William Tyler
Martin Luther Changes the Future

William Tyler - Martin Luther Changes the Future

- And welcome therefore to this second talk on the history of Germany. And today, my story is one of religion and war. Two topics that sadly too often have gone together throughout history, religion and war. And the century in which we’re looking at a slice of Germany history today, two centuries, the 16th and the 17th century, and the title religion and war applies to the talk that I’m giving. I’m going to spend half of it, roughly half, on religion, which is Martin Luther and the coming of Protestantism, and the second half on the 30 Years’ War. Now, before you tune out, I am not going through the 30 Years’ War battle by battle and campaign by campaign, that would be an impossible task in half an hour and not a task that I’ve ever welcomed because it’s such a complex one, but it is very important in terms of its consequences and it’s that that I want to talk about. So then, war and religion. It’s to remind us all though, before I start, that Germany is not a nation state in the period I’m talking about, the 16th and 17th century. The largest part of what today we call Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire governed by the Habsburg family, as indeed it is to be until the end of the first World War when it had become the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But in the period we’re talking about, the Habsburgs ruled not only the Holy Roman Empire, which includes what we would call Germany, but also Spain, lands in America, the Netherlands, Switzerland, whole ranges of places within Europe, and that is why in the second half of the talk, the 30 Years’ War is important because it breaks the Habsburg’s stranglehold on Europe. I suppose we all know that the basis of war has to be justified. In the modern day, politicians appear in their parliaments and give an explanation of why we are going to war. In fact, the United Nations charter quite clearly says why we go to war.

In the past, Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, called and talked about it in terms of a just war. That is to say a war that is justified, and they said it’s right to fight a war for the right reasons. The problem is, people were allowed to define the right reasons for themselves, no different than politicians today who say well, it’s right that we should intervene but of course, the people that we’re intervening on don’t think we have a right to do so. And then secondly, the doctrine of a just war said that if you did fight, then you were to fight in such a way that it was the right way. Now today, we don’t talk about the right way, but we do talk about international humanitarian criteria, but if we look at the Russians in Ukraine, they are breaking every possible international code of what is acceptable in a modern world and much of it in an older world as well, as acceptable. And certainly in the 16th and 17th centuries, the people talked about fighting wars in the right way, but then of course, did not do so, but managed to argue that they were, and this is a problem that humankind has been arguing over for a long, long time. Are wars justified? After all, Christianity, the dominant religion in Western Europe, talks about being a religion of peace and a God of peace, and yet we find ourselves studying European history where there’s war followed by war. So this interesting concept of religion and war, and I’ll come back to that right at the end of my talk today when we look at the consequences of the 30 Years’ War.

But our story rightly begins today neither in war nor in religion and nor indeed in the 16th or 17th century, but it does begin in Germany, it begins in Strasbourg, and it begins with a man called Johannes Gutenberg who invented the printing press. It’s always debatable this because he was flitting with various types of printing presses before he got it absolutely spot on in about 1450. So the printing comes in 1450, and before any of you put up on my screen here that William, it was known in the far East long before, I know but I’m talking about Europe. I’m talking about the first time we’re able to print books and pamphlets, and it was just as huge a revolution, arguably a greater revolution, even than the internet is in our own lifetimes. Now, Gutenberg realised that he had produced a printing press but where was his market? And he decided that his market was the Roman Catholic church. Why? Because the Catholic church issued edicts, dictates, and most importantly, particularly here in Germany, it was issuing indulgences. Now, indulgences were a piece of paper which previously had to be hand written by a scribe, and the indulgence gave you a carte blanche for your sins. It forgave you all your sins so that according to Catholic theology, you did not have to go from Earth into purgatory before you could go to heaven. You could bypass purgatory and go straight to heaven, and you could get an indulgence for those who had already died, and according to Catholic theology, were languishing in purgatory. You could, as it were, unlock the door and send them to heaven. Of course, you paid. You paid the Catholic church large sums of money to buy the indulgence, and the Catholic church was always in need of cash, mainly because its hierarchy lived high on the hog as they say, but the business of issuing the indulgences was a ready market for Gutenberg and so he began his whole marketing aimed at the Catholic church.

In fact, he was going to print a bible, today called the Gutenberg Bible, a printed bible, but he found himself deeply in debt, like many inventors do. He’d spent a lot of money and a lot of time in developing the process. He was in debt and he needed someone to pay him out of debt, and he’s got a business partner, a man called Johann Fust. Well, Gutenberg found what many inventors have found before, that you get into bed with a businessman and then they take over, and Fust took over. He paid the debts off but he took over the business, and he is the one that made the money and not Gutenberg. It’s a well known sort of story, isn’t it? Of inventors who don’t themselves make the money, but someone makes the money out of them. The Catholic church, at the beginning, thought this is wonderful. We can print all the stuff we could never print before and we can pass it to the churches so that the priests can weed out the notices from Rome on a weekly basis. This is really revolutionary, they thought, but they didn’t quite realise the enormous potential that printing had as the middle ages ended and the modern age began. In fact, if you were a university student, that might be an essay title. How far can you say that it was printing that ended the middle ages and began the modern age? Discuss. One of the things that printing led to was that people who wished to challenge the authority of the church, the theology of the church, could now do so by reaching a mass audience, hence the rise of Protestantism. And secondly, because Protestants printed bibles and prayer books in the natural language of the country, so in our case, in German, then if as Protestants said you as an individual could make your peace with God, you didn’t need the intermediary of a priest, you did it yourself, and you did it by reading the bible.

