Johann Lachmann

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Johann Lachmann (* 1491 in Heilbronn ; † around December 1538 there) was a Lutheran theologian and the reformer of Heilbronn. The Heilbronn catechism , begun by Lachmann and published in 1528, is considered the second oldest Lutheran catechism . It is also thanks to Lachmann's negotiating skills that the imperial cities of Heilbronn and Wimpfen were spared from worse devastation during the Peasants' War in 1525 .

Life

Origin and education

He was a son of the bell founder and councilor Bernhard Lachmann († 1517) and his second wife Anna Fritz. The older brother Bernhart the Elder came from the father's first marriage . J. († 1523), who, like his father, became a bell founder and later demonstrated his father's workshop. Like Johann from his second marriage, his brother Jerg († 1524), who was also a bell founder, came from. Johann attended the Latin school in his hometown and in 1505 moved to the University of Heidelberg . Here he obtained the academic master's degree in 1508 . He must have been a gifted student who already aroused admiration on his master's degree. After completing his artistic studies, he turned to jurisprudence and also held some humanistic lectures.

Appointed as parish administrator to Kilian's Church in Heilbronn, he held this office from 1514 to 1520, representing the Würzburg canons in Heilbronn. His activities included reading mass, carrying out baptisms, weddings and funerals, pastoral care and the administration of the parish's property, which consists of real estate, validity and tithe shares. In addition to the Würzburg parish administrator, there was also the preaching office, which was founded in 1426 and assigned independently of the Würzburg canons by the council of the city of Heilbronn. When the Kilianskirchen preacher Johann Kröner died in November 1520, Lachmann applied for the office of preacher, which was awarded to him by the city council at the turn of the year 1520/21. His successor as parish administrator was Peter Dietz from Heilbronn. In Heidelberg , Lachmann obtained his doctorate on April 29, 1521 .

Early Reformation work in Heilbronn

Lachmann's earliest Lutheran sermons in Heilbronn are recorded in 1524, but based on various evidence it can be assumed that Martin Luther had followers in Heilbronn even earlier: As early as 1521, after Luther was ostracized at the Worms Reichstag, the Heilbronn council was undecided whether the Worms Edict would be announced should be, and the Electoral Palatinate , allied with the imperial city, warned in November 1522 against rebellious (Lutheran) pamphlets. In 1524 there were various religious conflicts in Heilbronn. In the spring the priests were ordered by a council decree not to have any relationships with their maids, to which the benefactor Wilhelm Greser replied that the priests would then have to adhere to the mayor's wives and daughters. The preacher of the barefoot monastery on the harbor market left Heilbronn in the autumn of 1524 to visit Luther in Wittenberg. The city was also in a dispute with the Carmelite monastery , whose Mönchsee in the east of the city was drained at the instigation of the council. The Carmelite Prior Heinrich Seitzenweiler had also seduced a daughter of Mayor Kaspar Berlin as a confessor. When the Carmelites complained about Master Hans preaching in the Nikolaikirche , the council let him continue to preach.

A testament to Reformation ideas in Heilbronn that is still visible today is the design of the west tower of the Kilian's Church, completed by Hans Schweiner in 1529 , which is considered an important Renaissance building due to its Reformation architectural decorations .

Götz von Berlichingen wanted to bring Lachmann to Neckarzimmern for a disputation at the beginning of 1525 , which should contain the heretic allegations of the Heilbronn barefooter Hans Jörg von Wildenfels against the newly believing Neckarzimmern pastor Jörg Amerbacher. The Heilbronn council allowed Lachmann to take part in the debate as a private person, but the conversation did not take place. Instead, at Lachmann's instigation, Götz had a notice posted against the barefoot monk in Heilbronn. In March 1525, the Würzburg bishop Konrad II von Thüngen complained to the Heilbronn council that the parish administrator Dietz was being pressured into reformatory acts.

Active in the German Peasants' War in 1525

During the Peasants' War, Lachmann mainly dealt with the peasant leader Jäcklein Rohrbach, who was burned alive in May 1525.

In April 1525, the unrest of the Peasants' War reached the city of Heilbronn. On April 3, the citizens, led by the vineyard owners, demanded that the Heilbronn council be dismissed. With Lachmann's mediation, a compromise was reached the following day. On April 5, Lachmann addressed a Christian admonition to the farmers moving from Sontheim past Heilbronn in the direction of Hohenlohe under the leadership of Jäcklein Rohrbach , in which he demanded obedience from the authorities, since in his opinion the burden of the farmers in the Unterland is much lighter than that of the farmers Peasants in Upper Swabia and their demands could be made without sword blows. On April 13, 1525, when the grown peasant army returned from Hohenlohe in the direction of Heilbronn, he sent a second admonition in which he expressed that it was not right for believers to draw their swords, even if the authorities made an unreasonable complaint; God does not need weapons for his word.

After the farmers stormed the neighboring town of Weinsberg on April 16 and committed the bloody deed in Weinsberg , they turned to Heilbronn and on April 18 plundered the Carmelite monastery outside the city. On April 19, some peasant leaders, including Jäcklein Rohrbach von Böckingen and Enderlin von Dürrenzimmern, were admitted to Heilbronn for negotiations. Lachmann, who had previously advised the city council against such negotiations, was also brought in to these negotiations. It was negotiated that the city would have to let 200 farmers in. These plundered the Deutschhof of the Teutonic Order and made high monetary demands on religious bodies. The laughing man, who always called for moderation, preached to the peasants and ate and slept with them, although he “would have preferred to carry stones”. Lachmann's influence on the peasants meant that their demands for money were reduced to a bearable level and that the city did not have to provide a flag , cannons or powder for the peasant army. Lachmann also worked on a contract between the imperial city of Wimpfen and the farmers.

