Reform, Revolution and Crisis in Europe

Landmarks in History, Memory and Thought

Bronwyn Winter, Cat Moir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000726015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Today Europe stands at a crossroads unlike any it has faced since 1945. Since the 2008 financial crash, Europe has weathered the Greek debt crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the identity crisis brought about by Brexit in 2016. The future of the European project is in doubt. How will Europe respond? Reform and revolution have been two forms of response to crisis that have shaped Europe's history. To understand Europe's present, we must understand that past. This interdisciplinary book considers, through the prism of several landmark moments, how the dynamics of reformation and revolution, and the crises they either addressed or created, have shaped European history, memory, and thought.

Part I
Reform

1
Panorama 1989

The Political Aesthetics of the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany

Cat Moir

Introduction

When cultural luminaries of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) met on 14 September 1989 to unveil artist Werner Tübke’s panoramic history painting, Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland, in its specially constructed rotunda in the small Thüringian town of Bad Fran-kenhausen, they could not have predicted that barely two months later, the very East German state that had commissioned the work would be in ruins. In January 1989, SED (Sozialiatische Einheits Partei Deutschlands [Socialist Unity Party of Germany]) Party Chairman and the GDR’s de facto leader, Erich Honecker, had proclaimed that the Berlin Wall separating East Germany from West Germany and splitting the Cold War world in two would still be standing in 100 years (Hertle 2009, 42). In the evening of 9 November that same year, it was brought down in peaceful protest.

In the years leading up to the GDR’s collapse, its citizens had measured the goals of socialism against its “actually existing” reality and found that reality wanting.¹ In the face of shortages of basic goods, prohibitions on free travel and speech, constant surveillance, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, and widespread environmental destruction through heavy industry, the narrative that the SED had peddled for 40 years—that socialism had triumphed in East Germany, that the GDR was a free, equal, and peaceful society, and the heir and redeemer of all the failed social revolutions to have taken place on German soil—no longer convinced.

It was just that narrative, however, that the party had hoped to convey by commissioning Tübke to paint his Bauernkriegspanorama commemorating 500 years since the birth of radical theologian and leader of the German Peasants’ War, Thomas Müntzer.² Müntzer featured prominently in the political mythology of the GDR, which cast him as the representative of a repressed, progressive tendency in German history whose mission the GDR presented itself has having fulfilled. Müntzer was seen as a working-class hero ante rem, and the Peasants’ War—though ultimately unsuccessful—as an early modern anticipation of true socialist revolution.³ The unveiling of Tübke’s panorama, timed to coincide not only with the 500-year commemoration of Müntzer’s birth but also with the 40-year anniversary of the founding of the GDR, was an opportunity for the East German state to reinforce this official narrative and reaffirm itself as the heir to a radical tradition.

The vision Tübke realised, however, said more about the actually existing situation in East Germany than the regime would have liked. Depicting the Battle of Bad Frankenhausen, where Müntzer had led the revolutionary peasants in their final uprising against the German princes, ending in failure and Müntzer’s execution, Tübke’s panorama subverted both the conventions of politically correct realist art and the vision of history that the Müntzer myth was supposed to convey. Far from validating an approved, optimistic narrative of the historical progress of socialism, the circular panorama appears intensely pessimistic about the possibility of humanity’s historical development, instead suggesting a cyclical process of disappointed hope and decay. Müntzer, the supposed hero of the piece, stands at the centre of this Brueghelian chaos in a state of desperation, holding the flag of his Bundschuhbewegung lowered in defeat as the duke’s army slaughters the peasants. When the painting was unveiled in September 1989, all that seemed to connect the struggle of the revolutionary peasants with the East German state was the prospect of imminent demise.

This chapter examines the intersection between Reformation memory, the theme of historical crisis in GDR historiography, and the peaceful revolution of 1989 via an analysis of the history, aesthetics, and reception of Tübke’s panorama. The German Reformation and Peasants’ War became central sites of memory in the GDR as the new state sought to establish a distinct identity in relation to West Germany. Müntzer was seen as the representative of a progressive, revolutionary tradition in German history that contrasted with an authoritarian tradition represented by Luther. The regime looked to art and culture to convey this two-track, crisis theory of German history, and in particular to present itself as the heir to its revolutionary strand.⁴ However, far from endorsing the revolutionary aesthetics of experimental modernism, the SED sanctioned the vaguely defined but nonetheless conservatively imagined “socialist realist” style as the one most appropriate to communicating its message to the masses. Part of the Leipzig School of painting, Tübke’s innovative style was “realist” enough to pass muster with the party, but subversive enough to be socially critical.⁵ Though the artist rejected didactic readings of the Bauernkriegspanorama, it was clear to the public when it was unveiled against the background of an incipient revolution that this painting of the end of days spoke to the mood of the time.