But if you can read the bible, you had to be literate, and so literacy really takes off in this period, and as soon as you’re literate, you don’t only read the bible, you’re going to read other things, and it is said that in England, for example, by the first half of the 17th century, pornography had taken off along with political tracts. Indeed you could argue that the English civil war might not have been as possible to happen if it had not been for printing which enabled both sides to print defences for themselves, arguments against the others. So printing had an enormous effect on literacy and on Protestantism, and both literacy and Protestantism had an enormous effect on Western Europe, not least in Germany. And you might say well, this is coincidental, Protestantism and printing at the same time? Well in a sense yes, because there were people, sometimes historians call them proto-Protestants, which I think is incorrect, there were challenges to the Catholic church across Western Europe from John Wycliffe and the Lollards in England to Johannes Huss and the Hussites in the Czech lands of Central Europe. There had been challenges but they were unable to reach a mass audience because they lacked the ability to do so, they didn’t have printing. In the same way now that anybody can use the internet to reach the world, here I lecture to people thousands of miles away from where I am sat. The minute I first came into adult education in the late 1960’s, that wasn’t even a dream. We never even thought about doing what I’m doing today, and so these huge changes came about because of printing.

So people like Martin Luther, and he wasn’t the only one, think of John Calvin and Calvinism in Geneva in Switzerland, these men, and they were all men, were able to reach out through the means and medium of printing to get their message across and then that way, the church, that is to say the Catholic church, was unable to control it. They’d managed to control Wycliffe and Huss, they contained it and it was easy to contain, but it is not easy to contain when Protestantism has the opportunity to send printed stuff out. In fact, Luther is credited with writing an enormous number of books and not just books but pamphlets, and so a third of all published books published in German in the first half of the 16th century, a third of every German book published in the first half of the 16th century was written by Martin Luther. That’s an extraordinary thing. 33% of every book, one book in three was not just a religious book, but was a religious book or a religious tract written by one man. Now you begin to see the power of the printed word. Luther himself, Martin Luther, was born in Saxony in Germany in 1483. His parents were peasants, although his father rose up the social scale when Luther was a child. He became a miner and he actually bought a mine, and he became an ore smelter and began to make a little money. But Luther himself came from a poor peasant background, but his father made enough money that he was able to attend the University of Erfurt, and his father had hopes that he would have a nice middle class career as a lawyer, but instead of which he had a moment in time when he had a revelation. Evangelical Christians talk about having conversions based upon Saint Paul’s conversion, and this conversion of Luther’s he believed that Saint Anne appeared to him and saved his life, and he dedicated his life to the church and he became a friar. Now, a friar is rather like a monk. He couldn’t marry, he’s a priest, but he operated not behind the walls of a monastery but out in the field.

Not as a parish priest but as someone who moves around doing good but also preaching as well, and that was Luther’s life as a Catholic. He had an opportunity of attending a conference in Rome which he went to, and there he saw for himself the rotten heart at the centre of the papacy of the day. Cardinals and the popes themselves leading a life of well, leading a life that even shocked the non-religious nobility of Europe. Women, prostitutes, gambling, sex and gambling, parties like none other. Bringing in food from the ends of the Earth, serving, in one place, parrot’s tongues on gold plates. On a number of occasions, throwing the gold plates of the dinner out of the window into the River Tiber. Well, in that case they did have a net underneath, to be honest, to fish them back up again. And Luther saw this and, as it were, the scales fell from his eyes and he was appalled by what he saw. He went back to Germany and he’s now prepared to preach against the lifestyle of the high clerics in the Catholic church, the bishops, the archbishops, cardinals, and even the popes. Said this isn’t what God intended, and he said look, we should go back to the bible and we should use the bible in order to guide our morality and our lives. And thus, having a bible that was in German and published for all to read, was an enormous step forward. He objected to so much, he objected to, because our current question today, he objected to the fact that priests were not allowed to marry. He himself was to marry, interestingly. He was 48 and he married an ex-nun who was 26 and she proposed to him. Now interestingly for me, many of you know I was educated in an English public school which was a Christian Evangelical school. I am not an Evangelical Christian today and one of the reasons is I really find the hypocrisy of many Evangelical Christians to be unacceptable, but Luther was presented as a great hero. A man from working class background who educated himself and who then spoke out against the greed and horrors of the Catholic church.

