ABSTRACT
This afterword analyses the memory practices in Germany around the commemoration of 500th anniversary of the Reformation in tandem with the legacies of global Protestantism. It explores the interplay between a top-down memory culture of the Reformation orchestrated by the German state and the Evangelical Church, supported by the media, and a bottom-up, awareness of it as a local event. The essay relates these developments to the emergence of global Protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through a case study of the Moravians. Members of this radical religious group, which left Europe to avoid persecution, challenged the efforts of Lutheran orthodoxy to form confessionally homogeneous subjects. Their missionary endeavours nevertheless became a focal point for commemoration in the twenty-first century, with the proclamation of Herrnhut, the centre of the Moravian movement, as a ‘Reformation city’. They offer insight into the relationship between space, memory, and religious identity in cultures beyond Europe which could not directly relate to the sites, national heroes, symbols, or artefacts of the German Reformation. More broadly, this essay considers whether a global perspective on memory can help explain the conflicting and dividing visions of the Reformation, today and yesterday.
