May 15, 1525: on the outskirts of a village in Thuringia, the combined forces of Duke George of Saxony and Landgrave Philip of Hessen confronted a hastily assembled popular army of eight thousand under the spiritual leadership of Thomas Müntzer, the radical Reformation’s most strident voice. What came to be known as the Battle of Frankenhausen—the largest pitched engagement of the German Peasants’ War—was hardly a battle at all: fifteen minutes after giving the peasants three hours to surrender, the princes ordered an artillery barrage. Thousands died on the spot and Müntzer escaped to town, only to be discovered disguised as a sickly old man in an attic bedroom. He was executed two weeks later, after interrogation under torture, supposedly having recanted the scandalous beliefs that challenged both Roman and Lutheran Christianity, his head impaled on a pike and his body left on public view for weeks, perhaps even months.
This year marks the five hundredth anniversary of Müntzer’s death and the effective end of the German Peasants’ War. The war itself, the largest European popular revolt before the French Revolution, was not a circumscribed event, but rather the culmination of a series of local uprisings that had convulsed German-speaking lands since the middle of the fifteenth century. In 1476 thousands revolted in the Tauber Valley, stirred by Hans Böhm, a visionary shepherd known as the Drummer of Niklashausen, whose call for the abolition of clerical and feudal privileges ended with his burning at the stake; from 1493 to 1517, in Alsace and Baden-Württemberg, a number of rebellions under the banner of the Bundschuh (tied shoe) movement were repeatedly and brutally suppressed; the same region experienced the “Poor Conrad” uprising of 1514, a conspiracy of several secret peasant leagues against their feudal lord, which was likewise decimated. Restiveness was not solely the province of the poor. Immediately presaging the greater Peasants’ War that would soon break out, the Knights’ Revolt of 1522–23—led by Franz von Sickingen and an army of lesser nobles whose power had been eroded by the consolidation of rule in the higher nobility and the Church—besieged Trier. After its failure, forced to flee to his own castle, Sickingen died of wounds suffered during its defense. While precise numbers are hard to come by, historians estimate that there were one hundred thousand peasant casualties by the end of the summer of 1525 (Miller 162). The war’s subsequent denouement was also hardly conclusive, with significant uprisings continuing for years; a notable peasant rebellion, for example, soon followed in Tyrol, which protested against feudal oppression and economic hardship, drafting a more egalitarian constitution that was, however, never implemented.
Müntzer neither started nor led the German Peasants’ War. As its most prominent thinker, however, he gave it a rigorous justification, and his writings not only embody its urgency and pathos but also offer insight into its participants’ world. Much of Müntzer’s own life remains shrouded in mystery, but its outlines are clear (see Goertz; Bräuer and Vogler; Drummond). Born into modest circumstances around 1490, he trained in philosophy and theology in the febrile years before the Reformation caught fire in 1517. Müntzer obtained his first significant clerical post on Luther’s recommendation, yet his radicalism soon made an enemy out of his erstwhile patron. As Luther and his circle tacked ever more toward the magistrates, Müntzer aligned himself increasingly with the poor, whom he declared to be the true and only inheritors of Christ’s mantle; it was they, he maintained, who would hasten the arrival of a New Jerusalem foreign to status and wealth. In a series of bitterly sardonic writings between 1523 and 1525, Müntzer railed against the Church and clergy, called for the end of feudal privileges, and endorsed the violent overthrow of the social order for the sake of “the common man.” In addition to composing the first German church service, to which Luther’s own vernacular liturgy was a palliative response, Müntzer printed salvos like “On Counterfeit Faith,” “Interpretation of the Second Chapter of Daniel,” and “Letter to the Miners” that circulated widely. Müntzer himself was constantly on the move, expelled from or having to flee nearly everywhere he arrived, from Zwickau to Allstedt to Mühlhausen and elsewhere. A talisman of popular discontent with the political order, he made common cause with incendiary lay preachers and was involved in several attempts to seize municipal power for the “elect.” Luther (“Warning”) accordingly attacked this “Satan of Allstedt” as “a false spirit and prophet, who goes around in sheep’s clothing yet is secretly a rapacious wolf,” and he urged the princes to “smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly . . . a rebel . . . just as one must kill a mad dog” (Luther “Wider”). And killed they were: while the violent demise of Müntzer and his band at Frankenhausen did not spell the death of the radical Reformation, the legacy of which continued among Anabaptists, it signaled its end as a mass political movement and heralded the triumph of Luther’s magisterial Reformation, which left the structure of earthly power largely untouched. The alternative, bottom-up model of political order that Müntzer represented retreated underground.
Müntzer’s legacy is no less contested today than it was in his own time. Immediately after Müntzer’s execution, Philipp Melanchthon lamented not having been permitted to interview him in captivity in order to better understand his theology. In the absence of such understanding, Luther’s vituperation set the stage for Müntzer’s reception, relegating him for centuries to the position of a dangerous fanatic. A slender 1608 Protestant volume published in Leiden entitled Abominations of the Most Prominent Heretics, for example, offers Müntzer’s biography along with those of various Anabaptist leaders and even the Muslim prophet Muhammad “for the purpose of warning all pious Christians” against their blasphemies (see Greuwel der vornahmsten Hauptketzeren ). In many quarters, similarly fearful and dismissive accounts persist to this day (see the discussion in Müller, Mörder 13–18).
