Ideas - Will the real Martin Luther please stand up?

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Who exactly was Martin Luther? Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther translated the New Testament so that ordinary Germans could understand it. This sparked a theological, social and political revolution that we're still living in. So who was he: a freedom fighter? An antisemite? IDEAS explores the legend and legacy of Martin Luther. *This episode originally aired on April 14, 2024.

If you want to hear daily news that doesn't hurt your soul and might even be good for your soul, check out As It Happens. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nielke Oksal. Every day we reach people at the center of the most extraordinary stories, like the doctor who restored a patient's eyesight with a tooth. Or a musician in an orchestra that plays instruments made out of vegetables. Take the scenic route through the day's news with As It Happens, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. A horse-drawn wagon trundles down a rutted road in forested Thuringia, Germany, May 1521.

Martin Luther, the great reformer, is sitting inside with a group of friends, heading home from a frightening encounter with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Charles had demanded that Luther recant his written attacks on the Roman Church and the Pope. Luther refused. They reached Eisenach, where the group should split. Some of his friends turned directly to Wittenberg. Luther would not be going home. The military escort was sent away, and Luther and four people, they turned to the south

where Luther's family was coming from. Luther knew he was in deep trouble and was camping on his friends. There were five horsemen coming, stopping the wagon and taking Luther out, sitting him on a horseback and going away. And on May the 4th, 1521, they reached Wartburg Castle. Martin Luther would spend the next 11 months

at Wartburg Castle on a mountaintop, overlooking the town of Eisenach. There, he would write more polemical tracts, the most revolutionary of them all, a translation of the New Testament from the original Greek into vernacular German, one that ordinary people could read. For the people living in 16th century, it was a kind of revelation, the revelation of the Word of God, they thought. So now God has revealed and talked to the people. Martin Luther's translation did more than reveal the Word of God to ordinary people.

It trashed the church hierarchy and Charles V's empire, shattering ties between church and state and helping spark two centuries of conflict from whose ashes modern Europe would emerge. But who was Martin Luther? A brilliant translator? Creator of the modern German language, trailblazing champion for freedom of conscience? I think Luther was kind of hero, something in between saint and hero. Or was he a virulent anti-Semite? The national socialists argued you have suppressed the anti-Semite Luther, so you have suppressed the anti-Semit Luther. So you have suppressed the real Luther.

500 years after the publication of Martin Luther's New Testament, contributor David Kettenberg visited the medieval castle where Luther did his translation and other key spots in Luther's life. And he asks one central question. Will the real Martin Luther please stand up? It's a crisp October morning deep in the mountains above the town of Eisenach, Germany. in the mountains above the town of Eisenach, Germany. The cool air is bracing as I climb the path to Wartburg Castle. It doesn't look that different from when Martin Luther lived here

500 years ago, translating the New Testament into German. Luther's translation would be published and immediately sell out. And by making the gospels accessible to ordinary folks in a language they could understand, it cut priests and popes out of the loop. Its impact would be seismic. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Martin Luther's original story is legendary. Born in 1483 in the mining town of Eisleben, he'd later go to university to study law to please his father. But heading to school one day, he's caught in a thunderstorm. Terrified, he vows to enter the monastery, and he does, joining the Augustinian order.

His mentor is impressed and sends him to Wittenberg to study theology. But doubt and fear torment him. No one could be more unworthy, Luther tells himself. Meanwhile, a preacher named Johannes Tetzel is selling indulgences, time off purgatory in exchange for cash. As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, Tetzel tells peasants, the soul from purgatory springs, even if they'd raped the Virgin Mary. Luther is revolted. On All Saints Day, October 31st, 1517, he walks up to the big wooden door of Wittenberg Castle Church.

Or so the story goes, but one thing is certain. Luther sent his famous 95 Theses to Germany's most powerful church figures. Within weeks, copies roll off printing presses and begin circulating across the empire. Luther is summoned to Rome, but he declines the invitation. Rome is the seat of the devil he spits. Instead, he publishes three more excoriating tracts, declaring war on the papacy and on the entire Catholic Church. In June 1520, Pope Leo X issues a decree condemning Luther's writing, demanding that he recant. In December, on the campus of Wittenberg University, Luther burns it. In early June 1521, Luther is excommunicated. He's summoned to the city of Worms, where the emperor, Charles V, is holding an imperial diet or assembly.

