Misunderstandings, Controversies, Versions of History

In 1415, the Czech priest and and professor John Huss was tried, condemned and executed, burned at the stake, at the Council of Constance.

A little over a century later, in 1521, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, appeared before the young Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms. Luther reminded some people of Huss. Luther himself said that he agreed with some aspects of Huss' teachings. Some people assumed that Luther would be condemned and executed as Huss had been, and were surprised when, after Luther has stood trial before him, Charles allowed Luther to leave the council under the same safe conduct which had protected him on his way there.

 

And ever since, people have wondered why Charles let Luther go. Perhaps Charles, and/or his advisors, were thinking of the situation in Prague and the surrounding Czech territory: Huss had been executed, but the Hussite church was very much alive. Perhaps Charles wondered whether Huss might have had less influence if he had been tolerated, ignored, treated as a well-meaning simpleton. 

I don't know why Luther was let go. Already in 1521 he was very popular, and the Lutheran church kept growing at an enormous pace. And, it seems to me, Luther was misunderstood from the start and is still misunderstood. For example, German peasants revolted in 1524 and 1525, and even a few nobles joined them. And these people in revolt called themselves Lutherans. As have many others to this day, they seem to have equated existing orders, and conservatism, with the Catholic Church, and Lutherism with all and any sort of protest or resistance to existing orders.  "Protest --" it makes up the first two syllables of the word "Protestant."

Luther did not sympathize with the revolts. He wrote and published a tract in which he advised the nobles to crush the rebellion thoroughly, to torture and kill the rebels. And indeed, they did exactly that. 

Would the powers that were have treated the rebels any differently if Luther had not said or written a word about the rebellion? I don't know. I tend to doubt it. I tend to doubt that this was one of Luther's most widely-read published works. Because people have not ceased to associate Catholicism with conservatism and Lutheranism with rebellion. Especially in Germany. Those who live in other parts of the world, and may be familiar with conservative Lutherans and Leftist Catholics, might be astonished, for example, to read, as I did, Schiller's history of the Dutch Revolution, where every imaginable sort of tyranny is associated with Catholicism, and every noble spirit of freedom with Protestantism, which in Germany meant Lutheranism. Except in painting and sculpture, where, Schiller said, it was all exactly reversed.

Schiller was an ignorant dingbat.

After the Diet of Worms, religious wars between Catholics and Protestants began, and did not cease for centuries. Luther condemned Lutheran peasants and championed Lutheran rulers, kings and dukes and counts. 

Decades after Luther had passed away, in 1576, a 24-year-old Habsburg king and archduke became the Emperor Rudolf II, and ruled until 1612. I wonder what Luther would've thought of Rudolph. Like every other Habsburg ruler before and after him, Rudolph was Catholic. Unlike many other Habsburgs, Rudolf did not dislike, distrust or disapprove of non-Catholics. His court in Prague became a center of artistic and intellectual activity. He valued individuals according to the abilities, their talents; if he cared at all about their religious beliefs, he gave little sign of it. 

A widespread belief about Rudolph at the time was that he was insane, and a very weak ruler, who did little to halt the gathering storm of religious conflict which exploded six years after his death at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. This view also tended to dominate among historians, until just a few decades ago. Now, it seems, an entirely different view of Rudolph is the mainstream, that of a wise and tolerant ruler far ahead of his time, who did nothing at all to fan flames of war, and whom many of his contemporaries feared simply because he was far ahead of his time in his habits and thought. Not a lunatic, but an enlightened monarch a couple of centuries before the Enlightenment. 

Who's right about Rudolph? Who's wrong? Or is everyone perhaps partly right and partly wrong? I don't know. 

Around 1600, Ferdinand's court, widely thought of at the time as a madhouse, was visited by an orphaned teenage Czech noble who would also go on to divide opinion -- Albrecht von Wallenstein. Raised a Hussite, Wallenstein converted to Catholicism and served the Habsburgs as a military leader,  and later also as a financier, until his death in 1634. 

Or did he? This is the most controversial point. The conventional view, challenged by Golo Mann's biography of Wallenstein published in 1971, is that, in the last couple of years of his life, he began to conspire against the Emperor, while pretending to still be his loyal Generalissimo. Having been born a baron and risen, through his extraordinary talent as a military leader and statesman, to count, then marquise, then duke, he was accused of wanting to rise, at the Emperor's expense, still higher -- and the only ranks in 17th-century Europe higher than duke were king and -- Emperor.

Mann and others maintain that there simply is no serious evidence that Wallenstein was unloyal to the Habsburgs, and that his rising power was inconvenient to certain thoroughly dishonest and ruthless politicians, who turned the mind of the Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-1637) against one of his best helpers. 

Who's right? I don't know.

Is It Idiotic Of Me To Be Reading Schiller's Historical Works?

Nietzsche warned me: in Goetzen-Daemmerung, Schiller is the 3rd-listed of his "Unmoeglichen," his "impossible people." Nietzsche calls him the "Moral-Trompeter von Saeckingen."

