The Peasant War in Germany

Contents

1. Introduction by D. Riazanov (1925) 12 min 7

   David Riazanov, director of the Marx–Engels Institute, introduces the book on the Peasant War’s 400th anniversary (1925): its sources in Zimmermann, Marx and Engels’s view of the peasantry as an ally of the proletarian revolution against Lassalle’s glorification of the knights, and Engels’s unrealised plans, late in life, to rewrite it as a history of Germany.

2. Engels’s Preface to the Second Edition (1870) 21 min 7

   Engels explains that the book, written in 1850 under the impression of the counter-revolution, draws its facts from Zimmermann but explains the religious and political struggles of the Reformation as class struggles. Turning to the present, he finds the German bourgeoisie “come too late,” frightened into alliance with the crown and Junkers by the proletariat, and surveys the workers’ possible allies — the unreliable petty bourgeoisie, the venal lumpenproletariat, the indebted small peasants and above all the farm labourers of the east.

3. Addendum to the Preface (1874) 17 min 5

   After Sedan and the founding of the Prussian-German Empire, Engels describes Bismarck’s regime as a Bonapartist completion of the bourgeois revolution from above, the persecution of the Social Democrats, and the German workers’ advantages: their theoretical sense, inherited from German philosophy, and their late arrival, which lets them learn from the English and French. He praises their struggle on three fronts — theoretical, political and economic.

4. I The Economic Situation and the Social Classes 34 min 8

   Germany around 1500: production growing but organised around regional centres, so that the princes rather than the emperor became the centralising power. Engels maps the classes — princes, knights, a clergy split between prelates and plebeian preachers, urban patricians, a burgher opposition, a plebeian opposition of journeymen and vagrants, and at the bottom the heavily burdened peasants, difficult to rouse but ready to explode.

5. II The Opposition Groups and Their Programmes: Luther and Muenzer 49 min 12

   The religious wars were class wars in theological dress, because the Church dominated all thought. Engels distinguishes burgher heresy (a cheap church) from peasant-plebeian heresy (equality, often with insurrection), and three camps in the Reformation: conservative Catholic, moderate Lutheran, and revolutionary. Luther moves from revolutionary fire to the service of the princes, like the constitutionalists of 1848; Thomas Muenzer, preacher and agitator, carries the plebeian revolution toward the kingdom of God on earth — a portrait modern historians find too modern.

6. III Forerunners: Peasant Uprisings, 1476–1517 39 min 6

   The forerunners of 1525: Hans the Piper of Niklashausen (1476), the secret Bundschuh conspiracies of the Upper Rhine (1493, 1502, 1513, 1517), Poor Konrad in Württemberg (1514), and the great Hungarian rising under Dózsa (1514), all crushed. Engels notes the asceticism of plebeian movements and the recurrent demands for secularising church lands and a united Germany.

7. IV The Uprising of the Nobility 13 min 3

   The Knights’ Revolt of Hutten and Sickingen (1522–23): a declining nobility tried to restore the empire against the princes but, living off the peasants, could not ally with them, and was quickly crushed.

8. V The Peasant War in Swabia and Franconia 1 h 10 min 7

   The Peasant War in the south-west, 1524–25: risings in the Black Forest, Upper Swabia, Franconia, the Odenwald, Württemberg and the Palatinate; the Twelve Articles; the Weinsberg killing; Götz von Berlichingen and Florian Geyer; the Heilbronn reform programme. The peasants’ moderation, localism and trust in negotiations let the Swabian League’s commander Truchsess defeat them army by army, with massacres and burnings.

9. VI The Peasant War in Thuringia, Alsace and Austria 25 min 6

   Muenzer in Mühlhausen, where Engels sets out his famous reflection on the leader who takes power before his class is ripe for rule; the defeat at Frankenhausen and Muenzer’s execution; the risings in Alsace (crushed by the Duke of Lorraine), Salzburg, Styria and the Tyrol, where the Austrian peasants and miners held out longest.

10. VII The Significance of the Peasant War 14 min 4

    The consequences: the clergy and nobility lost, the cities gained nothing, and the princes were the sole victors; German decentralisation, both the cause and the result of the defeat, was entrenched. Engels draws the parallel with 1848 — in both cases the princes profited — but stresses that 1848 belonged to a European movement and its defeat was not final.

11. Appendix: The Twelve Articles of the Peasants (1525) 12 min 6

    The peasants’ programme of March 1525, in the University of Pennsylvania translation: election of pastors, abolition of the small tithe and serfdom, free hunting, fishing and woodcutting, limits on labour services and rents, judgement by the old law, restoration of common lands, abolition of death duties — every demand justified from Scripture, and each offered for withdrawal if shown contrary to God’s word.

12. Explanatory Notes by D. Riazanov 59 min 4

    Riazanov’s seventeen notes on the people and movements in the text: Zimmermann, Louis XI, the Carolina, the Waldenses, Arnold of Brescia, the Albigenses, Wycliffe, Huss and the Hussites, the Flagellants, the Lollards, chiliasm, Luther and the Reformation, Joachim of Floris, Nicolas Storch, Dózsa, and the Wars of the Roses.