Or: The Battle for the ‘Common Man’

This weekend, many places in Germany celebrate an event that happened half a millennium ago. In 1525, representatives of various rebellious peasant groups adopted a set of written articles that would go down as a milestone in the history of European democracy.

Alongside a list of specific demands like villages being able to dismiss preachers who ‘misbehaved’ or being able to fish and hunt freely, their Twelve Articles also asserted a universal human right that continues to be at the core of Western democracies today: to be free. The peasants wrote:

‘Until now it has been practice that we have been treated like serfs, which is deplorable, since Christ redeemed all of us with his precious blood, both the shepherd and the nobleman, with no exceptions. Accordingly, we hereby declare that we are free and want to remain free.’

The German Peasants’ War that brought about the Twelve Articles was part of a wider context of social unrest in Europe. The continent had been shaken by structural economic issues, pandemics, bad harvests and the Reformation. The old elites, particularly lower-ranking aristocracy, whose members feared for their wealth and status, had responded by making conditions worse and worse for the 80% of society that farmed their land and kept things going.

Taxes went up. Free peasants were often pressured back into serfdom. Land was ringfenced for hunting, fishing and poaching. Even when peasants died, they weren’t free from demands. In an early form of inheritance tax, their grieving families had to pay their landlord a death toll, often the best piece of clothing and livestock they owned.

Local and self-government were severely curtailed, as were personal liberties regarding freedom of movement or marriage. The old elites were simply overdoing it in their panic to protect their own interests in times of change. All over Europe sporadic unrests kept breaking out throughout the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Yet, the German Peasants’ War of 1524 and 1525 stands out and continues to loom large in the German imagination today. This is partly due to its sheer size and scale. What began with sporadic outbreaks of rebellion in what is now southwestern Germany spread north and east rapidly and became a movement of hundreds of thousands of people – the largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution.

The reaction of the nobility was brutal. They saw no reason to negotiate with their rebellious underlings and instead suppressed the uprising with military might. Estimations of how many people died vary, but many sources cite a figure of around 70,000 slaughtered peasants.

The idea of brave, democratic-minded, pitchfork-wielding peasants taking on an arrogant, callous elite never lost its appeal through the ages. In addition, the events unfolded in the age of the printing press, allowing an enormously prolific distribution of the Twelve Articles, of which over 25,000 copies were printed and spread throughout Germany. The peasants’ voice thus appears to ring through to us today unfiltered.

I think both of these are reasons why the German Peasants’ Revolt has inspired generations of Germans to see very different things in it. Whatever seemed like the important issue of the day would become the overlay for the interpretation of the events that had unfolded in 1525.

Older interpretations up to the first half of the 19th century often took the side of the nobles. Take the man who is regarded as a founding father of history as an academic discipline, Leopold von Ranke. Writing in 1839, he described the Peasants’ War as the ‘greatest natural phenomenon of the German state’. The analogy implies a similarity to floods, earthquakes or other natural disasters: destructive events that happen to societies and which civilisations must withstand in order to preserve their way of life. Ranke believed the peasants were driven by primitive, emotional forces like envy or unreasonable hatred.

In the context of the liberal and socialist revolutions that hit Europe in 1848, other interpretations came to the fore. The radical thinker and historian Wilhelm Zimmermann sided with the peasants, seeing in them the predecessors to the rebellious masses rising against the elites contemporary to his own time. Karl Marx’s pal Friedrich Engels did the same but modified the image somewhat to make it fit his notion of the class struggle.

This socialist interpretation of the Peasants’ War was also picked up by other Marxists who viewed history through the lens of class struggle and oppression. In East German historiography during the Cold War, the events of 1525 loomed large. This was for two reasons. On the one hand, the story lent itself to a narrative in which oppressed people unsuccessfully fought against the elites for centuries, whereas now the workers were supposedly in charge.

Two, many of the revolts had taken place on the territory that now lay in the GDR. So this was an opportunity to give the relatively young state longer historical roots. The most spectacular manifestation of this idea is still visible today in the Peasants’ War Panorama, a painting of monumental proportions – 14 metres (46 ft) by 123 metres (404 ft) that lives in its own building in Bad Frankenhausen, Thuringia.

