Shear Defiance: On Andrew Drummond’s “The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer”
Andrew Drummond | The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer: The Life and Times of an Early German Revolutionary | Verso | February 2024 | 372 Pages
“I have no doubts in the common people,” wrote the clergyman, heretic, and revolutionary Thomas Müntzer in 1521. He was in Prague, where riotous crowds had recently stormed Catholic monasteries and chased priests through the streets, demanding more spiritual freedom and an end to priestly corruption. These were familiar scenes in sixteenth-century Germany and Bohemia. A few months prior, Müntzer had been forced out of a preaching position in Saxony for encouraging weavers and laborers to reject local religious and secular authorities. In Prague, he took the opportunity to sit down and write a statement on the recent unrest. As he saw it, the common people were demanding a spiritual revolution, at any cost: “Oh, you really poor, pitiable little band, how you thirst after the word of God!”
For centuries, the pitiable people of Germany and Bohemia had been ruled by three powers: the Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, and the feudal aristocracy. One hundred years before Martin Luther published his famous list of complaints, the Czech theologian Jan Hus questioned why a religious organization based in Rome should be collecting rents and tithes in Bohemia, not to mention dictating how sermons and sacraments should be performed. A Catholic council quickly burned Hus at the stake but the sense that the Church was too rich, too extractive, too corrupt, and too foreign became pervasive among peasants and nobles alike.
When Luther’s Ninety-five Theses hit the Wittenberg presses in 1517, Germans were primed to see religious reform as linked to political reform. Luther denounced the Pope and his clergy for promising spiritual salvation in exchange for cash contributions. He affirmed that anyone, regardless of their social class, could understand God’s teachings and be saved. Attacks on the Church started to go hand in hand with protests against the feudal system, under which German princes and landowners had free rein to collect taxes and compel unpaid labor from the peasants living on their estates. The system became particularly onerous in the early sixteenth century after a series of poor harvests dampened profits. Peasants began to use Luther’s language of religious revival and spiritual cleansing to articulate their discontent with their rulers.
Dissatisfaction erupted into rebellion in 1524 when thousands of German peasants and laborers took up arms, in Europe’s largest popular revolt until the French Revolution. The movement was decentralized, spreading sporadically as local militias and self-organized peasant armies stormed castles and overthrew town councils. A group of peasant representatives from Swabia agreed on a list of twelve demands, including the abolition of serfdom and the right for parishes to elect their preachers.
Martin Luther swiftly condemned the rebellion, perhaps sensing that elites would crush his reform movement if he promised more freedom to their subjects. Thomas Müntzer, in turn, became the insurrection’s spiritual leader. In May 1525 he stood before an army of 8,000 disgruntled plebeians on a hilltop outside the town of Frankenhausen in central Germany, vowing that God would protect them against the combined power of three noble armies. He was only thirty-five, yet this brief life was long enough to cement his belief that only he and his followers knew the true wishes of God—and anyone who opposed them was God’s enemy. Just before the battle, Müntzer made this point clear in a letter to a count, advising him to surrender or face divine wrath:
Now tell us, you miserable, wretched sack of maggots — who made you into a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his own precious blood?... We will not hesitate to carry out what God has commanded us to do. So do your best, too. I am coming for you.
The battle was short-lived. On the morning of May 15th, the rebel army was massacred at the hands of the noblemen and their mercenaries; around half of the adult male population of Frankenhausen perished. Müntzer was captured, tortured for the names of his co-conspirators, and executed. The princes ordered that his head be impaled on a stake and displayed outside the town.
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We wouldn’t know much about Müntzer, nor remember his role in the Peasants’ War, without the torrent of condemnation that accompanied his death. Shortly after the battle of Frankenhausen, Martin Luther printed A Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer—a castigating obituary in which Luther claimed that God had punished or “judged” Müntzer and his followers by stifling the uprising. Müntzer was portrayed as a violent lunatic, who encouraged a dangerous disregard for law and order among the lower classes. One of Luther’s collaborators, Philip Melanchthon, wrote that Müntzer taught his parishioners that “all possessions should be held in common,” and if “they wanted some corn or cloth, they went to a rich man… If the rich man did not want to hand it over, then they took it by force.”
It was convenient for Luther and the German princes to claim that Müntzer stirred up the peasantry, allowing them to deny the widespread, grassroots nature of the insurrection. By making Müntzer a scapegoat, Catholics and Lutherans cemented his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast. This image only made the preacher more appealing to later generations of radicals. When nineteenth-century intellectuals began to apply class analysis to the European past, they reimagined Müntzer as a proto-communist forefather.
Friedrich Engels suggested in an 1850 study of the Peasants’ War that Müntzer’s ultimate goal was no less than the emancipation of the “proletarian element” nascent among Germany’s peasants and laborers. Müntzer may have couched this emancipation in religious language but, according to Engels, his desired outcome was still the establishment of a communist society, one without class differences and private property. Müntzer was celebrated as a political hero in postwar East Germany, where a monumental painting of the battle by Werner Tübke was placed in a museum on the hilltop outside Frankenhausen.
The centuries-long manipulation of Müntzer’s life for political ends has obscured who the preacher was and what he believed. In a new biography, Andrew Drummond tries to set the record straight. He repurposes the title of Luther’s polemic, a gesture at the fear Müntzer aroused in the German elites and how they exaggerated Müntzer’s extremism to stamp out any sympathy for his cause. For Drummond, Müntzer’s path to Frankenhausen is just as interesting as his demise and offers valuable lessons in defying entrenched hierarchies.
