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THE MOMENTOUS CLASS STRUGGLE OF THE GERMAN PEASANTS’ WAR  
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Daniel Colligan
March 22, 2025
Jacobin
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_ This year marks the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’
War, the largest European uprising before the French Revolution, in
which peasants seized upon the radical implications of Martin
Luther’s theology to challenge a hierarchical social order _

Rebels capture a count in an 1867 painting of the German Peasants'
War by Hermann Eichler., Wikimedia Commons

 

Review of _Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War_ by
Lyndal Roper (Basic Books, 2025)

The largest revolt in Western Europe prior to the French Revolution
was the German Peasants’ War
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1525. This uprising, transpiring five hundred years ago, saw peasants
and their political allies seizing upon the radical implications of
Martin Luther’s theology in an attempt to undercut the hierarchical
social order of early modern Germany. The peasants’ ambitions were
ultimately crushed, as German princes managed to quell the unrest with
military force.

 

Lyndal Roper, the Regius professor of history at Oxford, is
commemorating the quincentenary of the German Peasants’ War with the
release of a new interpretation of the event, _Summer of Fire and
Blood_
[[link removed]].
Already the author of several books on the Reformation, including two
on Luther, Roper offers up the first major historical account of the
war since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Roper recognizes that she is intervening into a historiographical
controversy that is “more than just an academic matter” and rather
a “public issue” in Germany. Part of the reason for the lull in
writing on the German Peasants’ War is the divergence in
interpretations of the event inherited from the Cold War rivalry
between the German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of
Germany. In the West, the Peasants’ War had been portrayed as a
primordial German effort to establish fundamental human rights,
whereas in the East, Marxist-Leninist authors envisioned it as a class
conflict driven by the teleological necessities of history’s forward
march toward socialism. Roper aims to transcend this “highly
politicised historiography” and forge a new account of the
Peasants’ War that is not beholden to any one established strain of
interpretation.

Despite covering a history that unfolded many centuries ago, Roper
believes that the dilemmas that the German peasants grappled with have
relevance to contemporary political questions, such as natural
resource ownership, wealth inequality, who belongs to a political
community, and other issues besides. Roper’s book seems destined to
become the standard historical account of the German Peasants’ War
in English, if only for a lack of any suitable competitors.

Roper’s account succeeds as a straightforward narrative of the
events of the German Peasants’ War. But the book ends on an
unconvincing note, attempting to argue that Marxism is a deficient
lens through which to analyze the peasant revolt. This concluding
discussion does little to persuade the reader that class should be
deemphasized as a factor illuminating the course of the Peasants’
War.

Neither German, nor Peasant, nor War

Retelling the events of the German Peasants’ War of 1525 presents a
challenge for any historian. The difficulties start with the name
itself: the uprising was not primarily a military conflict, at least
not until its later stages. Even though peasants were the primary
social force behind the revolt, they managed to also recruit many
nonpeasants to their cause. Important phases of the uprising began
prior to 1525 and eventually spread across an area that overlaps with
the present-day territory of Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria,
and beyond, by no means involving exclusively German-speaking
participants.

Neither the peasants nor their secular and ecclesiastical opponents
had any kind of unified command structure. Instead, a number of roving
bands of peasants and collaborators ranged across Central Europe
independently of one another, albeit inspired by a common commitment
to radical Reformation theology. The various political authorities,
once the peasants’ movement had taken on threatening dimensions,
moved to militarily squelch it wherever and whenever they could.

The various political authorities, once the peasants’ movement had
taken on threatening dimensions, moved to militarily squelch it
wherever and whenever they could.

The nature of political authority in early modern Germany presents
another complexity, as the Holy Roman Empire’s “confusing
patchwork of different rights and claims” meant that any individual
peasant might be subject to several different forms of rule. Often the
most proximate authorities were ecclesiastical landlords who extracted
various forms of rent from their subjects. However, it is difficult to
generalize, and any particular peasant might have envisioned
themselves rebelling against any combination of local (and/or distant)
exploiters. Roper observes that “the war was driven by different
issues in the different landscapes; no one explanation applies
everywhere.”

Given the complexities involved, one quickly understands why the
German Peasants’ War is often told as a tale of contending
theologies. It is much easier to grasp the ideological battle between
Luther and his antagonists — usually Thomas Müntzer
[[link removed]] stars
in the opposing role — than the narrative history of the dispersed
and uncoordinated peasant revolt and its suppression. Nevertheless,
Roper proves an adept guide to the events of the Peasants’ War,
interspersing the development of the historical narrative with
relevant context about early modern German society.