And so we're now coming to the place where the real thing did happen. I'm Harald Storch and I used to be for many years the regional dean of the Protestant church here in Worms. And so Harold takes me to the exact spot where Luther came face to face with the emperor. Dr. Luther, do you persist in what you have written here? Are you prepared to retract these writings and the beliefs they contain?

Luther's famous answer, dramatized in the classic 1953 film Luther, featuring Neil McGinnis as the renegade monk. Unless I am so convinced that I am wrong, I am bound to my beliefs by the text of the Bible. My conscience is captive to the Word of God. To go against conscience is neither right nor saved. Therefore, I cannot and I will not recant. Here I stand.

I can do no other. The Emperor was not amused. Who is this monk to go against the Church and against me? I should have seized him right then and there and had him had him arrested just as Czech reformer Jan Hus was a hundred years earlier lured to an imperial council then promptly seized tried and burned at the stake. This could have happened to Martin Luther as well. So Jan Hus was tricked He was invited to come and was arrested. And there were people here in Worms

who thought they could do it just the same way. So he was in extreme danger. Luther gets out of town. Fortunately, he has a powerful ally, Friedrich Loise. Together with a few friends, Luther climbs into a wagon heading back to Wittenberg. But on the way there, the wagon is intercepted by a group of horsemen. There were five horsemen coming, stopping the wagon and taking Luther out, setting him on a horseback and going away.

And on May the 4th, 1521, they reached Wartburg Castle and for the next ten months Luther should be here as Juncker Jörg in Cognito. Uncle Jörg? Uncle Jörg in Cognito. Uncle Jörg. Uncle Jörg, yes. My name is Dorothy Menke and I am a scientific researcher here at Wartburg Castle. And I am Daniel Micks. I am an employee of the Wartburg Stiftung here at Wartburg Castle. And we are two persons of the department for researching, collections and education. Martin Luther was here in the Wartburg from when till when? He was here from May 1521 to March, 1st of March 1522.

He wasn't really a prisoner, was he? No, he wasn't really a prisoner. He was almost like a noble guest. His identity was to be hidden and so... Only a few people in the whole empire knew that he was here. Because he was hidden, he was... protective custody. Yes, like that. Beyond the reach of Emperor and Church, Luther was safe but not necessarily sound. Luther has a

big gastrointestinal problems. It was a pain for him every single day. And interesting on this letter, completely in Latin, there is then one sentence in German in the middle of the letter. And in German it is, Mein Arsch ist böse geworden. Where is that? My ass has turned bad. So that is the problem. And after six days, he finally could go to toilet and he is feeling like the birth of

a child. Yeah, but that was only one problem. He struggled with loneliness here. He was a man in the mid of the empire, we would say. He was teaching in the University of Wittenberg every day to students. He always had his friends around him. He was a few days ago in the Diet of Warm speaking to the biggest man in the empire. And from one day to another he is sitting here and nothing is happening.

When he came to Wadberg Castle it lasted only a few days and he started working. On the one hand he was complaining I had nothing to do, on the other hand he was very productive. He was working all the time. Luther had his work cut out for him. At least a dozen different editions of the German Bible had been published since Gutenberg's invention 60 years earlier. An estimated 20,000 copies were owned by scholars and princes, but they were bad translations, all based on the Latin Vulgate from a thousand years earlier,

which itself was a translation from the ancient Greek. So, sitting in his room at Wartburg Castle, Luther launches into his own translation, helping him at his side critical Latin and Greek translations by the great Dutch scholar Erasmus and a Hebrew book of Psalms. But Luther's greatest source of inspiration was his love for the German tongue. Yeah, so he would say you have to look at people's mouth, how they are speaking, in order to find the right translation. He had a special genius in doing so. Of course, he had supporters, like Philip Melanthon, who was a professor of Greek. And of course, in philological aspects, he was by far more competent in the Greek

language than Martin Luther himself. Philip Melanthon. But Martin Luther had this kind of personal genius to find this strong German equivalent of the philological exactness which Melanchthon was the genius in. He's laying down his principles for translation. There he says you have to talk like the woman in the house, like the children on the street, like the man in the market. That doesn't mean he went to them, but he knew how they spoke.