Not only it’s way of life but also theology, particularly the mass, believing that the bread and the wine of the mass did not change into the body and blood of Christ but remained bread and wine, all of that. And also believing that you were saved by faith alone and not by works. Now, that gets us into a complicated theological argument and I’m not going down that route. Let’s simply say that Luther created a theology which was at odds with Rome, and his criticisms of the Roman Catholic church, although well placed, were not well received by the Catholic church. Up until this point, the Catholic church is the one unifying factor in the whole of Western Europe, it’s the last remnant, if you like, of the old Roman Empire. I know we can talk about the Holy Roman Empire, but the Catholic church is in Scotland, Ireland, England, it’s in Sweden, Norway, it’s everywhere! It is the one faith, the one religious faith, it dominates and thus the pope has enormous power, enormous power, but once Luther is on the scene, all that changes. Now, I said he married, he and his wife actually had four children, well, they had more than four, but they had four children that lived into adulthood, and we’re told that Luther absolutely was smitten, not just by his wife but by the children. He even went so far as to become a sort of early feminist saying well, he said, and we have to take it that he actually meant all that, he actually said in a lecture that coitus interruptus, which was the only form of birth control the Catholic church recognised, and strictly speaking still is the only birth control the Catholic church recognises, Luther actually said that this was unacceptable. Why? On the grounds that it was frustrating for women. Well, his wife, I wouldn’t want ever to meet Luther, thank you very much, but I’d like to meet Mrs. Luther, I’d bet she’d have a fantastic story to tell.

So his views about women was certainly not those of the day, and that’s about as heroic a figure as you can make Luther appear, in my opinion. In the Germany that we’re talking about, in 1524, there’s a peasant’s revolt, they call it the Peasants’ War. Engels is to write about it in the 19th century, and in this Peasants’ War, you’d have thought the child of peasants, Martin Luther, the opponent of papacy and the princes of the church, would take the part of the people rebelling against their secular lords, against the poverty and the famine that they endured, but no, he supports the lords against the peasants. Why? Because he needed the great lords of Germany to become Protestant in order to be able to spread his message wide and far. In other words, Luther played down the part of his religion which might have made him supportive of the poor because he was acting in a political way as well. That doesn’t sit easily with the picture that we have in Christianity of Luther being this great hero. I don’t think he was. I don’t know and we have no interviews with him, obviously, but I suspect that he became more and more self absorbed. Certainly his views as a younger man were much more moderate than they were as an older man, he died in his 60’s, where then around he became older, and that’s absolutely so when it comes to Jews, whom I’ll speak about in a moment. Now, why should that be? Why should he become more reactionary as an older man? Well, you might say well, age makes you reactionary. Well, his form of Christianity should not have done that but it did, and maybe it isn’t his form of Christianity but more to do with him as an individual. I find Luther a perplexing character, really. So what happened to him when he begins to preach and he begins to write? Well, he’s summoned by the Holy Roman Emperor to a meeting in the city of Worms, which I always liked as a child because it’s spelled worms, and doing A level, it was a nice, easy one to remember. The diet, which is an official meeting of the Holy Roman Empire at Worms.

Now, Charles V was genuinely a devout Catholic, more devout than most of the popes of his time, and Charles V summoned Luther hoping that he would recant his beliefs and Luther didn’t recant and instead, made a defiant speech. He said in part, and this is Luther’s own words, your Lordships, your Lordships seek a simple answer. I will give this manner plain and unvarnished reply. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures, the bible, or clear reason, for I do not trust in the pope or in the councils alone, he means the councils of the church, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves. I am bound to the scriptures that I have quoted and my conscience is captured the word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything. And thus, Protestantism is up and running in 1521. Now, Luther should, according to the laws of the Holy Roman Empire or indeed those of the church, have been arrested, maybe even killed as a heretic, but he’s protected. He’s protected by some important people, the most important of whom is the German Duke of Saxony, his own area who converts to Lutheranism. And then there is a knock on effect, a domino effect, that in the North of Germany in particular, many of the rulers turned to Protestantism, and so he was never again brought to trial, never stopped from preaching, never stopped from publishing, and went on to live a full and, as far as one can see, satisfactory and complete life, and the year of that is 1521. Now, what started him off was a few years before that and it was indulgences. In 1515, the Church of Rome said that if you purchase an indulgence for your sins, they weren’t going to cover future sins, you need to pay again. They also said look, you can pay for your mom and dad, your uncle and auntie as well, for the first time. They were pulling large sums of money in.

