Thomas Müntzer, radical preacher and supporter of a massive lower-class revolt, enemy of Martin Luther, the Roman Church, and the princes of Saxony, died on the executioner’s block on 27 May 1525. It might come as a surprise to him, five hundred years later, to discover that he has been co-opted as a hero by the German Far Right.
Back in 2020, discussions were being initiated in the German state of Saxony on suitable commemorations to mark the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War of 1525. At that time, a leading member of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) made a short speech in the state parliament, questioning why the Left-wing parties felt that Müntzer was one of their own. Müntzer, he declared, “would vote for the AfD”. To some degree, this remark by Hans-Thomas Tillschneider was a throwaway provocation, but one not without background. The AfD has long supposed that left-wing historians have wrongfully claimed for themselves Müntzer and the memory of the great Peasants’ War. Tillschneider, regarded as something of a hard-liner in the AfD and also a great fan of Russia and Putin, looked back regretfully to the East German historians pre-1990, whose attitude towards Müntzer he considered to be far more patriotic than that of post-1990 liberals and lefties.
Other extreme-right German activists have also claimed Müntzer as one of their own, seeing him as ‘a champion of the people against the elites’, one of the ‘many below against the few above’. In particular, the weekly ‘youth’ journal of the AfD (Junge Freiheit) has regularly provided potted histories of the events of 1525, all supporting the cause of the peasants/farmers and, after a lukewarm start, reclaiming Müntzer himself as a German hero. The German Right’s interest in Müntzer and the Peasants’ War is part of their broader aim of gathering up the votes of the German rural communities, farmers as well as citizens of small country towns, all of whom feel with some justification that they have been neglected and betrayed by the urban elite of the German ruling-class and by the sometimes heavy-handed policies of the EU. Like their equivalents in France, Spain, Italy and Britain, the AfD has been pulling on its wellie-boots in order to sit astride tractors for photo-ops up and down the land, proclaiming themselves defenders of rural communities. They have opportunistically tapped into a deep reservoir of resentment, harnessing the rage of the farmers to aid the AfD’s political ambitions.
With the German farmers of today comes their history. With that history comes the peasantry. With the peasantry comes, almost inevitably, Thomas Müntzer. This is not a new historical approach from the German Right. Back in 1933, one German historian felt inspired to write that ‘Today, at the conclusion of the first victorious German revolution, the peasant has finally found in the Third Reich the position in life for which he strove in 1525’. (This historian, Günther Franz, later progressed through the ranks of the SA and the SS, and until 1945 played a leading role in establishing anti-Jewish and anti-communist guidelines for academic research.) Admittedly, the Right has always lauded the peasants and farmers more than they highlight Thomas Müntzer. For there are some uncomfortable truths about Müntzer that even the creative spinning of the AfD cannot quite hide.
Certainly, Müntzer was what would today be called “anti-elite”, an emotive phrase much bandied about by right-wing populists across the globe. In no uncertain terms, he called for the overthrow of the ‘godless tyrants’, the great feudal princes and noble classes of Germany, among whom could also be counted the magnates of the Roman Church. He fought against what might today be called the liberal intelligentsia, despising their reliance on high-flown theological debate, and their lack of empathy with the plight of the peasants. He threw in his lot with a lower-class rebellion which was the largest ever seen in Europe and would remain as such until the French Revolution.
Public Domain. CC0 1.0 Universal.
Müntzer did not instigate the peasant rebellion of 1524/25; but, at the crucial battle of Frankenhausen in May 1525, he could be described – slightly anachronistically – as the peasants’ political leader. For his resolute stance on the side of the peasantry, he earned the undying hatred of the Reformation leader Martin Luther, and of Luther’s sponsors, the princes of Saxony. Although Müntzer approached the social and economic demands of the peasantry from a resolutely apocalyptic-religious position, his view of their suffering was accurate. Consider his words here, written in the autumn of 1524:
‘What is the evil brew from which all usury, theft and robbery springs but the assumption of our lords and princes that all creatures are their property? The fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the face of the earth – it all has to belong to them! To add insult to injury, they have God’s commandment proclaimed to the poor: God has commanded that you should not steal. But it avails them nothing. For while they do violence to everyone, flay and fleece the poor farm worker, tradesman and everything that breathes, yet should any of the latter commit the pettiest crime, he must hang… It is the lords themselves who make the poor man their enemy. If they refuse to do away with the causes of insurrection how can trouble be avoided in the long run? If saying that makes me an inciter to insurrection, so be it!’
So, Müntzer championed the cause of the peasantry, just as – so the AfD would like to think – the German Right champions the cause of small farmers. But Müntzer had an attitude to other nations and religions which the AfD would assuredly prefer to keep under wraps. In his preserved letters and writings, Müntzer several times mentions Muslims and Jews – and not in a confrontational way. In 1523, for example, he was threatening to expose a local nobleman as a ‘deranged madman … not only before all Christendom, but also … before the Turks, the Heathens and the Jews’, thereby implying that non-Christian opinions counted (even those of heathens). And in a letter of 1524, Müntzer explained his idea that the ‘Elect’ – that is, God’s people who experience true faith – need not all be Christians: ‘even if someone was born a Turk, still he will have the beginning of this same belief’. This was an astonishingly enlightened view of the relative value of different religions.
Müntzer’s reliance on Old Testament prophets and his very robust condemnation of the country’s ruling class were both matters which Luther found so abominable that he described him as ‘Satan’. In 2017, leading members of the German Lutheran church, most probably without knowing anything of Müntzer’s soft line on ‘the Turks’ and conveniently ignoring Luther’s well-documented anti-Semitism, followed suit by equating Müntzer with leaders of the Islamic State (IS).
It is so easy to grab a figure from history and condemn or praise them. Let’s face it: even as historians, we all have our idols and our villains. Müntzer has for a long time been an icon of the Left. Ever since the middle of the 19th century, inspired by the 1843 history of the Peasants’ War published by the liberal historian Wilhelm Zimmerman, and by the 1850 book by Friedrich Engels, Müntzer has been an admired figure in German progressive circles. During the early 20th century, he was eagerly adopted as a revolutionary forebear by Marxists such as Ernst Bloch, and after 1945 by the East German state (GDR). The official GDR view of Müntzer started off in rather gung-ho fashion, with Müntzer effectively being portrayed as a proto-Marxist leader of “the People” (the same role in which the governing SED party fancied themselves), and a theoretician of something called the ‘Early Bourgeois Revolution’. Even today, in those regions of Germany which lay in the GDR, the name of Müntzer can still be found incorporated into the names of streets, official buildings, high-schools and colleges, and so on.
So, if the Left can do it, then why not the Right? Does anyone have the authority to ‘own’ bits of the Past, or recruit historical figures into today’s political struggles? To which the only answer can be: yes, the Past is not copyrighted. But approach with due caution. History helps us understand the present; we can use the past as a guide for the future, and not make the same mistakes all over again. (OK, so this doesn’t always work…) But for such lessons to be of any value, we need to be completely honest; clearly, we can never know everything about a historical figure or event, but we can attempt to fill in all those irritating gaps by understanding the historical contexts. We cannot just cherry-pick what suits, and we cannot ignore any unwelcome truths. Only then can we arrive at a nuanced – and not anachronistic – interpretation.
Any other approach would have Müntzer voting for the AfD. And Martin Luther, doubtless, for Germany’s more traditional CDU. In Britain, meanwhile, Wat Tyler would come out and campaign for Reform UK. Of course he would.