What The Hell America!

Retelling the events of the German Peasants’ War of 1525 presents a challenge for any historian. The difficulties start with the name itself: the uprising was not primarily a military conflict, at least not until its later stages. Even though peasants were the primary social force behind the revolt, they managed to also recruit many nonpeasants to their cause. Important phases of the uprising began prior to 1525 and eventually spread across an area that overlaps with the present-day territory of Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, and beyond, by no means involving exclusively German-speaking participants.

Neither the peasants nor their secular and ecclesiastical opponents had any kind of unified command structure. Instead, a number of roving bands of peasants and collaborators ranged across Central Europe independently of one another, albeit inspired by a common commitment to radical Reformation theology. The various political authorities, once the peasants’ movement had taken on threatening dimensions, moved to militarily squelch it wherever and whenever they could.

The nature of political authority in early modern Germany presents another complexity, as the Holy Roman Empire’s “confusing patchwork of different rights and claims” meant that any individual peasant might be subject to several different forms of rule. Often the most proximate authorities were ecclesiastical landlords who extracted various forms of rent from their subjects. However, it is difficult to generalize, and any particular peasant might have envisioned themselves rebelling against any combination of local (and/or distant) exploiters. Roper observes that “the war was driven by different issues in the different landscapes; no one explanation applies everywhere.”

Given the complexities involved, one quickly understands why the German Peasants’ War is often told as a tale of contending theologies. It is much easier to grasp the ideological battle between Luther and his antagonists — usually Thomas Müntzer stars in the opposing role — than the narrative history of the dispersed and uncoordinated peasant revolt and its suppression. Nevertheless, Roper proves an adept guide to the events of the Peasants’ War, interspersing the development of the historical narrative with relevant context about early modern German society.

The incident that precipitated the German Peasants’ War was the countess of Lupfen ordering her serfs to collect snail shells to assist the women of the court in winding their threads. This latest levy was just one of a baffling array of obligations to which peasants were subject: “Such a torrent of impositions and dues,” Roper remarks, “that it is exhausting even to imagine ever fulfilling them all.” The countess’s demand was rebuffed, which expanded to a more general refusal to continue complying with peasant obligations. The spirit of disobedience quickly spread.

Peasant grievances were codified in the Twelve Articles, a list of demands drawn up by the pamphleteer Sebastian Lotzer, each referencing Bible verses that attested to its righteousness. First among the articles was the insistence that a peasant community should have the right to appoint the village pastor. The remainder were concerned with the unjust dues and taxes leveled against the peasantry, as well as the lack of community control over natural resources such as woodlands, streams, and meadows. Although variations of the Twelve Articles were also created, this document was widely embraced and wielded as a standard by the rebellious peasantry.

Populist preachers were not merely an aspirational demand of the peasants but an actual phenomenon in the German Peasants’ War. Over two hundred preachers were involved in the war, ministering to the newly agitated masses. The large number of these preachers is one reason why Roper downplays the importance of Müntzer, as he was but one of a small army of clerics influencing the course of events (although Roper does pay grudging respect to Müntzer as “the theologian who articulated social justice like no other”).

The mood of the early peasant movement was “largely good-humored, even carnivalesque.” Roving bands of peasants attempted to win over other villages and towns to their cause and plundered the monasteries and castles that they viewed as embodiments of their oppression. But the April massacre of a couple dozen nobles at Weinsberg underscored the gravity of the situation to Germany’s political authorities.

Once the military forces of the princes were mustered, they made short and bloody work of the uprising. Up to a hundred thousand insurgents were slain, most in the span of a few summer weeks’ time. The military inferiority of the peasant forces, combined with their lack of crucial allies — the larger towns and miners of Germany generally did not join the revolt — ensured that the result of the German Peasants’ War was a victory for the political establishment. Indeed, the German princes not only defeated their rebellious foes but ended up in an enhanced fiscal position by secularizing various ecclesiastical possessions, some of which had been the early targets of the peasants’ marauding.

The history of the Protestant Reformation is canonically dated from Martin Luther’s 1517 production of his famous Ninety-Five Theses, a critique of perceived Church corruption. Over the next several years, Luther expanded his literary output to more ambitious and incendiary topics, denouncing the pope as the Antichrist, railing against monasticism, and publishing pamphlets aimed at the general population that emphasized the importance of personal freedom in religious life. Luther’s pamphleteering found a receptive audience among the German masses, who readily imbibed his ideas but would eventually employ them to defy political authority in ways Luther had never intended (as exhibited by Luther’s infamous 1525 denunciation of the peasant movement: Against the Robbing, Murdering Hordes of Peasants).

