Joachim Eibach, Marcus Sandl. Protestantische Identität und Erinnerung: Von der Reformation bis zur Bürgerrechtsbewegung in der DDR. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. 258 S. EUR 39.90 (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-525-35575-6.

Reviewed by Edward Mathieu (History Department, Beloit College)
Published on H-German (September, 2005)

The Interdisciplinarity of Protestant Identity and Memory

Joachim Eibach and Marcus Sandl have put together a remarkable, important volume whose influence should go far beyond the history of religion. This collection of essays, the product of a conference at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in March of 2001, brings together a broad interdisciplinary range of authors.

The essays are divided into three sections according to historical period; there is an interesting division of discipline and periods--the first section focusing on the period of the Reformation is presented by historians, the second, on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by a theologian and two literature specialists, while the final section on the modern period features a music historian, a theologian, an art historian, and a literary scholar. This results in a shifting lens of analysis through time. The use of identity and memory as a common focus or theme lends the interdisciplinarity and broad temporal scope of the volume a coherence; the collection of essays by a very diverse set of scholars thus achieves a remarkable sense of unity. This unity is surprisingly (to me) not disrupted by the disciplinary division of the sections.

As its title implies, the book's coordinating themes are issues of identity and memory in the history of the Reformation and Protestantism. The authors approach identity and memory, and their complex interaction, from a diverse range of perspectives. There is the memory of Christ, of the time before the Reformation, and of the time after the Reformation. There is a changing sense of time as a frame for memory. There is the representation of memory in altar paintings, in hymnals, and in East German art that engages in resistance. There are efforts to connect the present with a remembered past. And, as Eibach and Sandl suggest, "memory of the Reformation and of the Protestant past have contributed to the construction of identity over the course of several hundred years" (p. 10). Most commonly in these essays, there is a sense of Protestant identity, though particularly in the modern period the memory of a Protestant past is related to national, class, and dissident identities.

A central problem in the volume is the rejection of tradition and the production of new traditions; this derives from the paradox of a claim to exclusive reference to the text of the bible and the need for constructions of community and identity beyond that text. A fundamental aspect of the Reformation was the rejection of the received "human" traditions accumulated over the centuries by the Catholic Church. Yet in the face of the critique of human tradition, adherents of the Reformation themselves needed to build traditions in order to develop a collective sense of identity. The authors in this section thus deal in various ways with the tensions and dialectics of the smashing and building of tradition. They address the ways transformations of memory, representation, and conceptions of time are implicated in the construction of Protestant identities.

Sandl, in his essay on Protestant biblical interpretation and the developing memory of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, suggests that Protestant identity--and unity--was achieved around 1580 not by agreement on dogma, but rather through the accumulation of a shared remembered past (p. 43). The Reformation rejected human tradition in favor of a return to the biblical text. But, according to Sandl, the development of a new tradition, including a new sense of history, was required in order to establish an acceptable Protestant identity. Sandl finds a key moment in the 1580 commemoration of the remembered unity of the Augsburg Confession.

Susan Boettcher tackles the peculiar and seemingly theologically contradictory representations of Lucas Chranach's altar paintings. Boettcher explains how Lucas Cranach uses a traditional aesthetic idiom--the altar painting depicting the great events of the history of human salvation--and thus reconsiders the relationship with the past and one's salvation. A peculiarity of these paintings is the placement of contemporary figures of the Reformation into the great scenes of Christ's work. In one painting, for instance, we see Christ on the Cross, being observed by John the Baptist, Luther, and Cranach. The blood that pours from Christ's side falls directly on Cranach, while Luther shows to the painting's audience the text of the bible (pp. 65-66).

Boettcher sees in Cranach's representations an immediate connection of the Reformers, and thus of the Protestant faithful, to Christ and salvation. Placing the Reformers in the scene with Christ indicated a direct connection to the time of Christ (the reformed church was thus the re-constructed original Christian church) and an immediate relationship (instead of one mediated by time and the office of the church) with Christ, the Savior. There is in this a call to remember Christ's sacrifice in a new way, dramatically changing the temporal nature of that remembrance. Protestants felt the need to oppose a Roman tradition, which they saw as a wandering from God's word, with their own reconstructed tradition (p. 82).

According to Thomas Fuchs, the Reformers and their followers did not want to dispose of religion as a factor of social integration; they thus needed to establish religious traditions that would serve to support a Protestant identity. Fuchs calls the Reformation a memory revolution, in which traditional knowledge was delegitimized; a new Protestant memory-system was based on a contemporized original Christianity (p. 89). Reformers sought to find correlations between the text of the bible and the traditions and practices of the early Christian Church. This remembrance was actualized in an array of practices, sermons and theater pieces (and, drawing on other pieces in this volume, also hymnals, paintings, meditation guides), thereby creating a new Protestant tradition.

Paralleling the argument of Susan Boettcher, Fuchs finishes his essay with a reference to a Cranach altar painting. Fuchs's example portrays the protagonists of the Reformation as apostles at the Lord's Supper with Jesus. Fuchs uses the painting to suggest a transformation of the relationship between the believer and Jesus' offered salvation. According to Catholic theology, Fuchs writes, Christ's sacrifice is removed in time from contemporary Christians, who need the mediation of the Church to receive Christ's offered salvation. The placement of the Reformers at the table with Christ, Fuchs concludes, suggests the immediate relationship of the believer and his savior (p. 89).

