Page 132 - Vinkler, Jonatan. 2020. Izpod krivoverskega peresa: slovenska književnost 16. stoletja in njen evropski kontekst. Koper: Založba Univerze na Primorskem
P. 132
izpod krivoverskega peresa
tions of pseudo Luther (“Table Talk”). On the Catholic side the imaginary
and the idearium of Luther as the foremost champion of Lutheran heresy is
especially represented by pamphlet and biographical literature; the typical
nature of Luther’s textual image on the Catholic side in the 16th century is
presentation through the medieval imaginary of heretics (arbor vitiorum).
With the end of the 18th century, the Napoleonic wars, romanticism
and the advent of Fichte in German philosophy (Addresses to the German
Nation, 1807), ideas about national identity begin to take clearer shape in
German culture – about the identifying marks “that separate Germans
from all other nations”. Fichte stresses that it is precisely the German lan-
guage with which “Germans resist being drowned among the rest”. Thus
Luther and his contribution in forming standard German and German lit-
erature become one of the supporting pillars of the 19th-century German
national identity. Together with the imaginary of Frederick the Great it be-
comes established among German nationalists in the second half of the 19th
century even as one of the main images of the imaginary and the idearium
of Germanness. Through the linking of Lutheran faith and Germanness in
the Los-von-Rom movement – German = Lutheran = Luther – this placing
of Luther in the German national idearium reverberates in Styria as well
in the second half of the 19th century and thus also among Slovenes, who
from 1861 were strengthening their identity in the transition from a “cul-
tural” to a “political” nation.
But in the background of changes in the dominant interpretational so-
cial practices between the 16th and 19th centuries (religious > rational; cor-
porative/supranational > individual, national) there are shifts in historiog-
raphy, which with its own development made it impossible for Luther to be
read from then on in the same way as he had been interpreted from his own
time up to the mid-19th century: there is a shift from genealogy, provincial
history and the biography of famous people to a critical and source-based
historiographical narrative (L. Ranke, L. Pastor).
With the assertion of rationalistic biblical criticism (J. D. Michaelis, J.
J. Griesbach) in the last third of the 18th century, the foundation was laid
for the critical reading of sources about Luther as well (in the publication of
historical sources such an approach is seen with the collection Monumenta
Germaniae, G. H. Pertz, 1823–). Thus the discourse about him broadens
from the sphere of at first exclusively ecclesiastical and then also political
history to the sphere of cultural, musical, literary and intellectual histo-
ry. Occasionally still other aspects of historiography are added to this lat-
132
tions of pseudo Luther (“Table Talk”). On the Catholic side the imaginary
and the idearium of Luther as the foremost champion of Lutheran heresy is
especially represented by pamphlet and biographical literature; the typical
nature of Luther’s textual image on the Catholic side in the 16th century is
presentation through the medieval imaginary of heretics (arbor vitiorum).
With the end of the 18th century, the Napoleonic wars, romanticism
and the advent of Fichte in German philosophy (Addresses to the German
Nation, 1807), ideas about national identity begin to take clearer shape in
German culture – about the identifying marks “that separate Germans
from all other nations”. Fichte stresses that it is precisely the German lan-
guage with which “Germans resist being drowned among the rest”. Thus
Luther and his contribution in forming standard German and German lit-
erature become one of the supporting pillars of the 19th-century German
national identity. Together with the imaginary of Frederick the Great it be-
comes established among German nationalists in the second half of the 19th
century even as one of the main images of the imaginary and the idearium
of Germanness. Through the linking of Lutheran faith and Germanness in
the Los-von-Rom movement – German = Lutheran = Luther – this placing
of Luther in the German national idearium reverberates in Styria as well
in the second half of the 19th century and thus also among Slovenes, who
from 1861 were strengthening their identity in the transition from a “cul-
tural” to a “political” nation.
But in the background of changes in the dominant interpretational so-
cial practices between the 16th and 19th centuries (religious > rational; cor-
porative/supranational > individual, national) there are shifts in historiog-
raphy, which with its own development made it impossible for Luther to be
read from then on in the same way as he had been interpreted from his own
time up to the mid-19th century: there is a shift from genealogy, provincial
history and the biography of famous people to a critical and source-based
historiographical narrative (L. Ranke, L. Pastor).
With the assertion of rationalistic biblical criticism (J. D. Michaelis, J.
J. Griesbach) in the last third of the 18th century, the foundation was laid
for the critical reading of sources about Luther as well (in the publication of
historical sources such an approach is seen with the collection Monumenta
Germaniae, G. H. Pertz, 1823–). Thus the discourse about him broadens
from the sphere of at first exclusively ecclesiastical and then also political
history to the sphere of cultural, musical, literary and intellectual histo-
ry. Occasionally still other aspects of historiography are added to this lat-
132
