Reformation Day

Reformation Day, on 31 October, commemorates the act taken to mark the beginning of the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences, dated 1517. The traditional image, Luther nailing the theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, is itself debated by historians. The door served as the university's notice-board, so a posting would have been an ordinary academic act rather than a dramatic defiance; the earliest account of the nailing comes from Melanchthon after Luther's death, and some scholars hold that Luther sent the theses to his archbishop that day and that the public posting, if it happened, came later.

What is not in doubt is the date of the letter and the rapid, printing-driven spread of the theses across Germany. The day is a public holiday in several German states and a major observance in Lutheran churches, kept with the hymn "A mighty fortress is our God". Its coincidence with the eve of All Saints is not accidental in reverse: Luther chose the eve of a great feast when indulgence-preaching was at its height. The 2017 quincentenary was marked by notable Lutheran-Catholic acts of common commemoration, a measure of how far the day's tone has shifted from polemic.

Reformation Day's status as an official public holiday in Germany varies by state rather than applying uniformly across the country, reflecting Germany's federal structure and the different religious histories of its constituent states: predominantly Protestant states in the north and east, including Saxony, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, observe it as a full public holiday, while predominantly Catholic states in the south and west generally do not, so that the same 31 October is a day off work in one part of Germany and an ordinary working day only a short drive away in another.

For the 2017 quincentenary of Luther's theses, the German federal government made an exception and declared Reformation Day a one-off nationwide public holiday in every state regardless of its usual status, a temporary and symbolic national unification of the holiday for the anniversary year alone, after which the ordinary state-by-state pattern resumed the following year, illustrating both the significance Germany attached to the five-hundredth anniversary and the limits of that significance, since the country did not choose to make the wider nationwide holiday status permanent once the anniversary year had passed.