Paper short abstract:

Martin Luther in his protest against church doctrine could not see that his 95 thesis would be commemorated as a major historical event 500 years later. The question of the paper is how ecclesiastical, federal and local authorities link their narratives of church, municipality and modernity to this event.

Paper long abstract:

The celebration of the 500th birthday of the drafting of Martin Luther´s 95 theses is taken in Germany as an 'event' scheduled for over a decade of years, ultimately resulting in an apotheosis in 2017. During this timeframe a memorial Luther canon or paradigm gradually came into being both in top-down and bottom-up creativity. Initially, the commemoration started as a governmental and ecclesiastical view on how Luther's thinking and Lutheranism is to be perceived, heritagized and commemorated as an expression of protestant self-understanding, the nation-state and modernity in general. During the years, the central objective, the idea of an overarching and unifying understanding of the reformation as an event of "world-significance" that started on German ground, was variously received at the local level.

A certain cluster of Luther sites situated in the former East-German federal-state of Saxony-Anhalt had to deal with the discrepancies between the living and dwelling circumstances of the local communities and the demands of (inter-) national tourism and commemoration, one of the results of the former GDR government being that only 14 % of the local population nowadays are members of a protestant denomination. Based on fieldwork in the run up year to 2017 this paper analyses the processes around memorialization, place and space in cities with the closest links to Luther´s biography: His birthplace (Eisleben) and childhood dwelling (Mansfeld) as well as his intellectual home (Wittenberg).