All About Ulm

Ulm is an amaz­ing city and made us feel once again some regret at the haste of our onward jour­ney. A par­tic­u­larly nice detail about the place is that it was the home of Felix Fabri, a Domini­can monk who was a prodi­gious pil­grim and even more prodi­gious jour­naler of his pil­grim­ages to Pales­tine. He even designed a lit­tle pil­grim­age around Ulm itself for Chris­t­ian ladies who could not under­take the expense or dan­ger of long-distance pil­grim­ages them­selves. Other medieval per­son­ages of sig­nif­i­cance are the Fug­ger fam­ily, also based in nearby Augs­burg, a major bank­ing house that financed some of the Roman Catholic-siding armies in the Ref­or­ma­tion period. Amaz­ingly enough, the Fug­gers are still around, still live in Ulm, and still are bankers!

At the other end of his­tory, Ulm is the birth­place of Albert Einstein—the for­mula e=mc2 seems to be quite pop­u­lar in adver­tis­ing here. Dur­ing the Sec­ond World War the city was 80% bombed, and that legacy is still very evi­dent. The enor­mous church (never a cathe­dral, but the pride and joy of a medieval free city) and var­i­ous houses sur­vive intact, but a good num­ber of the down­town build­ings are in the dull boxy style of late 1940s and early 50s restora­tion projects. The church inte­rior also fea­tures a huge statue of St. Michael with out­spread wings and an upward-pointing sword, a (now con­tro­ver­sial) sym­bol of pro­tect­ing the pop­u­lace from all evil, installed in the 50s. Ulm was bombed by the Allies in part because it was a strong­hold of Nazi ide­ol­ogy, but it also boasts another her­itage, that of the White Rose resis­tance move­ment of stu­dents, headed by brother and sis­ter Hans and Sophie Scholl. They printed leaflets in secrets and dis­trib­uted them pub­licly, call­ing into ques­tion the lies of the Third Reich. Even­tu­ally they were caught and with some of their friends swiftly beheaded for their treach­ery. An excel­lent account of their lives can be found in the book Sophie Scholl and the White Rose.

Ulm is located in the region of Würt­tem­berg, which has itself an unusual Ref­or­ma­tion legacy. The local reformer was Johannes Brenz, a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to Lutheran chris­tol­ogy and also one of the few voices oppos­ing the per­se­cu­tion of Anabap­tists. Under his aus­pices a local Würt­tem­berg Con­fes­sion was authored that remains part of Lutheran iden­tity here. The local dialect is Swabian, which is quite sim­i­lar to Swiss Ger­man. This meant that Luther­ans here always had strong ties to the Swiss Reformed and less of the aller­gic reac­tion to them that many Luther­ans in other parts of Ger­many had. Per­haps as a result of this strong local iden­tity, Pietism took root in Würt­tem­berg and flour­ished from the 18th cen­tury to this day. In fact, the move­ment was so strong that a sort of peace accord had to be worked out between the offi­cial church and the Pietists, which man­dated com­mon wor­ship for all in the parish on Sun­day morn­ings, but free­dom to form eccle­si­o­lae or what we’d now call small groups in the after­noon for prayers, Bible study, and guest preach­ers. This was very suc­cess­ful and even now the Pietist regions in south­ern Ger­many have much higher church atten­dance than any of the other Protes­tant Lan­deskirchen in Ger­many. Pietists also had a pen­chant for form­ing mis­sion soci­eties; over 50 mis­sion soci­eties came out of Würt­tem­berg alone! Last but not least—and per­haps most rel­e­vant for our pur­poses here—the legacy of friend­ship with Swiss Calvin­ists, and nego­ti­ated peace with Pietists, has meant that Ulm and the sur­round­ing region boast par­tic­u­larly good ecu­meni­cal rela­tions today with Catholics as well. The most impor­tant devel­op­ment has been work­ing our arrange­ments for mar­riages of Catholics and Luther­ans (for­merly called con­fes­sion­ally divided mar­riages, now renamed con­fes­sion­ally con­nected mar­riages). Mar­riage has always been the seedbed of ecu­menism, because there the divi­sion is felt most painfully and yet the trust has been strongest for giv­ing one another a fair and respect­ful hearing.

We passed our rest day yes­ter­day in a pleas­antly lazy manor. The only urgent task was find­ing me a pair of out­door pants—when we bought our hik­ing uni­forms in June we had the crazy idea that sum­mer and early fall would actu­ally be warm and a hik­ing skirt would do the trick. It didn’t. After that we heard a fan­tas­tic half-hour organ con­cert at the church, Bach and Bux­te­hude and Arvö Part, a con­tem­po­rary Eston­ian com­poser whose piece sounded like the music of the res­ur­rec­tion itself. The rest of the day was spent inert and gladly so. It’s a full 7 days to our next rest period and we are very glad to see a weather report of sunny for the next 2 of the 7!

Michael Plekon says:
September 11, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Prayers & greet­ings on 9/11. Have been through Ulm once on train I think. Hope the beau­ti­ful churches, monas­ter­ies & coun­try­side are feed­ing you both & will remain there all your lives. Thanks again for this won­der­ful ecu­meni­cal pil­grim­age and action. Will remem­ber you this com­ing week at Thomas Merton’s Geth­se­mani abbey where I will visit my friend, his old sec­re­tary Br Patrick Hart, give a talk, cel­e­brate the offices & feast of the Cross with them 9/14.
Hope the walk­ing is easy, the skies blue, your days full of color & adven­ture, your love deep & strong.
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paul sailhamer says:
September 11, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Thanks for the infor­ma­tion about The White Rose move­ment and the book.
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