12. “No Words Can Express My Heartbreak”: Widowhood and Final Years
O God, if Luther is dead, who will henceforth deliver the Holy Gospel to us with such clearness?” This lament is the heart cry of the great artist Albrecht Dürer, who would himself never live to hear the actual pronouncement, Luther is dead. The artist’s fears were expressed in 1521 after Luther’s excommunication at the Diet of Worms. Luther, however, would live for another quarter century. Indeed, he would continue to hold forth as a formidable religious leader. During those years, he escaped death on numerous occasions, either at the hands of an enemy or his own maladies. Yet for many, even in 1546, the words Luther is dead were alarming. Both enemies and friends were stunned. What would become of his legacy? The news confirmed Katie’s worst fears.
Biographers often divide the lives of their subjects into manageable segments, as has frequently been done with Martin Luther. With Katharina, the task is relatively simple. There are four major events in her life, each marking the beginning and end of two lengthy stages: (1) her entry into monastic life as a young child and her escape from it, and (2) her marriage to Luther and his death. Details of her five years prior to entering the convent are lost to us. Not so, her final years as a widow. Here we find her active and in control. In fact, during her nearly seven-year widowhood, as devastating as this season of life was, we see her rising up and taking charge amid blinding sorrow. She is independent, strong, and competent, even as she was in marriage.
From references to her at this time, however, it would be easy to characterize Katie during these final years as an irritable, belligerent, and hardened widow. And in many ways she was. Her problem was that she had the mind-set of an independent twenty-first-century widow more than that of a dependent sixteenth-century one.
The story begins with her husband’s death. Fortunately for biographers, he was a celebrity in his lifetime. Every detail of his life after 1517 was carefully recorded, particularly his death. Heiko Oberman sums up his final week:
In the last days before his death Luther had been the cheerful man his friends knew and loved. He had successfully completed a difficult mission: a trip from Wittenberg to Eisleben [where he had been born and baptized] to mediate in a protracted quarrel . . . After two tough weeks of negotiation, the parties had narrowed their differences and a reconciliation had finally—though only temporarily—been achieved. So there was reason to be cheerful . . . although he was quite sure he had little time left: “When I get home to Wittenberg again, I will lie down in my coffin and give the worms a fat doctor to feast on.” By highlighting the skeleton within the human body, late medieval art had urgently reminded everyone that health, beauty, and wealth were only a few breaths away from the Dance of Death. The “fat doctor” was well aware of this, not as a moralistic horror story, but as a reality of life poised on the brink of eternity.
This “Dance of Death” would have been very real to Katie in this era when bereavement was lurking somewhere beneath every rooftop in Wittenberg. But the suddenness of losing her husband was a searing pain. How does one cope with the loss of a beloved spouse? For me, the term widowhood spells fear, dread, and the indescribable sadness of losing my husband. He has visited that realm twice. For him, the terminal diagnoses (ovarian and pancreatic cancers) wrapped their shrouds around each marriage for more than three years, while family fun and laughter punched holes through the blackness. In the end, death turned into a painfully sad gift—no more chemo and unbearable physical suffering.
Although Martin had suffered painful afflictions, he was not terminally ill, and Katie would not have regarded his passing in any sense a gift. Amid her deep grief, however, she had no choice but to move on in all her work-related endeavors, confronting gender discrimination at every turn. Her rights over her estate and young children were far less than secure. When Martin died on February 18, 1546, there were four surviving children. Hans, nineteen, was by no means independent. Martin was fourteen; Paul had just turned thirteen; and Margarete was not yet eleven. And though Luther had thought he might die on several earlier occasions and had sought to prepare Katie for his death, there was not enough warning for her to even travel to be at his bedside.
Truly his death came with a suddenness that must have stunned her. He had previously been very ill, and his letters during earlier travels had shaken her to the core. But now, as his last letter to her clearly indicated, all was well. In fact, this final letter to her, written four days before he died, was among his most optimistic: “We can come home this week,” he began—and very welcome news it was. “The dukes have made up. I’m going to invite them as guests that they may talk to each other.”
Why does he always do this to me? she might have been thinking. And dukes? How am I supposed to properly house and feed them? Doesn’t he know I can’t handle any more freeloaders?
Luther must have known she wouldn’t be thrilled with more guests, and his next sentences would have pleased her: “I am sending you some trout which the Duchess of Hohenstein sent me. She is very happy over the reconciliation.” The best news, besides his imminent homecoming, settled her mind on family matters: “The boys are still at Mansfeld. We are so well treated here that we are in danger of forgetting Wittenberg. The bladder stone, praise God, is not bothering me.”
