Adventures With Suszie: Wittenburg

14 - 15 June 2014

At my University there is a group organized for International students in which they get together once a month for some kind of excursion boat tours, medieval fairs, a circus etc. they also have an annual trip to Wittenburg for the festival of Martin Luther's wedding.

Last year I really wanted to go but I had only just arrived and had not yet hit my stride with meeting new people so decided to sleep through that weekend instead. This year I had a whole year of practice at meeting new humans so I signed up as soon as the first email about the trip was sent out and started doing my research about Martin Luther.

My knowledge about the Reformation across Europe is very anglicized with a few historical novels thrown in, so I was in for a bit of an education.

As far as I was concerned, English was predominantly Catholic, then Anne Boleyn lent Henry VIII some books* and then the reformation happened.

*turns out there's more to those books than I had previously realised.

The realisation that I am most grateful for through this education is that the reformation wasn't quite so shallow as I had previously believed. The story in England kind of leads you to believe that Henry VIII realised that his wife was an old woman and wanted to bone Anne Boleyn, but she insisted he put a ring on it first. This of course required a divorce, and when he asked the Pope for special allowances to be made in this case the Pope said "Nah bro". This was because backstory: the Pope had already made special allowances so that Henry could marry his wife in the first place - because she had been married to Henry's late brother! Oy vey! Henry was using this initial special allowance as a reason that they should never have married - basically saying "You know how you said it would be okay? - Turns out it wasn't". In order to accept this the Pope would have to be all "My bad, I was wrong" - which, considering that he allegedly speaks with the voice of God, is saying that God made a mistake, not something the Pope really says.

Reeling from this rejection, Henry, who was normally quite used to getting what he wanted, went looking for some other way to get rid of his wife, so to speak. With some alleged cajoling from Anne, Henry found his way to some literature that inspired him to head his own church so that he would be the voice of God on Earth.

But you see there was this guy named Martin Luther, who wasn't just trying to bone someone, and he was a friar who was pretty unhappy with a practise, called Indulgence, that was pretty popular at that time in the Catholic Church. It basically meant that if you had sinned, or indeed were planning to keep sinning, you could go to the church and buy your way out of being punished for that sin, you would get a scroll with the sin you were allowed to commit and take it away with you, and carry on in your merry, sinful ways, with no worries about the hereafter. People were being exempt from all manner of sins, and the Catholic church used it as a sort of fundraiser for their crusades and rebuilding St. Peter's Basilica, they ensured everyone that it was all above board and it-says-so-in-the-bible-who-are-you-to-question-the-bible?! Martin felt a bit iffy about all of this, he had read the bible you see, and he was pretty sure it didn't say that that was okay. He wrote up his thoughts on the situation in his 95 theses, which he nailed to the door of the church, which sounds really dramatic but we were assured that it was a common occurrence and was just the way that they put things up for academic debate. The tone of his theses was apparently mostly quite academic and neutral, but there were some points that were a bit more direct in blaming the Pope for the situation:

"Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?"

The way our educators were talking to us all weekend the sense was that Martin Luther wasn't intending to break from the church and start his own, in writing the theses he was intending to start a dialogue about a practice that he and his peers believed was damaging the reputation of the church that he had spent his life serving. The powers that be apparently decided he was a bit of a radical and had him excommunicated.

The Catholic Church at that time believed that the bible should only be read in Latin, limiting the access of the holy word to scholars and those who were making the rules. Martin therefore saw this manipulation of the holy word to be an abuse of their power and privilege. This prompted him to start his translation of the bible into German, so that the people could decide for themselves whether or not the bible said what the people in charge were claiming it said.

The strange thing about this weekend in Wittenberg is the date that they choose to celebrate all of this. It is not the anniversary of the day he nailed the theses to the church door/wall, nor is it the day he was excommunicated and officially broke from the church, it is not the day he released his translation of the Bible into German, but instead, it is the anniversary of his wedding day! I get that it was a big deal that he got married because, as a Catholic monk he wasn't allowed, and she had been a nun. I just feel like there maybe some more important moments in his life, but then again I am not married yet so maybe I am missing some insight into the significance of that day on a humans life.

To celebrate the Luther's wedding anniversary Wittenberg has a big festival where people dress up in period costume and set up a medieval market place and have a parade. Some of the costumes were awesome! My 14 year old Henry VIII nerd self would have spent all of her money on one of them, however my present day self was more interested in the beer and food for sale.

You could buy scrolls for your indulgences from a guy dressed as a Catholic monk of the era, the sins he pardoned included illegal parking, adultery, then a specific one for adultery with your neighbor's wife, and a few others. You could buy mead horn to drink out of, and lots of other trinkets at the stalls.

In the evening we sat chatting to some local Wittenbergians, I talked to a guy in his mid twenties about the prevalence of religion in East Germany today. He told me about how his grandfather had been one of the few people who kept regularly attending Church in the DDR. The piece of that conversation that stuck with me is something he said so casually, he said that in three or four decades no one will even talk about the DDR, because in the grand scheme of German history it was a blip in the timeline. I find it really hard to believe that people will forget about it so quickly, but I guess I only really know as much as I do about it because I live here. I knew next to nothing about German history before I moved here, I'm a tad embarrassed at just how ignorant I was before, I guess New Zealand is pretty isolated, but I feel like that's not really a good excuse anymore!