Due to health issues, the talk by Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Solms on the 3th of October has unfortunately been cancelled.
Today, it can be considered an established fact that the German language would not exist in its current form without the powerfully eloquent influence of Martin Luther. However, his impact on the common speech was not, for him, an end in itself. Rather, Luther regarded his turning towards the vernacular as a logical consequence of his new theology, for which the language of the common people was indispensable. It therefore comes as no surprise that, wherever Luther’s concepts of Reformation were taken up, a new vernacular translation of the Bible was also established (among others by William Tyndale in English, Mikael Agricola in Finnish, Olaus Petri and Laurentius Andrae in Swedish, Christian II of Denmark in Danish and Primož Trubar in Slovenian). Yet this linguistic accessibility alone does not explain the immediate and enormous effect of the Reformation in Germany. Its success was substantially down to the eloquence of the Reformer, which he demonstrated most powerfully in his translation of the Bible. So it was that Luther’s Bible translation substantially paved the way for a unified German language. The path to that end would not be linear, but crooked and fractured in many and varied ways. It is no coincidence that so also was the path to the implementation of the Reformation and ultimately even to the development of a German nation in the 19th century.
Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Solms is Professor of History of the German Language and Older German Literature at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and, since 2007, director of the affiliated German Language and Culture institute in Lutherstadt Wittenberg. Since 2010, he has also been an associate Professor of the University of Luxembourg. Among other distinctions, he holds an honorary doctorate from the State Linguistic University of Yerevan (Armenia) and is a member of various bodies such as the Council for German Orthography. Since 2016, he has been researching the influence of Luther's language on Eastern European languages in a project for the German Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media.
The lecture will be held in German.
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