Martin Luther
...The biographer ought to record all the known facts of a man's life, important the unimportant, pleasant and unpleasantand then it should be the task of the reader to form his own judgment on the character of the man who has been described to him. True, especially in the case of Luther, this has often not been observed; and so-called biographers have been at pains to portray a reformer who was almost a saint, ignoring all his weaker and weakest points. There are, however, some quite excellent biographies of Luther, and to those who are concerned with getting a complete and unbiased picture, I would wholeheartedly recommend Funck-Brentano's work, "Martin Luther", from which incidentally I shall quote quite often.
The task of the commentator is quite different from that of the biographer. The commentator does not even attempt, or pretend, to give a full picture. He takes some particular points and analyses and discusses them in detail in order to prove, or disprovewhatever the case may bea particular theory. This is what I am trying to do. And since it is my object to trace Luther's influence on German political and social development, I shall discuss merely the factors which seem to me to be relevant.
I know of hardly any other man in history on whom it would be more difficult to talk than on Luther, for I fully realise that every statement of mine may be contradicted. First of all, this is because people find it very difficult to look at Luther in an unbiased way. Some glorify everything he has done, others vilify everything.
Take for examplequite apart from our subjectLuther's influence on the German language. Heinrich von Treitschke, the famous German historian, stated: "Luther invented the New High German in one day, at one stroke, he created it." But the historian Janssen (who wrote sixteen volumes on German history in the Middle Ages) states...
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