Mitteleuropa: Wittenberg
It’s been longer than I planned since I last wrote. It feels as though I write this at the beginning of every post, and it also seems as though I begin each one with a disclaimer that I have very little to actually say. In this case it seems to actually be true: the main thing I have to offer is pictures, so this blog will be little beyond glorified captions.
So, picking up where I left off in last October, I rose early one morning, slipped out of the hostel and onto the U-bahn to the hauptbahnhof, and then onto a train headed southwest. As the country slid by under the clear autumn sun, my disillusionment with Europe and anxiety about social interaction in a foreign tongue slipped into the background, and I was once more captivated by the physical idea of Europe, which of course provoked its own sort of anxiety – an anxiety of longing. Looking out over the landscape, I saw exactly what I expected, and yet could not quite wrap my head around how a place exists that is open and flat, and yet is only covered in copses of trees and fields so green as to almost be teal. I’m from the American west, a place of famously vast open spaces, but where I live, the flat land is largely developed, and even in rural areas, it’s just not that green. It’s fascinating to see a place so settled and physically civilized, and yet also so agricultural and wet and mild. I struggle to think of anywhere else in the world quite like it, and I want to live there, and worry that I can’t.
After a couple hours, I arrived at Wittenberg, which some years ago changed its official name to Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, just so tourists and pilgrims wouldn’t be confused about where they should go if they want to see Marty. The town is small, ancient, and possesses the idyllic charm that I just cannot quite articulate or ever seem to hold on to. It’s less to do with the town, and more to do with it’s setting in the countryside, with the sun on yellow leaves as you walk from the station to the town, or maybe even just nostalgia projected back five months and colored by the new wave song I’m listening to right now. I think everything I start writing after about a paragraph turns into a recursive loop of chasing that sense of very specific yet indefinable longing, and with it the frustration that I can’t live there, and the embarrassment that I’m writing in circles yet again. I want to think that surfacing this thought process is interesting or truthful or artistic in some sense, but I’m not convinced it is.
There are two main historical churches in Wittenberg, and both are closely associated with Martin Luther. To reach them, or really to get anywhere in the old town, there are only two narrow, parallel streets along which the city stretches in a line.
There is, of course, a great central square, starring statues of Luther and Melancthon, as well as buildings that look like Herr Mendels’ confections. Here is the Stadtkirche, while further west is the Schlosskirche, with its great drum of a tower.
It is here, in the side of the Schlosskirche, the Castle Church, that Luther is said to have nailed his theses to the church door. While the exact form of this original protest is subject to some historical debate, the door possesses enormous symbolic value, so it’s a shame that the original was destroyed in a fire centuries ago. It has since been replaced by a great metal door, with all 95 theses stamped into the door itself – a reflection of how the outsider revolt of the Reformation quickly became the dominant religious power in the area.
The interior of the church holds Luther’s mortal remains, and like all these grand churches, when the light is right, it is a place of great Mystery. For me, Luther is a figure that I took for granted growing up, despite my protestant faith. Perhaps it was my aversion to making too much of particular church fathers, in the same way that protestants can be skeptical of saints, that led me to not care much about Luther. Or perhaps I just was more interested in military history as a child. Now, as an adult, my feelings on Luther are more complicated. I’ve studied the medieval world that preceded him extensively, and I love it, and don’t wish to discount its traditions and insights; but I also am enormously grateful that I don’t live in that religious context, with the focus on fear and works and a hierarchy on earth. At the same time, my struggles with my own protestant beliefs extends to a caution around the reformers of the sixteenth century, a fear of what they said – though that fear gains power from my belief that they are right in many ways. So, coming to the epicenter of that revolution in faith is like approaching the center of a vortex. Only now all is calm there, and the storm has long since passed by to other climes.
From the tower, you can see the town that birthed this great turning of the world’s gyre that ultimately led to the particular faith I hold dear. It’s a small and sleepy town, surrounded by a land of green trees and fields, and white windmills, beating out the march of time against the sky.