After the peasants had been defeated by the Swabian Federation near Böblingen on May 12, 1525 , Lachmann sent a third admonition, in which he portrayed the defeat of the peasants as a visitation of God for the “treacherous, pagan, diabolical, tyrannical, furious act” of the peasants , but still expresses his heartfelt sympathy for them.

Lachmann was portrayed several times as a friend and supporter of the farmers by the old believers. To justify himself, he had the three Christian admonitions printed as a book in the summer of 1525. In the period that followed he was involved in several lawsuits surrounding the events of the Peasants' War in Heilbronn. When the Teutonic Order complained against the city because of the opening of the gates for the farmers and the subsequent plundering of the Deutschhof, the predominantly old-believing court of justice tried to portray Lachmann's sermons as rebellious, which could be refuted by witnesses. Lachmann also came into conflict with the city council, which did not want to take responsibility for opening the city up, but instead opened proceedings against citizens who sympathized with the farmers in the spirit of the Swabian Federation.

Reformation in Heilbronn 1527/31

The Heilbronner Catechism was started by Lachmann and Kaspar Graeter completed

In October 1525 Lachmann joined the Lutheran convictions of the Hall preacher Johannes Brenz . On April 20, 1526 Lachmann became engaged to Barbara Wißbronn from Heilbronn, whereupon the Heilbronn Council received a protest note from the Würzburg bishop. The council replied that there were no heretical preachers in Heilbronn. Lachmann defended his sermons and the planned marriage in another letter, which took place on November 15, 1526 in Kilian's Church and gave rise to all kinds of excitement.

In 1527 the religious dispute between Lutheran and Old Believer followers reached a climax in Heilbronn. Preachers vied against each other in the pulpit, and the tumult in Kilian's Church and Barefoot Church was sometimes so great that it was no longer possible to preach at all. Lachmann appeared as a warning to unity and emphasized that the city only had to open the gates to the farmers in 1525 because they had been "split".

Lachmann was responsible for the introduction of the Protestant Lord's Supper and the reorganization of the poor after the idea of ​​his “Christian order” in 1527/28 . In many cases he urged the fight against vice and obtained the renewal of the old ordinance against blasphemy , gambling and drinking . The abolition of several public holidays goes back to him , which he called "filling days" because of the widespread gluttony. In 1528 the Heilbronn catechism , which he had begun and completed by Kaspar Graeter , was published, which is considered the second oldest Lutheran catechism. In 1529 he introduced German baptism in Heilbronn, and he also made the blessing of marriage in German. He forbade the ringing of bells, which he called “idolatry”, at mass, Vespers and funeral mass and opposed the observance of fasting days. In the period that followed, Heilbronn was one of the Protestant cities, also because Hans Riesser, a Protestant mayor, was elected for the first time in 1528. Nevertheless, a lively spiritual controversy raged in the city, including not only voices of old faith but also the appearance of Anabaptists between 1526 and 1530 and again from 1534.

On March 30, 1530, Emperor Charles V asked the city of Heilbronn to send representatives to the Reichstag in Augsburg. Lachmann, who, like Brenz, regarded the old-believing emperor as standing above the parties, hopefully wrote the article On Church Change , which reproduced the order of the Heilbronn service at that time and assumed the city's responsibility before the emperor for its ecclesiastical attitude. The writing was probably not handed over or not heard, as Mayor Riesser joined the Augsburg Confession of Faith according to Melanchthon on August 14th in Augsburg .

With the abolition of mass in the parish church of St. Kilian in December 1531, the Reformation in Heilbronn was practically complete, and the news about Lachmann is becoming rarer. In 1532 he found himself overburdened with his tasks in Heilbronn and requested the appointment of a second preacher, for which they wanted to win the Marburg Ordinarius Erhard Schnepf , but who refused, after which Meinrad Molter held this office from 1533. On April 13, 1535, Lachmann's position as preacher was renewed for ten years, and in July Molter also received a ten-year contract.

In the summer of 1536, the parish administrator Dietz, who had been doing his parish affairs "at the approval of the council" (ie Protestant) since 1534, resigned from the parish administration, but remained in Heilbronn church service for a long time as a Lutheran. Johann Bersig, who corresponded to Lachmann's ideas, became his successor as parish administrator.

The last message from Lachmann is his intercession for a civil rights petition by a young couple on November 6th, 1538. On January 27th, 1539 his first preaching position was given to Meinrad Molter, so that Lachmann at the age of 47 years between November 6th, 1538 and Must have died January 27, 1539. Through his level-headed behavior and his firm conviction, he left behind an imperial city that was united in the Lutheran faith.

Aftermath

After his death, Lachmann was quickly forgotten, so that no funeral speech, no gravestone, no dates of life, no picture and almost nothing about his person have been preserved. It was not until the pastor and historian Karl Friedrich Jaeger , with his works on the Swabian Reformation history and the history of the city of Heilbronn from 1828, that a representation of Lachmann's work based on the files of the Heilbronn archive was presented for the first time. Lachmann is said to have lived in the Käthchenhaus in Heilbronn . He was assigned the task of designing the bay window on the building in 1534.

Lachmann appears in the historical story "The Stonemason of St. Kilian" by Philipp Spieß, and since 1912 Lachmannstrasse in Heilbronn has been named after him.

Works

  • Three Christian exhortations to the peasantry before they moved to Weinsberg to refrain from taking their pride , Speyer 1525
  • Catechesis or lessons for children as taught and held in Heilbronn , Augsburg 1528

literature

personal data
SURNAME Lachmann, Johann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lutheran theologian and reformer from Heilbronn
DATE OF BIRTH 1491
PLACE OF BIRTH Heilbronn
DATE OF DEATH between November 6, 1538 and January 27, 1539
Place of death Heilbronn