The German Peasants’ War: masculinity, realists and utopians

A review of Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper (Basic Books, 2025), £14.99

The year 2025 marked the commemoration of the Peasants’ War. Five hundred years ago, in 1524-5, a huge uprising swept across large parts of Germany. Peasants and many townspeople stood up for their rights, calling for freedom and justice. They rose up, organised themselves and went into battle against their exploiters and oppressors. In doing so, they targeted the institutions and symbols of power: monasteries, castles and other markers of the feudal order. In May 1525, this movement reached its climax in the Harz foothills and northern Thuringia, where it also suffered one of its heaviest defeats. Here, the peasants had risen up under the spiritual and practical leadership of the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer.

The rebellion unfolded in the complex context of the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, which included the slow advance of capitalism, the colonisation of the Americas and the accompanying intellectual ferment. In this context, “reformers” appeared on the stage of history who attacked the existing system and living conditions, demanded social change and found a receptive audience among the masses. A major criticism was directed at the institutions of the Christian Church and the papacy, one of the pillars of feudalism. In Germany, this criticism was represented by Martin Luther. However, alongside him, there were many other rebels ranging from hesitant reformers to revolutionaries such as Müntzer.1

Museums and historians, book publishers, newspapers and TV channels had been preparing for the commemorative year of 2025 for a long time.2 German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke at a ceremony in Memmingen (Bavaria) in March.3 In March 1525, representatives of peasant groups gathered here and set down their complaints and demands in their famous “Twelve Articles”. There were many other, similar documents, such as the 62 articles of the peasants of Stühlingen (Baden-Wuerttemberg) from the previous year or almost 300 demands from the Baltringen (Baden-Wuerttemberg) peasants—reflecting the simmering tensions that characterised this period. Steinmeier spoke of “our history of freedom” and of today’s “threats to freedom”.4 He was not referring to militarisation, state repression and genocide. No doubt, like the many other political figures who have spoken about the Peasants’ War, he would respond to an uprising of similar scale today much as the ruling class did then: by crushing it without hesitation.

There have been several new publications, among them Lyndal Roper’s weighty 500-page book titled Summer of Fire and Blood.5 Roper is an Australian historian and Regius Professor of History at Oxford University. She is also a member of the board of the Thomas Müntzer Society in Mühlhausen in Thuringia, one of the towns gripped by the Reformation and a place in which Müntzer was active. She is well known for her detailed biography of Martin Luther, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, and for her book Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany.6 In Summer of Fire and Blood, Roper engages with the historical sources with remarkable depth and attention. She creates a panorama of the Peasants’ War with a wealth of material and vivid imagery. As in her work on Luther, she weaves art and culture into her account.7 This includes painters such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder and those less well known, such as Sebastian Brant, and their innovative techniques in depicting landscapes and working people and their festive traditions.8

Interestingly, Roper structures her account according to the seasons. She starts by providing extensive insights into the diverse farming activities during the agricultural year. She details the social stratification among the peasants, the richer farmers and poor cottagers, those who had draught animals and those who had to work on other farms. The use of the common land, the Allmende (commons), was coordinated by the peasants themselves. Rich farmers benefitted most from this system because they had more livestock to graze on it.9 Yet, what they all had in common was their dependency on the landlords, whose rule many sought to shake off.

Alongside the peasants, some miners also joined the uprising. They organised themselves according to their religious affiliation and, at times, plundered churches. Roper provides some details about the work and life of the miners in today’s regions of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, both rich in copper and silver. Where miners lived, there was hardly any agricultural land because of the mineshafts, spoil cones and slag heaps dotting the landscape.10 There were dozens of mines with a total of around 3,000 workers in the Harz foothills and 90 smelting furnaces in Mansfeld. It was often the task of women to wash out the ore.11 The market of the mining town of Hettstedt (Saxony-Anhalt) was supplied weekly with wagonloads of food and other products, sometimes from as far away as Hamburg, to provide the miners with essential goods.12 Such insights provide a valuable complement to the portrayal of agricultural labour that dominate histories of the Peasants’ War.

In her chapter “Movement”, Roper describes how Hans Müller from the Black Forest walked from village to village with ten men and a herald in front, reading out the peasants’ demands, until they managed to build a Haufen (band) of several thousand men. At Bermatingen (Baden-Wuerttemberg), near Lake Constance at today’s border with Switzerland and Austria, 10,000 peasants gathered, twice as many as there were inhabitants in the region. In Erfurt (Thuringia), then a town of 16,000 inhabitants, 11,000 men assembled.13

Roper wonders what it sounded like to march with a peasant army, its pipes and drums producing, as she writes, “complex and compelling” rhythms.14 For provisions on the march, the bands took supplies from monasteries, pressed officials into giving them cattle or made an abbot hand over a “waggonload of wine”. In Würzburg (Bavaria), the peasants paid the town bakers for large quantities of bread.15 Scribes managed the correspondence between the peasants and the authorities. In many cases, they carried “reasonably organised mobile chancelleries” with them.16

However, the defeat of the peasants entailed severe consequences. They were hunted down and massacred like animals by the troops of the nobles. According to Roper, in Bruchsal (Baden-Wuerttemberg), so many insurgents were thrown into a tower that they could not move. Peasants who took refuge in cellars were burned to death.17 The rebels were mutilated, impaled or beheaded. Blood ran in rivulets through the streets; mercenaries raped women and girls. Where villages were not burned down, many people lost their property or were subjected to heavy fines.

