Luther’s chair in Wittenberg
The headquarters of the modern memory cult of Martin Luther is the Lutherhaus in Wittenberg, the redundant Augustinian monastery that became the residence of the former monk and his extended family and household in 1524. Now a major museum of the Reformation and a UNESCO world heritage site, its inner sanctum is a wood-panelled room, sparsely furnished with a ceramic tiled stove, a table, and this curious wooden window seat. Twenty-first-century visitors are told that this is where his wife Katharina van Bora sat to do her sewing; it is certainly hard to see how it could have accommodated the corpulent body of the increasingly fat reformer. It has, however, been known as ‘Luther’s chair’ since at least the nineteenth century, as this stencilled sketch in pen and ink by the Church of England clergyman, Samuel Roffey Maitland, reveals. Made by Maitland, who was later librarian at Lambeth Palace, during an extended tour of Germany and Poland between April and October 1828, it indicates that Wittenberg was by then an established site of Protestant pilgrimage. While the provenance of this piece of furniture is unclear and its link with the founding father of the Reformation tenuous, this Luther ‘relic’ attests to the capacity of material objects to operate as a powerful touchstone for remembering past heroes. AW
Sketches in pencil, ink, and watercolour by Rev. Samuel Roffey Maitland, April-October 1828: fo. 38r, pen and ink sketch of Luther’s chair.
LPL: MS 1944