He had a good feeling for the German language, like a musical language. He uses alliterations, and it was to be heard. It was to be heard in church and it's a very musical language. For instance, the words to introduce a Last Supper has a certain sound. I think it is in a certain way dominated by the vocal A. Say it in German. It's musical.

Yeah, I think that Luther created songs that had very, very much to do with his feeling for language. It is okay. I introduce myself. My name is Thomas Kaufmann. I'm a historian working on the field of church history, especially in early modernity, the centuries between the 15th and the 18th century. And you're a Luther scholar. Yes, of course. I'm working very much about Luther, who is one of the most interesting and most special and most problematic figures of the 16th century.

I think the most interesting and, for me, fascinating thing with Luther are his linguistical facilities. There are only very, very few people who are able to express their ideas and salts in the German language as he did it. Lots of parts of the New Testament Luther knew by heart. So when he read the Greek text and the Latin version

of Erasmus, the most complicated thing for him was to get German expressions for what he thought that biblical text might say. Luther's translation was more than just masterful philology, transposing meaning from one language to another. It involved scriptural interpretation, hermeneutics. The most famous example, his translation of St. Paul's idea about justification, Luther adds the word sola, only. Man is justified by faith alone. His point? The good works don't bring salvation. Neither do priests or popes. Personal faith does nothing else. Faith in the gospel,

in the word of God. Luther also writes his own prefaces, one at the very start of the New Testament and another one outlining what he called its most noble books, the ones that convey Christ's teaching. The theology of Paul, the letter to the Romans, it is the letter to the Galatians, it's the first letter of St. Peter and it's St. John who gets the most prominent position in his understanding of the New Testament. The preaching and the talking of Christ, the word of Christ, is the most central thing in the New Testament. So we have to concentrate on these texts, and you have to read them first. You have to read the New Testament in the mirror of St. Paul and St. John.

As Luther labors over his translation, beyond the walls of his castle hideout, the Reformation is in full throttle. Luther's friend Andreas Karlstadt is up on the pulpit, attacking monastic vows and challenging authorities, both religious and political. As if that weren't shocking enough, Karlstadt is inviting parishioners to handle the consecrated hosts themselves, to pick it up if it falls to the ground. A trio of self-declared prophets have arrived, claiming to have spoken with God directly, precisely what Luther had been saying people should be doing.

Capping off the mayhem, evangelical rowdies are running around howling like wolves, smashing church property, singing songs about drinking beer, and fornicating. Luther hears all about it and is outraged. His followers are running amok with his ideas. His enemies are attacking him. And he's holed up like a hermit in a tiny room on top of a mountain, German translation of the New Testament. In March 1522, with the manuscript under his arm, he returns to Wittenberg.

There, the Greek expert Philip Melanchthon helps polish the text. What you're hearing now is a song of praise for Luther and Melanchthon, performed by Germany's Kalmuss Ensemble. Having polished their translation, Luther and Melanchthon send it off to the printer. The first New Testament, the first Luther Bible, was published in September 1522. It's called the September Testament. I'm Jeff Myers. I'm originally from the United States, grew up in Kansas, studied theology in California.

I've been living in Frankfurt on mine for the last 30 years. I'm a pastor, halfway retired, still very active doing preaching and doing a lot of reflective walking tours on the historical Luther Trail here in the state of Hessen. Buchgas. That's the Buchgas, the Buch Lane. 500 years ago Martin Luther's New Testament was sold on this street. It was sold out very, very quickly. I believe the first edition was about 3,000 copies as far as I remember, and cost between one half and one and a half gulden, which I'm told is about the cost of a refrigerator

today. To give you a sense of how expensive it was back then, about the cost of a refrigerator to buy a small New Testament from Martin Luther. Of all the revolutionary features of Luther's New Testament translation, none were more sensational than the pictures. Twenty-one woodcuts by Luther's friend Lucas Cranach. The images depicted scenes from the Apocalypse of St. John, also known as the Book of Revelation. The most controversial was an image of the Hoor of Babylon seated on the back of a dragon.