How fitting it would have been if he had returned and she could have had some private parting words with him. She so desperately needed consolation, and there was no one who could have soothed her more than this German barbarian with whom she had lived for twenty years. Theirs was a solid marriage that never knew heart-pounding romance, but their partnership of deep and abiding affection carried them through joys and sorrows and hardships. Now this, the ultimate hardship. When the news arrived, the Black Cloister was never blacker.
But in fact, she was not the one to first officially hear the news: “Shortly after Doctor Martinus died at about 3:00 a.m. on February 18,” writes Heiko Oberman, “Justus Jonas carefully recorded Luther’s last twenty-four hours, addressing his report not to Luther’s widow, as one might expect, but to his sovereign, Elector John Frederick, with a copy for his university colleagues in Wittenberg.”
It was important to have the death witnessed and recorded. Jonas had drawn up the letter in the predawn hours, less than two hours after Luther died. Besides Jonas, the witnesses included sons Martin and Paul, the court preacher, a servant, a notary and his wife, the inn owner, and two doctors. Children, friends, strangers—all but Katie. Another stranger, a doctor, “ascribed the death to a stroke of paralysis, brought on by the closing up of a wound in his leg from which the Reformer had suffered for years.”
Dressed in a white smock, Luther’s corpse remained on the bed where he died until his death mask and coffin were prepared. Then the following afternoon, his body was taken to a nearby church, where Jonas preached a funeral sermon. The next day, after Katie had been informed by Philip Melanchthon, the funeral procession headed toward Wittenberg. As the parade passed through towns along the way, church bells pealed. Not until the morning of February 22, four days and a few hours after Martin died, did the procession arrive in Wittenberg at Elster Gate.
Heading the procession were various court representatives from Saxony, accompanied by dozens of mounted horsemen. It was a state funeral, with all the solemnity that would accompany the death of a prince or king. Katie and daughter Margarete had been driven out to meet the procession, and her wagon followed behind the hearse with the coffin draped in black. The three sons walked with other close relatives. Following them were professors, students, and town officials bringing up the rear. Johannes Bugenhagen gave the funeral oration, followed by personal reflections from Philip Melanchthon, “who did not make a secret of the fact that Luther was not a ‘saint,’ but a normal person who also had rough edges.” His place of burial was the famous Castle Church.
Melanchthon had written to Chancellor Brück about Katie’s reaction to the news: “It is easy to see that the poor woman is deeply shocked and greatly troubled, but especially on account of the three sons whom the sainted Doctor had in Eisleben, not knowing how they might react to their father’s death.”
How difficult it must have been for Katie to grieve privately for her husband, who belonged to all of Wittenberg and regions far beyond. Where could she go for consolation? She had very few friends, some of whom had predeceased her. Nor did she possess her husband’s calm certainty that death meant moving on to a far better heavenly home. The finality of the deaths of her two daughters years earlier and now the death of her husband left her crushed.
For nearly three decades, Luther had been an important public figure, and his death was not a private matter related primarily to wife and family. His passing marked the end of an era. When Philip Melanchthon, while in the middle of a lecture at the university, was first given the news, he was crestfallen. His words needed no explanation: “The charioteer of Israel has fallen.” Others had already picked up the mantle, but the father of the Reformation, that sickly and rumpled prophet, had been, at least figuratively, transported to heaven in a chariot of fire.
Unlike Elijah, however, Martin Luther’s final hours had been very carefully written for posterity. In fact, it would not be long before his enemies (as his followers feared) began spreading rumors that he had recanted on his deathbed or that he had undergone a miserable death at the hands of the devil or that he was guilty of the most unpardonable sin of suicide. And such rumors continue even today. On a website devoted to Luther, a man named Ray commented, “Growing up in a strict Catholic family, my dad would tell me stories of how Luther was racked by pain in his final moments, crying out to God to forgive him of the sins he committed against His Church, those present looking in horror as he screamed out that the demons were dragging him away.”
Katie was certainly used to such denunciations from her husband’s opponents, but now she would have to face them alone. Worse, however, must have been the censure aimed directly at her. And she would realize that she had few friends. Even close relatives seemed almost aloof. When her sister-in-law Christina von Bora wrote to her requesting financial help for her son Florian, Katie, as her letter indicates, responded by emphasizing her present sorrow and brokenness:
I see that you have a heartfelt sympathy for me and my poor children. For who should not properly be sad and worried on account of such a dear man as was my beloved husband . . . I can neither eat nor drink. And in addition to that, I cannot sleep. And if I had a principality or an empire I wouldn’t feel so bad about losing it as I feel now that our dear Lord God has taken this beloved and dear man from me and not only from me, but from the whole world. When I think about it, I can’t refrain from grief and crying either to read or to write, as God well knows.