Moreover, they said you don’t have to confess, you can just buy without having to say whatever you had done, and the Church of Rome sent a man called Johann Tetzel, who was another friar, to go around Germany collecting the money, and that provoked Luther into pinning up, in 1517, on the doors of the Parish Church of Wittenberg Saint Mary’s, 95 pieces, 95 points, the majority of which dealt with indulgences, condemning the Catholic church. That is what started it all, and then in 1519, he published them, printed form of those. In 1521, he’s brought to the diocese of Worms and the split occurs. Protestantism is now up and running in Germany and it’s spreading. Not just Lutheranism, Calvinism is spreading, Calvinism has even spread into Germany from France and from Switzerland, and others spring up. And in England, Protestantism takes hold in a particularly English form, which isn’t the subject of my talk. Now before I leave Luther, and I’ve got to look at my watch carefully, before I leave Luther, I feel I must say something and I want to say something about Luther’s anti-Semitism. I know Trudy may have or will be speaking about this subject, but we had a word on the phone and she seemed not to mind if I made some points. Now last week if you’ll remember, we talked about how Tacitus’ book, Germania, was later to influence the Nazi theories about a pure race. It is said that Luther’s views about Jews also influenced later Nazis. Indeed, at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, the man who was the publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Sturmer, Julis Streicher, said at the Nuremberg Trials that the source for his beliefs, the source for his anti-Semitism, was Luther, and if he was going to be blamed, Luther should be blamed as well. The judges merely said that they weren’t looking at historic example of anti-Semitism, but they were looking at the anti-Semitism of the Nazi party, but the fact that Streicher hoped to use that as an argument at Nuremberg is itself of interest.

Now I said before, I think Luther is a crude and coarse peasant. He isn’t like John Wycliffe, the proto-Protestant in England who was an Oxford dom, extremely learned and would have appeared extraordinary middle class, and even if he disagreed with you, would have put it in nice, polite language, not Luther. This is Luther in 1543, three years before his death, he wrote a treatise on the ineffable name and generations of Christ, and he imagined the devil stuffing Jewish orifices with filth, and his actual words were: the devil stuffs and squirts a Jew so full that it overflows and swims out of every place pure devil’s filth. Yes, it tastes so good to their hearts and they guzzle it like sows. When writing of the death of Judas Iscariot, he adds this: when Judas Iscariot hanged himself so that his guts ripped, and as happened to those who are hanged, his bladder burst and the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready to catch the Judas piss and afterwards together they ate the shit. Now that is truly, truly appalling language, and for a man of God to use such language, words fail you. I don’t want to defend Luther about anything if this was the sort of garbage he came out with. And you might say, and all the Jews seem to me might say, but William, we can’t, and I’ve heard Jews say this to me in talks, we can’t keep going over the distant past, the more immediate past of Nazism and the holocaust is more important to come to terms with in the modern age. Well, the argument is and has been for a long time that Luther and Nazism are like that. Luther’s anti-Semitism and Nazi anti-Semitism are linked. There’s been an interesting case going through the German courts in the last few years, and only finally determined in the summer of last year, 2022, and it concerned the town where Luther preached and he put up the 95 pieces and it included the church.

The Parish Church in Wittenberg of Saint Mary where on the wall of the church is a sculpture in sandstone and it shows a rabbi lifting the tail of a pig to look for his Talmud, and as he stares, other Jews are gathered around the belly of the sow to suckle, remember that Luther referenced a sow in the passage I just read, and above this scene is scrawled, in a mangled inscription, of the Hebrew phrase for the holiest name of God, Jehovah, and these appalling anti-Semitic images were common iconography in Germany. The Judensau or the Jew’s Sow, the Jew’s Pig. They began in the 1300’s and the printing press carried on the motif in religious books, even on playing cards, and right into the modern period of the 20th century. And even today, 20 of these horrendous sculptures are still embedded in German churches and cathedrals. A man called Michael Dullmann, who was brought up as a Christian and converted to Judaism, began a legal case for the removal of the sculpture in Wittenberg in particular, and the case finally reached, in the summer of 2022, Germany’s top court. Dullmann had lost his case in earlier courts, now it comes to the top court. Now you might expect, given the holocaust, given the ideas of the 21st century, that Dullmann would win and even if he didn’t win in local and regional courts, and Saxony is a hotbed in modern times of neo-fascism, the alternative right, surely Germany’s top court would finish this forever. Well, Reuters reported on the 14th of June last year, this is the Reuters report, it’s only a sentence: Germany’s top court ruled on Tuesday that an anti-Semitic mediaeval sculpture can stay on the facade of a church in the Eastern town of Wittenberg, rejecting an appeal by a Jewish plaintiff who has for years argued it is an insult to all Jews. 2022, not Nazi Germany, not Luther’s Germany of the 16th century, but the democratic Germany of 2022. True, there are explanations in German of what this is about, but there it is in an area of Germany which has very recently voted for the far right. Should we be concerned?

