The Leucorea is a relic of Wittenberg’s great heritage as a centre of the Reformation and Renaissance humanism.
It was where Hamlet, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern studied.
It is now an institution based in Wittenberg in Germany supporting academic research.
It ran its third Trivium conference last week.
The Trivium ‘rebooted’ is the brainchild of Dr Karl Tetzlaff, a young academic theologian who is the managing director of the Stiftung Leucorea.
Dr Tetzlaff has devised a programme of three days of residential training in rhetoric, grammar and dialectic, with a modern spin, for sixth-formers from the Saxon-Anhalt area.
In June 2025, I made a pilgrimage to Wittenberg to see if I could find a venue for a some kind of event that could draw upon the mythology of Melancthon and Hamlet to repopularise rhetoric and public performance in education.
Serendipity! I met Dr Tetzlaff. He had already come up with a format and delivered his first conference.
Having run the European Speechwriter Network for 16 years, my theory is that we’re going into a Reformation in reverse.
The printed word no longer has credibility because AI generates limitless amounts of it. The internet is the perfect tool to promote lies and misinformation – you can edit, erase and censor content easily.
We’re going back to an oral culture. When the words are clearly coming out of a mouth and not a machine, when we can gauge tone of voice, body language and fluency, we feel it’s worth paying attention. We work out whether we feel the person speaking is trustworthy.
I was curious about what Dr Tetzlaff had created. I studied German at university, so I asked if I could attend. They were not exactly enthusiastic, this was a German academic institution after all, but I persuaded them.
I grew up in Oxford so I’m used to being in a university town, but since the late 90s, I have been dismayed by its expansion and gentrification. By contrast Wittenberg satisfied all my romantic ideas of what a university should be: quiet, old, austere, religious, leafy and aesthetically beautiful.
I arrived on an afternoon of blazing sunshine wondering what I had let myself in for.
Looking at the programme, Dr Tetzlaff was very well connected. His headcount of speakers and trainers was 18 in three days for thirty young delegates. All of them highly eminent – Friedrich Merz’s speechwriter was there, as was the speechwriter to the female President of the Bundestag. And their workshops were in competition with each other!
I enjoyed a presentation by screenwriter Leila Stiehler. She wrote the script for the film Gundermann which was a huge hit in Germany. She then led a writing workshop. At the end of the day the young people performed their scripts which was quite magical.
My personal highlight was a heavy presentation (by English standards) from Professor Dr Andrea Kern from Leipzig titled, ‘Wo beginnt und wo endet die Freiheit?’. Dr Kern explained, using an example from Kant, that if you aspire to be rational, it depends on the ability to step back and articulate the reasons behind your reasons. Something Hamlet does in his soliloquies.
This all has to do with becoming conscious of your interior thoughts, expressing them in words and evaluating your ability to modify your behaviour.
That’s the kind of intellectual exercise you do in Lutherstadt-Wittenberg!
The sixteen and seventeen year olds were lapping this up and eagerly asking questions.
They would also sit down at the piano at the intervals and play Schubert or Beethoven. I didn’t see any of them looking at their phones during the talks.
I later discovered that they had all chosen to be there, and many of them came from the Schulpforte – which, reading between the lines, is Saxon-Anhalt’s answer to Eton College.
Apart from the lectures and workshops, there was a Melancthon tour featuring a guide dressed in a Renaissance Talar. They also had an escape room experience in the old monastery.
I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the young people. I asked them if they would like to do something similar in English. Of if they would come to a Trivium conference in Oxford?
They said they would love to, but paying for it might be a problem.
The last session with the former Minister President of Saxon-Anhalt, Dr Reiner Haseloff, tapped into some of the political tensions that are bubbling inside Germany. The state is going to the polls later this year and the populist party, the AfD, could win outright.
Haseloff, who comes from the moderate right, told them about his experiences growing up in the GDR and his later involvement in politics in the reunified Germany. He ended by questioning recent immigration policies. I couldn’t follow the arguments exactly, but passions were running high. A lot of hands went up in the audience and Dr Tetzlaff had difficulty bringing everything to a close.
My reason for going to Wittenberg was to further explore the idea of ‘immersive’ education. I took with me a biography of Luther which I read while I was there. I went on a church tour, the Panorama exhibition, the Luther museum, a Lutheran service in English and I made a visit to Leipzig.
I saw the signs showing where the big guns of the Reformation lived – the ones I was reading about in my book. I heard the stories about Frederick the Wise, I experienced the landscape and I walked the length of this town which transformed the world through argumentation and printing. I learnt – because my subject is rhetoric – that Luther’s 95 theses, were not commandments, but ideas for discussion.
The kind of insight that makes a big difference when trying to understand the Reformation.
My perspective on Hamlet, a play I’ve been familiar with since I was a teenager, has been transformed.
The text reveals more depths.
I read David Wiles’s book The Players’ Advice to Hamlet and it gets the heart of how we understand emotion, politics and rhetoric.
It raises many questions, as human beings, do we have ‘authentic’ selves? Or are we all insincere actors, playing the parts that come most easily to us?
How do we understand the differences between appearances and reality?
Is it necessary for politicians to tell lies? Do we need to redefine what democracy is?
These are all debates that young people need to have. Maybe only the brightest are interested in having them, but there needs to be spaces where they can take place.
After my visit, I can ask ChatGPT all manner of questions arising, I can Google Frederick the Wise, I can talk about my experiences with friends.
This is what I call ‘immersive’ education, one that influences us in proportion to our aptitudes and interests, not a ‘coercive’ education that demands that we pre-prepare uniform answers for examinations.
These young people were learning about things which enriched their spirit, not their CV.
They were getting to know each other and having an experience which expands their creativity and ‘being’. What a refreshing change from the utilitarian demands of mainstream education.
If you would be interested in taking part in a rhetoric conference in English in the UK or in Wittenberg, please get in touch.
