Page 220 - Stati inu obstati, revija za vprašanja protestantizma, letnik XIV (2018), številka 27, ISSN 2590-9754
P. 220
synopses
ly the German language with which “Germans resist being drowned among the rest”.
Thus Luther and his contribution in forming standard German and German literature
become one of the supporting pillars of the 19th-century German national identity. To-
gether with the imaginary of Frederick the Great it becomes established among Ger-
man nationalists in the second half of the 19th century even as one of the main imag-
es 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 “cultural” to a “political” nation.
But in the background of changes in the dominant interpretational social practices
between the 16th and 19th centuries (religious > rational; corporative/supranational >
individual, national) there are shifts in historiography, 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 genealo-
gy, 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 dis-
course 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 history.
Occasionally still other aspects of historiography are added to this latter sphere: e.g. the
history of everyday life, economic history and the history of reception, of key signifi-
cance is the Weimarer Ausgabe of Luther’s writings (1883–2009), which consists of 127
books with about 80,000 pages comprising a scientific-critical edition of Luther’s writ-
ings. These published primary sources along with ever-increasing digitalization and web
accessibility of other 16th-century sources (the German DFG project for the digitaliza-
tion of manuscripts and old printed material in German libraries) show Luther as a very
multi-faceted personality between the autumn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
they reveal his opus as “work in progress”, and in particular make it impossible to still
write about him from the standpoint of historiography in one-dimensional way. Conse-
quently the present-day knowledge of this material calls for an integral historiographi-
cal approach in the treatment of Slovenian Protestantism as well and thus also for a new
biography of Trubar and – above all – a systematic historiography of Protestantism on
Slovenian territory from the 16th century to the present day.
Keywords: Luther, the imaginary, historiography
Prevod povzetkov v angleščino: Margaret Davis
Bibliografska obdelava: Helena Lemut
218
ly the German language with which “Germans resist being drowned among the rest”.
Thus Luther and his contribution in forming standard German and German literature
become one of the supporting pillars of the 19th-century German national identity. To-
gether with the imaginary of Frederick the Great it becomes established among Ger-
man nationalists in the second half of the 19th century even as one of the main imag-
es 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 “cultural” to a “political” nation.
But in the background of changes in the dominant interpretational social practices
between the 16th and 19th centuries (religious > rational; corporative/supranational >
individual, national) there are shifts in historiography, 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 genealo-
gy, 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 dis-
course 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 history.
Occasionally still other aspects of historiography are added to this latter sphere: e.g. the
history of everyday life, economic history and the history of reception, of key signifi-
cance is the Weimarer Ausgabe of Luther’s writings (1883–2009), which consists of 127
books with about 80,000 pages comprising a scientific-critical edition of Luther’s writ-
ings. These published primary sources along with ever-increasing digitalization and web
accessibility of other 16th-century sources (the German DFG project for the digitaliza-
tion of manuscripts and old printed material in German libraries) show Luther as a very
multi-faceted personality between the autumn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
they reveal his opus as “work in progress”, and in particular make it impossible to still
write about him from the standpoint of historiography in one-dimensional way. Conse-
quently the present-day knowledge of this material calls for an integral historiographi-
cal approach in the treatment of Slovenian Protestantism as well and thus also for a new
biography of Trubar and – above all – a systematic historiography of Protestantism on
Slovenian territory from the 16th century to the present day.
Keywords: Luther, the imaginary, historiography
Prevod povzetkov v angleščino: Margaret Davis
Bibliografska obdelava: Helena Lemut
218