From Snails to Swords

The incident that precipitated the German Peasants’ War was the
countess of Lupfen ordering her serfs to collect snail shells to
assist the women of the court in winding their threads. This latest
levy was just one of a baffling array of obligations to which peasants
were subject: “Such a torrent of impositions and dues,” Roper
remarks, “that it is exhausting even to imagine ever fulfilling them
all.” The countess’s demand was rebuffed, which expanded to a more
general refusal to continue complying with peasant obligations. The
spirit of disobedience quickly spread.

 

Peasant grievances were codified in the _Twelve Articles
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drawn up by the pamphleteer Sebastian Lotzer, each referencing Bible
verses that attested to its righteousness. First among the articles
was the insistence that a peasant community should have the right to
appoint the village pastor. The remainder were concerned with the
unjust dues and taxes leveled against the peasantry, as well as the
lack of community control over natural resources such as woodlands,
streams, and meadows. Although variations of the _Twelve
Articles_ were also created, this document was widely embraced and
wielded as a standard by the rebellious peasantry.

Populist preachers were not merely an aspirational demand of the
peasants but an actual phenomenon in the German Peasants’ War. Over
two hundred preachers were involved in the war, ministering to the
newly agitated masses. The large number of these preachers is one
reason why Roper downplays the importance of Müntzer, as he was but
one of a small army of clerics influencing the course of events
(although Roper does pay grudging respect to Müntzer as “the
theologian who articulated social justice like no other”).

Peasant grievances were codified in the _Twelve Articles_, a list of
demands that each referenced Bible verses attesting to its
righteousness.

The mood of the early peasant movement was “largely good-humored,
even carnivalesque.” Roving bands of peasants attempted to win over
other villages and towns to their cause and plundered the monasteries
and castles that they viewed as embodiments of their oppression. But
the April massacre of a couple dozen nobles at Weinsberg underscored
the gravity of the situation to Germany’s political authorities.

Once the military forces of the princes were mustered, they made short
and bloody work of the uprising. Up to a hundred thousand insurgents
were slain, most in the span of a few summer weeks’ time. The
military inferiority of the peasant forces, combined with their lack
of crucial allies — the larger towns and miners of Germany generally
did not join the revolt — ensured that the result of the German
Peasants’ War was a victory for the political establishment. Indeed,
the German princes not only defeated their rebellious foes but ended
up in an enhanced fiscal position by secularizing various
ecclesiastical possessions, some of which had been the early targets
of the peasants’ marauding.

Reformation Paths Not Taken

The history of the Protestant Reformation is canonically dated from
Martin Luther’s 1517 production of his famous _Ninety-Five Theses_,
a critique of perceived Church corruption. Over the next several
years, Luther expanded his literary output to more ambitious and
incendiary topics, denouncing the pope as the Antichrist, railing
against monasticism, and publishing pamphlets aimed at the general
population that emphasized the importance of personal freedom in
religious life. Luther’s pamphleteering found a receptive audience
among the German masses, who readily imbibed his ideas but would
eventually employ them to defy political authority in ways Luther had
never intended (as exhibited by Luther’s infamous 1525 denunciation
of the peasant movement: _Against the Robbing, Murdering Hordes of
Peasants_).

Roper considers the German Peasants’ War as key to the history of
the Reformation, since it represented a fateful fork in the path of
the Reformation’s historical development. The “radical
Reformation” that a mass movement of peasants inspired by a
liberatory theology would have pursued represented a road not taken
due to the revolt’s suppression. Ultimately, the German princes were
able to consolidate their power at the expense of the peasants and
others marginalized by the uprising, thus ensuring a more moderate
history of politics and theology in the region.

Admirably, Roper refrains from presenting the Peasants’ War as
merely providing the backdrop for the battle of ideas between Luther
and his theological rivals. Naturally, these contending ideologies had
their influence on the course of the Peasants’ War, but Roper is
keen to investigate the dynamics of the peasant struggle itself.
“The key thing about the Peasants’ War,” Roper writes, “was
that it was a mass movement.”