Yes, we should, in any democratic country in Europe for that, at the very least it could be taken out and placed in a museum. These are the same arguments that we know in Britain about the slave trade, the pulling down of statues, my own city pulling down the statue of Colston who was a slaver and a benefactor of the city, but a slaver, in a city which now has a very large African-Caribbean population who find it objectionable as Jews find these Judensau, Jewish pigs unacceptable. This is about as far from wokeism, in my opinion, as you can get. History doesn’t go away. History has a horrendous ability to reassert itself centuries later and be used centuries later, but there’s a court, the highest court in the land of a democratic Western Europe, I can’t cope as a lawyer with that. So let us Luther and merely note that Protestantism changed Western Europe forever. There was a book written a long time ago now called Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Well, by RH Tawney, he was a great adult educator incidentally. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, now that theory has been challenged since because you can point to Spain and you can dismiss the argument, but there is a truth in the argument because it’s Protestant Netherlands and Protestant England that develop a capitalist system. Protestantism increased literacy, and although literacy does increase in the Catholic world, it doesn’t increase to the extent that it did in the Protestant world, because it reaches down in Protestant Germany to the lowest who want to read the bible. Some of you maybe well know the story there, but a long time ago, one of the things I was responsible for as the head of service in the county of Warwick was adult literacy, and we always tried to make adult literacy have a connection to the students who wanted to learn to read.

So we did lots of things for young men who couldn’t read based upon car maintenance manuals and books and magazines about cars, and then I had this extraordinary telephone call from an Evangelical black church in the town of Nuneaton and they said we would like to have a literacy class, which we would provide. So I said that’s fine, is there anything else that you want? And they said well, we would like it based upon the bible. So I said well okay, did you have a view? Yes, they said we want all our members to be able to read the Gospel of Saint John for themselves. And so in the 1970’s, we were running a course in adult literacy based upon the Gospel of Saint John, and I felt as though I’d gone back four centuries to the 16th century when Protestants were doing exactly the same thing. So let’s leave Luther and to some extent Protestantism but not entirely, and turn, oh goodness, turn the religion to war. The 30 Years’ War fought across many countries in Northern and Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. The countries where it was fought, quick list, Holy Roman Empire, Spain, France, Dutch Republic, Denmark, Norway, one country at the time, the Dutch Republic, Sweden, Brandenburg-Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria. It was a terrible, terrible war. Historians argue over how many people died in this war. It’s now thought that deaths caused by the war itself, in military and civilian life, death caused by the spread of disease gave figures which amount to 1.3 to 1.8 million dead, military alone, a military controlled death. Adding civilian deaths, then they add up to a huge figure, and it’s thought today, in modern terms in Germany, that something like 7-8 million people died out of a population of something like 18 to 20 million. We think the population of Germany in 1600 was 18 to 20 million and in 1650, had dropped to 11 to 13 million.

War took many lives, these were huge armies that the world had not seen before, but it also saw people dying of famine as the armies lived off the land. It saw people dying of disease, typhus, the black death even. It was a terrible, terrible, terrible war, and its consequences have lived with us ever since. This is what MacGregor says in his book, Germany: Memories of a Nation: The war was devastating for the civilian population and for the economy. As armies crisscrossed Germany, they spread terror and plague. Jacques recorded the brutal impact on villagers in Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, on the arrival of the pillaging army. Similar horrors were experienced across all of Germany and never forgotten. It is generally conceded that the economic consequences of the war was still discernible well into the 19th century. In early May, 1945, Hitler’s successor, after Hitler’s suicide, at Mardonius ordered the German armed forces to stop fighting. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, rationalised Germany’s capitulation by explaining, this is Speer, the destruction that has been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the 30 Years’ War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the scale of that evil. Indeed, in a recent survey done of Germans, most Germans feel that the 30 Years’ War, for consequences for the population as a whole, was worse than World War II. Now, whether that’s true or not, it’s what Germans think, and we talked before about what people think.

I said before I started that I’m not going to go through the battles, if you want to read that, read Peter Wilson’s book, which is in paperback now, called Europe’s Tragedy. If I turn it on its side, you can see how enormous it is. If you want something short, you can read the Osprey book, the 30 Years’ War with pictures, but I want to say something about the end of the war. The war finally came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. 1618 to 1648, 30 years. Who gained, who lost, what changed? Those are the questions that I think are interesting. Military historians are fascinated about the war and whether Gustavus Adolphus, Swedish king, changed tactics forever by the tactics he used in the war. We can do all of that, but it’s the long lasting effects. First of all, Calvinism was recognised throughout Germany as a legitimate religion alongside Lutheranism. Secondly, the Holy Roman Empire, although they didn’t realise it at the time, was irreparably damaged. The Holy Roman Empire is to stagger on until Napoleon, less than two centuries ahead, and its successor, the Austro-Hungarian Empire will struggle on ‘til 1918, but the Holy Roman Empire as envisaged by Charles V is broken forever. Why? Well, because the princes and dukes of the various states and statelets of what we call Germany increasingly became independent of the Holy Roman Empire. I don’t mean officially independent, but in real terms, independent, practically independent, but the emperor’s wishes from Vienna did not penetrate anymore into Germany.