History

When the GDR crystallised as an independent state after World War Two, the new society required a serviceable history in order to legitimise itself. The immediate past of National Socialism was clearly incapable of providing any useful narratives, nor could the myth of anti-fascist resistance—which had been far less widespread than the regime liked to pretend—foster sufficient allegiance to the project of state building. Meanwhile, despite the Soviet Union’s impeccable communist credentials, the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath nevertheless remained the tradition of the occupier. The East German authorities thus had to look further back to Germany’s own revolutionary history—to the November Revolution of 1918, the March Revolution of 1848, and, ultimately, to the Peasants’ War of 1525—for a supposedly progressive lineage to which to connect the project of building socialism on German soil. The Peasants’ War and Reformation provided what Raina Zimmering (2000, 169) has called “addition myths” intended to expand the GDR as a political community by addressing those who may not have identified with the foundational myth of anti-fascism.

The myths of Müntzer as a proto-socialist revolutionary and of the Peasants’ War as a pre-modern attempt to emancipate the common man were, of course, not invented in the GDR. The text that set the tone for the socialist reception history of these events was Friedrich Engels’ 1850 book The Peasants War in Germany (cf. Engels 1978). Engels was the first to inscribe the Peasants’ War into the German revolutionary tradition by connecting it to the events of March 1848. For Engels, the parallels between the German revolution of 1525 and that of 1848/49 were too striking to be dismissed. In both contexts, as Engels saw it, liberal reformers had betrayed the cause of more revolutionary social change and aligned themselves with the forces of conservatism and reaction. As a result, in 1848 as in 1525, the princes—whether Frederick III or the Prussian Junkers—had ultimately been able to hold on to power at the expense of the interests of the wider populace. For Engels, Luther personified the treacherous reformer, the “protégé of the elector of Saxony” who sacrificed the popular element of the movement and aligned himself with the bourgeois, noble and princely side (Engels 1978, 417). According to Engels, Luther’s actions set a precedent in German history, establishing a tendency towards conservative compromises with power and against radical change. Meanwhile, Engels interpreted Müntzer unambiguously as both a communist and an atheist ante rem whose thwarted efforts to overthrow the corrupt princes and landlords would similarly be replayed in later revolutionary situations.

Engels’ interpretation was highly influential among German communists and social democrats seeking to situate themselves within a home-grown revolutionary tradition. In his Forerunners of Modern Socialism (1895), Karl Kautsky similarly sought to integrate Müntzer and the Peasants’ War into a progressive genealogy of socialist development. Meanwhile, if Engels had earlier explicitly connected 1525 with 1848, in her 1920 essay “Revolutionary struggles and revolutionary fighters of 1919,” Clara Zetkin positioned the Peasants’ War as a precursor to the German November Revolution, likening Luther to the treacherous social democratic leaders who had betrayed the revolution’s aims. During the Weimar years and against the background of National Socialism, Zetkin’s party, the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, German Communist Party), identified Müntzer with anti-fascist figures such as Ernst Thälmann and Luther with those perceived to have betrayed the 1919 revolution such as Friedrich Ebert, Gustav Noske, and Phillipp Scheidemann. Engels’ thesis according to which Luther’s treachery had inaugurated a tradition of “misery” in German history became a powerful dogma and laid the foundation for the official GDR interpretation.

Ernst Bloch’s Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921) somewhat broke this socialist narrative mould (cf. Bloch 1962). Though it remained broadly faithful to the Engelsian story, Bloch validated Müntzer’s credentials as a religious mystic to a far greater degree than those on the left previously had. Orthodox Marxism, after all, understood itself as a fundamentally atheist doctrine; the key point when it came to Müntzer in this respect was to present his religious message as ultimately surplus to his broader social message in such a way that would allow him to be seen as a forerunner of modern German communism. While Bloch certainly emphasised the socially radical dimensions of Müntzer’s message, for him, Müntzer’s strength was that he did not couch his social criticism in purely economic terms but spoke to the spiritual significance of equality and justice. It was a lesson that Bloch, who found himself perpetually at odds with the regime when he lived in East Germany from 1949–1961, believed the contemporary left would do well to learn.

