Long, long ago—actually, about five centuries—the seeds and roots of Marxism had been planted and were actively growing. Fredrick Engels’s The Peasant Wars in Germany (1850) might be accurately described as the very first “Marxist classic” of historical studies, setting the pace for scholarship to the present day. Author Andrew Drummond, a multi-talented novelist and historian in Scotland, affirms that Engels did a very creditable job, given the research materials available. His recent book, The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer, moves onward with the wider sources now available, deepening our understanding and exploring everything that is ever likely to be known about the crucial revolutionary Christian long revered by German revolutionaries and whose visage graced the paper currency of East Germany.
A little background in Christian radicalism, some of it explored in Drummond’s book, may be useful here. The Reformation, a pan-European response to the worsening of social conditions, as well as to the emergence of craft organizations that looked in retrospect like the mobilized proletariat, may be traced back to fourteenth-century England. The Black Death had reduced the population drastically and improved the working conditions of the survivors. This prompted the nobility and its merchant retinue to demand more of its workers offsetting their vast, largely military, expenses. A translation of the Bible into English by John Wycliff and the use of the text by street clergy helped set off the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (also known as the Wat Tyler Rebellion) that shook the ruling classes and found its way across the Channel to other heresies. By the fifteenth century, Central Europe was astir with a rebellion at once both chiliastic and linked to the class struggle in the cities and the countryside.
The rise of a commercial economy had meanwhile prompted intense resentment from the rising middle classes against the Roman Catholic Church and its demands. As Drummond explains, theology offered a necessary metaphor in a society where all issues were defined in religious terms, with an appeal to the Gospels as the inevitable text of all would-be revolutionaries. The long-term effects of the Crusades, meanwhile, had weakened the aristocracy. The ironclad relationships of lords and peasants continued—even as the rising commercial classes, consolidating themselves, demanded up to 40 percent of everything that the poor produced.
The discovery of gold and silver in parts of what would later become Germany brought unprecedented wealth and new levels of social contradiction. The corruption and misbehavior of the clergy prompted a popular pursuit of “answers.” An emerging cadre of intellectual-activists arming followers with ideas definitely against the public order included one Thomas Müntzer, a member of the Gelehrtenproletariat. Young preachers and self-educated craftsmen, these intellectual-activists formulated a radical vision of the “church of the future,” requiring neither grand physical structures nor officially accepted clergy. Writing and publishing openly or in secret, they may also have been the first revolutionary pamphleteers.
Müntzer’s family background, and even his birth date, have long evaded the efforts of researchers. He was likely born around 1490 in a small town in the Hartz Mountain region, rich in precious minerals. His father may have been employed fashioning raw metal into gold or silver coins. Young Müntzer seems to have enrolled at a college in Leipzig, only to drop out before graduation. He nevertheless became a sort of assistant priest in 1510, and there may have taken part in a failed plot or insurgency meant to unseat the Archbishop of Magdeburg. He managed nevertheless to attend the University of Frankfurt in 1512, though a later authority marked, in Latin, “seditiosus” alongside his name in the matriculation list. Müntzer left school with the equivalent of a Master’s degree. Thereafter, he set himself to teaching nuns and tutoring the sons of the prosperous. By this time, Müntzer began formulating the implications of his rebellious views.
Joining a fellow reformer in a local church, he emerged as a skillful polemicist, denouncing the existing bishops as “tyrants” and “adulterers.” By 1520, he had articulated the working plans of his faith: True Christians must carry on the work of Jesus, which was destined to be resisted by the rich and powerful, the aristocracy, the merchant classes, and priests. He had become a revolutionary.
Drummond quotes Müntzer as saying: “the origin of usury, theft and robbery lies with our lords and princes.… And on top of that, they then proclaim God’s commandments to the poor and say: God has commanded that you shall not steal. But that of course does not apply to themselves.… They refuse to remove the causes of rebellion, so how can it turn out well in the long run? And if these words make me a rabble-rouser, so be it!”1
Via religious metaphors, Müntzer had entered a theological quarrel that, as Drummond explains, could only be won by seizing the means of production. By 1524, Müntzer argued that a society made by and for all its members was both necessary and possible. If his own district of activity did not exceed sixty-five kilometers, his pamphlets, sermons, and letters reached much farther. The authorities considered him a central figure in what became a regionwide social uprising by 1524–1525.