And so Germany is now genuinely a fractured and fragmented country, but it gave some of those states, Saxony, Brandenburg-Prussia, and Bavaria, increased opportunities to develop economically and militarily, and that’s precisely what Brandenburg-Prussia was to do, and although it is to take nearly three centuries, it is Prussia that in the end unifies Germany in 1871. It’s a long time to come and it’s a strange story that Germany is so divided up until 1871, but it gets there in the end. The Dutch provinces, the Dutch Republic, is finally recognised by Habsburg Spain as an independent country. Today, that means the Netherlands and Belgium, it’s independent. Sorry, Belgium comes away from Spain and becomes the Austrian Netherlands, later joining the Netherlands proper, but the Netherlands, the Dutch Republic, becomes independent and develops as this extraordinary powerhouse of finance and imperial dreams. The Swiss Federation, which had been part of the Holy Roman Empire, becomes entirely independent, although as you well know, the separate cantons, the Switzerland, have an independence of a dynamic sort within the Federation. So two new European countries are born and recognised, the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Federation. Belgium has to wait. The Netherlands incidentally is Protestant, Belgium is Catholic. Sweden enters its golden age at this point. It gained control of Western Pomerania on the European mainland with a city of Stettin. Remember Churchill’s speech, Stettin in the Baltic. It gained the archbishopric of Bremen, the port of Weimar, the bishopric of Verden, and it controlled the Baltic Sea until finally, it lost out to Russia in the next century.

This is Sweden’s golden age. Germany is interesting. Germany has an economic revival and a military revival, and if we turn to the Osprey history of the 30 Years’ War, to short circuit what I want to say, it reads like this: One problem to be addressed in Germany was how to overcome the economic damage of the war and to create a climate of security for economic progress. The states actually encouraged immigration and to do this, a policy of religious toleration was advantageous. This is like the problem faced by Britain post Brexit. Without the ability to employ Europeans from the EU easily in Britain, we have a serious crisis of staffing, of filling jobs. Now, the Germany post 1648 recognised this and the states that went ahead, like Brandenburg-Prussia, incidentally Protestant, said come to us, we don’t mind if you’re Catholic, just work hard. The author goes on to say they attempted to do this and believed that the underlying policy should be to rebuild the economic capacities and the population resources. Then they went further and the economists argued if the population increases and our economic output increases, then the rulers of the states can tax more, and what would you do with that taxation? They had relied heavily on mercenary armies during the 30 Years’ War, now they create their own armies, and we all know what happens in Prussia and the Prussian Army. But there are Americans listening to me tonight, and if you take Hess in Germany, all Americans will know that Hessian troops sought to put down the American Revolution of the 18th century when Britain employed Hessian mercenaries to fight in North America, in what is to become the United States. In other words, the rulers of these German states made cash, big sums of cash, by hiring out their armies or parts of armies to other people.

England being a case in question, not just in America in the latter part of the 18th century, but in the early part of the 18th century in England or Britain itself to crush the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745/46. So you get a militarization of Germany and an economic revival of Germany, plus Germany does not become embroiled in overseas expansion like the Netherlands, France, and Britain. Now having mentioned France, France is the main gainer out of the 30 Years’ War because it managed to split Habsburg, Spain from Habsburg, Austria. France, let me just read this sentence, France obtained sovereignty over Alsace-Lorraine and was confirmed in the possession of , Tulle, and Verdun in the North, which it had seized a century before. France thus gained a full on frontier West of the Rhine, we’re back to the Rhine again. France became, at this point on, the dominant power in Europe. Most of you did the French course, remember Louis XIV, Louis XV? This is France’s moment in the 18th century, emerging out of the 30 Years’ War. First Sweden in Western Europe, then France. Not Germany, of course not, Germany is fractured. Germany’s moment comes with unification in 1871. And here I say what about Britain? What about England? We didn’t have anything to do with it. Despite the fact that James I’s wife was the daughter of the king of Denmark who was involved in the war, we did not become involved in the war. It was the usual stance of unilateralism in a sense, outside of Europe, the same reason America has always tried to follow such a policy, and we followed it. We also had other reasons and that is that we went into our own civil war in the 1640s and 1650s. So England does not play a part in this war whatsoever. Our moment has not yet come. There’s one final interesting piece to add and that’s this.

This is Robert Cole’s book on the history of Germany. The 30 Years’ War encouraged European states to embrace the balance of power view of European affairs that would dominate for the next two centuries, and to recognise the destructiveness of war. In the 18th century, European wars tended to be fought on a limited basis by small armies engaged in carefully controlled battles with a minimum of bloodshed and a maximum of negotiation, and that’s true. Balance of power, you create blocks that balance each other. Of course, the whole system failed in 1914, but it worked in the 18th and 19th centuries. It doesn’t work when Germany becomes a united state. I’ve touched on a number of things in this talk which link the past, as it were, to the present, and I feel that is really a very important thing to do, and I want to finish with two things. One, the Times had a book review this week, a book about the history of Russia and Russians by an ex-British ambassador, and the Times wrote the following: I’m going to have to move my lamp, it’s getting dark in here, I can’t see. And the Times said this: The former ambassador to Moscow examines 1,000 years of Russian history, explaining how cherished myths evolved and how the Russians have rewritten their past to buttress their self belief. This is a fine introduction to how the past has shaped the Russian present.

