A priest in his robes and one of these flat-top hats
4 stars
Thomas Müntzer is a person that stuck around in my memory after reading the historical thriller Q by the Luther Blisset Collective some fiftheen years ago.
Why does a fanatic preacher from the 16th century that led a failed peasant rebellion in Southern Germany interest me?
I think it is something like this: I grew up in a not very strict, but religious and chuch-going family. When we moved my parents got to know many of their friends in church. We probably never learnt anything about the reformation there, but when I did in school and during my Confirmation we only learned about Luther.
I was an adult when I learned that the reformation included a multitude of movements and thinkers, many which were in opposition to Luther in many ways, but which has largely been forgotten in the official retelling of the event. This also opened …
Thomas Müntzer is a person that stuck around in my memory after reading the historical thriller Q by the Luther Blisset Collective some fiftheen years ago.
Why does a fanatic preacher from the 16th century that led a failed peasant rebellion in Southern Germany interest me?
I think it is something like this: I grew up in a not very strict, but religious and chuch-going family. When we moved my parents got to know many of their friends in church. We probably never learnt anything about the reformation there, but when I did in school and during my Confirmation we only learned about Luther.
I was an adult when I learned that the reformation included a multitude of movements and thinkers, many which were in opposition to Luther in many ways, but which has largely been forgotten in the official retelling of the event. This also opened up the reformation as an historical period and I discovered that it was way more interesting than I first thought and that is worth looking into for all who are interested in historical change.
Getting to know Thomas Müntzer (and many of the other movements) also showed me that Luther maybe wasn't as amiable of a thinker as I first thought and that there has been movements earlier in history that has in some form or another strived for a more equal society (the English Levellers and Diggers piques my interest in the same way, even should I trust Drummond there may be a loose links from the German Anabaptists).
The story of Thomas Müntzer is also the story of those who lost and thus didn't get to write the history. The loosers of history is almost always interesting.
So what entices me is an image of a priest in his robes and one of these flat-top hats that goes over the ears, standing on a hill, swinging a sword while he slanders the princes for ruining the life of the common people in his best German while the peasants of Thuringia stands behind him and the paid mercenaries of the German nobility stands on the other?
Yes. I think so.
And probably the image isn't entirely true. What is clear from Drummonds book is that we know some things about Thomas Müntzer, but because not much has been saved of his books and letters (and that the DDR government managed to gift some of his letters to Stalin on his seventieeth birthday) there is so much we simply can't know.
Maybe this is one of the reasons that many have been interested in Müntzer, including Friedriech Engels which wrote a book on the German Peasants War, that beyond what is solid facts we can project a little bit of what we like onto him?