From the graphic novel »1525. The uprising «by Giulio Camagni
Photo: Bahoe Books/Giulio Camagni
Almost exactly to the day exactly 500 years ago, representatives of Upper Swabian “farmers” gathered in Memmingen in order to formulate a common catalog of demands to the nobility. Already in the decades before, due to intensifying exploitation, there were repeated uprisings that were put down immediately with great brutality. In 1524/1525, however, the nobility houses were distracted by wars and parts of the lower clergy had joined reformal or even social revolutionary demands. The reputation of the peasantry after more right to the nobility and clergy opened into a surface fire that caught an area from Alsace and South Tyrol to Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia up to today’s Lower Saxony.
The Italian comic artist and painter Giulio Camagni has from this substance for the A busy Wiener Verlag Bahoe Books Made a complex graphic novel, the motives of which illustrate the next pages. There can be no question of a “Novel”, a novel in the real sense. Camagni, born in Udine in 1973, who studied contemporary history in Milan, has no dramaturgical plot or main figures that allow readers emotional identification. Instead, he relies entirely on the historical material: In the constant change between locations and time levels, Camagni reconstructs the preconditions and course of the peasant wars, which he describes as a great social and proto-republican uprising. In order to illustrate the social lines of conflict, Camagni traces numerous individual biographies. He outlines the life of Georg Truchsess of Waldburg, which comes from the smalladen and is used as a blood dog to suppress the peasant uprising. Then he follows a few pages to Prince Ulrich von Württemberg, who is characterized as an alcoholic despotic tyrant. He focuses on the insurgents of the “poor Konrad”, which with their revolt delivered the prelude to the peasant wars in 1514, and then quickly turns to the characters Luther, Müntzer and Zwingli, who drove the church split between 1517 and 1524. However, this aspect is not pursued any further. Instead, Camagni describes the fate of a simple woman named Else, who is to be forced to be married and opposed the arbitrariness of church authority.
This assembly technology demands the reader in some concentration. But the further you read, the better opens up Camagnis method. “1525” tells the history of the peasant wars in “plateaus” – in levels that are separated in terms of spatial and time and yet intertwined. He does not hide the fact that Camagni used the work of various historians. His graphic novel is a historical investigation set in moving images. Very worth reading!
Giulio Camagni: 1525. The uprising. Bahoe Books, 114 pages, born, 28 €.
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