Perhaps not a single event of German history is so carefully forgotten, rewritten, used for your own goals, such as a peasant war. The revolutionaries of 1848, the labor movement, the Nazis, the GDR, the Federal Republic, all of them formed events in accordance with the images, sometimes subtly, sometimes rustic.
The uprising of farmers and artisans in 1524/25 was a scene of the revolutionary failure of the URS. There were already uprisings that were suppressed by the feudal system. In 1524/5, something new appeared: movements that acted at the local level, but represented a general program.
Luther had a tragic significance for the rebels. His letter “On the freedom of the Christian” (1520) was the mental lawsuit of the uprising, his call from 1525 to the princes to combat farmers, the central step towards the merger of the reformation with the authorities and its nationalization.
In the 19th century, Luther was modeled on the figure of a hero of German nationalism, when German, who encoded German, by the translation of the Bible and the imposed (Roman) foreign government. “The greatest German in our history is Martin Luther,” said Adolf Hitler in 1933.
In collective memory
Thomas Münzer Radical and Martin Luther, moderate engraved himself as antipodes in collective memory. This is a familiar historical constellation, such as Danton and Robespir, Kerensky and Lenin, Ebert and Luxembourg.
Thomas Münzer, a preacher with a polemic talent, was a tragic, mysterious figure, whose messianic faith in the need for a radical change was unhappy with real politics. Von Münzer (as the little biographical significance of the phoner and Siegfried Bryauer stated) are known little biographical. The pure works of Münzer are characterized by Christian mysticism, morality with a high degree and revolutionary promise of equality. He turned to the farmers only after the princes rejected his disciples. In 1524/25, the religious ideas of Münzer united with a social uprising.
Sed tried to evaluate Münzer as an anti -Luther and a key figure in the specific national history of the GDR. For this purpose, the peasant uprising was understood as the early bourgeois revolution and the Christian seer Münzer as the ancestor of Karl Liebknecht. In the work, published in 1987 in the military publisher GDR, you can read that GDR is “the performance of the hopes and the desire of the actors of the peasant war.” The idea that the longing of a Protestant mystical Munitsa was a rather godless gdr of all people is an amazing retrospective historical bend.
Before that, German historiography was not insured. Historian Peter Bikl emphasized that a new compromise appeared between the rulers and the farmers in the southern German communities. The revolution failed, but the reform was successful – it was also a pleasant historical rear mirror of the German itself.
In addition, the bikl contradicted the thesis that the campaign of extremely bloody revenge from the princes, who cost 100,000 farmers, became the basis of the German subject. It also fell into liberal German self -esteem.
Creative misunderstanding
Intensive instrumentalization of the peasant war in the GDR also created one of the most creative artistic misunderstandings of the 20th century in Germany: the peasant war of Werner Buck. He stands in bad Frankenhausen, a place to defeat the armies of farmers against the German princes, not far from the place where Münzer was beheaded 500 years ago. This is an impressive monument 18 meters high, developed by SED as a massive crowning glory about the commemoration of the peasant war.
This panoramic painting is impressive not only from the style of painting, reminiscent of the Renaissance. This Rotonda is an example of how the artist obliges the restrictions on the art of a political contract. The panorama illustrates the cyclic worldview of the period of the peasant war and is already the dementia of mechanical progress, thinking about Seda. The world theater of Buck is a dance of death, visual is drowning in the spirit of the 16th century, a historical sight.
It was opened in September 1989, after a few months the GDR was a story. This is an ironic Apers in the leaded post -History of the Peasant War.
