From Boston Review-I am a son of Martin Luther. As was my father. As was his father. But as a German man living through today’s German and European politics, what does it mean to be a son of Martin Luther?
It took me a while, more or less the first forty years of my life, to at least partially comprehend this heritage and to understand who I am: a member of a long line of Lutheran pastors. I had not seen myself like that. I had seen myself, in the narcissism so particular to my generation, as independent, a creation of my own.
And so when I eventually opened the Bible that my father gave me a few months before he died, I was shocked to see and read the year it was printed: 1546, the year Luther died. Opening this book, very heavy and clad in old brown leather with two iron bars at the side, was a like staring into a well. It was deep, it was dark, and I plunged right into it: the texture of the paper, the old German letters that I can read only with effort, the way the pages are adorned with drawings of biblical scenes, and most of all the small notations, some in German and some in Latin, that covered each page. The comments on specific lines or words—thoughts of my forefathers—were mostly illegible and hard to decipher, like a very loud chorus that I was unable to hear. It was my family history in a palimpsest.
More here-
http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/georg-diez-martin-luther-and-me
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