Scherer, Wilhelm. “Martin Luther.” In A History of German Literature, translated by F. C. Conybeare, edited by F. Max Müller, vol. 1, pp. 272-82. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903.

[In the following excerpt from an English translation of his 1885 survey of German literature, Scherer identifies Martin Luther's translation of the Bible as the foundation of modern German prose, remarking that the earliest German grammarians based their observations on Luther's idiom.]

It was Martin Luther who created the Reformation in Germany; his mind and his will determined the character of the whole movement. The numerous remarkable men whom the New Learning had formed, and who afterwards entered the service of the Reformation, had either to attach themselves to Luther or to sink into insignificance beside him. Even Zwingli could only succeed in gaining a local influence; in his mind the New Learning and the Reformation were not opposing interests, and he hoped to meet in heaven Socrates, Aristides, the Scipios, and other good heathens. He displayed all the practical common-sense of the Swiss; he was first a purifier of morals, and afterwards a Reformer. His cheerful temperament knew nothing of inward struggles such as those through which Luther gained the power of confronting the Pope and the Old Church, and carrying the nation with him. Luther, too, had imbibed elements of humanistic culture, but he was not a true Humanist. He could esteem a few didactic productions of classical poetry and science, but the beauty of the classical authors left no impression on him. In the Scriptures he found both beauty and wisdom, and that sufficed him. It was for the sake of the Bible that he became a philologist. Erasmus and Reuchlin led him to study the Scriptures in their original form, and by his translation he made them accessible to the German people.

Before Luther, no German had, so far as we know, been energetic enough to grapple with the whole of the Scriptures. No one had followed the example of the Goth Ulfilas. Under Charlemagne a translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew was the only work done in this direction. The ninth century was content with extracts and metrical paraphrases; the tenth and eleventh demanded German texts with commentaries, such as Notker's Psalms and Williram's Song of Solomon. From the twelfth century we possess fragments of the Gospels in German; and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notwithstanding the papal interdiction of the Bible, these translations of single portions continued to increase, and gradually embraced the whole of the Scriptures. The Emperor Wenceslaus ordered a splendid copy of the whole Bible, decorated with many pictures, to be made from these various translations. The German Bible was first printed in 1466, and before the year 1522 it had been printed fifteen times. But these editions all followed one and the same translation, the different parts of which were very unequal in merit. They were of little help to Luther in his work; he not only had to correct mistakes but to substitute a clear, graphic, thoroughly German prose for the old text, which was uncouth and often incomprehensible, and which slavishly followed the original without ever attaining to its excellence. Luther reproduced the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures in a German form, after having passed them through the medium of his own thought. In the Greek portions he adhered more literally to the original, in the Hebrew he allowed himself more freedom, as the genius of the two languages seemed to require; in the former he was dependent almost entirely on his own knowledge, in the latter he drew more help from his friends. He had the highest idea of the importance of the task he had undertaken. He knew what art, industry, knowledge, and wisdom were required to make a good translator. ‘Interpretation,’ he says, ‘is not an art for everyone; it needs a very pious, faithful, industrious, diffident, Christian, learned, experienced, and practised soul.’

Luther was an enthusiastic lover and admirer of his mother-tongue, and he spared no trouble to make his translation a monument of German style. He devoted himself to the work with the greatest seriousness and conscientiousness; he tried to absorb the spirit of the original, and his thorough knowledge of the popular tongue, together with his firm resolution not to write for the court or for scholars, but for the people, enabled him to make his Bible a true people's book.

The work issued from the Wartburg, and shed fresh glory on that place of ancient literary renown. Luther began his great work at the age of thirty-eight, when he was at the height of his popularity after the diet of Worms. In the winter of 1521, about Christmas time, he formed the resolution, and, though it sounds almost incredible, by the time he left the Wartburg, on the third of March, 1522, he had already finished the New Testament. In two months the work had been done so far that it only required a final revision; Melanchthon helped in this revision, and in the month of September of the same year the book was published. While the New Testament was being printed, Luther set to work upon the Old. But it was not till the year 1534 that the whole Lutheran Bible was published at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft, in six parts. In the year 1541 it was remodelled with the assistance of expert collaborators, and this version afterwards received a few amendments in the editions of 1543 and 1545.

