Falsities and Fallacies
False Ascription
Büchmann in his “Geflügelte Worte” (“Winged Words”), Berlin, 1882, says, “Universally, yet without the least warrant, the following lines are ascribed to Martin Luther:
“Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang,
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang.”
“Who loves not wine, wife, and song,
Remains a fool his whole life long.”
Weib, wife, was originally written weiber, women. It was changed by Th. Weyler in his “Thinkers’ and Poets’ Words.”
Even the Luther Room in the Wartburg, says Büchmann, has the couplet on the wall. Its first appearance in literature was in 1775, in Der Wandsbecker Bote of Matthias Claudius, a popular German writer, who incorporated it in a humorous toast or “health.” Roeseler (Berlin, 1873) credits Claudius with the authorship of the couplet, but according to Redlich (Hamburg, 1871), the author was John Henry Voss, who cited it in the Muses’ Almanac (Hamburg, 1777), and repeated it in a published collection of his poems. When it appeared in the Almanac the Hamburg pastors were so incensed at Voss’s slur upon Luther that they defeated his election as a teacher in the Johanneum.