Roper considers the German Peasants’ War as key to the history of the Reformation, since it represented a fateful fork in the path of the Reformation’s historical development. The “radical Reformation” that a mass movement of peasants inspired by a liberatory theology would have pursued represented a road not taken due to the revolt’s suppression. Ultimately, the German princes were able to consolidate their power at the expense of the peasants and others marginalized by the uprising, thus ensuring a more moderate history of politics and theology in the region.

Admirably, Roper refrains from presenting the Peasants’ War as merely providing the backdrop for the battle of ideas between Luther and his theological rivals. Naturally, these contending ideologies had their influence on the course of the Peasants’ War, but Roper is keen to investigate the dynamics of the peasant struggle itself. “The key thing about the Peasants’ War,” Roper writes, “was that it was a mass movement.”

It would have been incredibly unlikely for this mass movement to emerge, however, had Luther not mounted a frontal attack on Church authority. Why mass peasant discontent originated when it did had more to do with the emerging critique of the Church hierarchy than any change in economic or social conditions. Luther’s denunciation of monasticism and endorsement of freedom would become ideas that the restive peasants channeled.

Another idea embraced by the peasants was Christian brotherhood. This credo provided an ideological justification to level distinctions between joiners of the revolt, whether peasant, townsperson, mercenary, miner, or even the odd noble, subsuming them into a collectivist force. Swearing an oath to one’s brothers was a deliberately subversive gesture, undermining hierarchical status distinctions in the German society of orders.

The ranks of the peasant revolt swelled as this Christian brotherhood marched from village to village. Marching peasants would invite new villages to join their cause, using a mixture of cooperation and coercion to incorporate recruits: “If you will not come to us, we will come to you” was the typical invitation/threat. The experience of traveling brotherly peasant armies gathering strength through incorporating additional forces was formative: “Marching was,” Roper writes, “in a sense, the war.” Even movement itself was an act of defiance, violating various mobility restrictions by which peasants were often bound.

These peripatetic peasant armies could only be sustained through living off of local resources, and the monasteries of Germany found themselves the primary victims of this extraction.  Monasteries and convents were opportune targets, not only because of the provisions they hoarded but also since they had been declared ideological enemies of the Reformation and were often economic exploiters of peasants to boot. More than five hundred monasteries were ransacked over the course of the Peasants’ War, almost half of all monastic institutions in the area of the revolt. In this way, the Peasants’ War represented “a kind of vast antipilgrimage,” a visitation of religious sites not to revere but instead to plunder and despoil. Somewhat amazingly, this pillaging did not generally involve violence against persons, at least in the uprising’s earlier phases.

The historiography of the German Peasants’ War has featured a wide variety of interpretations. The most prominent work to come out of the socialist tradition is Friedrich Engels’s pithy and passionate The Peasant War in Germany. Writing in the aftermath of the bitter experience of the 1848 revolutions, Engels was drawn to the class struggle of the German Peasants’ War as a point of comparison for the defeats the German socialists had recently suffered. His work is based on the history of Wilhelm Zimmermann, whose account of the war marks the beginning of its modern historiography. (Less remembered today, among other socialist examinations of this episode, is Karl Kautsky’s work addressing the Peasants’ War.)

But the early twentieth century would see the Peasants’ War examined through a very different lens. The National Socialist Günther Franz released his “popular classic” on the subject in 1933, which was peppered with Nazi dog whistles. Although he removed the conclusion’s fawning reference to Adolf Hitler in post–World War II editions, the rest of the work remained largely unchanged. Through his continued work on the Peasants’ War, coediting collections of source material, he established himself as the “leading modern authority on the war as a whole.” (The Peasants’ War is by no means the only area in German agrarian historiography where Franz’s influence casts a long shadow.)

The post–World War II division of Germany into East and West produced rival historiographies of the German Peasants’ War. Marxist-Leninist writers in the East, drawing inspiration from Engels, championed the war as an instance of “early bourgeois revolution.” In the West, historian Peter Blickle conceptualized the experience of the Peasants’ War as a “revolution of the common man,” a combined struggle of various subaltern classes to overcome a crisis of feudalism.

