Luther, Münzer, Hutten

As soon as Luther’s theses had given the signal for the open struggle against Rome, the colourful chaos of the different conflicting interests in Germany was simplified, in that the different classes and factions within the classes divided into three great camps, conservative Catholicism, bourgeois reformism and plebeian revolution.

In the conservative Catholic camp gathered all the elements that were interested in the maintenance of the existing state of affairs, with the Emperor at their head. So low had the medieval imperial power sunk that, at the imperial election in 1519, the French and Spanish Kings brawled over the crown. Almost all of the seven Electors responsible for the election had permitted themselves to be bribed first by French, then by Spanish gold. The final winner was the Spanish King Charles, who sprang from the house of Habsburg and was at the same time lord of the hereditary lands of Austria. He could no more afford to break with Rome as the lord of the Austrian hereditary lands than he could as King of Spain. His mercenaries had stormed Rome to subject the Pope to his will, but he could not reject the Papal Church that was the chief instrument of his rule in Spain as it was in the hereditary Austrian lands. Therefore the Emperor Charles V remained a determined opponent of the German Reformation. In this he had the support of the spiritual and some of the secular princes, the richer nobility, the aristocratic faction of the clergy and the city patricians.

In opposition to this conservative Catholic camp stood the great mass of the nation which rose in a passionate rebellion against Papal exploitation. It soon split however into two camps, in one of which gathered the property-owning element of the opposition, the mass of the lower nobility, the guild burgesses and some of the secular princes who wanted to enrich themselves by the confiscation of Church property and were inclined to use the opportunity to make themselves even more independent of Emperor and Empire. This moderate bourgeois party wanted to free itself from the yoke of Papal exploitation but did not want secular exploitation to be disturbed, particularly in so far as they were practising it themselves. In sharp opposition to them there was soon formed a revolutionary party, recruited from the peasants and the urban plebeians, which wanted to remove all secular exploitation at the same time as Papal exploitation. The nature of both parties was strikingly reflected in the nature of their leaders, in Martin Luther at the head of the merely reforming party and Thomas Münzer at the head of the thoroughgoing revolutionaries. Both were clergymen and came from the plebeian faction of the clergy.

Martin Luther (1483-1549) was born in Eisleben, the son of a peasant. After a hard and strict upbringing he had dedicated himself to a clerical career. Intellectually he was not particularly gifted. Many of his contemporaries were bolder and more original thinkers. As a student in Erfurt he had joined the Humanist circle that was formed at the university, but he did not get far with his Humanist education. He seems to have been more attracted by the gay life of the Humanists. This is indicated by the qualms of conscience that drove him, in 1505, to the Augustine monastery in Erfurt and the most drastic penances. In 1509, he was appointed by the Elector Frederick of Saxony as Professor of Theology at the newly formed University of Wittenberg where, in 1517, he published his theses against Indulgences, or rather against the excessively shameless misuse of Indulgences, for he himself said in his theses that whoever spoke out against the validity of Papal Indulgences should be cursed and damned.

Luther himself was extremely astonished by the effect of his theses. He was still under the spiritual spell of the Roman Church, but the clumsy attempts of the Papacy to silence him – the kind of attempts that are always made by ruling classes who have run out of resources, and always with the same lack of success – aroused his peasant obstinacy and the movement which, unknowingly and unwillingly, he had sparked off drove him further and further. He was far more driven than he was the driver, but he won a decisive influence over the masses because he never let the professor in him dominate over the peasant and, much more than all his contemporaries, he possessed a vivid and stirring style of speaking. His services to the German language are his abiding merit. The harder he was pressed by Rome, the more ruthlessly he fought back. He preached violent resistance to Papal exploitation. The plague was to be driven from the globe not with words but with weapons. German hands had to be washed in Roman blood. And Luther was no less sharp in his attacks on the secular princes who did not agree with him. Anyone today who tried to use the language of this ’dear son of God’ against the German princes would quickly find himself in jail on a charge of high treason.

