writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

the pastor, including his wife and children – texts by e. g. Herman Semmig (1820‐1897), by Hermann
Josephson (1864‐1949) and Bertha Josephson‐Mercator (1861‐1906), and by Hermann Werdermann
(1888‐1954). This kind of idyllizing picture from Lutheran authors has been powerful far into the 20 th
century and up to now.
These texts are intensely concerned with their authors’ contemporary issues. Modeling Bora as a
counter‐argument to Catholic versions and thus using descriptions of her in defense against such
attacks (e. g. Walch, Beste) means that she herself is not at all the important issue, neither is her own
16 th ‐century context. From each side, Bora is used as a weapon in a debate among men: Catholic
priests and monks and Lutheran pastors, professors, and teachers. These men were fighting the
opposing group, but they shared the conviction that it was male scholarly agents who were entitled
to define religion. As a part of this task of definition, they also had to come to terms among
themselves about what exactly had to be held as religious truth and where exactly were the relevant
differences. All the historical and biographical facts adduced had to serve the respective religious
truth. They had no independent value of their own.
During the 19 th century, there was a decisive shift in this respect. More and more it was secular
notions like the nation, the state and even race that were seen as the leading categories. The texts
on the pastor’s household or the pastor’s wife strongly participated in nationalist, state‐focused
discourses, re‐orienting church and religion towards the frame of state and nation, while focusing on
this particular type of household. In the 1930s, Bora was even portrayed as ancestor of the Nazi icon
Horst Wessel, who was also son of a pastor and his wife. The author of this version of Bora, Hermann
Werdermann, a Lutheran pastor and professor, was himself an active member of the Nazi Party and a
staunch advocate of racist concepts. With such texts, religion was re‐written into a new system of
concepts, and thus was reduced to a secondary and dependent category. The agents here were
German Lutheran Protestants. Bora becomes an example of a German Protestant, of a member of a
German church, of a German pastor’s wife and even of a German housewife in general.
The literature on the pastor’s household was a main site of this re‐writing of religion into
categories of a secular nation‐state. This literature constructs a history of this type of household,
starting with the Reformation and the first marriages of monks and priests. Long lists of examples
through the centuries are added. The aim is to demonstrate a historical tradition, providing factual
foundation for taking this type of household as a normative concept, which in turn was useful in
contemporary 19 th ‐ and 20 th ‐century debates and developments. In this context, Bora and Luther
were re‐created as a pastoral couple and their household as a parsonage household – ignoring the
fact that Luther was a university professor and not a pastor, and therefore the couple’s household
not being the center of a parish community. This creative historical fiction has been so successful
that it is still seen as common knowledge.
This type of household is very much a creation of the 19 th and 20 th centuries, and as such it
belongs to the various household discourses of this time period. In these modern household
discourses, a changing and modernizing society is conceptually discussed in terms of the role and
importance of households, across various genres of scholarly (in the disciplines of history and
folklore) and popular literature, in factual as well as in fictional texts. Society is given here a genderinclusive
foundation. Household is one of the much‐debated topics in the 19 th and 20 th century.
Deeply conservative or reactionary politics and especially gender politics is involved. But there is
another side as well: On a meta‐level of thinking about society, the conceptual implications of the
household as a category are relevant up to now. It is highly interesting to follow these discourses
through their many popular branches, whereas modern theoretical thinking (in the disciplines of
sociology and political theory) erased the household from society’s basic units.
In the context of this modernizing re‐thinking of society, the household is introduced as the
central site of a specific religious way of living. Bora functions as a religious example for the
household as the central site of this way of living. The household as a basic religious element of
society has to serve all the needs of its members, i. e. the male and the female head of household,
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