All the works mentioned above were originally written in German. Although many have been translated into English, none of those that have been is truly an extended history of the Peasants’ War. (The Zimmermann and Franz histories were never translated into English; Blickle’s work is more of an analysis that assumes a degree of familiarity with the events of the Peasants’ War.) So at least as far as Anglophone literature is concerned, Roper’s book is the only entrant in an otherwise uncontested field.

How Roper interpretively distinguishes her account from those that have come before is not made explicit until the end of the book. One needs to leaf through the acknowledgments section to find the most candid statement about her approach. “The question of how to understand revolution in a post-Marxist era,” she writes, is “the foremost intellectual challenge that has confronted my generation.” Evidently, this is the challenge Roper sees her book as meeting: writing the history of the German Peasants’ Revolution, but stripped of any semblance of Marxism. German reunification, Roper writes in the conclusion, has “finally offered the chance to bring all regions into our account [of The Peasants’ War]. It also allows us to move beyond classical Marxism and Western neo-Marxism, and to begin to understand what the Peasants’ War has to say to us today.”

Roper’s conclusion conveys that she takes issue not merely with Marxism but with Karl Marx himself. Here the reader is surprised by a flurry of condemnations: that he has contempt for peasants, that he was “mesmerised by industrial production,” that he used “gendered terms,” that he has a “suspicion of emotion.” All of this commentary seems, regardless of its dubious merits, rather tangential in a book about the German Peasants’ War, on which Marx never wrote extensively. Roper justifies it by invoking The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as emblematic of Marx’s approach and attitudes toward peasants and a cognate piece to Engels’s Peasant War.

Engels is treated slightly less harshly but still comes in for a bevy of criticism. One charge leveled against Engels is that he overemphasizes Thomas Müntzer, although Roper herself notes his leading role in articulating an emancipatory theology during the Peasants’ War. Roper also claims that Engels “relegate[s] peasants to the sidelines” in his account, preferring instead to focus on the revolutionary implications of other classes, namely the incipient bourgeoisie and proletariat. But in somewhat of a contradiction, she also gives Engels credit for his “sympathetic interest in the peasant struggle” and his attention to the religious dimension of the conflict.

At her most extreme, Roper states that “the environment, human agency, animals, and freedom” were “not the issues that interested Marx and Engels.” This is a baffling statement for an Oxford humanities professor to make. Human freedom was a prime, probably the prime, concern motivating Marx and Engels’s political project. And since Roper singles out the Eighteenth Brumaire for criticism, it is worth drawing attention to its famous passage that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please” — which is hard to interpret as anything but a commentary on the possibilities and limitations of human agency. One could mount additional evidence from the Marx-Engels oeuvre countering Roper’s assertion, but suffice it to say that her antipathy toward the Marxist tradition leads her to overstate her case.

One need not travel all the way with Roper in her critique of the Marxist tradition to recognize some faults of the Marxist historiography of the German Peasants’ War. The Marxist-Leninst notion propounded in the German Democratic Republic of the “early bourgeois revolution” is clearly unsatisfactory as an interpretation of the uprising, not only because peasants were the main social force driving the revolt but because of the weakness of the “bourgeois revolution” concept per se — there has never been a case of a self-conscious bourgeoisie conceiving of and bringing about a revolution for the purpose of furthering capitalist economic goals. And no doubt, Engels’s account had the limitation of being based on a single work of history from the 1840s and was unable to take advantage of the scholarship that has emerged since.

However, these are hardly reasons for abandoning a class analysis of the Peasants’ War. Roper argues that “at its most basic, the language of class only takes us so far with the German Peasants’ War because the peasants talked of ‘brotherhood,’ not class.” Yet the fact that the peasants did not communicate with each other in Marxist jargon does not mean that they failed to act according to the interests entailed by their economic position. Indeed, any straightforward recounting of the events of the Peasants’ War, as Roper provides, plainly reveals that the peasants collectively drew the battle lines against their ecclesiastical and secular exploiters. Documents such as the Twelve Articles reveal a clear desire of the peasants to throw off the economic encumbrances with which the various forms of German early modern lordship burdened them.

All told, Roper has written a fine history of the German Peasants’ War, albeit one that descends into some rather unfortunate and unconvincing polemics toward its end. It will ably satisfy the needs of those looking for a reliable scholarly history of this episode. But those desiring a more concise and lively commentary might still find themselves reaching for Engels’s enduring classic. Whatever its shortcomings, The Peasant War in Germany understandably remains the most widely read treatment of this historical experience.