Doesn’t it seem inappropriate that Katie was being hit on for funds only two months after her husband had been buried? But she could not simply let the matter drop. In her reply, she declined to take on the support of Florian’s education. She implied that she was very poor, though in fact she was not. She “overstated the effect of her loss,” writes Scott Hendrix. When taking into account “Luther’s estate and the generosity of Elector John Frederick, the counts of Mansfield, and Luther’s close colleagues, there was plenty of money.” In fact, at the time of his death, they would have been among the most affluent residents of Wittenberg. But Katie, the realist, knew how quickly a financial estate could turn to dust during these dark days of war and pestilence—and court orders.
“When Luther died,” writes Erwin Weber, “Katharine’s world fell apart.” Although her husband had willed everything to her, and the Elector supported Luther’s wishes, “the judges in the territory would not permit widows to inherit the estate and ordered guardians for her children.” Her future was unsettled, and she regarded it her responsibility alone to make sure she would be able to carry on. She could not depend on the men around her.
Her greatest concern was for the financial well-being of her children. Katie was first and foremost a mother hen, fearful of letting the chicks stray very far beyond her protective wings. When she had been away on business, she expected Martin to be the reliable househusband. But now there were those who were accusing her of seeking to amass a fortune for herself with no regard for her children. Thus, despite her husband’s clear instructions in his will, she and the children were to have guardians. Her independence—and her very motherhood—was to be taken over by others. Only Margarete would live with her.
It’s hard to imagine a committee deciding the fate of this fatherless family when the mother herself was fully competent to take over. But that is exactly what was happening. The Elector, his chancellor, Gregory Brück, and others met behind closed doors and made decisions that would then be conveyed to Katie. He was certainly no friend of Katie, accusing her of caring less for her children than for enriching herself. He vowed he would ruin her by sending her children away and putting an end to what he insisted was her profligate spending. He paid no heed to Martin’s clear instructions that his capable wife, Katie, be their children’s guardian.
But Martin Luther was dead, and now was the time to put Katie in her place. Brück’s decisions were driven by spitefulness. “At any rate, in his aversion toward Katie and in his wish to sever her influence,” writes Ernst Kroker, “he now became unfair toward her. He cast suspicion on her with the Elector . . . Even less should he have implied that he twice came upon the rumor that Katie might get married again.”
Property was also a major matter of conflict. Katie and Martin had often disagreed on the acquisition of property, but her wishes had prevailed. Now after his death, she believed her only financial security lay in more land. He feared taking such risks amid political and military uncertainties. Who would work the land? There would be taxes to pay with no income. But Katie was determined to purchase more. “Against the advice of former chancellor Brück and Melanchthon,” writes Scott Hendrix, “Katharina purchased a low-lying farm at Wachsdorf.” It was a two-hour journey from Wittenberg, but not as far away as her Zülsdorf farm.
Why couldn’t Katie simply take the advice of others, especially Chancellor Brück? Why not make life easier—“send all the boys to school, dispose of the property, return the Black Cloister to the Elector, and live with her daughter modestly on an allowance from the Elector”? But that was not her style. She was a driven woman, a type A personality, and she simply could not be held back. Imagine her sitting in a rocker, knitting potholders for the rest of her life. Other women, perhaps. Not Katie. She was bound and determined to make her own way and to retain at least de facto guardianship of her four children. She was tenacious, and in the end, she prevailed. But her life was more harried than it had been when her husband was alive. In fact, during the years after Martin’s death, she was in court on three different occasions to demand her legal rights.
Only months after Luther had died, Catholic forces faced off against Protestants in what became known as the Schmalkaldic War. “The forces of John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse,” writes Scott Hendrix, “were no match for the troops assembled by Charles and his brother Ferdinand, and in April of 1547 the Lutherans surrendered at Mühlberg,” a town about a day’s journey from Wittenberg. Soon thereafter Wittenberg itself became a battleground, Electors Philip and John Frederick having been taken prisoner.
