The German Peasant War of 1525

Janos Bak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135162337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

First Published in 1976. This is Volume 3 of a colelction of essays in the Journal of Peasant Studies on the War. There is immense importance of the German Peasant War, both in itself as the first national peasant revolt in Germany and because of the influence of Engels work on the subject.

‘The Peasant War in Germany’ by Friedrich Engels—125 years after

Janos Bak*

The 450th anniversary of the Peasant War was also the 125th of the publication of The Peasant War in Germany by Friedrich Engels. Originally a series of articles in the May-October issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung edited by Marx and Engels, The Peasant War was re-published in 1870 and 1875 and many times since, with prefaces by Engels. The subject remained dear to Engels for the rest of his life and was to serve as a basis for further work on the peasantry and the agrarian question. Numerous references in his correspondence and a whole series of notes testify to the plans Engels had for a more elaborate study. Shortly before his death he still counted on starting work soon: ‘If only I were already at it’, he wrote on May 21, 1895 [Engels, 1956: 209].

The double anniversary suggested the idea of a discussion on the merits and significance of Engels’ book, but there are many reasons that may justify such an exchange of ideas. The Peasant War in Germany was one of the earliest historical studies based on the philosophy and methodology elaborated by Marx and Engels. As such, it is not only a classic example of the application of the principles of social science analysis to a particular epoch but also an important piece of evidence for the development of dialectical and historical materialism itself. Engels’ contribution to this development has recently been summarized as having emphasized the ‘empirical and pragmatic bearing of the doctrine’ [L. Krieger in Engels 1967: xvii]. The book on the Peasant War can serve very well to illustrate this assessment.

The historiographic and theoretical significance of The Peasant War is, however, only one of the aspects which may make this discussion relevant for students of peasant societies. The relationship of peasants to other social classes and groups, the organization of resistance and revolt, the role of ideologies—particularly of religious ones—in peasant uprisings, the question of spontaneous rebellion vs. consciously prepared and led peasant war and that of leadership are all subjects that have been analysed by Engels and are still very much in the centre of scholarly and political interest. Some of these will be discussed below, but many more could be.

‘The Peasant War in Germany’: a classic of historical writing

First the historiographical question. It would lead far into nineteenth and twentieth century intellectual history were we to discuss the fate of Engel’s book in the context of historical scholarship since 1850. It may suffice to say that The Peasant War has been little read and little discussed outside of Marxist historical schools. Its most recent renascence was marked by the extensive studies devoted to it in the German Democratic Republic during the last fifteen years. These in turn induced West German historians, motivated by both scholarly interest and the development of political relations between the two Germanies, to discuss its merits. The main stages of these discussions are summarized by Rainer Wohlfeil (below, pp. 98–103) and Günter Vogler (pp. 108–117).

The reasons for this limited and ‘one-sided’ (ibid.: xxviii) revival are manifold. For one, most historians of the early sixteenth century may have preferred to use the more informative traditional monographs, such as the one by Wilhelm Zimmermann (1841–43), which actually served as the basis of information for Engels’ analysis. True, Zimmermann and several more recent books [cf. Engels 1967: xli n. 48] contain more details, but the belief that they are more ‘objective’ than Engels’ may be treacherous. As to Zimmermann, his intention was, in his own words (1844): ‘I wanted to give my people a book … that would have relevant reference to the present: the great movement of 1525 is connected with the aspirations and upheavals of our times as closely as … the day before yesterday with today’ [Friesen, 1973: 9]. It has recently been demonstrated that Zimmermann wrote his book in a missionary spirit and was convinced that by producing his monograph he was working hand in hand with the spirit of the times toward an immediate inauguration of the Kingdom of God [Friesen, 1973: 107–116]¹.

Still, for information on the events and their details one does best to turn to the more recent handbooks and scholarly monographs and not to Engels; his analysis has claims to significance other than that of being an exhaustive reference book.

In the critical introduction to his edition of The Peasant War Leonard Krieger listed three factors which in the eyes of a non-Marxist historian justify the inclusion of Engels’ book in a series of Classic European Historians:

‘First, it initiated a prominent tradition of socialist history on the era of the Peasant War, running through Karl Kautsky (1895), E. Belfort Bax (1899), and Roy Pascal (1933), to the current official Marxist studies. It is a tradition serious enough … to rival the non-Marxist tradition and to leave the interpretation of the Peasant War still moot between them. It should be added, as a subordinate consideration, that the Marxist line is not only becoming more respectable academically but has always been more convenient scholastically. Of the historical works devoted wholly or mainly to the Peasants’ War, the only ones in English are those from the socialist tradition. The best of the non-Marxist tradition, old and new alike, remain in their original German. This tradition is available in English only through more inclusive works in which the Peasants’ War is one topic among others.

