ResoluteReader: Loren Goldman & Massimiliano Tomba - Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants' War at 500 Years

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Loren Goldman & Massimiliano Tomba - Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants' War at 500 Years

I don't often review academic journals on this reading blog, but this special issue of History of the Present caught my eye. Despite the intense discussion around the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants' War in Germany there are few publications in English so I was pleased to get hold of this.

At first glance this is an eclectic mix. Alongside some engaging and penetrating articles on Thomas Müntzer and his legacy, there are some new translations by Andrew Drummond of key related texts and extracts from Eric Vuillard's excellent novel The War of the Poor. Drummond's contributions also include a fresh working of the Twelve Articles of the rebellious peasants. Though the most useful translation here is of Martin Luther's Letter to the Princes of Saxony, Concerning the Rebellious Spirit. It is helpful to have this accessible as it is not in every Luther collection. In it we see, once again, Luther's use of the Bible as an authority to justify princely destruction of the rebels:

For Your Princely Graces know well that your power and worldly sovereignty are given to you by God with the command that they should be used to keep the peace and punish the unruly, as St. Paul taught in Romans 13. So Your Princely Graces should neither slumber nor miss this opportunity. God will demand an answer of you if you neglect to use the sword that has solemnly been entrusted to you. And the people and the world would not forgive it if Your Princely Graces were to tolerate and suffer such rebelliouos and outrageous violence.

Later, says Luther, "it is either us or them". But note. This is an article from June 1524 before the main rebellion has started. The "sword" here is not yet the physical sword, though the ambiguity must have been useful. It is the metaphorical sword. Luther warns "we are quite prepared to allow and tolerate it if you fight back with words, so that the true teaching is protected. But we declare that you should not use force or mobilise any troops. For we, who chamption God's word, should never fight back with the fist". Within a year Luther would abandon that position and urge the princes to "stab, smite, slay".

Understanding why Luther could come to such a violent position, and in particular the role of Müntzer in advocating for a rebellious struggle against the status quo is part of the purpose of the new material in the book. An excellent introductory article by the editors places Müntzer and the "War" in the context of 500 years of history. They conclude that "to remember Müntzer and the Peasants' War today means exploring the not-happened and the not-yet-explored". This highlights the importance of the period and the struggle (as well as Müntzer's own ideologies) in creating spaces to think about the future and try and shape it. Müntzer was expert at drawing and building on radical traditions to advocate for a common future, at the same time as "protecting it in a tehological shell". His thinking is both universally radical, while at the same time being constrained by the time and place in which he was developing his thought.

This "insurgent theology" is the subject of Massimiliano Tomba's main piece. He makes an important point that while Luther created new ideologies to "justify the princes' authority" as above. But others expanded on this. Hegel "celebrates the Reformation" and sees in it the transition to a new order freer of theological constraints, constructing a "specific conception of freedom and rationality to a universal principle for the foundation of law and the modern state". Tomba points out, that this was to stabalise society in the wake of a struggle that had almost torn apart the old world. It would be Engels and Marx who would take this further and see within the post Peasants' War society a stagnation of development and theory that would hamper German development until the 20th century. As Tomba says:

The trajectory that emerged victorious from this clash used armed violence to suppress the insurgents and used theoretical violence to weaponize concepts and categories in order to neutralise the concrete possibilities contained in diffrent political and legal trajectories.

The Reformation, at least in this stage, was shaped by the class struggle of the GPW, and the ideologies (principly Müntzer's) that emerged out of the struggle. Had Michael Graismar not been isolated in time and space on the other side of the Alps, he might also be listed here for his more developed economic thinking. What came out of this Reformation's victory, was a top down process that imposed change from above. It was, as Tomba says, the "culmination of a war machine against different visions and practicies of life in common". Though here I would suggest culmination is an inadequate and passive definition. A better word would perhaps be victory. It was, if nothing else, a class war that was won by the ruling class.

These themes are explored further in Loren Goldman's article on Müntzer in the "Marxist imagination". Goldman points out the way Marxists, in three key periods, have used the GPW to explore their own contexts. Engels, famously, in 1850. Kautsky in the 1920s seeing Müntzer as "harbinger and herald of the urban industrial proletariat class" and and Bloch who sees Lenin in Müntzer. It is a reminder, Goldman says, that any historical character, "reflects the insurgent particularlity of those who summon it". Here it is difficult to agree, but we could also add that the State Capitalist regime of East Germany put their own spin on Müntzer. A revolutionary precurrsor to their own society, that helped a veneer of socialism to be painted over the anti-democratic nature of their hierarchy.

Two other essays are worth mentioning. Alejandro Zorzin's study of the impact of Müntzer in Latin America, particularly on revolutionary liberation theology, opened up new areas for me. It is remarkable to see how radicals, working with limited translations, were able to use Müntzer for new activist and theoretical reasons. Anne Norton's study on Müntzer also brings fresh material. Here she explores the way Müntzer could use scatalogical and vulgar language to pierce the powers of hierarchy and wealth. She says, quoting Müntzer "They stink, all of them, the powerful and their military minions, for these 'enemies of the cross have crapped their courage into their pants'."

Parallels with 2025 are obvious. But Norton cautions us not to draw too many parallels, not least between the "sovereignty" of the rebels of 1525 and contemporary revolutionary democratic theory:

This conception of sovereignty differes radically from the conception of 'the people' as a unifed and uniform whole... It acts in a dispersed, disseminate form, seeding the democratic. It is embedded in people as they work to rule themselves. Sovereignty is in them, in their bodies. If is in their earthly, material presence, that the right to rule is present in the world.

Perhaps the common theme that emerges from most of these essays is that Müntzer's radical vision in 1525, which emerged from the class struggle that was the Radical Reformation, is not a blueprint, but an inspiration. It is a tool to shape contemporary revolutionary thought - to inspire of course - but also to open the radical imagination. Müntzer will continue to be read to remind us that we can think beyond the political spaces we already have.