The translation of the Bible is Luther's greatest literary achievement, and at the same time the greatest literary event of the sixteenth century, or even of the whole period from 1348 to 1648. It laid the foundation of a common culture for all ranks of society, and opened a whole intellectual world to the people. Luther's Bible was an inexhaustible source of grand and edifying thoughts, a noble and imperishable literary monument, a treasure often worshipped to the point of superstition and abuse.

Luther's Bible permanently fixed the literary language of Germany. Though the Reformation increased the divisions within the German nation, though it rent asunder Protestant Germany and Catholic Germany, yet, on the other hand, it softened the contrast between South Germany and North Germany by definitely imposing on the Low Germans a High-German literary dialect. In this respect, the Reformation laid the foundation for modern German literature and for that unity of intellectual life which we at present rejoice in.

Before Luther's time the High-German, though it enjoyed a certain literary pre-eminence, had not been able to put a stop to the literary employment of other dialects. The form of German used in the Imperial Chancery was, when Luther began to write, the one generally recognised as a pattern to which others should conform; but though the Chanceries of the various princes and of the towns as a rule followed this form, they yet continued to mix their own dialect with it.

When Luther first began to write he adopted the form of German employed in the Saxon Chancery, and adhered pretty closely to the Saxon dialect. Gradually, however, he succeeded in freeing himself from it, and attained to a form of language which approaches very nearly to that of our day, though not coinciding with it. His language became the authority for all writers and printers. In Strassburg we find that books written about 1515 had already to be modernised in 1540. The first German grammarians, Fabian Frangk (1531), Albert Ölinger (1573), and Johannes Clajus (1578), based their rules consciously or unconsciously on Luther's form of speech. And the Bible was and continued to be the classic in this language. It made its way from the centre of Germany into the countries round. In Switzerland it supplanted the ‘Schwyzer Dütsch,’ which had still been written by Zwingli; it supplanted Platt Deutsch in the North and the Cologne dialect in the North-West. Even the Catholics participated at once in the advantages afforded by Luther's Bible. ‘They steal my language from me,’ said he; but it was a triumph to him to have taught even his enemies how to speak. Hieronymus Emser corrected Luther's New Testament according to the Latin text recognised by the Catholic Church (1527); Johann Dietenberger of Mainz did the same for the whole Bible (1534); Johann Eck's more independent translation, made in 1537, could not assert itself against Luther's.

But Luther not only gave the German Bible to his Church; he not only made the Bible the centre of his theology, but on the basis of the Bible he reorganized the sermon and the Church-hymn.

The sermon had continued to flourish since the time of Berthold von Regensburg and of the Mystics. In the course of the fifteenth century it received an extraordinary addition of material, and its sphere was also much widened. The best German preacher of this century was Geiler von Kaisersberg, a Swiss by birth, but brought up in Alsace, who occupied the pulpit of Strassburg Cathedral from 1478 till his death in 1510. He was an orator of far-reaching fame, but he often sacrificed the dignity of the pulpit to the popular desire for a realistic mode of expression, and would entertain his listeners with unsparing satire on all classes of society. Though a man of wider culture than Berthold von Regensburg he was yet inferior to him, and he carried Berthold's mannerisms to excess. Like Berthold he would start from common things, and hang religious teaching on to them. In one of his sermons he makes Brand's ‘Ship of Fools’ the foundation of his discourse, and takes each fool singly and treats each bell on his cap as a separate sin. Any passing interest of the day, and even the most ordinary occupations of everyday life, were not too mean to serve as material for his allegorical ‘Moralisations.’ Other preachers of this period shared Geiler's faults, and added others to them. We notice in all of them a false striving after realistic effect, much obscure and barren learning, and a mass of satire and anecdote, of frivolous and comic ingredients. Such was the condition of the sermon at the time when Luther appeared.

He replaced all this by simple teaching; he did not condescend to work on people's feelings and imagination, but simply appealed to their reason and conscience. His sermons were mostly interpretations of the Bible. His chief desire was to bring home the Scriptures to the understanding of every one of his hearers, and to point out their application to everyday life. This he did with great power and clearness, and in his own peculiarly simple and attractive style. Ordinary rhetoric played but a small part in his sermons, but for this very reason he appealed more to the hearts of his audience. He could not, however, hinder the sermon from sinking again in later times into allegory and dogmatism, into pedantry and polemics.