It would have been incredibly unlikely for this mass movement to
emerge, however, had Luther not mounted a frontal attack on Church
authority. Why mass peasant discontent originated when it did had more
to do with the emerging critique of the Church hierarchy than any
change in economic or social conditions. Luther’s denunciation of
monasticism and endorsement of freedom would become ideas that the
restive peasants channeled.

The German Peasants’ War represented a fateful fork in the path of
the Reformation’s historical development.

Another idea embraced by the peasants was Christian brotherhood. This
credo provided an ideological justification to level distinctions
between joiners of the revolt, whether peasant, townsperson,
mercenary, miner, or even the odd noble, subsuming them into a
collectivist force. Swearing an oath to one’s brothers was a
deliberately subversive gesture, undermining hierarchical status
distinctions in the German society of orders.

The ranks of the peasant revolt swelled as this Christian brotherhood
marched from village to village. Marching peasants would invite new
villages to join their cause, using a mixture of cooperation and
coercion to incorporate recruits: “If you will not come to us, we
will come to you” was the typical invitation/threat. The experience
of traveling brotherly peasant armies gathering strength through
incorporating additional forces was formative: “Marching was,”
Roper writes, “in a sense, the war.” Even movement itself was an
act of defiance, violating various mobility restrictions by which
peasants were often bound.

 

These peripatetic peasant armies could only be sustained through
living off of local resources, and the monasteries of Germany found
themselves the primary victims of this extraction.  Monasteries and
convents were opportune targets, not only because of the provisions
they hoarded but also since they had been declared ideological enemies
of the Reformation and were often economic exploiters of peasants to
boot. More than five hundred monasteries were ransacked over the
course of the Peasants’ War, almost half of all monastic
institutions in the area of the revolt. In this way, the Peasants’
War represented “a kind of vast antipilgrimage,” a visitation of
religious sites not to revere but instead to plunder and despoil.
Somewhat amazingly, this pillaging did not generally involve violence
against persons, at least in the uprising’s earlier phases.

Standing Alone

The historiography of the German Peasants’ War has featured a wide
variety of interpretations. The most prominent work to come out of the
socialist tradition is Friedrich Engels’s pithy and passionate _The
Peasant War in Germany_
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Writing in the aftermath of the bitter experience of the 1848
revolutions, Engels was drawn to the class struggle of the German
Peasants’ War as a point of comparison for the defeats the German
socialists had recently suffered. His work is based on the history of
Wilhelm Zimmermann, whose account of the war marks the beginning of
its modern historiography. (Less remembered today, among other
socialist examinations of this episode, is Karl Kautsky
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the Peasants’ War.)

But the early twentieth century would see the Peasants’ War examined
through a very different lens. The National Socialist Günther Franz
released his “popular classic” on the subject in 1933, which was
peppered with Nazi dog whistles. Although he removed the
conclusion’s fawning reference to Adolf Hitler in post–World War
II editions, the rest of the work remained largely unchanged. Through
his continued work on the Peasants’ War, coediting collections of
source material, he established himself as the “leading modern
authority on the war as a whole.” (The Peasants’ War is by no
means
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only area in German agrarian historiography where Franz’s influence
casts a long shadow.)

The Peasants’ War represented ‘a kind of vast antipilgrimage,’ a
visitation of religious sites not to revere but instead to plunder and
despoil. 

The post–World War II division of Germany into East and West
produced rival historiographies of the German Peasants’ War.
Marxist-Leninist writers in the East, drawing inspiration from Engels,
championed the war as an instance of “early bourgeois revolution.”
In the West, historian Peter Blickle conceptualized the experience of
the Peasants’ War as a “revolution of the common man,” a
combined struggle of various subaltern classes to overcome a crisis of
feudalism.

All the works mentioned above were originally written in German.
Although many have been translated into English, none of those that
have been is truly an extended history of the Peasants’ War. (The
Zimmermann and Franz histories were never translated into English;
Blickle’s work is more of an analysis that assumes a degree of
familiarity with the events of the Peasants’ War.) So at least as
far as Anglophone literature is concerned, Roper’s book is the only
entrant in an otherwise uncontested field.

Moving Beyond Marxism?

How Roper interpretively distinguishes her account from those that
have come before is not made explicit until the end of the book. One
needs to leaf through the acknowledgments section to find the most
candid statement about her approach. “The question of how to
understand revolution in a post-Marxist era,” she writes, is “the
foremost intellectual challenge that has confronted my generation.”
Evidently, this is the challenge Roper sees her book as meeting:
writing the history of the German Peasants’ Revolution, but stripped
of any semblance of Marxism. German reunification, Roper writes in the
conclusion, has “finally offered the chance to bring all regions
into our account [of The Peasants’ War]. It also allows us to move
beyond classical Marxism and Western neo-Marxism, and to begin to
understand what the Peasants’ War has to say to us today.”