The events were fascinating to the Nazis too, whose private armies, the SS and the SA saw themselves as fighting the old regime to establish a new one. They picked up an interwar song called ‘Wir sind des Geyers schwarzer Haufen’ (‘We are Geyer’s Black Company)’’. This was a reference to Florian Geyer, a nobleman who’d sided with the peasants in 1524. It became an SS favourite but was notably also sung later by the East German army and continues to find its way into songbooks today, often in shorted or altered varieties.

West Germany also continued to venerate the events of 1525, marking anniversaries with exhibitions and books and teaching the history as part of the curriculum in schools. This became part of a story of how ordinary people fought for human rights and democratic freedoms and how this had now been achieved in West Germany’s post-war system.

Interestingly, the 450th anniversary in 1975 produced a flurry of activity in both East and West Germany, and some historians from both sides were in contact with one another, battling it out for a definitive interpretation of the Peasants’ War. The West German historian Peter Blickle, for instance, produced one of the most influential and much-translated accounts of the conflict in which he argued that the events were shaped not just by the peasants but by ‘the common man’, a type in which he included city dwellers, miners and others, basically anyone who wasn’t part of the ruling class.

It’s this wider definition that Germany continues to celebrate today. Moving away from the peasants towards a broader idea of ‘the common man’ allows anyone to feel this is their history. Including the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Yesterday, he attended a ceremony to commemorate the 500-year anniversary of 1525 and argued that the Peasants’ Revolt was the ‘trigger of a freedom movement’ that sowed the seeds for German democracy today. He drew a direct line between what the peasants wanted then and what modern democracy is about.

‘Today,’ the President continued, ‘we see that liberal democracy is threatened and attacked – domestically and from the outside and with a force that many of us would not have believed possible.’ Steinmeier received much applause when he continued to say that history is instrumentalised, especially by those who ‘agitate against democratic institutions and who want freedom just for themselves or for their group.’

The concept of the ‘common man’ fighting for freedom against oppression is now so vague that the head-of-state of one of the most powerful countries on earth counts himself among that group. This is despite the fact that since 1949 his office is no longer directly elected by the people and that his party, the centre-Left SPD, was only voted for by 16.4 percent of the population.

Another way of looking at it is that it’s especially the ‘common man’ (and the common woman) who feels that democracy in its current application is no longer working for them. The AfD, against which Steinmeier’s argument was directed, has become the ‘poor people’s party’, as a journalist aptly put it in an analysis of voting results in some of the country’s most deprived regions. According to this, in both East and West, the AfD would have won the election in February if only poor regions had been allowed to vote. Of course, the anti-immigration party also has many middle-class and wealthy voters, but whichever criteria you apply – wealth, class, education status or income – they get voted for disproportionately by the ‘common man’.

Voting for disruptive forces outside the political centre may be a modern-day form of the peasants’ revolt. People who no longer know how else to make their discontent heard go for the most radical option on the ballot paper.

If there are lessons to be drawn from 1525, then it’s surely that it’s dangerous to disregard the concerns of the common man as illegitimate or unreasonable. Compromise or reform may have quietened things down in the early modern period as it eventually did in the 19th century.

If, however, the ruling class considers its own views correct while working people feel they are being ignored, eventually, they will do something drastic. Just as in 1525, there is an accumulation of crises piling up on them today that increase levels of despair: economic uncertainties, the aftermath of a pandemic, seismic ideological shifts. Just as in 1525, there are new means of mass communication around to accelerate and escalate things: then the printing press, today social media. Then as now, insisting on one’s own view without empathy for the other side is not going to make the residual anger go away.

Whatever the case may be, I suspect the German Peasants’ Revolt will continue to inspire future generations of Germans to see what they believe is important in events that took place hundreds of years ago. Given how drastic the changes in interpretations have been for the last 200 years, I daresay we’ll hear very different speeches again for the 550-year anniversary in 2075. I’m curious so I’ll aim to live long enough to hear them.