Roper brings numerous details to life, allowing often-overlooked figures of the uprising to take centre stage. At times, this makes reading the book tedious. She, moreover, often resorts to psychologising individuals without adding explanatory value: strained relationships between aristocratic fathers and sons meant that “filial ruthlessness” could turn sons into “vicious avengers against the peasants”.18 She attributes “a dour egalitarianism” and “a hatred of urban life and of its elites and luxury” to the Tyrolean rebel Michael Gaismair.19 This echoes today’s accusations of “social envy” when people protest against the unequal distribution of wealth.

Roper accuses Müntzer of a “towering megalomania”, arguing that his rhetoric was a “flood of bloodthirsty, violent language”.20 At the same time, however, she downplays Luther’s ruthlessness when describing his language as merely “excessive”. In his pamphlet Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, Luther called for the peasants to be smitten, slain and stabbed.21 After the slaughter, Luther, according to her, was about to apologise “contritely” for his words, but, as she admits, “the result was even more extreme”.22 In fact, referring to people who criticised him, he suggested that one should “answer people like that with a fist, until the sweat drips off their noses” and called for them to be executed.23 Roper appears to favour Luther as a “realist” over “dreamers, visionaries, or utopians” such as Müntzer. She argues that Luther’s “realism armed him against the charms of utopianism, and he could see what the outcome of rebellion would be”.24 This echoes Luther himself, who raged against the “spirits and enthusiasts”.25

Writing as an academic, Roper does not bring in her personal views and politics when, as in the case of the Peasants’ War, an uprising is drowned in blood to the applause of reformers.26 However, when she characterises the people abolishing the nobility and establishing equality as having a “radical, but coercive vision” at one point, what shines through is a distrust of the masses trying to take their destiny into their own hands.27 This is a weakness that aids the appropriation of the historical events.

Another problem is that Roper imposes today’s feminist perspective on the events of that time. The chapter “Brothers” is replete with devaluating terms such as “manly metaphor” or “ethos of manhood”.28 She describes the oath of allegiance sworn by the rebels as part of rituals that “welded manhood to political capacity”.29 For the lords, the “Peasants’ War was an assault on their manhood”.30 Again, in attacks on convents of nuns, “there may have been more than a streak of misogyny”.31 In this assessment, she overlooks many other motives that she mentions elsewhere, for instance the fact that “as a group, nuns were hated for their wealth and apparent idleness”.32 Where men’s monasteries were stormed, she speaks instead of an “impassioned assault on monastic manhood”, “the false brothers”.33 Here, she diminishes some of the achievements of the uprising, namely the creation of democratic organisational structures by peasants.

Women were hardly part of the uprising. However, Roper’s line of argument obscures the view of the power and class relations of that time. The rebellious men, whom she nevertheless often treats with sympathy, are surreptitiously accused of not being feminist—but she does not ask why. She absolves the Church and state of responsibility for promoting and perpetuating the oppression of women through their rules, laws, and ideologies, as well as upper-class women, who exploited their male and female subjects just as much.34

Against this backdrop, she also attacks the notion of the “common man” as the main protagonist of the uprising and, with that, historian Peter Blickle, who has dealt with this concept in depth. She accuses Blickle of neither having interrogated “the masculinism of his own language nor that of the values of the revolt”.35 There is no doubt that 16th-century society was one that belittled women. Chronicles and historical accounts have been written primarily by (upper-class) men until today. This is an almost trivial observation and due, to put it simply, to the development of class societies, the private family and the “world historic defeat of the female sex”, as Friedrich Engels put it.36 However, neglecting these causes and—by not reflecting on what this means for our understanding of past societies—reducing the motivation of the uprising to masculinity, risks reproducing the erasure of women’s agency in history. Blickle points out that the “common man” in the conception of that time encompassed men and women. According to Blickle, it was not until the 18th century that occasional references were made to the “common man of male and female sex”.37 Only a few names of women supporting the Peasants’ War are known today, partly because the peasant armies were primarily composed of men, while women continued to run their farms—but what did women think about the uprising? The historian Janine Maegraith aptly summarises the approach applied by Roper:

I struggle with an interpretation that reduces the Peasants’ War to a very virile, masculine event. It’s about masculinity, about brotherhood, that’s true. But when I focus on that, the rest of society falls into a vacuum. We are trying to fill this vacuum: What were the realities of life like? Why do women hardly appear in the sources? And how do we read the sources? Women, for example, had to continue to care for the farm when the men set off.38