The sacred song had passed through all the various phases of German literature. Walther von der Vogelweide and many other Minnesingers and Mastersingers wrote religious poems. But it was not every religious poem that could become a Church-hymn, or even a popular religious song. The Mystics, too, had cultivated this branch of literature, but it was not till the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century that there arose religious poets, such as the Monk of Salzburg and Heinrich von Laufenberg, who made it their special object to increase the existing store of Church-hymns, and thus to break the power of the secular ‘Volkslied.’ Heinrich von Laufenberg in particular adhered, as far as possible, to the spirit of the ‘Volkslied;’ he retained the popular melodies and sought to infuse a spiritual meaning into the conventional phrases, but he really accomplished the very opposite of what he had intended. His elegant and melodious hymns sounded far more secular than religious; they shed an unholy splendour round the sublime subjects which they sang of, and drew divine things down to an earthly level.

Luther, on the contrary, revived the best traditions of the Christian Church-hymn. The Psalms had been the basis of the oldest Church-songs, and Luther in his hymns returned to the Psalms and the Bible, though without despising those glorious Latin hymns and ‘Sequences’ of the older Church, which were really developments of the Psalms. He also remodelled a few old German songs, as, for instance, the Easter song. ‘Christ is arisen.’ Moreover, he embodied his hatred for the Pope in some original verses, in which he teaches his followers to pray thus:—

Erhalt uns Herr bei deinem Wort,
Und steur des Papst's und Türken Mord.
(Keep us, Lord, in Thy Word,
And frustrate the murderous designs of Pope and
          Turk.)

In another hymn, the first which he wrote for congregational use, he adopted the tone of the popular roundelay, and sang the redemption of man in the dramatic style of a ballad; but the dignity of the subject does not suffer in the least from his treatment of it.

Most of Luther's hymns were written in the years 1523-24. A manly tone rings through them all, such as was yet unknown to German lyric poetry; and they are all written in that impersonal spirit which is a characteristic of this whole epoch. As the dramatist vanishes behind his creations, and speaks through the souls of strange characters, so Luther in his hymns makes his own personal feelings retire into the background, and expresses in powerful language the feelings and sentiments shared by the whole congregation of the faithful.

Some of Luther's hymns are in the narrative form, others again are instructive, while some are in the form of a confession of faith. The character of the Christian knight, which we have met with in various metamorphoses throughout the Middle Ages, is the true ideal of the age of the Reformation, and nowhere is this ideal more gloriously represented than in Luther's famous hymn: ‘Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott.’ This hymn, for which Luther probably composed the melody as well as the text, is based on the 46th Psalm, and was written in October 1527, at the approach of the plague. It is the reflection of a moment of great distress and difficulty, and at the same time it affords us a true picture of Luther's own strong and noble soul. But of his inner experiences he only reveals to us those which everyone might feel alike, those which in their moral aspect recur in all ages, whenever a brave man, conscious of the goodness and greatness of his cause, arms himself against the attacks of the world.

It is in his hymns that Luther shows most of the artist; but he is an artist also in his pamphlets. And while in his songs he suppresses all subjective emotions, in his pamphlets he allows them free course. His translation of the Bible, his sermons, his hymns, all served as weapons in a peaceful agitation for the Protestant cause. But side by side with these, he also availed himself, from the very beginning of the conflict, of all the stronger means of agitation, which, in the then existing state of German culture, lay at his command. Those who could not read might have their feelings roused by woodcuts. Luther therefore invited Lucas Cranach to produce ‘The Passional of Christ and Antichrist,’ in which the sufferings of Christ were contrasted trait by trait with the pomp and luxury of the Pope. The latest news might be spread through printed songs or prose-writings; thus Luther described the burning of two Evangelical martyrs at Brussels (1523) in an excellent song, and also published many accounts of important contemporary events, with or without criticisms, but never without a decided purpose. Other short writings might also be spread by the aid of printing; thus we find papal letters of indulgence among the earliest productions of the press, and Luther caused his own celebrated theses against indulgence to be printed for circulation. Living and enkindling speech could now be replaced by printed words, and weapons of attack and defence might by this means be put in the hands of thousands; Luther made extensive use of the polemical pamphlet and accomplished great things by its aid. The historian of German literature must class these controversial writings with the polemical poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide. The object of attack is the same; the effects produced and the rhetorical weapons employed are in both cases closely allied, and only the literary form is slightly different in each. By means of his pamphlets Luther spoke to thousands, and made his voice resound throughout Germany. Most of them show a certain want of coherence in the development of thought, consisting as they do of a series of numbered assertions, proved one after the other, without any attempt to gather them into a logical whole. Their tone varies greatly according to the different audiences whom the author is addressing, but he always takes care that his meaning shall be clear to all. He is less successful in temperate discussion than in passionate attack; in pamphlets of the latter character he adopts a tone of unaffected popularity, using all those arts which he scorned to employ in his sermons, in such a way as often to remind us of Brother Berthold and Geiler von Kaisersberg.

