It is fifty years since Max Steinmetz produced his large-scale historiographical survey of images and interpretations of Thomas Müntzer from Martin Luther to Friedrich Engels. Since then, the German Democratic Republic, in its self-proclaimed role as the champion of Müntzer's legacy, has disappeared and with it studies which saw Müntzer as a precursor of what Marxists termed the ‘early bourgeois revolution’. In the meantime there have been several brief bibliographical updates, notably by James Stayer, Hans-Jürgen Goertz and Peter Matheson. Now Günter Vogler, formerly professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin and author of many specialised studies on Müntzer, has provided a magisterial two-volume compendium taking the narrative to 2017. In this review only a selection of salient themes can be presented.
Melanchthon's Histori Thome Muntzer remained the principal source until the age of Pietism. Gottfried Arnold recognised Müntzer's debt to spiritualism: he edited the Theologia Deutsch and works by Thomas à Kempis and Johannes Tauler (though not Müntzer's own writings). In the early sixteenth century the Lutheran pastor Justus Menius was the first to posit a link between Müntzer and Anabaptism, but for the next two centuries the relationship was assumed rather than seriously explored. A more nuanced approach had to wait for the Enlightenment, which fed into Wilhelm Zimmermann's positive study of the German Peasants’ War, first published in 1841 which, together with Engels's tract, remained the bedrock of Marxist interpretations until very recently. Early (that is, pre-Marx) communists, however, had already acknowledged Müntzer's commitment to community of goods (omnia sunt communia) from a Christian perspective.
Vogler adds much to twentieth-century accounts: Communists and social democrats in the Weimar Republic echoing the squabbles between Reformers and revolutionaries (Luther versus Müntzer); the Nazis’ failed efforts to integrate Müntzer into their vision of a völkisch peasant hero; Ernst Bloch's impressionist and error-strewn philosophical musings on Müntzer as a theologian of revolution; and, strikingly, the way in which Karl Holl's ‘Luther Renaissance’ paved the way for serious intellectual interest in Müntzer's ideas as the product of a coherent philosophy.
Vogler's account is laudably even-handed, though his successive précis of competing views at times is somewhat bland. Interestingly, he notes that Günther Franz's treatment of the Peasants’ War as a peasant-led struggle for national renewal had been fully worked out before he joined the NSDAP and embraced its ideology of Blut und Boden. Given Franz's edition of Müntzer's works and the persisting influence of his Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg (first published in 1933) one can only wonder why he receives such scant attention here.
Of post-Second-World-War studies Walter Elliger's massive biography (1960) is criticised by Vogler, less on account of its overt anti-Marxist tenor than for disdaining archival sources and for concentrating on Müntzer's self-perception at the expense of his unfolding lived experience. In his own biography Vogler concedes that Müntzer remained to his dying day first and foremost a theologian, rather than a social revolutionary. This shift of emphasis derives in large measure from Vogler's long-standing friendship and collaboration with Siegfried Bräuer, the doyen of Luther scholarship in the former GDR, though their joint biography (2016) leaves several questions unresolved, not least the continuing issue of Müntzer's influence on Anabaptism (an uncomfortable topic given the subsequent dominance of Mennonite pacifism).
Although Vogler at the beginning of volume ii regrets that he has little space to discuss Müntzer in art, literature, music or in museums and exhibitions, these aspects are frequently discussed in the publications of the Thomas-Müntzer-Gesellschaft (twenty-seven volumes to date), of which Vogler was formerly chairman. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Vogler's concluding pages on the many Müntzer monuments and commemorations in Saxony and Thuringia fail to mention the apotheosis of GDR memorialisation, namely the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen (opened in 1989) which was built to house the extraordinary painting by Werner Tübke of scenes from Müntzer's life and times, which retains its title as ‘The early bourgeois revolution’.
Vogler does not confine himself to works in German. Aside from studies in Japanese, he reviews a vast range of works in the major European languages, including the burgeoning literature in Italian (concerned primarily with utopias), the works of American scholars (many from a Mennonite background) and the writings of the Scots theologian Peter Matheson, including his translation of Müntzer's tracts, correspondence and liturgies, and the first scholarly study in French by Louis Gérard Walter (1927), which draws proper attention (following Otto Schiff) to Müntzer's mysterious sojourn on the Upper Rhine on the eve of the Peasants’ War. Vogler's two volumes may now stand alongside the recently completed three-volume critical edition of Müntzer's writings, correspondence and ancillary materials. Together they provide the indispensable framework for future work on Thomas Müntzer, on whom the last word has assuredly not yet been said.