Roper’s conclusion conveys that she takes issue not merely with
Marxism but with Karl Marx himself. Here the reader is surprised by a
flurry of condemnations: that he has contempt for peasants, that he
was “mesmerised by industrial production,” that he used
“gendered terms,” that he has a “suspicion of emotion.” All of
this commentary seems, regardless of its dubious merits, rather
tangential in a book about the German Peasants’ War, on which Marx
never wrote extensively. Roper justifies it by invoking _The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte_
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emblematic of Marx’s approach and attitudes toward peasants and a
cognate piece to Engels’s _Peasant War_.

Any straightforward recounting of the events of the Peasants’ War
reveals that the peasants collectively drew the battle lines against
their ecclesiastical and secular exploiters.

Engels is treated slightly less harshly but still comes in for a bevy
of criticism. One charge leveled against Engels is that he
overemphasizes Thomas Müntzer, although Roper herself notes his
leading role in articulating an emancipatory theology during the
Peasants’ War. Roper also claims that Engels “relegate[s] peasants
to the sidelines” in his account, preferring instead to focus on the
revolutionary implications of other classes, namely the incipient
bourgeoisie and proletariat. But in somewhat of a contradiction, she
also gives Engels credit for his “sympathetic interest in the
peasant struggle” and his attention to the religious dimension of
the conflict.

 

At her most extreme, Roper states that “the environment, human
agency, animals, and freedom” were “not the issues that interested
Marx and Engels.” This is a baffling statement for an Oxford
humanities professor to make. Human freedom was a prime,
probably _the_ prime, concern motivating
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and Engels’s political project. And since Roper singles out
the _Eighteenth Brumaire _for criticism, it is worth drawing
attention to its famous passage that “men make their own history,
but they do not make it just as they please” — which is hard to
interpret as anything but a commentary on the possibilities and
limitations of human agency. One could mount additional evidence from
the Marx-Engels oeuvre countering Roper’s assertion, but suffice it
to say that her antipathy toward the Marxist tradition leads her to
overstate her case.

Engels Endures

One need not travel all the way with Roper in her critique of the
Marxist tradition to recognize some faults of the Marxist
historiography of the German Peasants’ War. The Marxist-Leninst
notion propounded in the German Democratic Republic of the “early
bourgeois revolution” is clearly unsatisfactory as an interpretation
of the uprising, not only because peasants were the main social force
driving the revolt but because of the weakness
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“bourgeois revolution” concept per se — there has never been a
case of a self-conscious bourgeoisie conceiving of and bringing about
a revolution for the purpose of furthering capitalist economic goals.
And no doubt, Engels’s account had the limitation of being based on
a single work of history from the 1840s and was unable to take
advantage of the scholarship that has emerged since.

However, these are hardly reasons for abandoning a class analysis of
the Peasants’ War. Roper argues that “at its most basic, the
language of class only takes us so far with the German Peasants’ War
because the peasants talked of ‘brotherhood,’ not class.” Yet
the fact that the peasants did not communicate with each other in
Marxist jargon does not mean that they failed to act according to the
interests entailed by their economic position. Indeed, any
straightforward recounting of the events of the Peasants’ War, as
Roper provides, plainly reveals that the peasants collectively drew
the battle lines against their ecclesiastical and secular exploiters.
Documents such as the _Twelve Articles_ reveal a clear desire of the
peasants to throw off the economic encumbrances with which the various
forms of German early modern lordship burdened them.

All told, Roper has written a fine history of the German Peasants’
War, albeit one that descends into some rather unfortunate and
unconvincing polemics toward its end. It will ably satisfy the needs
of those looking for a reliable scholarly history of this episode. But
those desiring a more concise and lively commentary might still find
themselves reaching for Engels’s enduring classic. Whatever its
shortcomings, _The Peasant War in Germany_ understandably remains
the most widely read treatment of this historical experience.

_DANIEL COLLIGAN is a PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate
Center._

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* History
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* class struggle
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* Germany
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* Reformation
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* Martin Luther
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* Peasants
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