September 27 -29
Our last three days were spent in Wittenberg. After the first day we finished all the on-camera work and said good bye to Rick and Peter. They took the train north to Berlin and flew back home. They had been shooting for a month straight in London and now Germany. After they left, Kurt and I met with Luther expert Martin Treu at Luther Hall. In addition to the Luther show, we also want to produce a shorter video on his wife Kaitie Luther. She was quite a story herself. As a nun in a convent, Katie and her fellow nuns heard about Luther and fled in the dark of night. Showing up in Wittenberg the nuns were taken in by Luther and his friends. In those days the affair was looked upon as scandalous. Things really got juicy when Luther married one of them, Katie. Prior to this, priest couldn’t marry. Luther and his friends changed all that. At least, outside the Catholic Church. We also got some local actors to dress up in period costume and record a few scenes from Luther’s day. Together with a horse drawn cart and the picturesque backdrop of Wittenberg, it may actually look like the 16th century.
Each morning I had the pleasure of taking a run through Wittenberg. The weather was great.
One morning after breakfast Kurt, Joyce and I drove to the medieval city of Torgau. This is the city where Katie Luther is buried in the city cathedral. We then visited the ruins of a convent were she lived prior to meeting Luther.
It has been ten years almost to the day, since German reunification. It is clear that a lot has changed here. Travelers can still witness evidence of the former communist state in larger cities like Halle. As you drive through, grey, concrete apartment blocks line the road. Industry seems to be closer to the villages than in the west. But where ever we went, the winds of drastic change were blowing. Streets were new. Brick sidewalks were newly laid. Castles and historic churches were often showed in scaffolding. The Luther Hall in Wittenberg, for example, is scheduled to close for two years for renovations. Every once in a while you see a tiny old Trabant, the former Soviet style car popular before the fall. But for the most part, cars are as new as the infrastructure. The West Germans have poured millions of Deutsche Marks into the economy here. Apparently there is some grumbling from West Germans because retiring East Germans were able to tap into the west’s pension fund. On the whole though, it still looks like reunification will be good for all parties concerned.
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