In this informative, fascinating, and accessible book, Thomas Albert Howard examines how the Reformation has been conceptualized, interpreted, and remembered on past commemorative occasions, from the first centenary jubilee in 1617 to this year’s quincentenary. The greatest attention is paid to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the author’s own specialism. Focused mostly on German-speaking areas, but with illuminating forays into the United States and Britain, Howard details the changing ways in which Lutherans, particularly in academic/political settings, invoked their movement’s founder on major anniversaries, and his use as exemplar for generations of Protestants seeking explanations for the Protestant faith and the role it played in their world. From the outset, Howard distinguishes between the past itself and the remembered past; studies of social memory, after all, have taught us that these two are rarely the same thing. Rather than reckon with this discrepancy within Lutheran history, which itself would make for a fascinating study, Howard situates his focus squarely on the latter, drawing on the theoretical work of Jan Assmann.
The first chapter examines the jubilees of 1617 and 1717, when commemoration events were dictated by a confessionalized state in which magistrates and ecclesiastical authorities cooperated closely in policing religious orthodoxy. Howard’s analysis—based on a bevy of evidence including official ordinances, sermons, academic addresses, debates, poems, plays, prayers, pamphlets, woodcuts, and commemorative coins—reveals that the centenary of Luther’s protest against indulgences, called Thesenanschlag, saw the solidification of Luther’s post-Reformation reputation, the symbols of his reform movement established, and the association between theological and political authorities tightened. It is significant that the bases of these celebrations were not events in Luther’s life, though they arose from commemorations of Luther’s birth, baptism, or death, but his Thesenanschlag. In the decades running up to the centenary, Lutherans had watched a newly confident Counter Reformation take back earlier territorial losses in the Holy Roman Empire, and their own movement become riven with division between ‘Gnesio-Lutherans’ and ‘Philippists’; Howard demonstrates that the first jubilee celebration was framed in the context of both of these threats to Protestantism. He shows that while further intellectual developments, such as Pietism and early Enlightenment ideas about the natural sciences, made a small mark on the 200th jubilee celebrations, on the whole the precedents set by the 1617 anniversary set the mold for the 1717 commemorations.
1817, however, was a ‘turning point’ infused with modern sensibilities, including Enlightenment rationality, mature Pietist tones, emerging historicism (about which Howard has written articulately elsewhere), and early German nationalism sown by the German victory of Napoleon at the Battle of Nations in 1813. Howard argues that the 1817 commemoration was driven by two key aims: strengthening Prussian nationalism and tamping down intra-Protestant divisions. The confessional nature of the 1617 and 1717 jubilees thus gave way to three hallmarks of modernity in the tercentenary anniversary: bourgeois society, nationalism, and historical progress.
The tercentenary in fact was the beginning of an entire century of Reformation jubilees, and Howard’s third chapter targets the largest of them all, the 400th anniversary of Luther’s birth in 1883. The changes in Germany since the tercentenary included German unification under the Bismarck’s Protestant leadership, Leopold von Ranke’s narrative historiography, the Industrial Revolution, and Romantic nationalism. Howard shows how these intellectual and political developments found their expression in the person of Luther, who emerged from the 1883 celebrations as a hero of the German Empire. Even in America, where Luther had been celebrated by relatively small numbers in 1817, the 400th birthday commemoration was marked by ‘practically all American Protestants’, who understood the event through a Whiggish historical lens.
Howard’s final substantive chapter outlines the ongoing change of Lutheran memory in major political developments of the twentieth century, including the World Wars, Nazism, and the partition of Germany. He chronicles the fraught atmosphere of the 1917 anniversary, for instance, in which Luther’s emergence from the ‘bondage’ of the Roman church served as a metaphor for freedom. Readers are especially recommended to read Howard’s explanation of retrospective attitudes toward Luther during the 450th Reformation anniversary in 1967, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution: here the theologian’s memory was bound up in Cold War interpretations of history. Howard also identifies the presence of Luther’s memory in the major religious developments of the last century, including ecumenism, the Second Vatican Council, and secularization.
Using the metaphor of ‘the sampling of geologic layers’, Howard eschews exhaustiveness for a very focused study, and it pays off on the whole. Some readers might wish for more discussion of how German Catholics understood this emblem of Germany: there are tantalizing glimpses of Catholic responses to various jubilees throughout but more sustained attention could be given. Certain threads are presented in the introduction and seemingly abandoned (for instance, the ‘ethics of memory’ [7]). Howard nevertheless masterfully draws together a wide range of sources and sensitively interprets them to offer a compact and persuasive account of Lutheran commemoration in the past five hundred years. Though it was written in time to reflect on the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Thesenanschlag, it will no doubt be of value to scholars of the Reformation, memory studies, and historiography for a long time to come.