The reason? On the Hoor's head sat the triple tiara or papal crown. The church fumed at the insult. Thomas Kaufman. They had the idea that it would work to burn texts like they did centuries and centuries ago. And of course it does work if you only had two manuscripts who have survived of strange ideas and you burn them. So the bad ideas are driven out of the world. But in the time of the reproduction of text by the printing press, this doesn't work at all. The woodcut controversy was ironic. The New Testament book that interested Luther the least was now his translation's greatest selling point.

Yes, of course. This is an ironic aspect because the most hated book of the New Testament was the Apocalypse for Luther. He disliked it very, very much. And were people like snatching up copies of the New Testament because of these woodcuts, because they were great to look at? Yes, of course. And they were polemic, they attacked papacy and so on, and this could be a factor of attraction as well. Martin Luther's New Testament was more than just a powerful translation with scandalous

pictures. Never before had all 27 books of the Christian scriptures been published as a single volume. German Bibles combining both Old and New Testaments had been published before. Those bad translations from the Latin Vulgate. And for a while, publishing the books of the New Testament as individual pamphlets was popular. But Luther decided to keep them all together. But Luther decided to keep them all together. And within a decade, French and English printers would follow suit. Across Europe, ordinary people could now forge their own personal bond with God and His Son on Earth, reading scripture themselves. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada,

across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey, I'm Jill Deacon and I'm excited to share my new podcast with you. A Love Affair with the Unknown is conversations with smart, funny people navigating life's unknowns with courage and candor, something we could all use during these wildly uncertain times. Me and I started to cry and I realized I haven't dealt with anything. My family's motto was, I'm not going to be able to handle that.

Listen and subscribe to A Love Affair with the Unknown wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday. We're so used to books being translated now that it's hard to imagine what it meant in Martin Luther's time. But by translating the New Testament into German, he unleashed a revolution that would transform Europe and the world. This documentary is called Will the Real Martin Luther Please Stand Up? by contributor David For the people living in the 16th century, it was a kind of revelation, the revelation of the Word of God, they sought. So now God has revealed and talked to the people.

Now Christ is speaking to them by the New Testament. If you compared, for instance, to Jewish communities, they always lived with the holy texts. There's no Jewish identity without dealing with Hebrew texts, not so in Christianity. There were priests who read the Latin New Testament and who had to interpret it, but the normal people didn't have any access to the holy documents. And this was, I think, the most striking thing. The people could read what the sources of Christianity were, and they felt that God

himself was talking to them. Copies of Luther's September Testament were snatched up at the Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs that now flourished in the wake of Gutenberg's invention. Soon, Luther's translation would be republished across Europe without Luther's permission. Copyright didn't exist back then. Back in Wittenberg, Luther, Melanchthon, and Kranach worked on their own second edition, or what became known as the December Testament. Armed with Luther's translation, literate people now had access to the word of God, kicking the Reformation

into high gear. We have what we call the Reformation movement was in a certain sense a publication phenomenon. People started publishing, of course, theologians, preachers in different towns, and they introduced lots of citations from the New Testament translated by Martin Luther. For instance, an author like Agula von Grumbach, who was a noblewoman in Franconia, published tracts and connects different biblical texts together. Her own text is, in a certain sense, a combination of biblical citations, driven from Luther's translation of the New Testament. So it democratized.

Yeah, in a certain sense, of course. Yeah, it democratized. You can attack authorities. Agula von Grumbach attacked the authorities of the University of Ingolstadt. She had the Bible in her hand. She could quote from the Holy Scripture, and she could attack and fight against authorities, which was, of course, a very, very interesting thing. As Germans began reading Luther's translation, it occurred to educators that they should set up schools

with a translation on the reading list, Harold Storch. Almost everywhere, the inauguration of the reform was accompanied by founding schools. For example, here in the city of Worms, when the council adopted the Reformation, one of the first things was to found a school for the Latin and the Greek language, so that the youngsters could study the Holy Scriptures in the original languages and also a German school for ordinary people so that as many people as possible could read the Bible for themselves. The translated Bible was an opportunity to read and study and understand the Bible related to the

ability to read and write. Luther's Bible opens the door to public schooling that also inspired singing. The people liked it. They liked singing. For instance, the small town Göttingen, there were a group of craftsmen here in the city of Göttingen who rebelled against the representatives of the old church, and they stood like a wall, shoulder to shoulder, and they sung Luther's hymns. Luther approved of singing and even wrote his own songs and hymns. This is believed to be his first effort. Ein neues Lied wir heben an. It's called