Now, I’ve made many references today to how the Nazi past was influenced by this 16/17th century past with Luther, but I want to add in one third thing from this period. I mentioned that Luther did not support the peasants in the Peasant’s War and that is true, but I want to read one little piece, and I promise I will end very shortly, from Jeremy Black’s book, On a Brief History of Germany, and Black writes this: The Content Organisation of Presentation of History reflected in East Germany after 1945, communist perspectives who were German , there was a focus on past German radicalism. For example, on the Peasant’s War, 1524, which was depicted as having been widespread, it wasn’t. East Germany held a conference attended by its leader, Erich Honecker, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the leader of the Peasants’ War, a man called Thomas Muntzer. A radical cleric was Muntzer, celebrated by Engels in his 1850 book on the Peasants’ War, which I mentioned earlier. Muntzer was presented in East Germany as a radical revolutionary who offered an alternative to Martin Luther, seen as part of a bourgeois revolution and therefore, Muntzer was seen as a precursor of East Germany. Wow.

So both West and East Germany are using different parts of Germany’s past to justify the present that they were living in. This link between past and present, the myth of the past, as well as the reality of the past. I’ve got to finish. I’m enjoying this too much but I’ve got to finish and I’m going to finish with the last sentence, last couple of sentences from Peter Wilson’s excellent book, Europe’s Tragedy: The History of the 30 Years’ War. All the books are on my blog, I’ve put a new set of books up. Though they are now largely silent, the voices from the 17th century will speak to us from the innumerable texts and images we are fortunate to possess. They offer a warning of the dangers of entrusting power to those who feel summoned by God to war, or feel that their sense of justice and order is the only one valid. They offer a warning of the dangers of entrusting power to those who feel summoned by God to war, like Putin, or feel that their sense of justice and order is the only one valid, Ukraine . History is the past, but the ideas of the past influence the present and not always for the good. Thank you so very much for listening, I’m sure people have lots of criticisms and comments, it looks as though I’ve got lots.

Q&A and Comments:

No, I didn’t suggest that Rome was able, sorry, if I gave the impression that Rome issued printed pamphlets on a weekly basis, no they didn’t. What I’m saying is that the clergy across Europe were able, on a Sunday, to issue stuff that had come from Rome. It would take a fortnight or so to reach them. They come by sea as well, by the way, not just by land. One Friday, I approached a group of men in habits bending over an enormous stove, very busy cooking. I asked the first one if he was the chip, oh no, no, no, chipmunk, no, I’m the fryer, I’m the fish fryer.

Oh Martin, Martin, dear. Oh dear, I’m afraid I got as bad a sense of humour as you.

Ron, whatever good Luther may have done, it is outweighed by his advocacy of exterminationist anti-Semitism, indefensible. I think I said that. Yes, you are absolutely right, he’s indefensible over that. I don’t want to defend Luther, I’m sorry, I don’t want to defend Luther.

Q: Oh Sandy, I seem to recall that Luther is supposed to have suffered immensely from constipation, might that have affected his temper as he aged?

A: I think yes, you’re right. Whether that did affect it, but I do think health probably played a role as he got older, I agree with that. Oh no, no. I’ve set you all off on humorous things.

Marjorie says Luther lost weight on a diet of Worms. Oh no, no. I’ve started it. Oh dear, I shouldn’t have started this at all.

Q: Was the conversion of the Saxon nobility completely political, an easing of religious demands?

A: No, I don’t think it was political. What happens is if the duke becomes a Protestant, then those in Saxony also became Protestant after a Treaty of Augsburg in 1555. So no, there are genuine conversions to Protestantism, but it also becomes political as well. Well, we’ll see part of that when we come to Prussia.

Roe says I agree, we cannot forget old histories, it shows centuries old hatred. Absolutely right, absolutely right. Marion says Luther’s language is an ignorant insult to what Judaism has given to the world. He seems to have been one of the blind who cannot see, pity that other ignorant people continue to keep anti-Semitism alive until today. Yep. Yes, you’re absolutely right.

Q: Didn’t Luther court the Jews?

A: Yes, well, he believed that all Jews should convert to Christianity. He thought it would be an easy task to convert them to his form of Christianity and when they didn’t convert, then his anti-Semitism becomes worse, absolutely.

Lynn says thank you for filling in the gaps of what I learned about Luther at school. Not one hint of anti-Semitism, but not surprising considering I was one of four Jewish girls out of 800. No, but I don’t think, Lynn, I’m sure you’re not as old as I am, but even if you’re not, I don’t know which country you were educated in, maybe it was in Britain, then they would not have taught that. It simply wasn’t taught.

And Adrienne, you are quite right. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, absolutely.

