Protestant heroics
Eric Till's Luther: Rebel, Liberator, Genius portrays the Reformer in warm and glowing technicolor. One cannot but side with this courageous young man who takes on an insensitive and secularized religious establishment. Heroes and villains are made easily identifiable in this film, though historical authenticity gets short shrift in the process.
The film concentrates on the crucial half-decade of Luther's life between 1517, when his 95 theses triggered the controversy with the Roman Catholic Church, and 1521, when he refused to recant his convictions before the assembly of the German Estates at Worms and was declared an outlaw. A brief prelude takes us back ten years, when Luther decided to become a monk, while the final portion of the film includes scenes showing the iconoclasm of some Lutheran sympathizers; the uprisings of the German peasants; Katherina von Bora, whom Luther married in 1525; and finally the Diet at Augsburg in 1530, when the emperor attempted to suppress the Lutheran innovators. One cannot avoid the suspicion that Katie and the German peasants make their appearance for reasons of political correctness.
The film does not show convincingly why and how "rebel, liberator and genius" came together in Luther. The German peasants assuredly did not take him to be their liberator. Luther steers clear of major issues surrounding the Reformer: Was the church really that depraved in the early 16th century or is this Protestant propaganda? Is Luther's story, and that of his supporters, solely a religious story or was there a convergence of power politics, economics, misunderstandings and religion? The film avoids placing Luther into this matrix, contenting itself with time-honored Protestant clichés, such as that the Catholic Church was badly in need of a rebel (the film is rather melodramatic and graphic when it purports to show what Rome was like ca. 1510). And John Tetzel is maligned once more with the allegation, a favorite Protestant chestnut, that he claimed indulgences would spare even someone who had violated the Virgin Mary.
