In his essay, Wolf raises the question of the relevance of the reference point: “Can we really make Martin Luther and his dimension of the Reformation a starting point for debates today that are intended to make a significant contribution to finding sustainable and resilient answers to the challenges of the present?” Wolf doubts this and begins by discussing the limitations and problems of the historical Martin Luther on the basis of three aspects, whereby he states, among other things: “Whoever in wider German history focuses on identity formation and the creation of group allegiance through hatred not only found material for this in Luther, but also clearly elaborated discourse models.” Although Wolf acknowledges the critical attitude of enlightened Protestants towards the “dark sides” of Luther, he also sees no starting points for updating other, supposedly truly modern sides of the theologian and monk. According to Wolf, “Martin Luther and his dimension of the Reformation are undeniably part of the transition to European modernity”. However, he could not serve as a viable critical approach to this modernity. In Frieder Otto Wolf’s view, the past Luther Decade and the highlights planned for 2017 in this context also illustrate the limits of anniversaries: “Communities cannot reproduce their cohesion simply by celebrating anniversaries. This is a more complex process, in which life perspectives and material interests play a more important role than the traditional or even contemporary passing on and dissemination of prevailing patterns of interpretation,” says Wolf. The anniversary year of the Reformation will therefore probably not be able to do more than “once again brilliantly illuminate the long since completed farewell to the cultural hegemony of Protestantism in large parts of Germany.” This farewell is not to be regretted. From a humanist point of view, Martin Luther was “neither a clear pioneer of modernity nor of the contradictory perspectives of liberation inherent in it. This anniversary therefore has nothing to say to non-Protestants. The celebrations impose a misleading central perspective even on non-Lutheran Protestants. And the urgent problems of our present day would not even be addressed by a ‘Reformation of the Reformation’ – neither the global ecological crisis nor the neoliberal destruction of Western welfare states or even the perforation of the world peace order,” says Frieder Wolf. The Luther Decade and the anniversary year of the Reformation are ultimately nothing more than another opportunity for discourse – and even large ideological apparatuses cannot rely on their use of resources to achieve hegemony in discourse positions. “Insofar as they find access to public discourse spaces at all, the power of good arguments always unfolds,” the President of the Humanist Association of Germany concludes his contribution.
Other authors of the edition: Thomas Kaufmann, Luise Schorn-Schütte, Dorothea Wendebourg, Hubert Wolf, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Ulrich Willems.
The APuZ issue on the topic of “Reformation” can be obtained in print from the Federal Agency for Civic Education or downloaded free of charge as a PDF: www.bpb.de/shop
