Luther’s Lost Books and the Myth of the Memory Cult

Abstract

On the morning of 18 February 1546, in his birthplace of Eisleben, Martin Luther died of heart failure. Just as Johann Friedrich, Elector of Saxony, had feared, and Luther himself had prophesied, his trip to the duchy of Mansfeld to settle a jurisdictional dispute had proven too much. Despite the efforts of the people gathered at his bedside, who included two of his sons, the two pastors Justus Jonas and Michael Caelius, two local doctors, and the count and countess of Mansfeld, Luther passed away peacefully. Indeed, the fact that Luther’s death was a good death was immediately turned into a matter of public record in the report sent by Jonas to the Elector in Torgau. Arriving before daybreak, the report was read to the Elector and his response, in the hands of the same messenger, arrived back in Eisleben with an unambiguous command: ‘Bring me the body’.1 These words were directed at the counts of Mansfeld, who, as they had explained in their own letter to the Elector, were hoping to keep Luther’s body in the duchy to ‘honour’ the fatherland of his birth. But Johann Friedrich insisted it be returned to Wittenberg, and even ordered that they accompany the corpse to the borders of Saxony. Accordingly, the next day the counts joined a three-day long funeral procession that passed through Halle and Bitterfeld before ending in Wittenberg with the burial of Luther’s body in the Castle Church. Following funeral sermons by the Wittenberg reformers Johannes Bugenhagen and Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s coffin was lowered — to a greater depth than that of a normal grave — into the earth beneath the floor of the church.