If the political mythology surrounding the Reformation and Peasants’ War was already well established by the time the GDR came into existence, it acquired fresh significance in the East German context. Though the memory of the Reformation era was subject to complex manipulation in the GDR, it can broadly speaking be seen to have fulfilled three main functions, which shifted over time. In the initial aftermath of World War Two, the doctrine of “German misery” was invoked by representatives of the GDR regime in an attempt to explain the rise of Nazism. Alexander Abusch’s book Der Irrweg einer Nation (A Nation’s Errant Path) was paradigmatic in this respect (cf. Abusch 1949). There, Abusch argued that Germany had been led into the catastrophe of National Socialism by a particular course of its history: a series of failed social and political revolutions and compromises with authority that dated back to the Reformation era.⁶ In this conception, Luther and the reactionary tendency in German history were aligned with the heritage of the BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or West Germany), which was seen to have incorporated the remains of Nazism by rehabilitating erstwhile fascists.⁷ Meanwhile, the anti-fascist GDR was presented as the legitimate heir to the spirit of Müntzer and the Peasants’ War.

After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, though antagonism with the West remained high, the SED now sought to consolidate the political community internally. The more explicit condemnation of Luther associated with the German misery doctrine did not serve this purpose well, since it might have alienated those who saw Luther as a positive figure, particularly East German Christians. During the 1960s, the sharp contrast between Müntzer and Luther was softened somewhat, and both Reformation and Peasants’ War came to be seen as part of the “early bourgeois revolution” as a historical event that was understood as the shared heritage of East and West Germany alike. In the context of the 450th anniversary of the Reformation in 1967, Luther’s image, in particular, was revised. Though the old ideas of Luther as a traitor of the people and a reformist remained, they were now joined in official discourse by conceptions of him as radical and populist. Gerald Götting, then leader of the East German CDU (Christian Democratic Union), spoke in a speech of his “ Volksverbundenheit ” (commitment to the people), an attribution that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. The special Luther Committee established by the Ministry of Culture also commissioned a new biography for the occasion. Authored by Gerhard Zschäbitz, the volume’s title— Martin Luther, Größe und Grenze (Martin Luther, Greatness and Limitations)—indicates the still ambivalent, but undoubtedly more positive vision of Luther that was cultivated during the 1960s (cf. Zschäbitz 1967).

The perspective shifted again, however, when Erich Honecker replaced Walter Ulbricht as SED Party Chairman and thus de facto leader of the GDR in 1971. In the 1970s, East-West German relations entered a period of détente. However, Honecker’s mission from the outset was to foster an East German “national culture” distinct from that of West Germany, and the former Minister of Culture deployed the mythology of the Peasants’ War to that end. The 1970s saw the anniversaries of the births of two major figures of the German Renaissance—the 500th anniversary of the birth of artists Albrecht Dürer (1971) and Lucas Cranach the Elder (1972)—and 1975 also saw the 450th anniversary of the end of the Peasants’ War.

However, whereas in 1967 the ideological emphasis had been on Luther and, at least to a certain extent, on the all-German heritage of the Reformation era, now it shifted back strongly to Müntzer and to the specific importance of the Peasants’ War for East German national identity. The committee set up within the GDR’s council of ministers (Ministerrat) to organise the 450th anniversary events insisted that the jubilee be celebrated in the spirit of the “best traditions of the workers’ movement and the people, from the peasants’ revolt of the Middle Ages to the heroic acts of the antifascist resistance.”⁸ The intention was unmistakeably to present East Germany not only as the culmination of a progressive tendency within German history, but as the socialist state that had realised the unfulfilled goals of revolutions past. In the regime’s official propaganda on the topic, the “emergence and development of the German Democratic Republic” was explicitly described as “the lawful result and the crowning achievement of the century-long battle of progressive forces” (ibid.). It was in the context of the commemoration of the 450th anniversary of the Peasants’ War that the Ministry of Culture commissioned Werner Tübke to paint the Bauernkriegspanorama at Bad Frankenhausen.

The initial impetus came from Edith Brandt, Secretary for Science, Education, and Culture in Halle, who on 9 July 1972 published an article in the party newspaper Neues Deutschland suggesting the construction of a monument on the battlefield site (cf. Gillen 2011). Brandt had been impressed by the panoramas she had seen on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1972, particularly two panoramas in Sebastopol, one depicting the Crimean War in 1854–1855 and another of Soviet troops liberating the city from German forces at the end of World War Two. She was convinced that a si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: (Hi)stories of Europe
• PART I Reform
• PART II Revolution
• PART III Crisis
• Conclusion: (Hi)stories of Crisis
• Contributors
• Index