One of my first decisions in planning The Magic Battery was to set it in 16th-century Germany. Germany, because that’s the part of Europe I know best. The 16th century, because it was a period of dramatic changes. Copernicus had set out a new view of the universe. Paracelsus had challenged long-held ideas in medicine. Luther had taken on the Catholic Church and divided Christendom.
Luther never appears “on stage” in my novel, but he is frequently mentioned and quoted. Many of the quotes that I use are real; the ones on magic are made up, but I tried to make them true to his character. The main source in my research was Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. The book was also an excellent source on life in that period.
What kind of man was Luther?
In The Magic Battery, Dr. Brandt talks about the idea of greatness. He says about Gottesmann, the story’s villain, “Human life has little to do with his idea of justice. People like that are called great. They have a vision, and they’ll climb over any number of dead bodies to reach it.” He continues, “There’s another kind of greatness. Creating something new. Making life better. Letting understanding replace ignorance. Letting hope push fear away. Those people aren’t always appreciated. Sometimes the great people do terrible things to them. But the world is better for them.” As for Luther, he says, “He’s a great man. I’m not sure which kind he is.”
When Luther first gained public attention, the Catholic Church was at the most corrupt point in its history. Rodrigo Borgia had been Pope. In 1521, the Pope was Leo X, noted for selling “indulgences,” in effect high-priced admission tickets to Heaven. Luther rightly considered the practice an outrage. After posting his 95 theses and publicly challenging the orthodoxy, he was excommunicated in 1521. The same year, the Emperor ordered him to appear before the Diet of Worms. He said:
Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.
The power and danger of conscience
The implications of those words are huge. They place the judgment of the individual above everything else. However, it’s critical that conscience, not reason, is his argument’s bedrock. Reason can challenge anything, even the foundations of Christianity. “Conscience” is more delimited, and it’s easy to rule out contrary ideas as not being matters of conscience.
In one of his commentaries, Luther wrote:
I used to make a list of my sins, and I was always on the way to confession, and whatever penances were enjoined upon me I performed religiously. In spite of it all, my conscience was always in a fever of doubt. The more I sought to help my poor stricken conscience the worse it got.
The difference between conscience and reason is obvious here. Conscience, in this case, meant obsessive guilt. We often think of conscience as an inner voice, telling us things that we can sometimes ignore but can never deny. But what happens if my conscience disagrees with your conscience? For instance, suppose your conscience says “Jesus is the Son of God” but mine says “Jesus was just a man.” Luther faced exactly this conflict in his dealings with the Jews.
Luther’s objection to Jews was religious, not ethnic or racial. If a Jew converted to Christianity, Luther had no problem with him. He believed that the only reason the Jews hadn’t converted was that the Catholic Church hadn’t given them sufficiently good arguments. He offered arguments which he thought were better, but he got very few takers. This led him to adopt furious hatred of the Jews. It’s hard to overstate how horrible his On the Jews and their Lies (1543) is. You can read as much as you can stand of it on the Kristallnacht Memorial website. He wrote a template for Kristallnacht almost four hundred years in advance.
I shall give you my sincere advice:
First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly, and I myself was unaware of it, will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.
Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them that they are not masters in our country, as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God.
Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.
Luther provided a model for Heinrich Gottesmann in The Magic Battery. (Another model was Victor Hugo’s Javert.) He always follows his conscience. He wouldn’t dream of seeking a false conviction. He feels regret that people have to be executed, and he wishes burning could be replaced by the more humane hanging. However, it’s an absolute for him that women and Jews must not practice magic, and putting people to death is preferable to letting that happen.
I find villains with a determined goal more interesting than merely evil ones. I’d rather read about Robespierre than the Marquis de Sade, Lenin rather than Genghis Khan, Cotton Mather rather than Rodrigo Borgia. You can hate them, but you have to think about exactly why you hate them. If I’d made a typical sixteenth-century witch hunter the villain, I wouldn’t have written as good a book.