The German Reformation

After all this the Reformation, which was acted out most conspicuously in Germany, was in a certain sense a fight of barbarism against civilization. But although one must not lose sight of this when trying to understand the great revolutions of the 16th century correctly, it would be wrong to be misled by it into underestimating the Reformation either historically or morally.

In fighting on the Catholic side to save a threatened civilization, the German Humanists overlooked the fact that the basis of Catholic culture was the ignorance and exploitation of the popular masses, that Germany particularly would have to be kept poor and ignorant if art and science were to flourish under Papal protection in Italy, and that only the victory of German barbarism over Latin civilization could open the way to the historic rise of the German nation. Moreover the Humanists, the most zealous supporters of modern absolutism, deeply detested the Reformation as a movement of the masses. They did not have the slightest interest in or understanding of the needs of the masses. They were soon swept aside by the revolutionary flood and completely forgotten. Only individuals among them, like tile great poets Dante and Petrarch in Italy, the great satirist Rabelais in France, the great thinker Thomas More, the first modern socialist, in England and the great fighter Hutten in Germany have lived on in their works.

Historical progress was bound up not with Humanism but with the German Reformation. In Germany all classes suffered equally heavily from Papal exploitation. They suffered all the more heavily because the Papacy had thrown the whole force of its power to exploit against the German nation since the other advanced nations had closed their borders to it. Even the exploiting classes in Germany became more and more disgruntled under the unbearable burden. All the profitable Church offices in Germany became articles of trade. From them enormous sums flowed year in year out to Rome and thus escaped the great exploiters in Germany, the princes and merchants. No wonder, then, that these brave people became more and more angry the more the Pope took the cream and left them the skimmed milk.

They could not however, like France and Spain, think of liberating themselves from the yoke of the Papacy, breaking the Pope’s domination and using him as a tool for their own rule. Germany, it is true, had a rich share of the prosperity that had been created by the development of commodity production. The craft activities of the guilds in the towns were already producing for broader circles and more distant markets. The weaving of coarse woollen and linen cloths had become a standing and widespread branch of industry, and finer woollens and linen even, as well as silks, were produced in Augsburg. Apart from textiles, those trades in particular had flourished that were associated with the arts and throve on the ecclesiastical and secular luxury of the later Middle Ages: gold and silversmiths, sculptors and carvers of statuary, copper-engravers and wood-carvers, armourers and so forth. Trade kept pace with industry. The great trade routes from India to the North still led through Germany, although the sea route to India had already been discovered. Augsburg was still the great emporium for Italian silks and Indian spices. The South German towns like Augsburg and Nuremberg were centres of a wealth that was considerable for those days. Similarly, the production of raw materials had significantly increased. The German miners of the 15th century were held to be the most skilful in the world, and the flourishing of the towns had torn agriculture out of its earlier medieval crudity. Great stretches of waste land were made productive. Plants to yield dyestuffs and other imported plants were cultivated and in general had a favourable effect on agriculture.

For all this, the upsurge in national production in Germany, significant as it was in itself, could not be compared with the upsurge in other countries. The population was still very thinly spread. Civilization still only existed where it was grouped around individual centres of trade and industry. The interests of these centres were widely separate and only touched upon each other slightly here and there. The South had quite different markets and trade connections from the North. There was scarcely any traffic between the East and the West. No one single town was the industrial and commercial centre of the whole country, like London in England or Paris in France. The whole internal traffic of the country was limited almost entirely to coastal and river navigation and a few great trading highways, from Augsburg and Nuremberg via Cologne to the Netherlands and via Erfurt to the North. Far from the rivers and trade routes lay a number of smaller towns which, cut off from intercourse, continued to vegetate on undisturbed under medieval conditions of life, only requiring a few goods from outside and providing little for external trade.