A New Song We Raise, beautifully performed by the Protestant culture circle of Antwerp. It recounts the lives of two men burned at the stake in Brussels in 1523 for preaching reform just one year after the publication of Luther's New Testament translation. Two years after the publication, German peasants rose up in revolt against the princes. Many had read Luther's translation and had taken his promise of Christian freedom to heart, but Luther was a political conservative and sided with the princes. An estimated 100,000 peasants were slaughtered. And that wasn't the worst of Luther's dark side.

This is a huge question, but we've not yet talked about Luther's anti-Semitism. Well, let's talk about it. What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? This is from a 1543 tract Luther wrote, On the Jews and their lies. It would later be embraced by the Nazis. First, that their synagogues be burnt down and that all who are able toss in sulfur and pitch. Second, I advise that their houses

also be raised and destroyed. Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught be taken from them. Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be... What happened to Luther between 1520s when he was sympathetic to Jews and Jewish people and you know, he wrote that famous tract?

First of all, I would say there's a question of terminology. He argues in 1523 in his tract that Jesus Christ was a born Jew. He argues that Jews were unable to convert to Christianity because the papish theology was rotten and they did not really get an idea what Christianity is about. So when we come up, we theologians from Wittenberg, and we teach the Jews what the idea of Christianity is, they will convert.

But it doesn't work at all. He brought up a catalogue of measures, how to deal with Jewish people, which is of course the most terrible part of these tracts, starting with the burning of synagogues. So we can draw lines between these catalogues of measures in his text from 1543 up to 1938 and the burning of the synagogues in Germany. My life's struggle is fought for nothing. Because we shall show, before it comes, and we shall win in our battle.

So, who exactly was Martin Luther? Guiding light for courageous descent? Father of German literacy and schooling? Or a political reactionary who threw his peasant followers under the bus and called for synagogues to be burned? People have been grappling with this question for 500 years in publications, debates, and paintings. Lukas Kranach, the elder, he was the most famous painter maybe in this time. And he was painting Luther eight or 10 times

during his life. And he was one of the reasons for the success of the Reformation maybe. Most of the peoples were not able to read and to write. So pictures made it easier. It was like propaganda, you can say, Kranach's picture, and he made different variations of Luther's pictures, and there you have the monk. It's looking very thin.

He's focused on theological beliefs. That's what the picture wants to say. Then we have the type with the doctoral cap showing him as an academic. And then we have the Junker-Jörg type and we can imagine he looked like that during his stay at Wartburg Castle. And he looks like a peasant? No, no, he looks like a noble man. Okay, I look at this man, you know more about artwork than I do. You can decide who Junker Jorg looks like for yourself by checking out Lucas Cranach's portrait at our website cbc.ca. This one, it looks combative even. If you see that it's a sword in his hand,

what does the Augustinian shreier and the professor of theology doing with his work. So this is only to give a message to the people. So this one is fighting for the Reformation, for the right understanding of the gospel, is fighting for you even. So that is the message of this. Yeah my name is Albrecht Gek and I am a teacher for religious studies in grammar schools. In recent years I have focused on the reception of Luther in art. So I have collected about 400 portraits of Luther. What I was interested in was not simply collecting them, but also in finding out what the ideas of those were who made these portraits

and what they wanted the audience to understand about Luther. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] The 18th century, of course, Luther was presented as the protagonist of the Enlightenment. So he freed conscience and thinking, reason, from the predominance of the church. And I remember a nice portrait in which he is shown as a figure standing and holding up a torch, the torch of light. And the whole thing reminds me very much of the Statue of Liberty in New York, so an epitome of enlightenment thinking, if you want. At the close of the 18th century, as the Enlightenment segued to romanticism, that moment was captured by Franz Schubert in his piano sonata in A minor,

passionately performed by Sergei Kuznetsov. formed by Sergei Kuznetsov. Schubert published this sonata in 1817. 1817, yeah, 300 years after the Reformation. This was the end of the wars against Napoleon here in Central Europe. And so, 200 years years ago Luther was the person who was for German independence creating the German language creating German identity Luther as the great liberator and all over the 19th century there is a strong image of Martin Luther

