How is the German Peasants’ War remembered?

Five hundred years ago this week, the rebels of the German Peasants’ War, or Bauernkrieg, were defeated in a series of battles. Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 peasants were killed. Everywhere in Germany this event is being commemorated. There are TV programmes, an opera, magazines, plays, readings and art works. Even places with barely a walk-on part in the Peasants’ War are doing something: Pfeddersheim in Baden is hosting a summer wine festival with medieval market to remember a battle in which thousands died in a place now known as Bluthohl (‘blood hollow’).

For the last thirty years there has been almost no new scholarship on the Peasants’ War. After reunification the subject was simply too difficult, because the former East and the former West had diametrically opposed interpretations of it. In the West, the Peasants’ War stood for democracy, and the Peasants’ Twelve Articles were fêted as the ‘first declaration of human rights’.

In the former East, the focus was on Thomas Müntzer, the revolutionary preacher and hero of Friedrich Engels’s 1850 history of the Peasants’ War. Having fought and died in Thuringia, Müntzer provided a revolutionary genealogy for the East German state. His picture was on the five-Ostmark note, and every town had a Thomas Müntzer Street. In 1976, the regime commissioned a monumental painting from Werner Tübke, 14 metres high and 123 metres long, housed in a special round museum (known locally as the Elephant’s toilet) on the battlefield of Frankenhausen, where the peasants were defeated on 15 May 1525. The Panorama opened in September 1989, weeks before the East German regime fell.

This year’s quincentennial commemorations began in March in the former West with a speech from the president, Frank Walter Steinmeier, at the formal opening of a museum exhibition in Memmingen, where the Twelve Articles were compiled.

The former monastery of Schussenried in Baden-Württemberg has a stupendous exhibition on ‘utopia and resistance in the Peasants’ War’. Avatars of eight real participants in the war have been created using AI, based on every scrap of historical evidence we have. They look disturbingly real but are regularly pixelated to remind visitors that they aren’t. The show centres on the Twelve Articles and the revolt in the south-west, but doesn’t tell the story of the Schussenried monastery itself or how and why the peasants attacked it. Nor does it mention Müntzer.

Mühlhausen, where Müntzer founded the ‘Eternal League of the Godly’, was chosen by the DDR regime as the site for a national Peasants’ War museum; this year it hosts three exhibitions. They were opened by Thuringian rather than national politicians: it was rumoured that locals did not want Steinmeier to come, and there may have been fears that in this heartland of the AfD he would have been booed.

Following recent research, the exhibitions point out that Müntzer was only one among several preachers even in Mühlhausen, that he came to a town where the Reformation was already in full swing, and that he never controlled the town. He is no longer presented as a revolutionary or a hero. One of the exhibitions in Mühlhausen deals with the ways the Peasants’ War has been celebrated in different historical periods, with a whole section on the DDR’s version.

Outside the main museum, a new sculpture by Timm Kregel has just gone up, paid for by popular subscription. It is a version of Dürer’s Bauernsäule, his sketch of a mock victory column for the Peasants’ War that appears in his treatise on measurement. Dürer’s monument was long thought impossible to build – a pillar composed of agricultural implements, topped by a melancholy seated peasant who has been stabbed in the back. It commemorates defeat, not revolution. It’s an interesting choice for Mühlhausen. By not featuring Müntzer it escapes the issues around the DDR regime’s adulation of him.

In Stolberg, by contrast, the town in Harz where Müntzer was born, there is no embarrassment about their (in)famous son. The local biscuit factory has produced chocolate truffles featuring his head. You can get Thomas Müntzer dried apple chips, or you can splash out on a Müntzer silver medal, this year’s lurid version featuring Müntzer’s severed head on a pike displayed alongside the rape of his wife.

Nowhere, so far as I could see, had people really come to terms with Müntzer and his legacy: the shrill tones, the demagogic rhythms, the identification of the ‘enemy’ that pervade his rhetoric. How was it possible for those in the East or those on the left in the West who heroised Müntzer not to hear his demagogic tones, or not to see how he whipped up hate against ‘the godless’, the enemy within? And yet Müntzer remains the theologian who like no other articulates the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed.

His erasure matters because it means there is no shared narrative of the Peasants’ War. East and West are further apart than ever, just as the social differences between them, according to some sociologists, are greater now than they were at unification. For the West, the commemoration is a way of attacking the rise of the far right in German politics, and while this is laudable, it risks casting those in the former East as people without a democratic tradition who must be educated into active citizenship.

‘We survived two dictatorships,’ people in the East say, and they feel part of a truculent communitarian past that is hostile to the state. This is absolutely not nostalgia for the old regime, though it is often wrongly characterised as such. Müntzer taps into this sense of alienation because he is a link to a revolutionary tradition, which is also the guarantor that the East German state was built by the opponents of the Nazi regime, and so had nothing to do with the Holocaust. By contrast, West German self-understanding for the last generation and more is built around the Holocaust and coming to terms with guilt. This fundamental asymmetry lies behind the very different approaches to the Peasants’ War.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Gerhard Richter has donated a hundred of his works to the New National Gallery. He chose Mies van der Rohe’s elegant building to house his paintings, inscribing himself not in the Hamburger Bahnhof gallery of contemporary art but in the national collection that spans the 20th century and modernism. The Holocaust is the central preoccupation of Richter’s work and this donation provides an account of the 20th century in Germany that centres on the Holocaust – although Richter was born in Dresden, this is a profoundly West German narrative (he defected to the West in 1961).

The four paintings of Birkenau (2014) fill an oblong-shaped hall, reminiscent of the Valhalla halls that commemorate the First World War and are associated with blood, sacrifice and militarism. But this is smaller in size, domestic not monumental. In the four corners of the room are the disturbing photos on which the work is based, modern digitisations of photos secretly taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau by an inmate. Richter translated these photos onto canvas and then built layers of paint over them until the images underneath were no longer visible. As you stand before the paintings, you are aware of the other side of the room behind you: a grey, flat mirror, which both shows a ghostly version of the canvases and presents you with yourself, in the paintings.

As I stood in front of the work I noticed a smallish man with a serious demeanour and upright posture walk into the room with two or three others, who also stood looking at the painting. It was Olaf Scholz. The day before had seen the debacle of the failed election of Friedrich Merz as chancellor and, for a moment, it had seemed that Scholz might have had to spend another week in office. On his first day as an ordinary private citizen, pomp and photographers all gone, this was where Scholz had chosen to come.