Thus a modern monarchy could not develop in Germany as it did in the economically developed countries, where it occurred precisely because a flourishing trade and industry indissolubly linked the economic interests of the whole country. Germany could only achieve groupings of interests by provinces, in other words political disunity. The German Emperors of the Habsburg house could not achieve the transformation from a feudal-medieval to a modern monarchy. Despite all their intrigues and acts of violence they could do no more than knit together their hereditary Austrian lands, and it was the threat from the Turks that formed the most effective lever to that end.

Apart from that, the Emperors failed in all their attempts to centralize the German Empire. While in France the great vassals were subordinated to the crown, in Germany they grew to become almost completely independent princes as the logical consequence of the economic fact that they were the representatives of centralization within the disunity, the representatives at least of provincial centralization. Next to them the Emperor became more and more simply the first among equals.

Apart from this decisive fact, the structure of German society in the 16th century was formed, just as everywhere else, under the influence of the new mode of production. The knights, the lower nobility, were caught up in irresistible decay. Within the clergy, the aristocratic faction of Bishops and Abbots, with its gendarmerie of monks, was opposed by the plebeian faction of the pastoral clergy in the towns and the countryside, the former deeply hated by the masses, the latter rather popular, especially since they provided the thinkers and theoreticians for the growing movement. In the towns the guild burgesses fought with the patricians with varying success over the town governments, while the plebeians, as a third urban faction, were still quite undeveloped, feeling themselves to be much more the ruined components of a decaying feudalism than the rising elements of the modern proletariat. Finally the peasants formed the substructure of the whole social organism – a substructure half dead with torture and racked with groans.

It was this chaos of the most varied classes and factions of classes, with their conflicting interests, that gave conditions in Germany their characteristic stamp when Luther, on October 31, 1517, nailed his theses against Indulgences to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg and thus gave the signal for the outbreak of the rebellion against Rome that had been simmering in the German nation for decades.

This revolt had already found a much sharper literary expression than Luther’s rather tame theses, which did not even criticize Indulgences themselves, the remission of sins for cash which was payable to the Pope, but their ‘misuse’. The famous Letters of Obscure Men composed by the Humanists had already dealt with the Papacy and the monks in a very different manner. They were satirical shafts of an incomparable sharpness but they were too refined for the people. The humanistic culture was foreign and incomprehensible to the masses. Luther’s theses, on the contrary, which seemed to the Humanists a mere monkish squabble, rested much more on the clerical mode of thought that the masses had inherited from the Middle Ages and which gave all their oppositional movements the appearance of theological heresies. In order to destroy medieval conditions, their apparent divinity had first to be wiped away.

Nevertheless Luther’s theses, which in and of themselves were only a challenge to a theological disputation of the sort that was quite normal at that time, would not have fallen like a spark into an open powder-keg if very urgent economic interests had not stood behind them. After countless previous Indulgences the pomp-loving Pope Leo X issued a new Indulgence that was intended to bring in the enormous sum of 50,000 ducats. He had farmed the Indulgence out as a business proposition against a share of the booty to the Archbishop of Mainz, at that time the leading prince of the German Church. The Archbishop, a Hohenzollern prince, had sent his salesmen out all over Germany to tempt the money out of the pockets of the faithful with more or less the same publicity methods that we find nowadays in the advertisements in the financial press.

These salesmen pounced with special zeal on the territory of the Elector of Saxony, which thanks to its mines was the richest state in Germany. Personally, the Elector Frederick of Saxony was a very pious, devout, even bigoted Catholic, but money matters were no joke in those days either, and he banned the Indulgence sellers from entering his territories. Nevertheless they swarmed around perilously close to the frontiers, so that the Elector gladly permitted Luther to attack the Indulgence seller Tetzel, who was pursuing his murky affairs in Juterbog.

Luther himself was completely unconscious of the fact that he was acting in a certain sense as the tool of the financial policies of his prince, but it was soon to become clear to him that this business was a matter not of theological heresy but of a very real struggle of interests.