Susanne Rau approaches the construction of a Protestant tradition through the writing of urban histories. This was, she explains, history written around the experience of the Reformation. According to Rau, as the Reformation receded into the past, the need for an imagined past increasingly became central to Protestant identity (see especially p. 107). The urban histories of Protestant towns centered on the local introduction of the Reformation and the leaders as well as its martyrs of that movement. History writing thus became a part of the fight for right teaching. The writing of history was a means to traditionalize--and thus perpetuate--the experience of the Reformation (pp. 93, 101).

The second section of the book sees a shift forward in time to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a move to a new set of disciplinary approaches. The increasing temporal distance from the Reformation sees a continuing engagement with memory, involving new or transformed religious practices. A key theme in this section is the personalization of religious practice and an increasingly inward-focused faith.

Literary scholar Stephanie Wodianka sees in a number of Protestant practices a turning inward and individualization of religious thought and an inward, individualized aim of meditation mortis. Wodianka begins with a consideration of new Protestant responses to thunder and lightning. She suggests that while traditional thought and practice saw religious intervention in the case of storms as directed at calming the outside forces or assuaging God's wrath, under Protestantism there is a refocusing inward--storms are a call from God to the sinner to reflect and repent (pp. 121-123). Wodianka calls storms "natural memory-events of Protestant identity" (p. 125). She relates this to meditation on death, a practice Protestants were fascinated with in the seventeenth century. She explains that meditation is a conversation with oneself, rather than a dialogue with God as happens in prayer. That focus on one's own life and death were part of a growing sense of personal responsibility and capacity for one's own salvation. This involves, suggests Wodianka, the personalization of salvation writing by and for the rememberer.

Theology scholar Christian Senkel looks at the changes and developments of the Protestant hymnal in the seventeenth century to uncover the personalization of Protestant faith and a related individualization of identity. Senkel describes the expanded selection of songs, including a broadening range of topics, increasing bibliographic infrastructure including division of songs into thematic sections, and the inclusion of multiple indexes. He argues that this allowed for a personalized engagement in religious practice.

Joachim Jacob, another literary scholar, addresses increasing significance of the "economy of speech and memory" in Protestantism of the eighteenth century. In the context of increasing personal responsibility for one's own salvation, Jacob tells us, the individual Protestant must carefully consider how actions, words, thoughts, and even memories will relate to salvation. This construction of an economy of salvation brings people to police themselves individually. The identity as a Protestant thus depends on an economy of memory.

The third section brings us forward to the modern period. Here, a central problem is the relationship between Protestantism and modern culture. These authors contend that Protestantism, or the memory of Protestantism, is still constitutive of identity.

The Bach revival in the nineteenth century offers music historian Markus Rathey evidence of the significance of Protestant religion in the early development of a German national culture and identity. He points out that the Bach renaissance was the product of bourgeois initiative and received primarily by a bourgeois audience. Bach's religious works in particular offered a musical style that was distinctively not foreign, while its recent performance history was not associated with aristocratic patronage.

The dialectic of memory and forgetting frames literary scholar Almuth Hammer's engagement with the relationship between culture and Protestant religion in the modern era. She argues that liberal theologians in the late nineteenth century embraced the close relationship of culture and religion, thus embedding their religion in the modern and associating theology with an openness to diversity. But after the First World War, a conservative reaction drew Protestantism out of time, reasserting its independent, autonomous, and self-sufficient role as a reference for identity and engagement in the world. For this later set of theologians, there could be no constructive coming together of religion and (modern) culture.

Theological scholar Bernd Oberdorfer argues that memory of Luther was a central element of Protestant identity in the twentieth century. Theological disputes arose over the interpretation of the significance of Luther; at the heart of the debate was the question of Luther's modernity or historicity. Two fundamentally different ways of remembering Luther viewed him either as a temporally distant historical actor or a timeless ahistorical embodiment of a normative absolute. The former allowed for a translation of Luther into modernity, while the latter might be used to police modernity. So while Luther remains at the heart of Protestant interpretation, he is used to support fundamentally different positions.

The final essay, by Art Historian Annete Dorgerloh, examines the memory of Luther in the late phase of the German Democratic Republic. Here Luther has lost much of his religious significance. Dorgerloh describes his significance as symbolic of resistance. The celebration of the 400th anniversary of Luther's birth in 1983 brought him into the public imagination, but the SED state failed to maintain control over his memory. East German citizens who were dissatisfied with the political status quo remembered the figure of the defiant Luther standing up against the authority of the Church and the Emperor as a model for their times. Dorgerloh sees his appeal in this instance going far beyond the small circle of practicing Protestants.

This separation of Luther's significance from a dogmatic religious identity in conflict with other Christian interpretations, the editors of the volume maintain, is important to our broader ability as scholars to step back from impassioned personal attachment to the memory and identity of Protestantism. They point to a deconfessionalization in the twentieth century, especially since 1945, that has reduced the confrontational nature of Christian identity and memory in Germany.

This is a contribution of great interest to those interested in the long-term development of Protestantism in Germany. It is, though, a volume whose significance goes beyond the history of religion. The collection offers important interventions in the study of time, memory, and modernity. It is, I might add, also a pleasure to read.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Edward Mathieu. Review of Eibach, Joachim; Sandl, Marcus, Protestantische Identität und Erinnerung: Von der Reformation bis zur Bürgerrechtsbewegung in der DDR. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11137

Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.