The 500-year legacy of a political thinker

Five hundred years ago this spring, about 8,000 armed peasants gathered outside the village of Frankenhausen in what is now Germany.

Their stand ended in disaster, with thousands dead from an artillery barrage, and their spiritual leader, radical theologian Thomas Müntzer, was beheaded two weeks later after a torture-filled interrogation.

The popular uprising—sparked in part by changes in traditional self-governance, failed harvests, and general mistreatment—was the largest European revolt until the French Revolution more than 260 years later.

“The people were outraged, and now Müntzer comes along with a rhetoric that allows them to express this outrage in a different way,” says Loren Goldman, a political theorist in Penn’s Department of Political Science, who spoke with Penn Today about Müntzer’s legacy and the 500-year anniversary.

The German Peasants’ War was just one in a series of loosely connected revolts and uprisings in the Holy Roman Empire during the century preceding the “battle” at Frankenhausen, notes Goldman. It is estimated that by 1525, about 100,000 peasants were killed in the conflicts. Goldman says that relatively little is known about Müntzer; while he was at one point a colleague of Martin Luther, the two later became scathing enemies, divided by Müntzer’s radicalism.

Müntzer did not launch nor did he truly lead the Peasants’ War, Goldman says, but he was its “most prominent thinker” who provided a theological underpinning to the economic and social complaints of those who worked the land for feudal lords.Müntzer was an ally of the poor whose writings attacked the church and feudal lords, calling for overthrowing society to benefit “the common man,” Goldman says. Unsurprisingly, he was also frequently kicked out of the places in which he settled.

His one-time friend Luther’s ideas brought about what we now know as the Protestant Reformation. Yet, Goldman says, “while his theological reforms promised to empower believers rather than the institutional church, he ultimately strengthened the power of the German princes at the expense of the people.”

By contrast, Müntzer both radicalized and was radicalized by the peasant uprisings that came along at the time, Goldman says. He was also an apocalyptic theologian who believed the world was ending, a widely shared view at the time, and aimed to hasten the coming of God’s kingdom.

After the local lords crushed the “army” at Frankenhausen, Müntzer fled into a nearby town. He was found hiding in an attic bedroom disguised as a sickly old man, taken into custody, tortured, interrogated, and executed two weeks later., Goldman says. The location where his head was stuck on a pike became a pilgrimage site, but in the aftermath Luther and his colleagues vilified Müntzer, and he became largely forgotten over time.

Several hundred years later, Müntzer’s works sparked new interest after a period of nationalism surrounding an attempted 1848 revolution in Germany, according to Goldman. Both conservatives and liberals held Luther up as a national hero, while the losing communist side turned to Müntzer. One of the communist thinkers of the time, Frederich Engels, penned a short book in 1850 about Müntzer and the war to help establish the bona fides of a Germanic revolutionary tradition.

Other writers and thinkers adopted Müntzer as their hero, including a founder of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, in 1895, Goldman says. They selected his writings and messages for their own purposes, representative of the ways in which Marxism has adapted and changed over the decades. “The liberals try to push him in one direction, that he’s a good theologian who’s sort of rational, and then you have the communists take him and say, no, the communism was the really important part,” Goldman says.

Despite being a relatively minor character in the broad scheme of the Reformation—a “gnat” compared to Luther, Goldman says—the influence of Müntzer’s ideas has spread around the world, including to Latin America.

Goldman is currently at work on a translation of a 1921 book on Müntzer titled “Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution,” and he recently co-edited a journal issue on Müntzer’s legacy with colleague Massimiliano Tomba of the University of California, Santa Cruz.