The German Peasant War of 1525 - New Viewpoints by Bob Scribner & Gerhard Benecke

Author:Bob Scribner & Gerhard Benecke [Scribner, Bob & Benecke, Gerhard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000424119
Goodreads: 57156028
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Horst Buszello

9 The Common Man's View of the State in the German Peasant War*

It is generally thought that the German Peasant War of 1525-5 was a many-sided affair, in which religious, economic, social and political factors determined causes as much as effects. The complex nature of events can only be explained in the last resort by a variety of approaches, and not by a monocausal or teleological method. Hence it is important to stress that the following remarks only apply to those aspects of the 1524-5 movement which deal with partly or fully articulated political demands of the rebels themselves. These I have called ‘the common man’s view of the state’. What I want to examine are the subjective views of peasants and burghers towards achieving a better political system, and not any objective tendencies or directions of the movement (this is a distinction used in Marxist historiography - cf. Laube, 1974).

The German Peasant War has often been discussed as a political movement (cf. Angermeier, 1966; Vahle, 1972). Many studies suffer in that they either only partly examine the articulated demands or reduce the variety of expressed aims far too hurriedly into one overall basic and common conviction of the rebels. Establishing a chief aim or going back to general principles behind all the differences, confines rather than helps our understanding of the movement. Hence I will try to examine the political aims of the rebels in each specific and peculiar circumstance and then say something about these aims in general (cf. in more detail, Buszello, 1969).

To start with, we should be clear that the Peasant War presented no cohesive whole in its outward, organised form nor in its political aims. Status, social position, measure of political education, local tradition, the course which any uprising took as an internal territorial or supra-territorial movement affected the rebels’ thinking just as decisively - and that means differently - as proximity to or distance from the Swiss Confederation. A variety of different political attitudes were produced.

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