Thus Müntzer, who had been praised only a few years earlier by Martin Luther for resisting the Roman church, had become a dangerous man. He even created, or, at least envisioned, his own vanguard party, the Eternal League of God. A flag newly made of white silk carried the famous rainbow, the signal from God to Noah that the Biblical Flood was abating—a symbol destined to reappear on the flags and posters of radical movements in the centuries to come.
Drummond’s description of the wider uprising is vivid and convincing. The region had already seen numerous protests, and even scattered violence, for several generations, all of them mixing religious and economic-social complaints. At a high point, up to forty thousand peasants rebelled. Luther, famed pamphleteer and notorious rebel against the Roman Catholic Church authority, cursed their activities. Drawing ever closer to the rising merchant class and his own version of a repressive clergy, Luther called upon the authorities to take revenge on the insurgents—and indeed they did, with the slaughter of perhaps one hundred thousand.
Müntzer had issued appeals for all to take up arms, crucially counting upon the miners and ironworkers whom we might designate the pre-proletariat. Some eight thousand gathered in the field near the village of Frankenhausen in May 1525. A rainbow appeared in the sky (or at least so Müntzer claimed). The peasant “army,” more of a crowd mobilized with crude weapons, faced a well-trained and well-armed military force. In a panic, they scattered, running for their lives. Within an hour, at least seven thousand had died, with the nobles and their soldiers making a sport out of the slaughter. Müntzer himself survived, was taken prisoner, and then delivered to a nearby fortress. He was almost certainly tortured. After his execution, his head was placed on a stake and moved from one prominent place to another, obviously to warn against further unrest. Luther himself later complained that a footpath could be seen where people had trod down the grass to see the resting place of the great martyr’s body.
Luther took upon himself the task of slandering Müntzer in pamphlet after pamphlet, reinforced by others eager to accuse the martyr of supposed personal corruption and blasphemy. Yet, Müntzer’s voice lived on, and not only among the heretical Anabaptists with their own rebellions in the following generations, made up mostly of craftworkers and peasants.
Centuries later, the new German Democratic Republic (East Germany) made Müntzer a veritable saint of revolution, building an archive of all his records recovered from a variety of sources. Ironically, the authorities boxed up all of Müntzer’s known letters, to be delivered to Joseph Stalin on his birthday in 1949. These documents remain in Moscow to this day. Happily, the precious files had been photographed before shipping. In 1989, a major museum exhibit in East Berlin celebrated his life with a variety of documents and furniture, offering visitors and others a popular but scholarly volume of interpretation.2 The end of the German Democratic Republic had already as much as arrived. By 2017, officials in the German Evangelical Church likened Müntzer to leaders of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda.
There is much missing in this long volume, or, rather, it would take more volumes to explore some of the larger implications of Müntzer’s significance for later radical thinkers and activists connecting him and his writings with Marxism. In recent decades, Andrew Weeks’s remarkable volume, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Philosophical History, teased out the recovery of dialectical philosophy from the ancients, clearly developed within the mystical beliefs of Müntzer and others.3 The humble cobbler Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), a key mystic revolutionary of sorts, envisioned a remarkable, evidently dialectical framework of ideas in his native Bohemia, where the Radical Reformation had been ardent—and violently repressed.
Minus the overt politics, Böhme articulated a communistic or communal vision of sweeping magnitude. Closer to William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” (“To see a World in a Grain of Sand/…/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand;/And Eternity in an hour”) than to any economic-socialistic doctrine, Böhme anticipated in theology the clash of forces and ultimate reconciliation of all contradictions, even the biological division of the sexes. Unlikely as it may seem to today’s Marxists, G. W. F. Hegel would call Böhme the “theosophus teutonicus,” the father of German philosophy, including his own. Thus Hegel, thus Marx—with many more complications, naturally.4
Scholarly treatments of the peasant uprisings during the Cold War years naturally had depicted the rebellions as a manifestation of mass irrationality, anticipating Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. Thanks most recently to Drummond, we now know better.
Notes
- ↩ Andrew Drummond, The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer: The Life and Times of an Early German Revolutionary (New York: Verso, 2024), 335.
- ↩ Marlis Hujer, Ich, Thomas Müntzer, eyn Knecht gottes (Berlin: Henschverlag, 1989) was published in collaboration with the Berlin Museum. This collection is rich with materials for later study.
- ↩ Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Philosophical History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
- ↩ W. F. Hegel, “Lectures on the History of Philosophy,” Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org.
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