villages in the vicinity. Hunger, and the sight
of their burning homes, finally brought the
peasants to surrender (July 25). More than twenty were immediately executed. Knopf of
Luibas, the only leader of this troop who did not betray his banner, fled to Biegenz. There
he was captured, however, and hanged, after a long imprisonment.
With this, the Peasant War in Suabia and Franconia came to an end.
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Chapter 6
The Peasant War in Thuringia, Alsace and Austria
Immediately after the outbreak of the first movement in Suabia, Thomas Muenzer again
hurried to Thuringia, and since the end of February and
the beginning of March, he
established his quarters in the free imperial city of Muehlhausen, where his party was
stronger than elsewhere. He held the threads of the entire movement in his hand. He knew
what storm was about to break in Southern Germany, and he undertook to make Thuringia
the centre of the movement for North Germany. He found very fertile soil. Thuringia, the
main arena of the Reformation movement, was in the grip of great unrest. The economic
misery of the downtrodden peasants, as well as the current revolutionary, religious and
political
doctrine, had also prepared the neighbouring provinces, Hesse, Saxony, and the
region of the Harz, for the general uprising. In Muehlhausen itself, whole masses of the
lower middle-class had been won over to the extreme Muenzer doctrine, and could hardly
wait for the moment when they would assert themselves by a superiority of numbers
against the haughty honourables. In order not to start before the proper moment, Muenzer
was compelled to appear in the role of moderator,
but his disciple, Pfeifer, who conducted
the movement there, had committed himself to such an extent that he could not hold back
the outbreak, and as early as March 17, 1525, before the general uprising in Southern
Germany, Muehlhausen had its revolution. The old patrician council was overthrown, and
the government was handed over to the newly-elected “eternal council,” with Muenzer as
president.
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take
over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of
the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination
would imply. What he
can do depends not upon his will but upon
the sharpness of the clash
of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the
material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon
which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he
ought to do, what
his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development
of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands
hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a
given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and
means
of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general
result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma.
What he
can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and
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to the present interests of his party; what he
ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he
is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are
ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the
interests
of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the
assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself
in this awkward position is irrevocably lost. We have seen examples of this in recent times.
We need only be reminded of the position taken in the last French provisional government
by the representatives of the proletariat, though they represented only a very low level of
proletarian development. Whoever can still look forward to official positions after having
become familiar with the experiences of the February government – not to speak of our
own noble German provisional governments and imperial regencies – is either foolish
beyond measure, or at best pays only lip service to the extreme revolutionary party.
Muenzer’s position at the head of the “eternal council” of Muehlhausen was indeed
much more precarious than that of any modern revolutionary regent. Not only the
movement
of his time, but the whole century, was not ripe for the realisation of the ideas
for which he himself had only begun to grope. The class which he represented not only was
not developed enough and incapable of subduing and transforming the whole of society,
but it was just beginning to come into existence. The social transformation that he pictured
in his fantasy was so little grounded in the then existing economic conditions that the latter
were a preparation for a social system diametrically opposed to that of which he dreamt.
Nevertheless, he was bound to his preachings of Christian equality and evangelical
community of possessions. He was at least compelled to make an attempt at their
realisation. Community of all possessions, universal and equal labour duty, and the
abolition of all authority were proclaimed.
In reality, Muehlhausen remained a republican
imperial city with a somewhat democratic constitution, with a senate elected by universal
suffrage and under the control of a forum, and with the hastily improvised feeding of the
poor. The social change, which so horrified the Protestant middle-class contemporaries, in
reality never went beyond a feeble and unconscious attempt prematurely to establish the
bourgeois society of a later period.
Muenzer, himself, seems to have realised the wide abyss between his theories and
surrounding realities. This abyss must have been felt the more keenly, the more distorted
the views of this genius
of necessity appeared, reflected in the heads of the mass of his
followers. He threw himself into widening and organising the movement with a zeal rare
even for him. He wrote letters and sent out emissaries in all directions. His letters and
sermons breathed a revolutionary fanaticism which was amazing in comparison with his
former writings. Gone completely was the naive youthful humour of Muenzer’s
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