founding the German nation over against especially the French. Before or after the First World War you find then a kind of critical theologians and philosophers like Troeltsch or Max Weber, who began to sort of analyze the kind of self-criticalness that Protestantism is more than nationalism. Harold Storch takes me to the Luther Memorial in Worms, a huge installation inaugurated in 1868 as German nationalism was beginning to swell. A circle of statues present Luther in a generous context, definitely not chauvinist. Alongside Luther and Philip Melanchthon, other figures, the 15th century Italian Savonarola and Bohemian Jan Hus, both of whom were burned at the stake for the reformist views, John Wycliffe, who translated

the Bible into English. And there's one other figure, Johannes Reuchlin, Hebrew scholar. The Prussian king, later Emperor William I, came to the inauguration. There was 20,000 people from all over Central Europe coming here to this monument. But in this very nationalistic time, Lute is grounded, as it were, in a European European context which I think is very interesting. Italy, Czech, which many nationalist Germans didn't even think to be a nation. This is fascinating. This is typical for the 19th century that Luther was seen as the entrance to the modern age so to speak. At the beginning of the First World War there was a statement of the 90 intellectuals, as this was called, Protestant theologians like Harnack, Seeberg, who supported the war philosophy of the Kaiser, and it was very few young theologians like the reformed Swiss theologian Karl Barth, or also some few

liberal theologians in Germany like Martin Rade or Albert Schweitzer who was sort of critical over against this war philosophy at the beginning of the First World War. And how did Luther figure into these contrasting ideas? Luther was the kind of anti-modernist person then. He was the person who was not for republic and democracy but for a special German way of authority so to speak. Tell me about Karl Bauer. I read your paper about Karl Bauer was a very important portraitist who wrote Luther's gaze should strike the viewer like a lightning bolt.

Karl Bauer is a portraitist of Luther who was born at the end of the 19th century and he worked well into the 20th century. He had a nationalist Protestant approach to Luther. So Luther was shown as the epitome of what a German might be. That later developed into a view which supported nationalist socialism and therefore I see Kalbauer rather critically although to pupils nowadays the portraits are rather attractive because Luther is shown in a very vivid kind of way in contrast to what you see when you see Karnach's portraits, for example. There are postcards and when you had your confirmation you got a certificate with your name and

verse from the Bible and sometimes a very large colorful picture of Luther by Karl Bauer. Take a look at Martin Luther yourself through Karl Bauer's eyes. We've posted an image on the Ideas website. The National Socialists, of course, Hitler and the like, actually couldn't find very much that in Luther which they could use. You cannot use religion or freedom for National they could use. You cannot use religion or freedom for national socialist intentions. But there was one thing, and that was Luther's anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. That was easily exploited by national socialists for their causes, so they could give the impression that Luther would have been a supporter of

National Socialism. The National Socialists argued, you have suppressed the anti-Siamite Luther. You have suppressed the real Luther. And of course there was theologians who said, yes, let him bring out. And others, of course, we didn't know about this. The ones who really saw Luther as a national socialist, this extreme position did exist yeah, but there was also many who sort of they did not think that Luther was supporting the Nazis, but they would argue we shouldn't interfere in the political sphere, so to speak. But both sides turned to Luther for support.

Both sides considered themselves as following Luther, so to speak. In the wake of World War II and the division of Germany, East German communists seized on Thomas Münzer, Martin Luther's radical antithesis. Münzer had backed peasants in their revolt against Luther's allies, the princes. Princess. Thomas Münzer was the hero of the socialists in East Germany. In 1983, the 400th birthday of Martin Luther, the East German government made a shift and then Martin Luther was part of the pre-bourgeois early revolutionary movement, as they would call it then. Before 1983, Martin Luther was not the kind of hero and then later on he was seen as a kind of pre-humanistic, pre-modern person who sort of brought the shift to the modern world, which of course had its climax in the East German government. Times change, so do ideas about Martin Luther. Thirty years after the fall of German communism, fascism is back.

