October 31, 2017 will be the 500-year anniversary of Luther’s nailing his 99 theses to the door of the Cathedral at Wittenberg. Perhaps it was the date that gave Danish author and public intellectual Peter Tudvad the idea for his latest book, Manteuffel. “Manteuffel” is an actual German surname that literally means “man-devil.” There could not be a more appropriate name for the protagonist of Tudvad’s novel about a fictional, villainous contemporary and friend of Martin Luther, Friedrich von Manteuffel.
If it wasn’t the date of the anniversary of the birth of Protestantism that inspired Tudvad to write Manteuffel, then it was probably what he learned about Luther while doing the research for his earlier book Stadier på antisemitismens vej (stages on the way of anti-Semitism). Denmark, which still has a state church, The Danish Lutheran Church, tends to downplay Luther’s moral failings such as his anti-Semitism. Virulent anti-Semitism wasn’t Luther’s only moral failing, however. Tudvad goes into detail in Manteuffel concerning Luther’s approval of a horrifically brutal and bloody suppression of a peasant revolt led by his own fellow protestant reformer, the unfortunate Thomas Müntzer, who was tortured and executed because of his role in the revolt.
Tudvad, who has spent a great deal of time in archives while working on his earlier non-fiction works, begins the novel with a description of how the narrator purportedly discovered Manteuffel’s long-lost correspondence while working in a German archive.
Anyone who has ever researched the history of his family, country, or hero is familiar with the exalted stillness and hushed piety of an archive. It’s not like a library where students hold noisy study-group meetings, or a church, where parents allow their children to yell and scream. Despite all our democratic pretensions, archives have escaped the profanation that has transformed other cultural institutions into transit halls with flat video screens, loudspeakers and lines of people waiting for their number to be called. Here there is no librarian who paternalistically doles out the discipline of fines to those who return books late, and no priest who with maternal solicitude explains when you should rise from the pew and then sit down again.
Instead, there is an archivist who, like a sibyl is initiated into the mysteries, both large and small, of the archive. You explain your project to the archivist as well as you can, because you don’t know yourself in which of the archives the answer to your question is found. You try, though, and the archivist succeeds miraculously in finding, behind the armored door that protects the hidden treasure of the archive, precisely the document that satisfies your thirst. You sit there at the little table, where the soft light from the single small lamp falls generously on the document whose secret shall now be revealed, like a monk in his cell. It occasionally happens that your expectations are immediately disappointed, not over the content, but over your own limited abilities as you struggle to read ancient handwriting or decipher a stenographer’s shorthand. You return to the archivist, who is able not only to locate documents, but also to decipher them, and hence in the best sense reminds one more of a priest than a librarian.
When, after some time, you’ve persevered through the trials of the novice and learned to use an archive properly, entering it is like crossing the threshold to another world. You become one with the archive and all its other users who are like so many limbs on a single body. What these others are searching for is a mystery. You know only that their research is part of the eternal tidal movement of the archive itself. Documents begin to pile up on the table until you have disappeared behind a mountain of the past, while outside the present waits to become ripe enough for archiving. You learn to balance like a stylite on the precise geometrical point where the future slices into the past for the future is the family history, dissertation, or biography on which you are working, and the past is everything that is worth writing about.
Hours pass. You lose all sense of what time it is, fail to notice your own hunger, or how long you’ve sat there without eating or drinking. You remain faithful to your work, despite time wasted on unhelpful documents, like a Catholic praying the Rosary. The work brings with it its own rewards, for while the visible world was dissected and analyzed long ago, measured and counted in its depth and breadth so that it is now no longer possible to learn anything new about it, it is otherwise with the hidden world of an archive. Here you place again your requisition form in the basket on the counter, thank the archivist deferentially when he reappears at the counter with your fulfilled wish, don the white cotton gloves required of those who desire to dig down into the virginal past. And then it happens that you find what you had sought –– or find something entirely different from what you’d sought.
Count Manteuffel had a consuming interest in theological questions and hence conducted an extended correspondence with Luther, as well as with other actual historical figures such as the notorious serial killer Elizabeth Báthory. What, you may wonder, does the famous protestant reformer have in common with a serial killer? All becomes clear in this meticulously researched historical novel.
Manteuffel, it turns out, is a vampire, so there is lots of blood and gore in the book. What distinguishes it, however, from the standard vampire thriller is the richness of meticulously researched historical detail, the depth of analysis of philosophical, theological, and social-political issues, and some genuinely beautiful writing, such as in the passage above.
Luther emerges as, to put it euphemistically, somewhat unsympathetic, not simply because of his association with Manteuffel, who happens to be a particularly gruesome and bloodthirsty vampire, but because of what Tudvad reveals he actually said (or wrote) and did.
Manteuffel is, among other things, a serious indictment of the father of the Protestant Reformation and hence promises to do for Protestantism (or at least Lutheranism) what The DaVinci Code did for, or perhaps it would be better to say “to” Catholicism. It’s an erudite page-turner that would be a blockbuster were it dramatized for the BBC.
Unfortunately, the book has yet to be translated into English. Fortunately, there is no more opportune time for an English-language publisher to seize upon it. Increasing attention is going to be deservedly focused on Luther this fall and some of the revelations to which that attention will give rise, including the social-political ramifications of Luther’s alliance with feudal authority against peasants, will guarantee continued interest in Luther for a long time to come.
Plus, it’s a book about a vampire. What’s not to like?
