Martin Luther and Jena - that is a peculiar relationship.
On the first documented visit of the reformer to the city, no one recognized him.
But posthumously, Luther is nowhere as visible as in Jena, because his tombstone with a contemporary life-size image is in the town church of St. Michael there.
Of course it doesn't cover Luther's grave, because that is known to be in Wittenberg.
But the bronze plate made for it in Erfurt in 1548 did not reach its destination in the aftermath of the Schmalkaldic War, and so in 1571 it came to Jena, the new theological center of Lutheran Protestantism.
The university, which had just been founded, was to turn the previously inconspicuous farming and winegrowing town into one of the most important educational centers in Germany to this day.
Andrew Plathaus
Responsible editor for literature and literary life.
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On this Thursday morning, directly opposite, there is a set table outside.
Three wicker chairs are waiting for guests, a corresponding number of beer mugs are ready, and a small wine jug bears witness to the fact that nothing goes astray in this city: According to the inscription, it is a souvenir of the general meeting of the German Forest Association in 1937, held far away Freiburg in Breisgau.
Bad times then, like today again.
But this table is about a much older event, which also took place here in this place, where Bismarck once stopped by and in 1957 the Jena bowling group for the blind and visually impaired was founded.
This is commemorated by heavy plaques on the wall of a Jena institution that has had its headquarters here since at least 1498: the “Schwarzer Bär” inn.
Surprising encounter while eating
In it, Luther sought shelter from a winter storm on his first visit on March 3, 1522, when he was on his way from hiding in the Wartburg to his old theological place of work in Wittenberg, where the Reformation had gotten somewhat out of hand during the long absence of its founder.
Luther's own supervisor, Andreas Bodenstein, alias Karlstadt, had radicalized the teachings of his pupil and thus endangered the princely support for the new understanding of faith by the Saxon elector Frederick the Wise.
Luther wanted to put Karlstadt in his place and risked his life because he was still under imperial ban.
So he traveled incognito as Junker Jörg, because the name Luther had long been notorious everywhere.
As luck would have it, his path crossed in Jena with two young Swiss people who were supporters of the Reformation and wanted to visit Luther but did not know him personally.
One of them, Johannes Kessler, later wrote down how the encounter in the “Schwarzer Bären” with that Junker Jörg went, in whom the two Swiss only claimed to have recognized Luther a few days later when they met him again in Wittenberg – now under his own name wildly preaching to the citizens from the pulpits against Karlstadt.
Kessler's report long went unnoticed as a manuscript in his native Sankt Gallen, but the text was printed in the nineteenth century and enthusiastically received by historians as a testimony to Luther's life.
And Jena was also satisfied, since the city had now acquired the role of a reformatory Emmaus,
in which two disciples did not recognize the lost Redeemer.
It was easy to live with such anecdotes.
A father of the country fights with the Luther roll
That hasn't changed, and so the 500th anniversary of the encounter offered an opportunity to start a new tradition in Jena.
On Lutherplatz, as the open space in front of the “Black Bear” is now known, around a hundred people have gathered to watch Luther once again as he leaves the two young Swiss in the dark about his identity, while all three happily dine ( at Luther's expense).
The scene is presented by some amateur actors from the local Lutherhaus in clumsy doggery, and at the beginning and end of the ceremony a wind class from the Ernst Abbe High School plays "O When the Saints Go Marching In".
As a tireless preacher against the cult of the saints, Luther certainly would not have dreamed of this.
But it sounds nice.