Ancient and Modern
M.A. Screech, 19 November 1981
Masters of the Reformation: The Emergence of a New Intellectual Life in Europe
by Heiko AugustinusOberman, translated by Dennis Martin.
Cambridge, 269 pp., £22.50, June 1981,0 521 23098 5 Show More
by Heiko AugustinusOberman, translated by Dennis Martin.
Cambridge, 269 pp., £22.50, June 1981,
“... Does Luther explain Hitler? Oberman, an international Dutchman at home in Tuebingen, asks the question only to toss it aside: the Reformation was not a ‘German tragedy’. Into this English version of Werden und Wertung der Reformation he interpolates an abrupt sentence: ‘The appalling experiences of the Third Reich incline historians to assume that what went wrong with the Reformation was Luther’s sell-out to the princes’ – which supposedly led to a German tendency to give the last word in politics or morals, not to the individual or the Church, but to the collective and the State ... ”