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A Life Built Around the Town

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A Life Built Around the Town

Luther lived, married, taught and was buried in Wittenberg, making the town considerably more than the site of the single doorway most people associate with his name.

A life built around the town

Beyond the 1517 posting of his theses, Martin Luther taught theology at the University of Wittenberg, which became a central intellectual hub of the Reformation, drawing students and scholars who carried Luther's ideas back across German-speaking Europe. He married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in Wittenberg in 1525, a marriage that itself became a public statement against clerical celibacy, and he is buried within the town's Castle Church, the same building associated with the theses.

A carving the town has argued over for centuries

Wittenberg's Stadtkirche, the town church, carries a Judensau, a medieval antisemitic relief sculpture mocking Jewish people, that has become the subject of an active modern legal and civic dispute over whether it should be removed, altered or retained with additional context, a controversy this entry names directly rather than glossing over given the carving's continued visible presence on an active church building.

As this entry's companion article covers

The historical event of Luther posting his theses on the Castle Church door, and the degree to which its exact circumstances are debated by historians, are addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.

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