Martin Luther in Primetime

In 1983, both East and West Germany celebrated Martin Luther’s 500thbirthday with great fanfare. Nowhere was this competition more provocativeand visually arresting, however, than in two multi-part television playswhich depicted Luther’s life: the West German Martin Luther, broadcast bythe public station ZDF in April, and the East German title of the same name,aired in October. In this essay, I argue that the East German versionconstituted an appropriative strategy of memory formation – one whichdepicted Luther’s positive qualities and grafted them into the Marxist canonof heroes. In contrast, the ZDF Martin Luther, which featured a highlyrational Luther, projected what Jan Assmann has termed a normative strategyof harnessing Luther’s memory, focusing on Luther’s intellectual argumentsand anti-radicalism.