Lightning Storm at Stotternheim

In Search of Martin Luther

I was lodged comfortably in a hotel at Erfurt, the city that once had the reputation of being the Rome of Thuringia because of its many churches and monasteries. It was shortly after the “Wende,” the Turn or Change, as East Germans were calling the profound peaceful revolution that had taken down the Berlin Wall and demolished a totalitarian regime.

Growing up in the west, we had always hoped for reunification but never really believed it would happen during our lifetime. Before coming to North America, I had lived in West Berlin and crossed the East German corridor quite often. Traveling by car was less depressing than the journey by train, with its obligatory wait in no-man’s-land, the shuffling boots of the East German border guards, their automatic-guns shouldered and the dogs sniffing at our feet. The pensioners from the east returning from a visit to their relatives in the west always looked fearful that they would be asked to relinquish the few precious possessions they had brought back home into the worker’s paradise, as Communist Germany was euphemistically called by its promoters.

Now as I was waiting in my hotel for the cab to take me to nearby Stotternheim, I still couldn’t believe that there was no longer any border, that all of this was now one Germany, and that no guards were going to interrogate me as to my intentions of traveling to the east.

I had come back to eastern Germany to explore what I had always wanted to see: Martin Luther’s haunts, the Cathedral of Erfurt where he was ordained priest, the cell in which he had been troubled as a monk with doubts and despair, questioning whether he might ever find a gracious God that would accept him. And then there was Wittenberg, where he experienced his religious breakthrough and insight that not his own deeds but God’s grace would make him righteous. There was his old monastery in which he and his wife Katie lived after the monks had left, and there was the city church, in which he had spoken out against indulgences, and finally, there was the castle church, where, according to his friend Melanchthon, he had posted his 95 Theses on the door.

But I was particularly interested in one place that had been decisive for Luther’s early religious vocation as a monk: Stotternheim, where he was nearly struck down by lightning, and in his anguish and despair had cried out to St. Anne, patron saint of miners like his father, and made a vow to enter the monastery.Stotternheim was not promoted for tourism during the communist period because it lay uncomfortably close to the Russian military headquarters.

Even people in nearby Erfurt had forgotten the former place of protestant pilgrimage. Only a few local insiders knew the locale and had maintained it against the will of the communist apparatchiks. But now Stotternheim beckoned to be rediscovered, and I had resolved to do so.

As I entered the cabby’s brand new white Mercedes, which he had polished meticulously to impress potential customers, I asked the driver whether he knew where Stotternheim was. I was lucky, not only did he know Stotternheim, he knew it very well, because his wife and in-laws were from that community. He assured me he could take me there in the shortest possible time.

But my next question, whether he knew the location near Stotternheim where Martin Luther on the second of July 1505 had nearly lost his life in a violent thunderstorm, was met with utter astonishment and incomprehension. No, he had never, ever heard about such a thing. And to prove that I must surely be mistaken, he turned on his CB. In no time all the cabbies in the vicinity of Erfurt questioned, denied, laughed and cried about this preposterous suggestion by a German-Canadian ignoramus, who thought that Luther was ever frightened by lightning near their Stotternheim. By the time we had reached the outskirts of Stotternheim, he thought that the multitude of his colleagues had finally convinced me that no such action had ever taken place in 1505.

But I didn’t give up that easily since I had told my students at MUN for years that Stotternheim did exist and that Luther had experienced there a profound change in his life that sent him into the monastery. I still had a trump up my sleeve, a description of how to find the place in a book from 1891. The problem was only that we were now counting the Year of our Lord 1991, just a hundred years later. As we approached a prominent turn in the road that would have taken us to downtown Stotternheim, I had a hunch that the unpaved road into the fields to my right might be the road mentioned in my guide from the past century. I now begged the driver to take a chance and proceed straight ahead into the fields instead of continuing on the pavement into the village.

The man complied but immediately regretted having followed my advice as we hit one pothole after another, and his immaculate white Mercedes turned into shades of darker and darker fatigue. Finally we observed a house on the left side of the road, and I suggested that we stop and ask the occupants whether they knew where Martin Luther had experienced his dramatic encounter. Unfortunately, only a dog answered when we knocked on the door. My driver had by now reached the deepest level of despair. Staring at the mud on his formerly white cab, he was ready to return to civilization no matter what. And, yet, from the road I could see in the distance an outcrop of trees, and I promised my unhappy companion that if this was not the place that I was looking for we would return at once to Erfurt.

Pressing on through more potholes and field stones, we finally reached the outcrop. There, as if struck by lightning myself, I could see a crude monument. As I came closer I saw that devoted hands had written onto a slab of red sandstone with white paint: “Here, young Luther was shown the way by lightning from heaven.” And on the other side one could read Luther’s exclamation: “St. Anne help me, I will become a monk!” as well as the explanation “Wendepunkt der Reformation,” turning point of the Reformation.

Even the cabby was now caught up in my enthusiasm about a place nearly forgotten but rediscovered by a traveler from distant Newfoundland. I’m still teaching my students that near Stotternheim, Luther’s life was profoundly changed during a thunderstorm.