In the midst of this chaos in 1546, with hand-to-hand combat now coming to the streets of Wittenberg, Katie and her three youngest children fled to the fortified town of Magdeburg, soon to be joined by the Melanchthons. That town, however, was swarming with other refugees and was itself not considered safe. So as soon as she learned that the troops had moved on, she returned to Wittenberg, no doubt fearing that her claim on the Black Cloister might be weakened if she were not living in it. During her short absence, however, her fields had been blackened, cattle killed and consumed, gardens in ruins, buildings except for the Black Cloister burned to the ground.
Again in 1547, she and the children were on the road, this time escorted by Philip Melanchthon and heading for Copenhagen, hoping that the king of Denmark would provide support and a safe haven. But the nearly four hundred miles of travel were dangerous and expensive. Long before they reached their destination, they encountered enemy troops, forcing them to turn back. She and the children found safety in a small German town, where they remained for two months before returning to Wittenberg, finding it still in turmoil. In fact, there was no place to hide. Others had panicked and were on the run as well. But one wonders if Katie, amid her fears and deep grief, was simply not making wise choices.
Today we would counsel a widow against making life-altering decisions too soon after the death of a spouse. But even if Katie had been offered such counsel, crop destruction caused by war and bad weather only added to her indecisiveness. We now know that confusion and exhaustion are common symptoms of grief. Indeed, in the year following her husband’s death, she was burdened with cares almost beyond her ability to cope.
Before the winter of 1547 set in, the little family had returned to Wittenberg. “It is certain that the double flight exhausted the cash reserves,” writes Martin Treu, so much so that she “stood temporarily at the edge of bankruptcy.” In these months of uncertainty, Philip Melanchthon, as guardian, stepped in to help out, but his friendship with Katie had never been close. Indeed, Melanchthon, who had revered her husband, was now frustrated by her independence and indecisiveness. And she no doubt felt equally frustrated that she was obliged to depend on him. But after a time, when she was able to gain legal control of her Zülsdorf property (with Melanchthon’s help), she had apparently regained some financial stability.
It is interesting that, amid her deep grief, Katie had assumed that her only real financial security depended on accumulating more land, as the purchase of a farm at Wachsdorf demonstrated. But hard times were only a harvest away, and in order to make ends meet, she would later have to mortgage her beloved Zülsdorf. Yet she persevered, and through her persistence and chutzpah, her sons were granted scholarships, the money provided by court officials whose loyalty to Luther was only grudgingly extended to her.
But for every step forward, it seemed as though she were taking two steps back. Indeed, it appeared as though everything were falling to pieces—her husband dead, his Reformation reduced to torn-up tracts, and now to see all of her own hard work demolished. On top of this was the fact that she had lost her status. While her husband was alive, she was recognized (though often resented) as the wife of the great Reformer. Now she was almost forgotten.
If widowhood, property destruction, and financial troubles had been all Katie had to contend with, her life might have stretched on for decades. Unlike her husband, she was strong, healthy, and mentally stable. We imagine her visiting her children and helping with grandchildren. How could anything else go wrong? Yes, of course, a plague was ravaging the land. We plead for her. Hadn’t she suffered enough already? Indeed, if she had not yet become a confirmed pessimist by this time, her final months would plunge her into that cold grip of despair.
In addition to owning properties, she had been modestly supported by her late husband’s benefactors, including Philip Melanchthon and the king of Denmark, as well as the Duke of Prussia. But the onetime nest egg was gone. When her husband died, they were relatively affluent, thanks to her hard work and her frugality. On that score, her husband died in peace, never imagining that in such a short time, his wife would become a beggar with a bitter living. For the last five years of her life, she would plead for money from benefactors, though often without success. Yet she soldiered on, keeping her Black Cloister boardinghouse open, though barely making a profit. Early in 1552, she finally did receive help from the king of Denmark, money she sorely needed to plant her crops—farmer that she was to the end.
But the harvest of 1552 ended badly. Imperial troops were not only ravaging the land, but, as rumor had it, were also spreading disease. When the fury of the plague came to Wittenberg in 1552, conditions were so threatening that by August, the university actually picked up and moved south to Torgau. Katie stayed on to protect her property and bring in the harvest. Soon thereafter, however, fearing that the plague had infected the Black Cloister, she too fled to Torgau.