Albrecht Gek. In 2017 I went to Wittenberg to give a talk from Luther to Hitler, question mark. And it was the time of the general election then and there was a poster of the AFD, Alternative for Germany, our right-wing party. And on the poster Luther was shown and the caption ran, I would vote AFD. So he would vote right-wing. And my paper was about this question, so I included that into the talk, arguing

that there is no direct link between Luther and right wing politics in the 20th century. There may be a link between right wing politics today and Luther, because they take him and right-wing politics today and Luther, because they take him and use what they can use and ignore what they can't. Today, of course, most Germans see Martin Luther in a more progressive light. German Lutherans have established a Luther trail to commemorate the Reformers' positive achievements. In Worms, the town where Luther took his famous stand five centuries ago, the Protestant Church and regional council have organized an exhibit called Here I Stand, Conscience and Protest. Generations of women and men who stood up for their ideals at huge personal

cost are presented as walking in Luther's footsteps. The Puritan dissenter Anne Hutchinson, anti-Nazi partisan Sophie Scholl, Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. But were these people truly Martin Luther's intellectual descendants? Harold Storch isn't so sure. This is a kind of door opener for modernity or modern life. That's the idea of this exhibition. The problem is that Martin Luther, on the one hand, he has kind of two legs, yeah?

The one leg stepping into modernity, but the other leg is in the Middle Ages. I personally would see him more as an ambivalent phenomenon, like the problem with the Jews, and he was not against burning witches, for example. In the Lutheran theology there is this word, simul justus ac peccator, the man is also justified and a sinner. Theologically he is a beloved sinner. He still is a sinner and not an ideal person.

And all these concepts, Luther more or less as an ideal person, also the ideal of the door opener to freedom. All these ideas have the problem that you may forget he's still a person with many many dark aspects. Across North America and in the UK, statues of famous figures with dark aspects are being torn off their pedestals. Not so in Germany, certainly not Martin Luther. I think we have got Luther statues all over the place really in Erfurt, Eisleben, Hamburg, Worms, Berlin. These statues were established in the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. And even though in those years it was a nationalist approach.

And people are rather critical of that today. These statues and monuments are not torn down. But what is being done at the moment is that the reception of Luther in the 19th century and in the first half of the second century is critically discussed. So the present 500 years anniversary is not an opportunity or not taken as an opportunity to extol Luther but to critically discuss his legacy and the way it was perceived throughout the centuries.

Then again, some Germans do think Luther's statues should come down. Thomas Kaufman does, of all people. For the past year, Kaufman has been laboring on a critical edition of Luther's December Testament. It's a masterpiece. But in Kaufman's mind, Luther the man is another story. In Protestant Christianity, there's a second, so to say, ritual after baptism. In the age of 14 or 15, you get confirmed. And there I was confronted with a very heroic picture of Martin Luther.

The strong man fighting against Papacy, a really heroic man who has created the German language, and I didn't like this Luther very much. And why didn't you like Luther, back then? Yeah, I have no inclination to heroes at all. But he was kind of depicted as the ideal German, the national hero. Yes, of course. And we have these... Father of the nation.

Yeah, and we have these terrible bronze monuments with a heroic strong Luther and so on. I think we should get rid of them. But here at Wartburg Castle, in the heart of the former East Germany, Martin Luther is something of a favorite son. That said, the local friar, who hurled scatological jibes at the pope and his inkwell at the devil is as much a legend as a real man. Many visitors come and are irritated because there is no ink spot and they say, where is the ink spot?

We say the ink spot isn't there anymore since the 19th century. But most people say, no, I saw it when I was a child. I know. People say I came to the Wartburg when I was a child. When I was a child. I remember seeing the Innsport. I remember seeing the Innsport, but it wasn't there. And it's just the imagination and the legend is so... It's a mighty legend that spreads over all places Luther stayed for some time. You were listening to a documentary by contributor David Kattenberg. Will the real Martin Luther please stand up?

Special thanks to Dorothee Menke and Daniel Micks, Wartburg Castle, Harold Storch in Worms, Thomas Kaufmann in Guttenen, Albrecht Gek in Osnabruck, and Jeff Myers in Frankfurt. Thanks as well to the Protestant Culture Circle of Antwerp and the Kalmus Ensemble for their beautiful recordings. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideasas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed.