‘German youth! You stand on consecrated soil. What consecration? It was here that Luther, that man of God, gave the German word of eternal truth to the German Volk! – and sparked the struggle, the bloody struggle for spiritual freedom and the equality of citizens!’ (p. 11). So rang the voice of philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries to a mass of university students at the Wartburg in 1817. Patrick Hayden-Roy’s The Luther Myth takes these celebrations in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars as the starting point for his study. The Luther Myth assesses the German reception of Martin Luther beginning in the nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. The thrust of Hayden-Roy’s argument is that, beginning in the early 1800s, a tide of German nationalism remade Martin Luther by plucking him out of his late mediaeval and early modern world of Saxony and projecting him as a timeless symbol of German pride and heroism. This projection would culminate in the mythical Luther as the living religious spirit of the German Volk and its ideal political expression, National Socialism.
Hayden-Roy’s first chapter lays the groundwork by highlighting how German zeal after Napoleon’s defeat permeated interpretations of Luther. Here, Luther was transformed ‘from a religious reformer to a central symbol of German national identity, whose image and legacy provided legitimacy for an authoritarian system of government, at least among middle-class Protestants’ (p. 27). The next two chapters focus on the Luther of World War I and its aftermath. Theologians in the new German Empire found in Martin Luther a man of the people, the ideal expression of ‘Germanity’. After the decimation of Germany and the establishment of the Weimar Republic, Karl Holl’s work served as a seedbed of a generation of scholarly refashioning of Luther, a ‘Luther Renaissance’. Here, Luther would be ‘reborn’ as a ‘living spirit’ embodying the divine-human relationship as one of conscience and revealing the hidden God in the course of history.
Chapters 4 and 5 unfold various images of Luther in Nazi Germany. Drawing on Holl’s doctrine of God in history, theologians attempted to make sense of Germany’s plight as God’s judgement and the rise of National Socialism as an act of divine providence for the German Volk. While some in the Confessing Church sought to resist the German church’s coopting of Luther by the powers that be, most interested parties saw Luther as ‘a cornerstone for the new regime’ (p. 103). Hayden-Roy observes the rapidity with which some baptised Luther in the waters of Nazi ideology, such that by 1934 the Luther of the Holy Roman Empire could become completely unmoored from his historical context to become the ‘German Luther’, a visionary voice touting the Volk’s peculiarity, sloughing off the foreign and the old in favour of the native and the new.
(As an aside, most of the dissent to nationalist appropriations of Luther in The Luther Myth emerges from those within the Confessing Church. While perhaps outside the scope of this book, it would be interesting to compare dissenting voices from the left. Quite famously, Friedrich Engels derided Luther as a class betrayer against the voice of the common German. How did German leftists prior to and amid the rise of the Third Reich perceive the elevation of Luther as the spirit of the Volk?).
The next two chapters examine key ideas in Luther’s writings that could be moulded to justify the regime and its policies. Nazi apologists transposed Luther’s figure of the Wundermann, a man appointed and gifted by God, a hero, onto the person of Adolf Hitler. More immediately inflammatory, however, was Luther’s writing on Jews. In his chapter, ‘Luther the Anti-Semite (?)’, Hayden-Roy contextualises Luther’s anti-Jewish polemic – it was not synonymous with Nazi anti-Semitism – while being realistic about its practical impact in the twentieth century. ‘In the end’, Hayden-Roy writes, ‘the distinction between Luther the anti-Semite and Luther the anti-Jew held little consolation for the Jews of Germany and exemplifies why Luther’s anti-Jewish writings were so enabling for the measures being taken against the Jews, since it eroded any religiously motivated determination to resist such persecution’ (p. 195).
Chapter 8 surveys a peculiar text from 1937, Arno Deutelmoser’s Luther, Staat und Glaube, which took Holl’s divinely imbued history to a radical conclusion: that Luther negated Christianity by dissolving the separation between Creator and creation. The state was sanctified by Luther as the sole tangible projection of God’s power; thus, Luther, unbeknownst to himself, became a prophet of das Reich. By rejecting churchly power and relying on conscience, Luther ‘prepared the way for a new pagan religiosity of power’ (p. 213). While Hayden-Roy notes Deutelmoser’s argument was excoriated by German church leaders of the day, he comments that Deutelmoser’s understanding of Luther ‘connects remarkably well with much of what was being published about Luther at the time’ (p. 213).
The final chapter deals with the postwar assessment of Luther and his connection to notions of Germanity. Karl Barth was critical of Luther’s theology of law and gospel, noting it was ripe for misapplication among German Lutherans, given their cultural setting. Anglophone scholars and, more frequently, popular writers sought to tie the failures of Germany to a distinct German otherness and authoritarianism, with Luther as a figurehead. On the other hand, Christians in Germany of all stripes tried to shield Luther and, by extension, German Protestants, from such critiques. They instead sought to hold on to notions of German religious heritage and pride in the face of postwar international scorn.
Patrick Hayden-Roy has written a compelling and thorough story of how historical subjects are so often moulded to fit the needs of the current moment, especially in perceived social crises. As he shows, such remoulded subjects can often be – and are – deployed with disastrous results. In this way, Hayden-Roy’s research is similar in spirit, if not in content, to works like Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (University of Georgia Press, 1980). The force of Hayden-Roy’s research lies not in the overarching thesis – that Martin Luther’s legacy was co-opted in an era of German ethno-nationalistic fervour – but in the sources he deploys to make his argument. Readers will be interested to see how the book interrogates popular literature and performance, placing it alongside theological tracts and ecclesiastical debates. Hayden-Roy’s work joins an important dialogue about Luther and historiography, especially Christine Helmer’s How Luther Became the Reformer (Westminster John Knox Press, 2019) and Sam Young’s forthcoming Saint of the Republic: The American Myth of Martin Luther (OUP, 2026).
