In 2008, the city of Wittenberg announced that in anticipation of the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, the coming decade would be recognized as the “Luther Decade.” This decade would be celebrated with worship services, academic lectures, and public performances, culminating in the quincentennial Reformation day celebrations in October 2017. In support of these efforts an official website was launched at which visitors could learn about the histories of Luther and the Reformation, view photos of historic sites associated with Luther's life and work, and even purchase Luther cookies, balloons, and other Reformation-themed bric-a-brac. These competing uses of Luther—as a confessional figure, as a German national-historical symbol, and a cultural commodity—are the theme of Barry Stephenson's Performing the Reformation.
In Performing the Reformation, Stephenson, an independent scholar affiliated with Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, argues that Luther and the Reformation are living sites of memory whose meaning is embodied and contested in the popular festivals held in Wittenberg. But Stephenson regards the historical and theological study of Luther and Wittenberg as a crowded field. Instead, he opts for an ethnographic study of how meaning is “performed” in the rituals, pilgrimages, and public spaces of Wittenberg. Heavily informed by the symbolic anthropology and ritual studies of Clifford Geertz, Ronald L. Grimes, and Victor Turner, Stephenson uses images, interviews, and direct observations of the Wittenberg Reformation celebrations from 2004 to 2006 to produce a “thick description” of the festivities and the popular reception of Luther and the Reformation. Thus, Performing the Reformation is an interdisciplinary study that weds ethnography, the anthropology of ritual, collective memory studies, and cultural history. Performing the Reformation also includes a DVD with video and still photos from the Reformation festivals, facsimiles of brochures and advertisements publicizing the festivities, and a list of websites directing the reader to additional information. Footnotes in the text smartly refer the reader to the corresponding chapter of the DVD, rendering the included multimedia an invaluable complement to the text.
The most notable chapters of the book explore how Wittenberg's festival and tourism scene is charged with religious, cultural, and local meaning. Lutherans recognize Wittenberg as a site at which they might revitalize their church. “A Mighty Fortress?” examines how ecclesiastical institutions compete to re-sacralize the festivities in the face of their growing secularization and commoditization, while debating the precise meaning of Luther and the Reformation for their own congregations. The mainline German Evangelical Church (EKD) and Evangelical Church of America (ECLA) sponsor religious services in the Wittenberg churches, hold confirmations at the Reformation festival service, and perform social services and outreach. At the same time, the conservative Independent German Lutheran Church (SELK) and Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) express concern that that the unruly nature of the Reformation festivals and the presence of irenical Lutheran congregations like the EKD and ECLA indicate that “there are no more Lutherans in Wittenberg” (183). In response, SELK and the LCMS have established a Lutheran mission in the city, invited conservative American Lutherans to make pilgrimages to Wittenberg, and eschew worship services sponsored by the EKD or ECLA.
The following chapter, “Martin Luther, German Hero,” explores how post-Wende Germans look to Wittenberg as a site at which they might find a useable past to recreate their fragmented histories. Indeed, a 2003 poll in which respondents ranked Luther the second most important German of all time (after Conrad Adenauer) suggests that Luther is still a significant cultural and historical resource. Visitors to Wittenberg march in processions, interact with living history exhibits, and visit museums dedicated to the Reformation. But the history of Luther's appropriation for nationalist purposes—most notably by nineteenth-century German emperors and later by the Nazis—and the difficult fact of Luther's anti-Semitism complicate the contemporary use of Luther as a national-political hero. Indeed, in some cases Luther and Wittenberg have become objects of derision, protest, and even vandalism.
The decline of Luther as a religious and cultural figure has opened a new space for the use and abuse of the reformer's memory—that of heritage tourism and economic development. In “The Carnivalesque, Processing Change,” Stephenson deftly chronicles how local entrepreneurs have increasingly commoditized Wittenberg and transformed the city into what one American visitor called “a Lutheran Disneyland” (191). Actors and participants in historical reconstructions are paid contractors employed by a Leipzig firm, while local Lutheran pastors struggle to find clerical appointments. Vendors cater to visitors' compulsion to drink, eat, and purchase souvenirs. The Reformation past and the city of Wittenberg itself are rendered stage props in a dramatic historical play—a play in which neither spiritual enrichment nor edification are the primary ends, but one in which the economic transaction is paramount.
Stephenson's Wittenberg is a startling amalgam of the sacred, the secular, and the market, begging the question: To whom do Luther, the Reformation, and Wittenberg belong? The author rightly notes that “Luther has been a renewable resource through which to enact, resist, and process social change, and a touchstone of Lutheran, Protestant, German, and even Western identity” (10). But while Stephenson's insights into the perpetual use and abuse of Luther's memory are compelling, they will not be unfamiliar to historians of Luther's reception. Heinrich Bornkamm, E. W. Zeeden, John Tonkin, and A. G. Dickens have studied how Luther and the Reformation were remembered and represented by novelists, philosophers, politicians, theologians, and historians. More recently, Stefan Laube has studied the (re)production and staging of Luther in Wittenberg's museums and material culture.
Nevertheless, Stephenson's ethnographic study of the contemporary Luther festivals, and decidedly “thicker” descriptions of the spaces and rituals that embody the celebrations is a welcome post-history to the important work done by the previously mentioned historians. And although Stephenson considers the historical and theological study of Luther and the Reformation a crowded field, future historians of the Luther Decade and the coming quincentennial of the Reformation will undoubtedly count Performing the Reformation as one of their most cherished sources for its rich images of the contested state of Luther and the Reformation today.
