Peasant wars – Müntzer Versus Luther

Strange how close Luther and Müntzer come when we consider them as the types of intellectual world husbandry. In 1525, Luther precisely put his finger into an open wound with his pamphlet against the “predatory rotting of the farmers”: at the time – like today – the religious disguise was about bare interests. One almost feels reminded of Brecht, who explained in 1935 at the Paris “Congress to Defense of Culture”: “Comrades, we speak of the ownerships.” While everyone else, Gide, Barbus, Feuchtwanger and Heinrich Mann, conjured up the value of the culture, which had to be preserved from fascism, Brecht asked the question of how to promise the dictatorships served. Quality does not come from the appeal to the quality of the rawness not from barbaric drives, “but from the shops”, which without the violence of property can no longer be made.

Luther also saw that just as clearly. He accuses three sins to the insurgent farmers: that they no longer obey the godly authority, that they rob the robbery and loot and their sins “cover with the Evangelio”, who abuse Holy Scripture as an ideology to contain their self -addiction.

Luther also uses the Bible to defend the interests of the authorities. The farmers referred to the Genesis: all things are free and created for everyone, everyone is baptized equally, i.e. before God. They quoted a verse that came from England: “When Adam Grub and Eva Span, where was the nobleman?”

Luther rejects this claim to freedom and equality, which has been in its own Christianity: Moses does not apply in the New Testament, in which Christ with body and good under the emperor: “Give the emperor what the emperor is.” With the Paul’s word, they become subject: “Everyone is subject to violence.” The baptism does not free body and soul. The “freedom of a Christian man” is to free himself for the service on the world according to its laws. It also does not depend on the “good works”, the recognition of which only flatters our vanity, but on the loving of all resistance and temptations where God put us.

Like today, the religious disguise was about bare interests.

Now the farmers had long been in God trust. Their original demands, presented in “Twelve articles of the peasantry”, were “humiliated”, in the name of “love, peace and unity”. Luther runs reality when he claims that the farmers wanted to “have the other foreign goods in common and keep their own to themselves”. Conversely, it was the appropriation, the privatization of the general, the jointly used community property on land, waters and forest through the authorities against which they rose.

Self -benefit from non -commitment was the unspoken, but lived motto of the new, the early bourgeois era in which the money began its triumphal march and the farmers were fault. The bourgeois, based on private property and the exchange of goods based on the production and way of life, started the actual revolution, which also undermined the rule of the small nobility. In this respect, the farmers were not a revolutionary, they did not want something new, but the restoration of old rights, which they considered as well as the rule of a just authorized authority.

Because the gentlemen themselves robbed them of breathing with more and more lease, interest and tax claims because they kept the insurgents with false promises, broke their own commitments and subsequently revenge on the beaten bloody, so the fights were independent of the fire avalanche, which set half the empire on fire.

And didn’t that happen in all revolutions? Who are by no means “locomotives of history”, as Marx called her, but rather with Walter Benjamin the “grip on the emergency brake” in order to stop an ominously experienced progress. The oppressed and humiliated people always rose in their despair against the continued things to stop the self-run of things to return to a paradise that they never had, but faith promised them: the “principle of hope” (Bloch).

Thomas Müntzer was such an emergency brake who fought for paradise on earth. The type of intellectual, who sees the world from below, the voice of the nasty bodies, who experience itself in the joint survey as God’s children, grow out as part, as a living member of a community of free and equal, in which the divine is directly, anarchically revealed as once in the Dionysia. This type does not need property, no property to make sure of himself, because he lives physically and mentally from this community, a municipality in which everyone enrich each other through their existence, their jointly developed talents.

But what if the municipality disintegrates when groups form, individuals separate themselves and create spaces to enjoy their peculiarity through privatization? Then it takes mediations, institutions and social regulations to compensate for the breaking inequalities to win a comprehensive unit of the different.

Luther saw this breaking apart as a threatening world fire. His Reformation should reconcile the secular order with the individual claim of the individual. That is why he relied on the power of the Protestant princes, who in turn served to consolidate this power against the demands of emperor and pope. And so Luther embodies the type of mediator, the thinker of order that views the world from above, as a voice of reason that holds the whole in the interplay of its conflicting parts.

Was this the birth of the left and legal intellectuals? With a phase shift or inherent traffic: The left -wing intellectuals have been considered constructors since the French Revolution, who design an ideal society of abstract principles such as the universal human rights on the tearing board of the mind, where they then measure the real companies. The ideal citizen, the “Citoyen”, also called “new person”, becomes the measure of the old, everyday person, whom you also make a head shorter if it does not fit into the pattern when he dances out of line and insists on his own opinion.

In contrast, legal intellectuals in the spirit of romance as a defender of nature, a no longer god, but natural order, an organic instead of the constructed society. In the place of the state machine, the dead laws of which the bureaucracy manages, the living relationship of “leaders and guided” is intended to take the living relationship between “leaders and guided” in the organic state of the “racially”.

Simply speaking: Leftists assume the principle, the wealth of nature and society belongs to everyone or none. Rights believe that it is not enough for everyone, and therefore call for hierarchical gradations of access to Ethnie, class, nation. “America First” or “Germany the German”: Selection, according to Heiner Müller, was the Basic Law of the 20th century. The 21st century is preparing to digitize the selection. Do we need an emergency brake?

A long version of this text appeared in »Palmbaum. Literary journal from Thuringia «, Issue 1/2025