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To understand why and how Müntzer was radicalized, Drummond has a relatively small body of sources. Some questions cannot be answered definitively: We have no clear evidence of Müntzer’s birth year or hometown, although most historians accept that he was born in 1489 in the Harz region of central Germany, possibly to a family of coin-makers. He likely studied theology at the University of Leipzig before receiving his first religious appointment in 1510. According to this timeline, Müntzer would have been around twenty-eight when Luther posted his theses in Wittenberg. We can imagine a young intellectual eager to participate in an era-defining debate spreading through academic circles and political chambers, into churches and public squares across the land.
We know from letters that Müntzer studied Church histories, the work of medieval mystics like Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso, and Martin Luther’s writings. Central to Luther’s theology was his belief that an individual could not pay someone else (i.e., a priest or the Church) to obtain spiritual grace. Grace was bestowed by God alone. In Suso and Tauler’s writings, Müntzer would have found a more severe vision of the path to spiritual salvation. They felt that God gave his followers spiritual confusion, emotional pain, and physical torments so they could overcome their love of sin and worldly pleasures. Suffering was a prerequisite to being saved.
Müntzer must have felt that he was doing plenty of suffering in his late twenties and early thirties. He struggled to find a permanent preaching job; even when working in towns that supported Luther’s reforms, Müntzer’s strident condemnations of the Catholic Church unnerved some secular authorities. In 1523 Müntzer finally found a stable position in the small town of Allstedt in Saxony, where an infusion of money from local silver mines had intensified class tensions. This was also the year he broke with Luther’s vision of spirituality and plan for the reform movement.
Their fundamental disagreement was over the relationship between the individual and God. Luther contended that any man could understand God’s wishes by reading scripture. For Müntzer, scripture was just another barrier between God and his worshipers. God communicated to his chosen people through inner messages and revelations. Even dreams could be a channel for understanding God’s will, an idea Müntzer may have adopted from lower-class folk spiritualism. Müntzer’s attitude toward faith was strongly egalitarian, but depended on believers feeling a forceful personal connection to the divine, as he described in 1521:
Whoever does not hear the real living word of God from the mouth of God, and does not distinguish between Bible and Babel, he is nothing more than a dead thing. But God’s word, which penetrates heart, brain, skin, hair, bone, marrow, juice, strength and power, must come to us differently, and not in the way our foolish, scrotal doctors babble about.
Drummond’s translations intimately capture the fervor of Müntzer’s devotion. The preacher’s theology was ultimately built on something as mercurial and ineffable as the Holy Spirit. Drummond notes that Müntzer, like many of his contemporaries, believed that an apocalypse was fast approaching, during which God would judge all people. Any action that speeded the coming of the end times and the process of spiritual confrontation was sure to be a good one. People should behave knowing that soon they will be elevated to God’s kingdom or condemned to Hell.
Müntzer concocted a set of beliefs that offered no opportunity for moderation or compromise with secular authorities. At the same time, Martin Luther had decided to ally himself with the German nobility and temper the reform movement to ensure their support. In 1524 he wrote to the princes of Saxony, encouraging them to expel Müntzer from Allstedt or risk violent revolt. Müntzer landed in the free imperial city of Mühlhausen, an ideal base to support disgruntled peasants and laborers who believed the time had come to end feudal rule. Once the rebellion flared up in southern Germany, Müntzer and Heinrich Pfeiffer, a former monk, gathered a band of townspeople from Mühlhausen and ransacked several local castles and abbeys. The militia eventually joined another band of peasants in Frankenhausen, where they faced down the united armies of the Saxon princes.
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God’s will empowered Müntzer to defy a repressive religious and social hierarchy but permitted no compromises. Drummond takes pleasure in capturing Müntzer’s apocalyptic vision of doom for the elites: “The sweat of the working people tastes sweet to them, so sweet, but it will turn into bitter gall. And then no debates or mock-battles will help them… The people are hungry, they must eat and they will eat.” This populist rhetoric inspires Drummond to characterize Müntzer’s religious struggle as a broader struggle for freedom and political equality. The two aims were not contradictory, for the preacher felt that “to oppose the godless was to advance the needs and aims of the oppressed.”
Drummond strives to portray Müntzer’s theology accurately while expounding its egalitarian potential. He writes that Müntzer’s “commitment to total societal change still resounds, crying out for a new era of social justice.” He also acknowledges that Müntzer’s story doesn’t follow a straightforward path of radicalization and increasingly bolder action.
Müntzer was likely pushed to join the rebellion by his parishioners’ social and economic discontent, thinking that attacking the elites would precipitate the Second Coming. He offered the peasants an utter disgust for authority, not a plan for reorganizing society. Indeed, Müntzer had no vision of how society should be organized if the Peasants’ War succeeded. He wanted a world where men and women feared God, rather than their social superiors. This is a prescription for sheer defiance in the name of religious faith, not social justice.
Müntzer had only the “language of prophecy, mysticism, and religion” to express his desire for revolution. To this end, Drummond cites Marx’s familiar dictum that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” He even claims that Müntzer deserves to be thought of alongside Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and other leftist revolutionaries. But Drummond is at his best when he places Müntzer squarely within a political and social world that looks strange to us today, where God or the devil might speak to you in dreams and a statement of political demands had to be peppered with scriptural references.
What can be gathered about Müntzer’s life from the historical record will always pale beside the dramatic, dangerous visions crafted by Luther, Engels, and the writers of historical fiction (Drummond calls Éric Vuillard’s 2021 novella about Müntzer, The War of the Poor, a “prime recent example of uninhibited carelessness”). But we don’t need to imagine Müntzer as a radical visionary for him to be a worthy subject. His theology is fascinating enough to overcome any biographical hiccups. He encouraged his followers to reject all spiritual authorities that did not agree with how they understood God’s will. He went to his death believing that he was a small part of a divine plan to mend a corrupt and troubled world—a place he would have been happy to see destroyed.