The nineteenth-century rise of revolutionary turmoil in Germany and beyond brought renewed interest in the Peasants’ War, and important works by liberals and radicals such as Wilhelm Zimmermann (1841–43), Johann Karl Seidemann (1842), and Friedrich Engels (1850) sympathetically reexamined Müntzer as an antipode to Luther, who was lionized at the time by conservatives and reactionaries as a font of German identity. Müntzer’s works, long inaccessible, gradually began to appear in new editions, and Marxists in particular came to enlist him as a significant predecessor, with August Bebel (1876) and Karl Kautsky (1895) penning favorable influential treatments. By the early twentieth century, Müntzer was undeniably back in the historical imagination: in 1914 Hugo Ball (14) drew parallels between him and nineteenth-century Russian radicals in their common opposition to religious orthodoxy, while in 1921 Ernst Bloch’s Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution appeared and Paul Gurk’s play Thomas Müntzer: A Tragedy won the Kleist Prize, the Weimar Republic’s highest literary award. Although Müntzer’s appeal was mostly on the Left, National Socialists also sought to claim him for themselves as a völkisch leader against Marxist interpretations (Oberman 104). But in Weimar it was indeed among communists that Müntzer had the greatest purchase. In 1925, the four hundredth anniversary of his death, the Communist Party of Germany held a commemoration at the Frankenhausen site of Müntzer’s last stand. Parallels were drawn to the deaths of communists in the reactionary Kapp Putsch of 1920, and a communist Reichstag deputy described the revolutionary German workers’ movement as the continuation of Müntzer’s struggle (Müller, “Reformator” 121).1
Müntzer subsequently became something of a patron saint in the new East Germany. The year 1953 saw the “Peasants’ Battle Monument” renamed the “Thomas Müntzer Monument,” with an inscription heralding him as a “revolutionary peasant leader against feudal oppression and exploitation, . . . who proclaimed the people’s state in Mühlhausen in 1525” (Müller, “Zwanzig” 14). He even loomed large in cinema: one of the most lavish productions by DEFA, the East German film agency, was the 1956 color epic Thomas Müntzer, a response to the decidedly less impressive 1953 black-and-white American–West German film Martin Luther, which entirely ignores the Peasants’ War. For Müntzer 1975 was a banner year; the 450th anniversary of his death saw commemorations throughout Germany and his image placed on the East German five mark note. In Bad Frankenhausen,2 the painter Werner Tübke began a monumental socialist realist panorama, Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, which finally opened to the public in September 1989, ironically just six weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. While a thaw between East German Müntzer scholars and West German Luther scholars began in the late 1970s (Heise and Stache), even today Müntzer research remains in the shadow of this communist appropriation: many of his letters now reside in Moscow, having been given by the Saxon state government to Joseph Stalin as a seventieth birthday present in 1949, and transferred after his death in 1953 from his personal library to the Soviet state archives (Kobuch).
The contested history of the German Peasants’ War mirrors the changing historiography of Müntzer’s legacy. In 1839 Leopold von Ranke presented the war as a manifestation of mass irrationalism fortunately not integrated into the dominant tradition of modernity, celebrating the massacre of the peasants as the final end of a movement led by a fanatic “possessed by a savage demon up to his last hour” (355) that had threatened to overthrow German civilization and reshape the whole political structure of the world from below (see Blickle 7). Ranke’s text was written when an entire social order was shattering and a new order was trying to rise, a change he looked on with despair; others welcomed the echo of Peasants’ Wars in their present. After the 1848 German Revolution, for example, the liberal theologian Wilhelm Zimmermann brought out a revised edition of his 1841–43 sympathetic and influential General History of the Great Peasants War that put 1848 in a long emancipatory context: “Throughout the entire Middle Ages, from time to time, the peasantry rose up against aristocratic and ecclesiastical lords, partly to preserve their old, original freedom, partly to defend themselves against the arbitrariness that sought to forcibly increase the burdens on the unfree and turn serfs into slaves [Leibeigenen]. This struggle can be seen in many places across Europe” (Zimmermann 25). His introduction concludes with these words: “It’s nice to please the present; but it is better to fulfill the future” (22). Zimmerman was well aware that the history of the past is the history of the present. There is something more, however: the critical historian ultimately aims at making room for the future.
