Wittenberg

Two things at Wittenberg are worth more attention than the bronze doors that visitors are brought to see, and one of them is the doors.

Whether it happened

The Ninety-five Theses exist. The letter enclosing them, sent by Luther to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz on 31 October 1517, is documented. That much is not in question.

The nailing is another matter. The account comes from Philipp Melanchthon, who:

• was not in Wittenberg in 1517, having arrived in 1518
• wrote it down after Luther's death in 1546

And Luther himself never mentions it in any of the enormous quantity of writing and reported table talk he left behind, which, for a man not given to understating his own part in things, is conspicuous.

Against that: the Castle Church door served as the university's notice board, and posting theses on it to advertise a disputation was entirely ordinary academic procedure. The story is therefore plausible and undocumented at once, which is an uncomfortable position for the founding image of a world religion's second-largest branch. Historians divide, and the honest formulation is that Luther certainly sent the theses and may well have posted them.

The doors visitors photograph are in any case not the doors: the medieval ones burned in the eighteenth century, and the bronze pair inscribed with the theses was installed in 1858.

The carving

On the exterior of the town church of Saint Mary, where Luther preached most often, there is a medieval relief of a kind known as a Judensau, a sculpture depicting Jews with a pig, in a manner intended to be obscene and contemptuous. Dozens survive on German churches. This one is on the church of the Reformation, in the town of the man who wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, which is why it is the one that is argued about.

A Jewish member of the congregation sued for its removal. German courts, including the Federal Court of Justice in 2022, declined to order it, holding that the sculpture in its present setting, with a memorial installed in the ground beneath it in 1988 and explanatory commentary added, is no longer an ongoing insult but part of a monument of remembrance. The parish supports retention on that basis. The plaintiff and others argue that contextualisation is a way of keeping a thing while declining to answer for it.

The atlas records both positions. A visitor should know the carving is there, know that it was allowed to remain by judicial decision rather than by inattention, and know that the decision is contested.

Luther lived, married, taught and was buried in Wittenberg, making the town considerably more than the site of the single doorway most people associate with his name.

A life built around the town

Beyond the 1517 posting of his theses, Martin Luther taught theology at the University of Wittenberg, which became a central intellectual hub of the Reformation, drawing students and scholars who carried Luther's ideas back across German-speaking Europe. He married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in Wittenberg in 1525, a marriage that itself became a public statement against clerical celibacy, and he is buried within the town's Castle Church, the same building associated with the theses.

A carving the town has argued over for centuries

Wittenberg's Stadtkirche, the town church, carries a Judensau, a medieval antisemitic relief sculpture mocking Jewish people, that has become the subject of an active modern legal and civic dispute over whether it should be removed, altered or retained with additional context, a controversy this entry names directly rather than glossing over given the carving's continued visible presence on an active church building.

As this entry's companion article covers

The historical event of Luther posting his theses on the Castle Church door, and the degree to which its exact circumstances are debated by historians, are addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.