forget the tender age of the electoress.”

  The elector made an indignant face.

  “No, Dr. Luther,” he said, “this advice displeases me very much. It is your task as my archiator to take care of my heart and strengthen it so that in all affairs of state and also in love it is up to its tasks. And the electoress is well.”

  With this he dismissed me, not in his most gracious mood.

  Is there not the saying that a man’s mind is his kingdom? So at home I mixed a heart-strengthening drink. For this I took leaves, blossoms, and fruit of hawthorn and prepared a potion. Also, I added an extract of blessed milk thistle, Silybum marianum, which in fact is usually used against liver complaints. But I thought that the white spots on the leaves, which originate from the milk of the Virgin Mary, would have a favorable effect on the entire health of the elector.

  What good was this?

  On the 20th of February, 1586, Elector Augustus of Saxony died. I was summoned to the residence, but it was too late. In the bedroom cowered the frightened young electoress beside the bed on which the dead prince lay. He was naked from the belt down, and she told me haltingly that her master and prince, lying on her and in copulative movements, suddenly went limp, fell to the side, took one last gasp, and lay still. I was hurriedly sent for, but already in the anteroom the secretary told me that the prince was probably dead. And so it turned out.

  I was only moderately upset, because this is an agreeable way to pass on, yet I was concerned for my insecure future. Would the successor keep me as his personal physician?

  The young electoress recovered rather quickly from her fright. As her dowry, she was given the castle of Lichtenburg near Wittenberg, but she did not make use of it. I lost sight of her somewhat, then I heard that on the 14th of February, AD 1588, she married the widowed Duke John III of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg, forty-three years old, who was in a sense a relation of hers as he was the brother of the deceased electoress Anna. Now the young widow—we must not forget that she was still only fifteen years of age—had a husband three times her age, though
younger than her first. Into this marriage she brought the handsome sum of 3,000 imperial thalers, which certainly was happily accepted by the duke, who was not very rich.

  This marriage turned out to be very fertile. The duke was well trained and in good shape, as he brought with him into this marriage fourteen children by his first wife, some of them being older that the young duchess. She did not hesitate to try to emulate her predecessor and gave birth to further nine children.

  This year of 1586 was an annus horribilis.

  My dear wife, Anna, died at fifty-four years of age on Saturday, the 15th of May. We had been married for thirty-three years, and losing her took away all my zest for life.

  Now, as I sat by her deathbed surrounded by our children, who had come running to support their mother, I was overcome by such grief that I could not help weeping and sobbing endlessly.

  My faithful wife had gone with me through all heights and depths of life and dangerous times and had stood by me in word and deed. She died without lamenting and, thank heavens, without pain. The last weeks had been hard, because as Anna suffered and was weakened from a fever, I could not find the cause and therefore could not fight it effectively.

  I closed her eyes, put a hymnal under her chin to support it and thus keep her mouth closed, and put her hands one above the other. My children kissed her on the forehead a last time, then we left her to the care of the undertaker’s women.

  Now I was alone, a widower fifty-three years old and hardly any longing for either life or love. My only wish remaining was to live the rest of my life with integrity and the hope that I would depart without fear or pain.

  Chapter 29

  . . . lets the reader know that I leave Dresden and go to Leipzig.

  Not at once, it should be understood. The successor of my elector Augustus was his sixth son, now called Elector Christian I. The other sons had all passed away.

  The succession of Christian was accompanied once more with religious changes, all of which caused his subjects and me to become bewildered.

  Christian kept me as his personal physician but did not make my life as his archiator easy, because very early he succumbed to alcohol. This prevented him from properly seeing to the affairs of the state, though his father had from early on trained him to govern the principality. The new elector preferred hunting, a pastime during which I was required often to be present.

  I did what I could to keep him away from bottle and tankard but dared not insist too much, because then, though normally a good-natured person, he could get nasty. All I could do to alleviate his stomach complaints was to prescribe him summer savory, Satureja hortensis, already recommended by Hildegard of Bingen, to be added as spice to his meals.

  But as soon as his sour stomach was better, he grasped the chance to take to the bottle again and that even more intensely than before. At the beginning he tried to persuade me to join him in drinking, but as a rule I could ward him off by pointing out my duties as a doctor.

  In alchemy—particularly gold making—he believed less than his father and therefore left me alone in this respect.

  What helped my mood and relieved me somewhat was his attitude on religious issues. He hated the bickering of the theologians about the true doctrine, which had poisoned the rule of his father. In this the Lutheran zealots and the Philippists, followers of Melanchthon, were at each other’s throats fighting like devils. He even enacted a law against such squabbling.

  I cannot emphasize enough how fed up I was with all this, the back and forth, the never-ending struggle about trifles backed up by threats to destroy each other.

