A On May 15, 1525, the princely armies destroyed the pilot in a bad Frankenhausen, indicated by Thomas Münzer. While Münzer, a talented speaker, preached, the mercenary’s electoral army broke the coordinated truce. In the evening, six mercenaries were dead – and 6,000 farmers were killed. Martin Luther, the founder of German Protestantism, hit the authorities on the side of the authorities and urged the princes to “strangle, strangle, strike and kill the rebels as a great dog.
Poor Frankenhausen, as a rule, is the end of the peasant uprising. But three days after the murder in Thuringia, a large bunch of farmers won Freiburg. The peasant wars were decentralized, they stretched for two years and extended from Central Germany to Lake Constance to Tyrol. The uprisings did not have leaders – or a lot. They spontaneously erupted, they organized themselves independently, without the highest command and the Central Committee. 300,000 farmers left their yards and armed themselves. Peasant wars were the largest uprising in Europe until 1789. Why then? Why Germany? Is there a German special path that has a root in 1525? How do we look at this uprising today?
Two parallel shocks led to the uprising: the reformation and pressure of the book, the Gutenberg revolution, which society plowed as deeply as digitization in the 21st century. The publication of the translation of Luther New Testament in 1522 in German was the first bestseller in the history of Germany. The Bible of Luther codified the German language, defined Germany as a cultural space and democratized an energy tool. The peasant movement, including several pastors, masters and mining workers, created something unbearable in 1525: the political community. In this space, which is available for almost everyone (men), internal discourse was possible, which is also fundamental for modern democracies.
A special desired thesis explained the trend of Germany to begin world wars from the absence of successful revolutions
Twelve articles of the peasant movement, which, among other things, required the free choice of pastors, the abolition of serfdom, the law on hunting and lower taxes, became a medial event. 25,000 copies were printed as soon as possible and read in hotels and in the markets. This was impressive in 90 percent illiterate. Knowledge was democratized, the number of pilots grew quickly.
According to the church historian Thomas Kaufman, the peasant uprising was “the first military and political event supported by the media in European history.” To a certain extent – the first media -war. Revenge was extremely bloody. Archduke Ferdinand, the emperor’s brother, demanded that the rebels “be strangled, kindled, burned”, “devastate and spoil the yards and houses” and “drive their women and children”. About 100,000 farmers were killed, which was less in battles than when to kill defenseless and civilians. After the defeat, the execution team went through the country. Anyone who rebelled had to pay extremely high taxes. Even if these repressions did not have a cold system of organized mass terror of a Stalinist or fascist regime – they exuded the same, a frightening message.
We do not know how the peasant movement of the euphoric awareness of becoming the author of his own history, terror and bloody fall. The rural culture was largely without writing. However, at the end of the 16th century, court documents show that the peasant war was also generated in oral tradition in front of her, and one after that. The bloody lesson, we can assume, left a nightmare of merciless force with which the uprising was folded. Peasant wars began as an uprising of an “ordinary person” in Germany – and ended with a quiet, frightened object.
The movement requires more than 300 years to form a movement with an impulse associated with it in Germany in 1848. The peasant war also deformed the newly founded Protestantism. He switched from religion -the critical religion to the church associated with the church. Luther’s training against farmers was the embryo of the merger of feudal rule and Protestantism. The result was the authoritarian state of the fact that Protestantism “with a certain half of the division,” said theologian Ernst Toletch. Holy state, pious objects.
The German left interprets the bloody fall in 1525 and the betrayal of Luther as the primary catastrophe and the beginning of a special German suffering. In England in 1688 and in France in 1789 they won the anti -life of the revolution. In federal fragmentation, on the other hand, revolutionaries regularly fail, because moderate from the fear of the lower class, an ally with reactionary abilities. This can be combined by the reformer Martin Luther with the SPD politician Gustav sock, who paved the right radicals after the November revolution in 1918.
This model was repeated -halfway in a democratic uprising in 1848. Similarly, in the 20th century, if one of them saw in 1933 as a counter -revolutionary answer for 1918. The playwright Heiner Müller, an expert in German misfortune, believed that the uprising in 1525 was gained by a German national character in 1525.
German Vika
This left suffering or a special thesis, was a kind of number of championships. She explained the trend of Germany to hear the power and the beginning of world wars from the absence of successful revolutions. This thesis was forgotten quite free. There are two reasons. Special contesting involves the existence of the norm of bourgeois states, in a film about which Germany appears as a deviation. It was fairly criticized as a stencil. The fact that democracy in the model states of France, Great Britain and the USA is not the best at the moment is currently not necessarily more believable. First of all, however, the special thesis was replaced by another optimistic master -tape.
The historian of the Social Democrats Henry Augustus Winkler has largely developed the thesis that Germany arrived west after 500 years and a lot of aberrations. The Federal Republic has become a democratic constitutional state related to the USA, the USA, France, England, and the birth countries of Western values.
In this narrative, the Federal Republic appears as morally, proposed by a politically logical result of a painful learning process. Since the reunion, the Federal Republic has finally become a normal nation in its self -sufficiency, it was happy to arrive and is firmly moored in the West of Anglo -Saxony. Everything fell into everything, a consistent story. You can probably understand Winkler as an analogue of the American sociologist Francis Fukuyama. In the “Limited History” in 1992, he celebrated the victory of the West and global liberal democracies. This forecast is not very well withstanding. It can also quickly turn yellow to the skill of the happy arrival of Germany in the West.
The soil on which German democracy in 2025 is porous. The alliance with the older brother of the United States is dissolved. The role of a student of a democratic model plays. The West, an almost teleologically excessive point of escape of German history, was, perhaps, fraud. Everything begins to slide. It also changes the prospect of 1525. We no longer speak from a safe position from a good end. This is one of the reasons to ask several self -critical issues. Why, for example, the democratic middle is interested in the uprising? In 1525, the Nazis distorted the folk struggle of the German peasantry. The movement of historical workers saw samples to follow in a peasant war.
GDR took a historical heritage
After Sedom Thomas Münzer dogmatized the ancestor of Karl Liebknecht. In the GDR “Experience of Actors of the German Peasant War“ Fulfill ”,“ German Peasant War ”, published in 1987. This industrial service showed how frantically the historical heritage of the GDR was supposed to occupy in order to maintain its own legitimacy.
The democratic center had and has mainly indifferent relations with 1525. The bourgeois revolutionaries of 1848 are now included in the canon. For their own purposes, the constitutional state and the right of voting, it was easy to reflect it. In 1525, however, for the German Center for Democrats, he is a confusing event. Luther, in fact, the hero’s figure as a central player of the Reformation, appears as a villain. Münzer is too radical, esoteric, argumentative, is also associated with the GDR as an identification figure.
The Federal President Gustav Heinemann, Johannes Rau and recently Frank-Walter Steinmeyer tried to fill this gap face to face. They – as social -democratic Protestants with the necessary sensorium – made them visible in 1525 as “part of the German history of freedom” and twelve articles as the attractiveness of universal human rights. It was necessary and commendable, but with limited coverage. Interest is clear. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the most creative interpretation of the peasant war of 2025 comes from any German professor, but from the Lindal of Roper, an Australian historian who teaches in Oxford. In the history of Germany, there was no event at all that could serve the republican to himself as a further mirror. Representatives of the story of a special path are in it. The time has come to evaluate radical democratic moments in the history of Germany. There are not many of them.
