Abstract

The events of the early 1520s in Wittenberg form a key-issue within the history and memory of the reformation. Using the example of the so-called “Wittenberg Movement“, the paper traces back this memory to contemporary perceptions of this event and reveals how a specific view gradually asserted authority over different perceptions within the memory of subsequent generations. Regarding the events of the 1520s in Wittenberg in a chronologically broader context, the paper demonstrates that these cannot clearly be distinguished from the usual conflicts in late-medieval Wittenberg. These findings render it dubious whether the social unrests in fact changed in nature or degree in 1521 and thus can be distinguished from different conflicts and identified as a “Wittenberg Movement“. If we follow these doubts, then our memory of this event is in need of explanation.

The roots of this memory can be traced back to the interpretations of Luther himself, which in contrast to different perceptions became noticeable already among the contemporaries. In a letter to the elector announcing his return from the Wartburg and in the Invokavit-Sermons, Luther established the “Wittenberg Movement“ as a counter-image to his own way of Reformation by arranging the events in Wittenberg in a chronological and narrative order. The “Wittenberg Movement“ appears here as a coherent story which already contains all the main features of the image which is memorised today: the radicalism of the movement, the escalation of anticlerical actions, which accelerates and culminates in the final iconoclasm, and the crucial role of Andreas Carlstadt.

This interpretation was further reinforced in the later pamphlet controversy between Luther and Carlstadt on the question of Christian images, in which Luther again referred to the Wittenberg iconoclasm. A further important step in shaping the memory of the “Wittenberg Movement“ was taken in the second half of the sixteenth century, when the documents in the archives where rearranged under the Lutheran elector August I. of Saxony. Thus, the article highlights the crucial role of archives and their powerful meaning for shaping and directing historical scholarship and cultural memory. Any scholarship on the Wittenberg Reformation since the sixteenth century had to use this structure of the archives in Weimar, which mirrors the social values and interpretations of Lutheran Saxony in the late 16^th century. In this way, the history the “Wittenberg Movement“ is at the same time the conscious and unconscious achievement of a specific story over different perceptions.