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Book Review: ‘Summer of Fire and Blood,’ by Lyndal Roper

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Book Review: ‘Summer of Fire and Blood,’ by Lyndal Roper

One of the many merits of “Summer of Fire and Blood” is how Roper — despite being the author of a luminous biography of Luther — shifts the focus away from the face-off between Luther and Müntzer and back onto the peasants themselves, dealing resourcefully with the fact that few of them left any written record of their time in the sun. “It must have been sensational,” Roper memorably writes of peasant invasions of monasteries, “to enter these enclosed communities, to find their warm heating ovens, feather beds, down pillows, libraries, jeweled chalices and massive stores of food, and to see and touch them for the first time.”

But it could not last. The peasants, townsfolk and lesser nobles shared few interests and their unsteady ad hoc alliances quickly foundered. The savior of the great princes showed up in the form of the young Philip of Hesse, who cannily connected the armies of the greater lords in a series of coordinated attacks on the peasants. Luther knew which way the wind was blowing. Killing peasants was now a godly work. “Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly,” Luther counseled. “It is just as when one must kill a mad dog.”

Roper estimates that as many as 100,000 peasants were slaughtered in the space of a few weeks. By the end of 1525, the great princes had restored order: The Peasants’ War was over. Along with the peasants, who never saw the world they had imagined, the biggest losers were the clergy. The monks of Central Europe never recovered. The winners were the great princes who had taught their more restive nobles a lesson, and further entrenched their power and wealth — many of them kept what remained of the loot from the plundered monasteries. “The peasants’ bloody defeat affected peasant communities for generations,” Roper concludes, “and transformed the Reformation from a movement that challenged the social order into one that supported the existing authorities.”

The German Peasants’ War has preoccupied artists and playwrights from Goethe to Jean-Paul Sartre. The events have also commanded a special place in the annals of the international left. Friedrich Engels, who wrote what is still the most widely read account of the Peasants’ War, picked the uprising apart as he and Karl Marx tried to understand the pitfalls of the Revolution of 1848. A century ago, the Weimar Marxist prophet Ernst Bloch interpreted the nearby Russian Revolution as the delayed gratification of Thomas Müntzer.

In a wide-ranging conclusion on the war’s legacy, Roper becomes impatient with the Marxist determination to explore why the momentum of the peasants could never durably join with the petty interests of the lower nobility. Engels, she claims, gives short shrift to peasants for not being “truly revolutionary,” and for getting their hopes up ahead of historical schedule.