Celebrating Luther’s 400th Birthday: Luther as Symbol of Protestant Unity and Division in the German Reich

In 1871, Otto von Bismarck established a German Empire whose population was two-thirds Protestant.  The anti-Catholic Kulturkampf dominated the Empire’s early domestic agenda. This effort had the effect of asserting Protestant political hegemony, and uniting Catholics, despite theological and political differences, into a minority bloc.  This Protestant political and demographic hegemony, however, obscures fissures within the Protestant majority.  While Protestants shared common cause against the Catholic minority, Protestants themselves remained deeply divided in matters of politics, theology, and German and Protestant identity.  

Celebrations of Luther’s 400^th birthday in 1883 exhibit both this shared Protestant ambition of establishing Protestant hegemony in the newly-founded German nation-state as well as Protestant disagreements over matters of politics, culture, and religion.  To all Protestants, Luther was the great national hero, even the father of Germany itself.  Protestants of all persuasions heralded Luther as author of the German language for his translation of the New Testament into German, and as a bulwark against foreign oppression in his battle against the pope.  Yet rival groups of Protestants – liberal, cultural, conservative, and confessional – recreated a Luther in their own image.  Each representation of Luther served, on the one hand, to assert Protestant national identity in a religiously pluralist Germany, and on the other, to assert a particular interpretation of that identity against its Protestant rivals. These competing Luthers simultaneously united and divided German Protestants.  

This paper explores these competing presentations of Luther as emblematic of competing visions of German Protestantism in the late nineteenth century with particular emphasis on their consequences for the establishment of rival Protestant political parties, cultural milieus, and religiosity and theologies.