Old Members’ Trust Graduate Conference and Academic Travel Fund Report – Isaac Dean (2022, History)

Setting out on this trip, it was our intention, as a cohort studying the German Peasants’ War of 1525, to get a feel for the landscape the contemporary people experiencing events would have been surrounded by; see the challenges to historical study of the subject based on the primary sources; and finally to examine the way in which the Peasants’ War has been historicised in the unique region of Muhlhausen. I arrived in Berlin late on 29 November, going straight to our hostel where we slept for the night.

The next day, we made the long trip to Muhlhausen, a central point to the German Peasants War where one of its most prominent ideologues in Thomas Muntzer had operated. It was fantastic to walk through the city, and get a feel for the small, narrow streets that you could imagine a crowd easily bustling through. We made our way to the town hall, where we were due to be given a tour by the archivist. She showed us the old council chamber, which was adorned with images painted following the Peasants’ War. These images stressed the once independent Imperial Free City’s loyalty to the Imperial throne of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as to the surrounding nobility. It was a striking example of the city rejecting its history of rebellion in order to try and regain lost privileges. Such a rejection was even more stark in the archives. Although they were well-ordered and contained a lot of material relating to the year 1525, the town records for that year were noticeably more mottled, patchwork, and incomplete compared to the surrounding years. As the Archivist noted, it was as if they had been purposely edited or erased in order to avoid officials being found culpable of conspiring with the rebellious elements of the townsfolk. This is part of what makes studying this subject so difficult; the primary source material is incomplete, and in any case may well be inflected with a certain image they, as a collective, are trying to portray.

From there, we moved on to see a local art historian, who gave us a tour of local soon-to-open exhibitions in local contemporary churches. Although much had changed about the interiors, you could still appreciate the majesty of the architecture, which those living at the time must have felt as they heard Muntzer’s sermons and teachings. Additionally, these exhibitions contained a variety of art and propaganda from Nazi and Communist era East Germany, allowing us to combine the historiography of both to make observations about how the German Peasants’ War has been remembered in East Germany, and the implications this has for politics and social life here too. I found it striking that plaques, statues, art, and conventions commemorating the Peasants’ War were ever-present, representing it as a ‘blood and soil’ or alternatively ‘proletariat’ revolution, while there was no mention of the Holocaust or Nazi war crimes that must have been committed along the central Judenstrasse during that period. War guilt is something we take for granted, having been so invested in Western European history in our politics, however this failure to understand the dramatic differences in viewpoints that actually exist in the interpretation of German history explains the disconnection from mainstream political movements, either in Germany or Europe.

The next day, we moved on to Frankenhausen, where a crucial battle had been fought between the peasant rebels and the noble armed forces led by Hesse. The peasants were slaughtered, and it marked more or less the end of the revolt in the region of Thuringia. Approaching the Panorama Museum there, we worked our way along winding country roads, getting an appreciation for the sheer space the rebels traversed as they travelled the region, as we slowly ascended to the top of the hill the battle had been fought on. Mist had descended over the horizon, and a serene silence had fallen in which scarcely a bell could be heard from the town at the bottom. There were no obvious signs of human disaster there, no signs of the thousands who had died, or had fled to the town down the hill, or whose blood had flown in gullies after them. But there was an eerie feeling of relation to them, sitting atop the hill with the sun hung above the sprawling countryside, so empty now but then filled with advancing troops and camps, and then littered with bodies. One felt the calm, the terror, and the elation of those standing there, with faith in their principles and those they stood beside, hours before their tragic end.

The museum itself stood titanic behind this scenery. Inside was contained a famous piece by Tubke, which took him over a decade to paint with a team of painters, and remains the biggest canvas painting in the world. It was finally completed for the East German communist state just weeks before the fall of the Berlin wall. A last gasp of official communist memory of the Peasants’ War, it contained an odd blend of historical reflection with almost sci-fi overtones. The clash of a continuum that flowed from before the War, through it, to what was then the present day was striking. The colours were harsh and vibrant, the people oddly grotesque without suffering the same distortion of art in the 1500s. It cut a mixed image of the Peasants’ War, which displayed how much that event had been integrated into the mythology of historical teleology. In of itself, it presented us with yet another challenge of studying the subject; the fact that historiography is so interred in ideology. Gunther Franz, a member of the SS, was responsible for publishing the most widely used collection of source material even to this day, while historiography in the East was detached from sources accessible for the west. and tied into narratives that suited them. This was our last stop before heading home that same day.

Published: 4 April 2025

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