Roper herself mentions the preacher Balthasar Hubmaier, who is reported to have said, “If men are shocked by fear and become women, then women should speak and be men”.39 Women participated in his community, and he explicitly addressed “sisters as well as brothers in his printed work”.40 Similarly, Müntzer called on the women of Allstedt (Saxony-Anhalt) to arm themselves and fight.41

Every revolt has the potential to transcend traditional ways of thinking and behaviour, as we can still see today. It opens the possibility of a class overthrowing existing class society and thereby “ridding itself of all the muck of ages” to “become fitted to found society anew”, as Karl Marx put it.42 This applies to all forms of oppression. Failing to connect such struggles to the question of class society risks reducing the explanation of oppression to the characters of the oppressors and leads to merely blaming or shaming even the most rebellious protagonists.

Unsurprisingly, Roper is fairly dismissive of Marx and Engels. She declares Engels to be a “co-worker” of Marx who glorified Müntzer.43 She reproaches Marx for referring to the French smallholders of the 19th century as like a “sack of potatoes” and “infantile creatures” who must be “represented by a leader”.44 A major flaw of Marxism is, according to Roper, its inability to “imagine a revolutionary peasantry” and its rejection of “idealism and, above all, emotion”.45 Although she concedes Engels’s sympathy for the rebellious peasants, she rejects his classification of the events in terms of the material conditions of the time. For Engels, Müntzer and his community of equals were ahead of their time, as were Gaismair and several other radical thinkers. However, the material basis and, hence, a class capable of establishing this new society was lacking.46

Marx hardly addressed the Peasants’ War, aside from a brief remark in his critique of Georg Hegel, calling it “the most radical fact of German history”.47 In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the source of the “sack of potatoes” quote, he is referring to the peasants of France at the time of the revolution of 1848. They had been freeholders since Napoleon Bonaparte’s land reform and suffered from the usury and mortgages imposed on them by the urban bourgeoisie. Because their plots of land were small, many were poor. Marx wrote that they had an interest in overthrowing the bourgeois order. Yet, while the “urban proletariat” was needed to provide leadership, it had been bitterly defeated in the Paris uprising of June 1848.48 As a result, in December 1851, the smallholders supported Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état. Roper’s criticism of Marx is ahistorical: they were no longer peasants united by feudal ties and the struggle to shake them off. Their plots of land lay side by side, like potatoes in a sack. These peasants may have suffered from similar economic problems, but they were in “free competition” with each other, just like the capitalist bourgeoisie in the cities, making collective agency difficult.49

Roper also criticises Marx’s views for “explaining the [Peasants’ War] in economic terms alone” and judges that this “is not enough”.50 Instead, scholars need to go beyond “concepts such as class, economic relations and the state”.51 She introduces ideological explanations that are disconnected from the material world. According to her, the peasants’ vision arose from a “theology of creation”, and they rejected the ruling system because it was “against Christ”.52 They did not see themselves as a class, but as brothers, which is why, according to Roper, the question of class was of little relevance.53 She dissolves real conditions into subjective feelings and blurs the contours of class society itself. The peasants may have called themselves “brothers”, but they knew that they were fighting against a ruling class that oppressed and exploited them: the lords, the princes, the priests, the pope and the emperor. They did so based on their own understanding of religion, challenging the ideas of the rulers.54

Moreover, Engels explicitly rejected a mechanical interpretation of Marxism. At the end of the 19th century, he repeatedly explained the relationship between the “economic base” and the “social superstructure”. In an 1890 letter, Engels emphasised the importance of numerous non-economic factors when analysing history:

[P]olitical forms of the class struggle and its consequences, namely constitutions set up by the ruling class after a victorious battle, etc, forms of law and, the reflections of all these real struggles in the minds of the participants, ie political, philosophical and legal theories, religious views and the expansion of the same into dogmatic systems.

He argued that all of this influences the course of historical struggles and “in many cases, they largely determine the form”, adding: “It is in the interaction of all these factors and amidst an unending multitude of fortuities…that the economic trend ultimately asserts itself as something inevitable”.55 This was the approach also Engels applied when he examined the material and ideological motives of the uprising in his writings on the Peasants’ War.

Roper’s book offers a vivid and detailed account of the movement, struggles and defeat. However, when it comes to analysing and explaining the events, it is a contradictory work. On the one hand, Roper brings to life what drove so many people to rise up. On the other hand, she overlays this with ahistorical feminism, psychologisation and idealism. She ignores the fact that real movements responding to material conditions allow certain ideas to become powerful. This latter approach is applied by Martin Empson in The Time of Harvest has Come—which, as Roper’s more unconvincing parts demonstrate, remains an indispensable work.

Rosemarie Nünning is a member of Sozialismus von unten (Socialism from Below) based in Berlin. She is the translator of Chris Harman’s People’s History of the World and several other works

Notes