Der Trompeter von Saeckingen (The trumpeter of Saeckingen) is an epic poem published in 1853 by Joseph Viktor von Scheffel which was an immediate and huge popular success. Viktor Nessler made it into a popular opera which debuted in Leipzig in 1884, just a few years before the extremely avid opera-goer Nietzsche published Goetzen-Daemmerung. If I had read Scheffel's poem or or seen or heard Nessler's opera, perhaps Nietzsche's one-liner about Schiller would've made me laugh.

Even as it is I schmunzelte. I get how Schiller tends to trumpet morality. I find it very tiresome how in the midst of an historical work he gets carried away and begins to shout at the reader about the Genius of This People and the Crushing of That Despot and The Laws of History and The Way that The Age of Heroes is Past and that We Today Can Only Look Upon Them like an Old Man Who Has lost His Nerve contemplating The Manly Caprices of His Youth, before settling down again and returning to the facts and figures and quotes and other things for which I came there -- there being Schillers historical writings. That last bit, about The Age of Heroes being Past, was especially troubling to me, because I had thought that we here in Western Civilization had left behind such ideas about past Golden Ages. I thought we had done that some time before Schiller. Maybe most of us had.

And anyhow, how much of this stuff, how much of works by Schiller such as Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung (History of the Dutch Revolution) and Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Krieges (History of the Thirty Years; War), is actually any sort of worthwhile historical writing at all?

What I don't know, what I've started to ask myself, is, Who reads Schiller's historical works, besides me? No one ever recommended to me that I read them, and quite a few people have recommended his poems and plays quite heartily, and a few are even enthused about such theoretical works of his as the one about naive and sentimental poetry. But I've never read or heard a thumbs-up about these historical works.

Perhaps if I'd never gotten that volume in Fraktur, vol 2 of a 2-vol collection of Schiller's works published in 1869 by the J G Cotta'sche Buchhandlung. That volume which begins with the works on the Dutch Revolution and the Thirty Years' War. I've had that thing for decades, and I finally came to grips with the fact that the Fraktur was keeping me from reading more than a paragraph or 2 at a sitting, and so, with not inconsiderable difficulty, I got this volume of the historical works in Antiqua, which is what Germans call the regular typeface the rest of the world uses and they have too for the most part for the last century or so. (Schiller's plays and poems are so easy to get, maybe the difficulty in obtaining his historical works should have warned that no sensible person wants them.)

Maybe if decades ago I'd gotten a volume of Schiller's historical works in a typeface more like this one, which I could read with less difficulty (How much difficulty? I'm not even completely sure that "J G Cotta'sche Buchhandlung" is a correct transcription, that's how much.), I would've been done with Schiller even before I became a fan of Nietzsche.

And yet, and yet, with a stupid serious look on my face -- very much, in fact, like the one Schiller himself seemed to be wearing whenever a painting or sculptor was nearby -- and against the sneers of the Nietzsches (I'm usually totally a Nietzsche!), I shall soldier on and see if maybe there is in fact a pony in here somewhere.

But, but -- I already mentioned, apart from my general disgust at the frequent melodramtic solos of the moral trumpeter about No Two Other Peoples were Ever So Dissimilar and It must Enliven The Heart of Every Friend of Freedom and so forth, the bit about the Forever Lost Golden Age really gave me pause. Another thing which made me throw the volume down and stomp around the room yelling "What?! What?!" was Schiller's assertion that printing was invented in Haarlem in 1482.

I mean, that's sure what it looks like to me he's saying: "Im Jahre 1482 wurde die Buchdruckerkunst in Haarlem erfunden," and one thing which really makes me wonder whether anybody at all is reading this stuff for the sake of historical edification, is that I can't find anybody anywhere saying that Schiller was off by at least 50 years and 1 country about the invention of printing. Even allowing for 230 years' worth of progress in process of writing history, this is the sort of thing which makes me wonder just how much Schiller was carried away with the moral--trumpeting, and whether the trumpeting left much actual worthwhile historical writing at all in its wake.

Hold everything: in the volume in Fraktur from 1869 it sez: "Im Jahre 1432 wurde die Buchdruckerkunst in Haarlem erfunden." This is why it's good to have more than 1 edition of the same book. Maybe 1482 is a misprint. Then Schiller would only be off by 1 country and not by 50 years. Or maybe not even by a country: there is a certain Laurens Janszoon Coster who, according to some Dutch patriots, invented printing before Gutenberg.

I'm not going to get into the middle of that fight.

CV Wedgewood doesn't mention Schiller in her history of the Thirty Years' War. Not in the bibliography, nowhere. In his biography of Wallenstein, Golo Mann, like his father a great fan of Schiller's poems and plays, quotes a line here and there from Schiller's Wallenstein-trilogy of plays, and otherwise mentions him twice entirely in passing, with absolutely no hint of a positive or negative opinion of him as an historian.