‘The second factor which warrants the attribution of classic status to Engels’ Peasant War in Germany is more convincing, for it bears upon an essential and distinctive quality of the book itself. In the actual working out of his economic thesis through his religious material, Engels formulated relationships of practical interests to religious ideals that are more important for the connections they make than for the putative economic primacy from which he began. Undoubtedly, Engels’ early religious experience and his lifelong conviction of a kinship between religion and communism helped him to approach, in the context of the religiosity of the Peasants’ War, as close as he would ever get to an integral relationship among the variegated historical activities of man. The connection between the radical sects and ‘peasant-plebeian’ classes—the connection that embodied Engels’ most penetrating historical perception—remains the one definite relationship that has been accepted by historians on both sides of the Marxist divide. In general, moreover, even if Engels’ priority of social interests and his one-to-one correlation of the other religious confessions with social classes have found no such acceptance, the relevance of the social dimension to the religious conflicts of the Reformation era is beyond cavil and the discovery of how this relationship actually worked remains one of the live issues for European historiography.

‘Third, and finally, The Peasant War in Germany embodies Engels’ Marxist dilemma in a form that can help every student of history to know himself. Engels himself unwittingly pointed out the lesson to be learned from the work in a later summary of the historical principles that had gone into it. When placed in juxtaposition these principles make explicit the fundamental paradox of history that Engels’ work, unpretentious as it is, does exemplify. The paradox consists in the necessarily variant views of historical events taken by the men who made the events and the historian who re-creates them, and it is Engels’ glory to have cast his Marxism into a sixteenth-century shape that makes clear the ultimate ambiguity of the historian’s situation.

‘Engels, on the one hand, understood the point of view of the men who made the long stretch of pre-industrial history, and he recognized their right to put their own stamp upon that history. Because these historical subjects viewed “thoughts as … developing independently and subject only to their own laws”, and because the determination of this thought process by “material life conditions remains of necessity unknown to these persons”, the men of the pre-industrial era constrain “every social and political movement to take on a theological form”.

‘On the other hand, however, Engels also fully recognized the right of the modern historian to read back into this same pre-industrial era the knowledge of the primacy of “material life conditions”, although this is a knowledge that only the industrialism of the historian’s own age made possible. The historian need only perform this reinterpretation, as Engels felt he himself had, and what had been “the riddle” of the driving forces of history is thereby solved for all preceding periods as well as for his own. Needless to say, Engels remained too much of a Hegelian believer in the retroactive power of knowledge to have himself been aware of the problem posed by this combination of principles. But to others not so comfortably endowed his Peasant War in Germany will remain a case study in the problem of how far the historian can go in opposing to his subjects’ interpretations of themselves contrary interpretations stemming from subsequently acquired knowledge which the subjects did not and could not have had about themselves. [Engels, 1967, xi–xlii]’².

Our discussion will concentrate on two points summarized above by Krieger. The first three contributions by German historians discuss the historiographical value of the analysis by Friedrich Engels, raising, however, several questions beyond the interest of the professional historian. The second part is opened by a student of the Chinese revolutions and takes its departure from the question of religion and revolution; no doubt, a crucial problem for both Engels and for everyone interested in the pre-industrial period and modern peasant societies. The comments of two social scientists from West Berlin, based on their field work and studies in the Middle East, are printed as a contribution to the discussion.

Engels and German Historians Today: The Question of Early Bourgeois Revolution

We are very fortunate and grateful to the authors that we can print three papers by major protagonists of the ongoing discussions in Germany. Rainer Wohlfeil was one of the first who made a number of arguments presented by his colleagues in the German Democratic Republic accessible to the Western public. His anthology of articles and his critical introduction to it [Wohlfeil, 1972] were significant steps in opening up the dialogue between the two Germanies. Ernst Engelberg and Günter Vogler have published extensively on both the theoretical and the strictly historical aspects of the subject (see the references, below, pp. 123, 126). Their willingness to participate and their kind assistance in the preparation of the English version of the papers made it possible to present for the first time outside the German-speaking world some of the main themes of this important scholarly controversy.