  A word about the so-called Formula of Concord, or Formula Concordiae, which Christian’s father had initiated and which Christian rejected as thoroughly as he did the unchristian exorcism in baptism. He was helped in this by Christian Johann Salmuth, newly appointed court chaplain.

  The Formula Concordiae, also called the Bergic Book or the Bergen Book, was originally devised to bring about an agreement between the strict Lutherans and the followers of Melanchthon, but it made, at the same time, any reconciliation between Calvinists and Lutherans impossible.

  In the electorate of Saxony, all pastors had to put their signatures to this formula. And the saying went around:

  Sign, dear pastor, sign

  Then you can keep the parish thine.

  Of course, everybody signed. I would have signed too to keep my job.

  Relief from many of my troubles came from my friendship with Chancellor Nikolaus Krell, who used his influence on the elector to cautiously (very cautiously indeed, since the electoress Sophia of Brandenburg was rigidly Lutheran) to reconcile Saxony to the doctrine of Calvin. Naturally, despite the reasonableness of this approach to religious and church policy, I did not offer my opinion openly, and my conversations with Dr. Krell were always without witnesses.

  Krell’s attempts to restrain Lutheran orthodoxy in Saxony also were directed against the influence of Habsburg, which he believed was damaging the sovereignty of his country. To this end he tried to befriend good King Henry IV of France, Queen Elizabeth I of England, and certain Protestant princes in Germany. Through Chancellor Krell, I became acquainted with European affairs, for which I was grateful to him.

  Our friendship did not seem advantageous for the Saxon chancellor, because in AD 1591, when Christian I had not quite died yet, Nikolaus Krell was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Königstein.

  The instigators of this unjust and loathsome action were Duke Frederick William I of Saxe-Weimar, who had been appointed regent of the electorate by Christian I, because the latter’s son, later Christian II, was under age at the death of his father; the bigoted Lutherans, to whom Calvinists were worse than the Devil; and the elector’s widow, Sophia of Brandenburg, who above all wanted to retain exorcism in baptism.

  So Chancellor Krell was brought to trial and accused of Cryptocalvinism.

  Only a few days ago the honorable Matthias Dresser brought me the news that King Henry IV of France and Elizabeth I of England pleaded for Krell and asked for his discharge and annulment of the sentence. But even that was of no avail. I am afraid Krell, this meritorious man, is in for something very bad indeed, as the new elector is only eight years old and is completely dominated by his mother, Sophia, and the ducal administrator Frederick William from Weimar.

  Krell’s work would certainly have merited a better recognition than what is happening to him now. He initiated the first survey of Electoral Saxony, which, without doubt, was of great importance for the administration of the country. It is truly an irony that the castle of Königstein, which under his chancellorship was reconstructed to become a formidable fortress, was the place of his imprisonment.

  Several years ago, I was tired of seeing what happened to commendable people, and I moved to Leipzig with my books and my laboratory equipment, where I settled down as a general practitioner for the public. It did me good to get away from court life with its lies and intrigues, the required pliability and also the resultant cowardice.

  My patients in Leipzig were normal townspeople, mostly, who were grateful for the attention I afforded them and also did not all the time put my medical advice and treatment in question. Death they always accepted as God’s will and not the doctor’s fault, which made life easier for me.

  Two years later the Electoral Saxony administrator, Frederick William of Saxe-Weimar, invited me to become his personal physician and also to look after the young princes of the late Saxon elector. I was granted a very good salary, which helped persuade me to take the position, though I had many reservations. Also my taedium vitae became always stronger, or to say it in simpler words, I grew tired of life. I was not long in my new position, because for weeks now I have been ill, no longer a doctor but a patient myself.

  All I have to say is said, and for the expected emergency preceding death I have a large phial of Tinctura opii, a poppy juice preparation, ready on my bedside table.

  May my children have
a happy life with less fear than I had and also more courage.

  May God forgive me my doubts and help me to overcome my fear of death. The whispering shadow of the reaper that the poet writes about may promise hope, not terror.

  Finis libri finis vitae.

  Acknowledgments

  I cannot thank Michael Leonard enough for his translation and all the trouble he took to create a text as near as possible to the German original. Without his never-tiring efforts in answering the author’s questions and his understanding of German culture and history, this book would never have been published in English.

  About the Author

  CHRISTOPH WERNER was born in the East German city of Halle on the Saale River and raised as the son of a Lutheran minister. He studied English and German at Martin Luther University at Halle and worked in English teacher training at various universities in East and West Germany before retiring to live in Weimar. He has written four novels and numerous short stories and essays.

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  Copyright

  shadows of my father. Copyright © 2015 by Christoph Werner. English Translation © 2017 HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Originally published as Paulus Luther. Sein Leben von ihm selbst aufgeschrieben. Wahrhaftiger Roman, in Germany in 2015 by Bertuch Verlag Weimar GmbH.