Sheila says it’s sad that humanity aren’t against the exhibition of statues like the one in Wittenberg and Colston statue in Bristol. I should offend everyone, not just the African or Jews in Germany. Yes, it’s a very difficult question and the Colston statue is not quite the same as the Jewish pig. These are difficult questions. Yes, everyone should stand up against things like that and I think if such a thing happened over a Jewish, somebody will tell me I’m wrong, I cannot think of the Jewish pig sculpture in a church in Britain. I may be wrong but I can’t think of one, and I think if the question was raised, that would be altered.

Q: Did you use a New English Bible?

A: I didn’t teach it. I have no idea, Margaret, what they used. I imagine they did. I have no idea what version of Saint John’s Gospel they used. I did go and visit the class, but I was more interested in talking to the students. I was the inspector, I don’t know what they taught. There was a person who organised for the whole of North Warwickshire. Oh Nanette, I went to school in Switzerland, learned a history about Luther, but about anti-Semitism I’m surprised he never touched. I was the only Jew in the whole school. She was educated, she says, in Protestant Switzerland, so that must be German Switzerland rather than French or Italian. I hope I’m right in saying that. I think it must be German Switzerland, that’s then par for the course.

Q: What is the difference between Lutheranism and Calvinism?

A: Oh, Calvinism believes, very quickly, Calvinism believes in predestination. What is to be, God has already decided and you can’t change it. Lutheranism says that you must seek your way to God through faith, and you demonstrate your faith by doing good works. Calvinism believes everything’s predestined, I’m not a theologian and a lot of theology is very conflicting and doesn’t always make logical sense.

Q: Where did Germany get money for war?

A: From the peasantry, basically. It got it from taxation. Some of them borrowed money and they would have borrowed, there were big financial firms in Germany by this stage in the early 17th century, but they would also have borrowed from Northern Italy and the Netherlands had a financial basis as well. Michelangelo’s Moses holds the 10 commandments tablets in his horns on his head, anti-Semitism conflict with Christianity. As I just said, there’s no logic in theology whatsoever. I was taught someone misinterpreted the word raise emanating from the head being horns. Sorry, I don’t know.

Q: How could a country like Switzerland claim neutrality?

A: That’s a modern thing, not a thing from this period when it was involved in the war as part of the Holy Roman empire. The story of Switzerland and Swiss neutrality is a strange one, especially if you can find a war memorial. I found a war memorial to World War II in Switzerland, interesting and one day, I’ll talk about Swiss neutrality, it’s an interesting subject. You indicate Germany did not participate overseas in expansion of some of the other European countries.

Q: What about Germany’s Africa?

A: This is not that period. Germany’s Africa is 19th century, it’s the exploitation of Africa by European nations in the 19th century, and it’s to do with the development of the unified Imperial Germany, which of course is one of the reasons that Germany went to war in 1914, because it felt it had a bad deal over empire as compared to Britain and France. But that is not the story of the 16th and 17th century explosion, for example, in North America, Canada and the United States today, by both Britain and France and by the Dutch in the Far East, as well as by France and Britain, that’s quite clear. You are referring to a different era of colonial history than I was, I hope that’s clear and I hope that wasn’t a rude way of putting it, I sounded quite loud.

Joan says, oh Joan, that’s a nice comment. It appears clever to state what you have today, I don’t intend to be clever, made no claims for that, however, it’s very inadequate in terms of economics. I wasn’t talking about economics, Joan, if I was doing economics history, I would have said more, but we will return, doubtless, in the future to some economic history of Germany, but it wasn’t on my agenda for today. Please remember , I have 60 short minutes and I have to make choices, and the choices I’ve made, let me be clear, the choices I’ve made are where German history influences European history, that is Luther and the 30 Years’ Wars, but it also is how it influences later Germanies, and I think both Luther and the 30 Years War do that. The story of economics in these centuries is not based in Germany, it’s based in the Netherlands and in Britain.

Q: What did they fight about?

A: What do the people always fight about? Religion, land, power.

Yvonne, your honour, I couldn’t possibly comment. You mentioned earlier on the usage of printing for politics and pornography, do you really think there’s a significant premium? I like that. But it’s actually true, in England’s case it’s true, I’m sure it’s true everywhere.

The man’s name is Dullmann. Read, or if you can, see John Osbourne’s Luther play written in the 1960’s.

Sheila, I think that’s a message to everyone.

Oh okay, Arthur, I know your point but I can’t do that, I have a limited time and I’m not going to start doing pretty pictures on the screen. I described it and I didn’t describe it in a thousand words, I didn’t have time. If I’m fussing around with pictures, no, I don’t do it, sorry. You can find it, it’s very easy to find it, takes a matter of seconds.

Right, I think I’ve done all the questions, all the smacking of hands bits as well as the thanks, and so thank everybody for listening, whether you agree or disagree, it matters not at all. That you engage with it and make your own views on it and come to your own conclusions, that’s all that matters, and thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next Monday.