Luther's pamphlets are quite as popular in tone as the writings of Walther von der Vogelweide, and some of the characteristics which we have noticed in Walther appear still more marked in Luther, such as natural imagery, pregnant phrases, proverbial expressions, exaggerated utterances of anger or scorn and a power of imaginative and vivid representation resulting in highly dramatic effects. Luther is very fond of personification; he speaks of Romish avarice, for instance, as the worst thief and robber, to be handed over to the punishment of thieves and robbers—hanging or decapitation. In his polemical pamphlets he always directly addresses his opponent, running him down, pouring out a torrent of abuse against him, and thus involuntarily drawing a grotesque caricature of the man. He never indulges in monologue, but always gives us a portion of a dialogue. Luther's whole personality is represented in his pamphlets: his bursts of passionate violence, his strong emotions, his fiery activity, his bold outspokenness, his deep humility and trust in God, his strong self-reliance, arising from the conviction of being engaged in a good work, and finally his boyish high spirits, leading him to make fun of his opponents, and to spare kings and princes as little as his theological colleagues. He himself disapprovingly compares his style to a restless and turbulent fighter, always struggling with terrific monsters, and he laments the want in himself of that loving and peaceful spirit which he admires so much in others. But he comforts himself with the assurance that the Heavenly Father in His great household must need different kinds of servants, the hard one for hard work, a common hatchet for common logs.

Neither in Germany, nor elsewhere, has there ever arisen a man who was able to appeal with such power to the whole nation as Luther did. No other writer has ever gained such vast and immediate influence through his writings; no other professor has ever afforded such an emphatic contradiction of the charge of pedantic conceit. In spite of his school and university training, in spite of the monastery and the professorial chair, Luther remained at heart a son of the people, and it was this that made him the people's hero. His disciples extolled him for having, as they expressed it, freed the noble German people from the Roman and Babylonian captivity like a true Samson; but Luther did far more than this: his nation was threatening to sink into mere frivolity, he recalled it to earnestness and a serious view of life.

Whether we glorify or condemn Luther's action it is impossible to deny that he had the support of the people, and also that the Reformation was of the greatest benefit to the intellectual life of the German nation. Those districts where the preaching of the Gospel did not prevail, or where it was suppressed, remained for a long time shut off from any great intellectual or literary development. Without the enthusiasm of the reformed religion, without the educational influence which the Lutheran pastors exercised on the people, there was no mental progress. As long as Luther lived he was the centre of Germany; scholars streamed to Wittenberg from all parts, and then spread the spirit of reform throughout the world. With Luther died the unity of German Protestantism. In the Smalkaldic war Wittenberg passed to the other Saxon line; Melanchthon did not exhibit the firmness which the occasion required, and Luther's University lost its supremacy for ever. Luther's memory, however, remained sacred to all Protestants. Exhaustive editions of his works were published, a collection was made of his letters and table-talk, and the pastor, Johann Mathesius, of Joachimsthal, narrated his life in an excellent and truly popular style. Luther's pre-eminent authority was not altogether a blessing for his Church; it became also a weapon of intolerance, and a source of dissension. But the influence of his powerful mind continued to make itself felt after his death far beyond the circle of those who counted themselves as his rightful heirs.