But if Luther never let the professor in him make him forget that he was the son of a peasant, the son of a peasant also never eclipsed the professor. The longer the revolutionary storm raged, the more deeply it agitated the masses and made them feel the yoke of their exploiters at home as much as the depredations of the Pope, the more Luther became a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice, unable to lay the ghosts that he had raised. And then the Wittenberg University professor and protg of the Elector Frederick of Saxony made his decision by announcing himself in favour of peaceful and lawful development. After Luther had flirted with the revolutionary democratic elements between 1517 and 1522, he betrayed them all one after the other between 1522 and 1525.

The bourgeois reformer Luther was opposed by the peasant-plebeian revolutionary Thomas Münzer (1490-1525). One cannot really call him an independent thinker either. He produced no new ideas in the movement of his time. But he was able to recognize its revolutionary elements with a penetrating and far-sighted eye and to grasp them with an incomparable force of action. He was a man cast in one piece, unshakable in word and deed. He came from Stolberg in the Harz, where his father is said to have died on the gallows, a victim of Count Stolberg’s despotism. Münzer, like Luther, chose the clerical profession but the revolutionary in him developed early. At fifteen he was already organizing, at the school in Halle, a secret league against the Archbishop of Magdeburg and the Roman Church in general, whose customs and dogmas he treated with the greatest contempt. He was soon driven out of his clerical offices, first in Zwickau, then in Prague. At Allsttt in Thuringia, too, his stay was very short. Before Luther he had already abolished Latin from his services and organized revolutionary propaganda in the area, continuing Luther’s mighty preachings after the latter had decided in favour of peaceful progress.

Münzer’s teachings attacked the central tenets not only of Catholicism but of Christianity. The real, living revelation, he said, was reason, a revelation that had existed at all times among all peoples and still did exist. To set the Bible up against reason, as did the tamed Luther, meant killing the spirit with the letter. Heaven was not transcendental, it was to be sought in this life. The vocation of the faithful was to create heaven, God’s kingdom on earth. As there was no transcendental heaven, so there was no transcendental hell. Christ had been a man like us, a prophet and teacher, not a god. By the kingdom of God, the creation of which on earth was the vocation of the faithful, Münzer meant a society without class differences, private property or a state power independent of and foreign to the members of society. All existing authorities, insofar as they refused to submit and join the revolution, were to be overthrown, all work and all property to be shared in common, and complete equality introduced. A union was to be established to realize all this, not only throughout Germany but all Christendom. Princes and Lords were to be invited to join, and if they did not the union was to overthrow and kill them, weapons in hand, at the first opportunity.

Münzer preached these ideas under the cloak of mystical phraseology, but that only deepened their effect on the masses, who were still completely steeped in religious modes of thinking. People flocked to him from all sides, and Luther could only do what reformists always do in such cases when faced with complete revolutionaries: he denounced Münzer to the Saxon princes. Münzer attacked the latter with challenging boldness, and they dared not even touch him. But the Allsttt council drove him out. Münzer went first to Mülhausen then to Nuremberg. He was again driven out of both towns and then moved to South Germany, a zealous stirrer of the ferment that announced the forthcoming violent outbreak of the peasant class.

First however the revolt of the lesser nobility, the knights, broke out in the autumn of 1522. Its leaders were Franz von Sickingen and Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), but the continued popularity of their names must not be allowed to obscure the inwardly reactionary nature of their choice as leaders. The burning hatred that Hutten and Sickingen cherished towards princes and priests and their equally burning enthusiasm for the recreation of the national empire made them, in the mid-19th century the favourites of the German bourgeoisie, who were animated by similar moods. But the empire Hutten and Sickingen wanted to recreate was the medieval one, a kind of noble democracy led by a powerless Emperor and purged not only of princes, but also of towns, with the oppression of the peasants retained. Over against this ideal not only the towns but even the princes represented historical progress. If the rule of the princes did mean disunity in Germany, it still to a certain extent concentrated national forces within the disunity, while the democracy of the Junkers , which Hutten and Sickingen represented, would have turned into that aristocratic anarchy from which Poland miserably perished.

The revolt of the lesser nobility was lost before it started. The towns had no more interest in supporting it than did the peasants. The princes had an easy time of it. Sickingen’s castles were quickly stormed and reduced. He himself fell at the siege of his seat at Veste and Hutten died a few months later, in September 1523, a refugee on the island of Ufenau in the lake of Zurich.