It is not unlikely that much of what is disputed in the opening paper may appear to readers trained in the social sciences as redundant hairsplitting over definitions, seemingly so dear to historians. And so might even parts of the replies. One may be, however, more patient with their argument, if one considers that while in Western Europe and the Americas the methodological framework of Engels in general has been for some time accepted by a wide circle of scholars as one of the possible dimensions of historical study [Engels, 1967: xl], this was much less true for Germany. An analysis of this divergence would lead us far away from our immediate concerns. However, social and economic analysis as the basic approach to pre-industrial (and industrial) societies is still very much disputed among historians everywhere. Hence the opposing positions of the debate are relevant to more than just the German disputes.

Above and beyond the disagreement on the primacy of the socio-economic approach and the difference in the estimates of the relationship between the Reformation and Peasant War, the main controversy is about the quality of the events around 1525. This is actually also the question that promises to be of greatest interest for non-historians and students of peasant societies. The assessment of the struggles of the Reformation period as an early, immature bourgeois revolution, the first revolutionary attempt of European anti-feudal elements to overthrow the feudal society was in effect proposed by Engels (even if he did not use the words ‘early bourgeois revolution’, as Wohlfeil points out). An inquiry into the validity of this judgement is more than a question of definitions and certainly transcends the analysis of the revolts and rebellions in and around 1525 in Germany.

Vogler elaborates on the stage of development in the forces of production and social relations that prevailed in late fifteenth-early sixteenth century Central Europe and attempts to demonstrate that there were considerable elements of early capitalism present, at least in the urban sector. Several articles in this issue mention the late medieval agrarian crisis combined with manifold crises of authority and ideology of the old order. The growth of market relationships intruding into the village and the increased differentiation of the peasantry point to the beginnings of capitalist transformation in the countryside. The doubts of Wohlfeil about the ‘bourgeois character’ of the Reformation and even more so about that of the Peasant War are, however, not totally unjustified; there has not yet been enough detailed analysis of the economic and social bases of the period. Even Marxists tend to devote more attention to aims and ideologies, despite the programmatic words of Engels (quoted by Vogler, below p. 109), than to questions of land tenure, social conditions in the villages, market networks, changes in the forces of production etc. Recently, historians, both in the East and West, have been increasingly turning their attention to these problems; witness Blickle’s article (above, pp. 63–74) and the works cited by him.

However, for those less curious about the details of the events around 1525 the main interest lies in the discussion of prerequisites, causes and consequences of this first (let it be granted, more or less) bourgeois attempt at the transformation of feudalism to capitalism. It is well known—and Engels’ book is an analysis of the causes for this—that the peasant war did not lead to such a transformation and as far as the German states were concerned, neither did the Reformation movement. German societies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were typical examples of the results of partial, half-hearted (in a word: truncated) bourgeois development, the reasons for which are too many to be discussed here. But students of modern peasant societies, from Latin America and Asia to the margins of Europe, are only too familiar with such truncated revolutions and pseudo-revolutions which left feudal and semi-feudal elements intact. For them, the study of that early, still immature bourgeois revolution that found its form in the German Reformation and the defeated Peasant War are of great interest. Engels’ conclusions about 1525, which he augmented by comments based on the still uncompleted bourgeois transformation in late nineteenth century Prussian-junker Germany, remain, as Vogler puts it, ‘valid as long as … there is an agrarian question’ (below p. 109). The valuable arguments presented in the discussion papers and the many more in the books and articles referred to (see below, pp. 123–126) are of considerable interest to this general problem. It would, however, do good to widen the comparative and theoretical basis. For example, the ‘myth of the rivoluzione mancata’ (Salomone, 1962) about the truncated revolution of the Risorgimento in Italy gave Antonio Gramsci [1949] the departure for a profound analysis of the social and political conditions of pre-industrial Italy as an explanation of the many failures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His paradigm for the reasons of the betrayal of a revolutionary peasantry by a weak and opportunistic bourgeoisie does not apply, of course, immediately to sixteenth century Germany or twentieth-century Latin America, but the relations of feudal backwardness and particularism to the immature forces of production and political struggle may offer useful parallels an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Sketch Map of the German Peasant War
• From Resistance to Revolt: The Late Medieval Peasant Wars in the Context of Social Crisis
• The Peasants of Swabia, 1525
• Images of the Peasant, 1514–1525
• Precursors of the Peasant War: Bundschuh and Armer Konrad—Movements at the Eve of the Reformation
• ‘Old Law’ and ‘Divine Law’ in the German Peasant War
• The Economic, Social and Political Background of the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants of 1525
• German Agrarian Insitutions at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century: Upper Swabia as an Example
• ‘The Peasant War in Germany’ by Friedrich Engels—125 Years After