Eisleben - Of Birth & Death

Travelling to Eisleben is pretty bleak; flat, uninspiring landscape, punctuated by industrial workings, passenger trains massively outnumbered by heavy goods rolling stock of the sort you rarely see in the UK these days, this is clearly a place of hard graft. The town itself, scared by generations of mining, isn’t pretty, nor particularly prosperous, and so is an unusual place to find 2 UNESCO World Heritage sites within 100m of each other.

Those sites are the birth house and place of death of Martin Luther, clearly this is the heart of Luther territory, hence the renaming of the town Lutherstadt Eisleben. The powers that be have certainly tried to make the most of their favourite son, the ubiquitous tourist audio guide rather bizarrely taking you beyond the 2 key houses on a Luther guided tour of recent town planning and improvement. It enthusiastically leads you through the back streets, pointing out how derelict buildings have been reclaimed by the installation of various Luther themed art projects, even, in one instance, taking you down a particularly run down street with nothing in it at all, the result, apparently, of the local council refusing a funding proposal, ‘such a shame’ bemoans a resurrected Luther into your ear! The local church was a scene of much commotion when I visited, the pulpit from which Luther preached his final sermon, 4 days before he died, was being ripped from the wall and boxed up, ready for shipping to Missouri where it was to be displayed as the centrepiece of a Reformation exhibition. The main memorial in the town square was covered, draped in tarpaulin, undergoing renovation in advance of next years 500th anniversary celebrations, or perhaps it was to shield his eyes!

Rather than detracting from my search for the origins of Luther, all of this peripheral amusement only served to amplify it. This is his town, his people, just a few weeks before he was born, in the Autumn of 1483, Luther’s parents moved here. His Father, a farmer’s son without inheritance rights had begun working in the copper mines and saw, in this place, the centre of the industry in the region, an opportunity. As it turned out he was one of many, and the supply of miners exceeded the demand, so he quickly moved on, but the young Luther maintained strong connections with the town all through his life. He died here as a result of being called in to settle a dispute between citizens, respected by all sides as he was, though ill and feeling particularly ill equipped for the task, he didn’t feel he could refuse. Within 3 weeks he brokered a deal, preached in his home church, was taken ill, and died. Luther’s life, theology and faith, it seems to me was rooted here. In an existence of ordinary people living tough lives. If the God of the Church of his youth felt austere, remote and demanding to him, a bright and earnest young man, then how much more must he have appeared so to those miners from whence he came? Luther’s life quest, to understand and express, in the often broad and coarse language of the miners of Eisleben, a God of graceful acceptance and a faith of meaningful living, echoes to the needs of today.