It's Reformationstag: Happy Halloween!

Among Martin Luther's vast writings, his 1543 treatise, "Jews and Their Lies," remains among the more shocking, and not remotely atypical. His latest biographers claim that he probably didn't actually nail his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, but just sent them round the way you'd bang out a staff email: "the hammering episode," writes Joan Acocella in The New Yorker, "so satisfying symbolically—loud, metallic, violent—never occurred. Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened."
Acocella highlights the constant presence of  bowels in Luther's imagination, a theme that dominates German comedy to this day: she recounts his proud moment when his little son "crapped in every corner of the room.”  That brought me back to the days when some of our German friends recommended their foolproof method of toilet-training: just let the child run naked in the garden, poop in the soil, and then somehow, miraculously, the kid will develop a longing for nice, clean indoor toilets and plumbing.
The more fools we, trying that method on our firstborn, who was only around eighteen months old, but big enough to have grown out of the largest size of pampers. While we weren't looking, he went back in the house, pulled on his nice new Lederhosen, and came back out to the garden, slyly making his way to the hole he'd dug and into which we assumed he would relieve himself. And he did! While wearing his Lederhosen.
“I am like a ripe shit,” Luther said when he was about to die, “and the world is a gigantic asshole. We will both probably let go of each other soon.” I can never read that--one of the more pungent quotations offered by Acocella--without recalling a few scenes from the German version of Saturday Night Live: rows of comedians seated behind closed toilet cubicles, their feet tapping away. Stefan Raab playing a farmer who is considering using a shovel to wipe himself.
 Happy Halloween! You can buy, for less than three euros, a playmobil Martin Luther. The little figure smiles in a friendly fashion you can't imagine ever appearing on the face of a man with the tummy troubles afflicting the real Luther. Quill in one hand, golden Bible in the other, open to a Gothic-lettered Das Neue Testament, translated by Doktor Martin Luther. 
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll take the jack o' lanterns carved by my kids; when lit, these orange faces glow with real menace. 
But hey, Luther's notions of conscience and bible-reading have enjoyed a certain heyday. If we credit him with increasing the desire to think for oneself and read, read, read, then I'd be happy to see him ascending, complete with halo, to the heaven of his choice.