Celebrating Peace in Biconfessional Augsburg Lutheran Churches and Remembrance Culture
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Chapter 8 Celebrating Peace in Biconfessional Augsburg Lutheran Churches and Remembrance Culture Emily Fisher Gray Every year on the eighth of August, the people of Augsburg, Germany, take a public holiday to observe the hohes Friedensfest (Great Peace Festival). This annual event marks the anniversary of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and gave Augsburg a parity constitution guaran- teeing Lutherans and Catholics balanced representation in city government.1 The annual Augsburg hohes Friedensfest presents to its citizens an essential story about their civic identity that is rooted in centuries of successful con- fessional coexistence, and exemplifies civic unity and toleration of religious diversity. Augsburgers are justly proud to claim this history. But the civic hohes Friedensfest celebrations of today obscure the confessional challenges posed by the imposition of the Treaty of Westphalia in Augsburg in the mid- seventeenth century, and the centuries of coexistence that have followed. These religious tensions are exemplified in the experience of early hohes Friedensfest celebrations, which, like all other festive observances in Augsburg, were strictly confessional in nature. From its inception in 1650 through 1984, the hohes Friedensfest was a Lutheran holiday, celebrating the triumph of the Lutheran confession and the restora- tion of its claims to legitimacy and church space after Lutherans lived under Catholic rule for much of the war. Instead of emphasizing the mutual benefits of peace shared by Augsburg’s Lutherans and Catholics alike, the purpose of the festival was didactic, highlighting rather than obscuring confessional dif- ference. The celebrations took place within the city’s Lutheran churches, the boundaries of which were carefully defined and protected, with a few cautious and limited forays into the confessionally neutral public spaces of the city. The music, sermons, feasting, and festivities served to remind the Lutherans of Augsburg of the depredations that befell their religious community in the 1 For the history of Augsburg leading up to the “parity” constitution of 1648, see Bernd Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden: Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsstadt Augsburg Zwischen Kalendarstreit und Parität (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989); and Paul Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt: Das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den paritätischen Reichsstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl von 1548 bis 1648 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004371309_010 Celebrating Peace in Biconfessional Augsburg 177 Thirty Years’ War and the triumphant restoration of Lutheran churches and political power in the city. Meanwhile, those with whom the Lutherans of Augsburg shared political power and civic space, their Catholic neighbors, went about their regular day and avoided the sites of Lutheran festival activity. Historian Etienne François has described an “invisible border” dividing Catholic and Lutheran inhabitants of Augsburg in the years following 1648.2 The Lutheran celebrations of the hohes Friedensfest—like the Corpus Christi processions observed only by Catholics—served to make religious differ- ences starkly visible on certain days of the year as the citizenry divided itself into celebrants and noncelebrants and retreated to confessionally distinct spaces.3 As the proportion of Lutherans to Catholics in Augsburg decreased in the eighteenth century and Lutherans became a minority, the Friedensfest celebrations and their accompanying souvenir images, the Friedensgemälde, placed increased emphasis on the spatial and theological boundaries between confessions. The hohes Friedensfest offered Lutherans a narrative of redemp- tion and inculcated a civic and confessional identity that firmly, if temporarily, excluded Catholics. Despite this intolerant erasure of the non coreligious other, the annual Lutheran celebrations of the hohes Friedensfest and the centennial celebrations of other important anniversaries were made possible through active toleration by Catholic neighbors and city officials who facilitated the Lutheran celebrations and even contributed, in small ways, to their success. I Memorializing Loss and Celebrating Redemption: Augsburg’s Lutheran Churches The first celebration of the Augsburg hohes Friedensfest on 8 August 1650 was one of 195 different peace festivals held between 1648 and 1660 in the Holy Roman Empire.4 Though the Peace was finalized in the fall of 1648, it took some time to interpret the precise meaning and terms of the agreements.5 The slight delay in organizing Augsburg’s peace festival was not unusual, nor was its evangelical character. Claire Gantet’s study of festivals commemorating the Peace of Westphalia found that the celebrations peaked in 1650 and were 2 Etienne François, Die Unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1991), 16–25. 3 Claire Gantet, “Peace Festivals in Early Modern South German Cities,” in Festive Culture in Germany and Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Karin Friedrich (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 66. 4 Ibid., 62. 5 StadtAA, Reichstadt, EWA 87 tomus 1..