The final horrific ordeal she faced was her last. With her younger children Paul and Margareta (the older boys away at school), she set out for Torgau. Exactly what happened is uncertain, but the horses bolted. She apparently was either thrown off or jumped from the wagon in an effort to control the horses, and in the process she took a serious fall, landing in a ditch and injuring her back. Imagine her body wracked with serious cuts and bruises and perhaps broken bones and internal injuries. The final painful months were truly sad. Martin had colleagues and friends in the town of Torgau, but they did not step forward to help Katie in her time of need. Daughter Margareta, now eighteen, tried to relieve her mother’s severe pain and nurse her back to health, but to no avail. Katharina died some three months later, on December 20, 1552. She was only fifty-three years old.
Her funeral, conducted by Philip Melanchthon and the local rector, was in Torgau. The death notice recognized her as the “wife of the venerable Doctor Martin Luther,” but also referred to her own lack of veneration: “Besides the trials of widowhood, she also experienced much ingratitude by many people of whom she should expect help and support for the sake of her husband’s public merits in the service of the church, but was often disgracefully disappointed.”
What a sorry obituary it was. After all she had accomplished on her own merits apart from being married to the “venerable” doctor, her children must have been “disgracefully disappointed” in the way the notice was worded. But maybe it would have been inappropriate to say that on her own she accomplished more than did the vast majority of men in the sixteenth century, despite their privilege of gender.
The years of Katie’s widowhood are difficult to unravel. During her twenty years of marriage to Martin Luther, she was the recipient of letters, and her life parallels his. But after his death, she appears to go missing for months, almost years, at a time. Some aspects of her life and responses to her husband’s death remain in the realm of mystery. In fact, one such mystery relates to a 1546 woodcut depicting her in mourning. Her mouth is covered by a piece of cloth. Some have speculated that the bandaged mouth was to represent the silence a widow should maintain in the absence of a husband who was to rule over her. Susan Karant-Nunn has pointed out that as late as the sixteenth century, widows were portrayed with clothing covering their mouths—“a symbolic representation of mundtod (“deadmouth”), the legal principle by which medieval German widows were denied a legal voice or identity.” They were to be represented by a male relative.
Katie would have scorned the idea of a mouth covering. The only one she would have ever worn would have been found in a woodcut, surely not on her person. But pictures tell us a lot about the times. Another interesting piece of art that also appeared in 1546, the year of Luther’s death, is titled The Fountain of Youth. Painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, it speaks volumes about the tenor of the times. While I will always be grateful for his painting of Katie (though the facial features of his women often have a similar flat and expressionless look), this piece is much more interesting and is entertaining as well.
The fountain of youth is a swimming pool of sorts in the center of the painting. Old women (most likely widows with no hope of a second marriage) are being carted and carried to the edge of the pool in various stages of undress. Indeed, naked, with breasts hanging low, they cautiously step down into the water. The ones already in the pool, who are standing and swimming, have a distinct appearance of youth. And by the time they are stepping out on the other side, they are nubile, naked maidens. From there, they enter a dressing room and emerge in beautiful ball gowns, one of the women partially hidden in the bushes—doing who knows what—with a handsome gentleman.
Here Cranach is having a good time with his paintbrushes, and the piece of art just happens to appear the same year that Katie, who twenty years earlier had lived in his home, became a widow. It is doubtful she ever saw the painting, and if she had, she would have found it scandalous. The thought of being a youthful forty-seven (as she was when she was widowed) was ludicrous. Life and death were real, with no time for fanciful fountains of youth.
What a terrible tragedy it was that her life ended so soon! She would never cuddle with grandchildren or live to see that her husband’s legacy was as secure as were his books and tracts. The more they were burned, the faster they appeared in new printings and translations. Luther’s reform was part of a larger movement spreading far beyond the borders of Germany that simply could not be stopped. Indeed, there were glimmers of hope that diplomacy might prevail and war averted. In fact, in 1555, three years after Katie died, tentative steps toward religious toleration were set in place with the Peace of Augsburg. With that agreement, each of the German rulers could choose whether his territory would be Catholic or Lutheran. Though religious conflict would surely continue, it was a stunning accord that seemed almost unthinkable during Martin Luther’s lifetime.
As it was, Katie’s last seven years were fraught with disaster and discrimination. She was stuck in the 1540s. There was no five-hundredth anniversary to look back on. She could not have comprehended that one day, far in the future, there might be a grand, yearlong commemoration. And Katie? Her life would be wrung dry by writers in search of sufficient words for a biography. She did not have the peaceful death that the record shows for her husband. Did she rage, rage against the final dying, dimming light, as Dylan Thomas profoundly expressed in his familiar poem?
Was she raging in her sick bed and, in those last days and hours, knowing there were too many tasks left undone—and children left unmothered?