In this spirit, Engels also wrote his seminal The Peasant War in Germany, after the defeat of the 1848 Revolution, and republished it with a new preface in 1874, after the defeat of the Paris Commune. Before the victors could wipe the slate clean, that tradition of struggle had to be revitalized to “remind the German people of the rough yet powerful and tenacious figures of the Great Peasant War” (Engels 16, translation modified). Engels does not write the history of the Peasants’ War to pity the victims or give them a voice: it is still the historiography of the victorious, albeit highlighting the dark side of the same past. Engels’s history is one of struggles, wars, and warriors, which he wanted to keep alive: it is the history of crushed attempts at liberation. For Engels, the Peasants’ War, however “premature,” should be considered part of the revolutionary tradition of the German proletariat. Reactivating this long-standing tradition was also a task Bloch set for himself in Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution, which, leaning on Engels, turns to this alternative vision of modernity in response to the failure of German council democracy during the revolution of 1919. The topicality of the parallel derives partially from the defeat, but primarily from the need to keep an alternative tradition to capitalist modernity alive.
Marxist historiography has emphasized social and economic changes in a framework in which the Peasants’ War is often defined as an early bourgeois revolution, and Müntzer is depicted as a revolutionary ahead of his time. In contrast, a historian with a völkish orientation like Günther Franz presented the war as a clash between the community of self-governing structures of the peasantry and the centralizing tendencies of the new, modern territorial state (Franz). Peter Blickle, in a well-balanced examination of the different forces in the field, characterized the Peasants’ War as the rebellion of the “common man” to change social relations and domination on the basis of the Gospel (Blickle). In short, like Müntzer, the Peasants’ War was, is, and will be many things.
Moreover, the Peasants’ War is not an exclusively German story. One could say that 1525 is the synecdoche of complex processes involved in the making of new legal, political, social, and economic structures—in other words, what is usually called the modern West. The popular uprisings challenged both the concentration of power in the monarchy and the privileges of the nobility. The uprisings opened a third legal and political possibility that is incompatible with both the royal and aristocratic poles of opposition. Historically, those who have ventured down this trajectory have paid a high price. The archives of the victors describe the insurgents as a “band of brigands” and “heretics” driven by “diabolical instinct” and “savage madness” (Cohn 99, 101). These are the terms used in the documents of the time. Historical inquiry would benefit from a comparative examination of these conflicts, by investigating these tensions from within, before the victorious won and the defeated were defeated.
The peasants were defeated. This is a fact. When Ranke (358) wrote that the movement of the Peasants’ War was “now forever at an end,” it was a prescription, not a description. The historicist claim to stick to the facts boils down to that. For Ranke, their defeat was a blessing because otherwise the Taborites would have “transformed the earth into a desert in the name of the Lord” (247). What happened in Tabor? Here, in the fifteenth-century Bohemian community inspired by the Hussite movement that had communal property and abolished the hierarchy between servants and masters, a mystical political experiment took shape, “not to overcome earthly difficulties in a new eudemonistic civilization, but rather for their derealization in the breakthrough of the Kingdom” (Bloch 64). In Tabor, Bloch observed, the fight was not for “better days, but for the end of all days” (64). This is what terrified the guards of the established order. For them, the end of their time and their days would coincide with the end of the world, with nihilism and a pitiless destruction. Nothing could be more wrong. The revolt was about ending a historical trajectory, that of private property and the nascent modern state, in order to make room for different trajectories. It was a war between a preestablished possible in the trajectory of progress and the irruption of a new time. This did not arise out of thin air. Nor was it the result of a dialectical reversal of destruction into creation. To move forward and create something truly new, one must orient oneself with a sense of direction rooted in the past. To return to Zimmermann, it is a matter of working on a “universal history of attempts at emancipation” (Zimmermann 7).
To investigate the significance of the Peasants’ War and Müntzer five hundred years after their defeat, a different historiographical approach must be found. This is not a history of victims, but a history of attempts at emancipation that still need to be fulfilled, to be completed. As Walter Benjamin well understood, it is the incomplete past, not an uncertain future to be realized, that calls us to action. Nothing immobilizes action and blocks concrete possibilities as much as a present without history and a past turned into galleries of victims.
To remember Müntzer and the Peasants’ War today means exploring the not-happened and the not-yet-explored. Politically, Müntzer asserted the power of the community over princes and the need for the direct presence of the people whenever judgment was made. He claimed the revocability of rulers against the tendency of princes to concentrate power in their own hands. He did not invent the revocability of rulers; he borrowed it from existing customs and reconfigured it. Similarly, he did not invent communism of goods, exemplified in the formula omnia sunt communia (all things are to be held in common). Against the trend toward the appropriation of common lands, Müntzer revived and combined existing customs and natural law with the tradition of the Taborites and Jan Hus. He revitalized the principle of common land existing in the mark system, protecting it in a theological shell.
Éric Vuillard comments on Müntzer’s killing in these words: “His body will be dragged over the scaffold and thrown to the dogs. Youth is endless, the secret of our equality immortal, and solitude wonderful. Martyrdom is a trap for the oppressed.” The texts gathered for this volume, five hundred years after the Peasants’ War, aim to keep alive the call for equality and democracy, their history, and the everlasting hope of emancipation.
Notes
Müller (“Reformator” 118–19) also describes a raging debate in 1921 over the representation of Müntzer and his comrade Heinrich Pfeiffer on Mühlhausen’s emergency currency.
“Bad” was added to Frankenhausen’s name in 1927 to advertise it as a spa town.
