Peasant war – a toxic trauma

Half a millennium away, and yet so close: the peasant war is not a historical event, but a virulent episode of German history, which remains of eminent importance for our present. The revolt was the first attempt to fight for a different order of things. For the first time, the “common man” got up to create fair conditions, on the basis of universal rights and against the bitter resistance of the authorities.

Among the many new releases for the 500th anniversary, “The suppression of the Peasant War in 1525” stands out, because as the subtitle emphasizes, Peter Seibert focuses on the ominous “beginning of German violence”. As one of his Motti, the Germanist and media scientist chose a quote from the Prussian colonial generally Lothar von Trotha, who ordered the unemployed shooting of all participants in the Herero uprising: »The Herero are no longer German subjects … Within the German border, every Herero is shot with or without rifles; I no longer take women and children, drive them back to their people or let them shoot them. ”Seibert wants to make the fatal continuity visible that begins with the ruthless brutality, with which the leaders of the national troops bloodily oppressed the peasant revolts in 1525.

Since then, the peasant war has been misused for various purposes. The young Goethe created a rebellious drama with “Götz von Berlichingen”, but which slandered the uprising; Friedrich Engels and in his entourage the GDR, stylized the uprising for the early bourgeois revolution, while the National Socialists claimed that when they started their power, the ancient German dream of freedom that had started with the bundle shoe fighters had fulfilled. The Evangelical Church, on the other hand, has the miserable role that Luther played in betrayal to the peasant pile fighting under his opponent Thomas Müntzer, while the birth of the democratic idea in the form of the “twelve articles” was deliberately ignored as a founding document of the uprising in the Federal Republic. This has only changed a decade after reunification, when on the occasion of the 475th anniversary of the farmers’ uprising in 2000 Federal President Johannes Rau, the revolution of simple people interpreted a “part of German freedom history” and an arc made from the peasant demands in the “twelve articles” as the first step to explain the human rights of the UN of 1948.

“The victory of capitalism,” said Heiner Müller after 1989, “the banks are concerned, not literature. The experience of defeat is important. ”In order to understand the collective experience of the defeat more precisely, Seibert takes the attempt at a different view of the peasant war, which is based on the rushing of the revolt through the merciless” war of extermination “of the national troops within a few months. What happened in 1525 was unprecedented and constituted no less than the primeval disaster of German violence: broad layers of the oppressed and exploited population had tried to intervene with collective strength into history, to change the social course towards a better, more humane future – in order to be put down mercilessly. The revolution is brutally suffocated in the blood by the terrorist of the authorities. “What comes after the catastrophic defeat of the farmers is the subject of the worst character,” writes Seibert. Obient and submission as ideal, forced adaptation and oppressed freedoms – the toxic “Teutschen virtues” are formed after the bestial displacement of the peasant uprising, forced by the absolute will to power of the rulers. They lead a after life that forms German history.

If Seibert concentrates on historical sources on the reconstruction of the mass murderous lowering of the peasant uprising, instead of refurbishing the history of the unrest or focusing on the focus, this happens with the impetus to try out a thesis that is worth considering, namely that the terrorist eraser Resistance spirit, which transformed large parts of Germany into “Killing Fields”, “ultimately a traumatic catastrophe that has not yet been mastered”. Last but not least, the fact that the Swabian Confederation mercilessly could take merciless was due to the professional equipment of the mounted mercenary troops with weapons, which in turn owed itself to Fugger’s loans. Even if the piling piles included up to 30,000 men, the insurgers proved to be without a chance against their often inferior opponents. Seibert emphasizes, when the warring parties encountered at that time it was not a battle, but slaughterings. As a rule, the cruel massacre of mercenaries ended within a few hours with the total extinction of the piling piles, while the losses on the part of the war experienced national troops were usually hardly significant.

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It is terrifying, partly tiring, Seibert page to follow page in his descriptions of the cruelty that did not stop at anything. His book shows a real horror cabinet of barbaric killing methods, including torture such as bleats and mutilation. For deterrence, some rebels were not burned, but roasted with lively body to extend the agony. Subsequent blood dishes corresponded to the unconditional will to annihilate, clasp -like persecution of women and children of insurgents, sexual violence in the form of rapes that the widow Müntzers had to endure, and much more. Seibert notes this in detail as a critical chronicler of crimes in humanity.

The author is concerned that we do not avoid his central question about the transgenerational consequences of the bloodthirsty massacre and all -encompassing orbits. “The short historical moment when the” common man “was able to raise his voice followed centuries persistent silence and a collective trauma that – to damage for the entire social development – could not be processed,” Seibert rightly complained. Our community bears the damage. The fact that collective disasters trigger deep social trauma, which can later break out in renewed disasters, is an insight that teaches us the German violence of the 20th century. This has to be recorded in the cultural memory so that violent excesses do not repeat themselves. What appears more urgent than ever today, where new disasters threaten on the nearby horizon. Peter Seibert’s written as passionate and shocking book on the suppression of the German Peasant War is indispensable for this.

Peter Seibert: The suppression of the Peasant War in 1525. The beginning of a German history of violence. J. H. W. Dietz, 304 pages, born, 26 €.