BAD FRANKENHAUSEN is a spa town in the German state of Thuringia and is home to one of the most astonishing socialist works of art ever produced.

An enormous panorama based upon Friedrich Engels’s 1850 book, The Peasant War in Germany. A war that has become part of the foundational myth of German socialism.

To mark the 450-year jubilee of the battle for Frankenhaus in 1975, East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party set the rector of the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, Professor Werner Tubke, the task of creating a monumental panorama painting: the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, also known as the Peasants’ War Panorama.

This immense work by Werner Tubke (1929-2004) is sometimes referred to as the Sistine Chapel of the North. He painted the revolt against the powers that be in the south of the German speaking area of central Europe, which the GDR saw as a precursor to its peoples’s republic.

Tubke is probably the most important painter of the GDR and was no superficial propagandist. His virtuoso theatrical work retained its aesthetic significance, even after the fall of the wall in 1989.

Completed in 1987 the panorama blends historical events with mythological and symbolic elements creating a multi-layered composition. Its centre is the peasants’ war, in the context is the intellectual, scientific, technological and cultural transformation of the Renaissance.

Thanks to a brilliant new book by Martin Empson (The Time of the Harvest has Come, Revolution, Reformation and the German Peasants War, Bookmarks 2025) we can now follow the events of 500 years ago with fresh eyes. The title of the book comes from Thomas Muntzer’s Prague Manifesto of 1521.

“All the extremes of scoundrelly behaviour had to come to the light. O ho, how ripe the rotten apples are! O ho, how rotten the elect have become! The time of the harvest has come! That is why he as hired me for his harvest! I have sharpened my sickle, for my thoughts yearn for the truth and with my lips, skin, hands, hair, soul, body and life I call down curses on the unbelievers.”

The language shows how genuine grievances are wrapped up in religious rhetoric. Empson explains how Germany in the early 1500s was under enormous strain with new economic forms causing rising tension.

Those tensions within Christianity were in the reformation unleashed when Martin Luther in 1517 demanded religious reform. 
The mass uprising we call the peasants’ war covered a much wider area than modern Germany. With uprisings in France, Switzerland and Austria, it also involved a wider spectrum of the population than the peasantry, including skilled artisans and merely to see it as a war, as Empson points out, is also to some extent misleading.

One thing that is beyond doubt is the utmost savagery with which the feudal lords set about putting down this revolt.

Following initial uprisings in southern Germany, the war quickly spread and reached Thuringia, where Frankenhausen became the centre of the rebellion in the spring of 1525. Under the leadership of Thomas Muntzer, thousands of peasants and craftsmen gathered there. Despite early successes, they were decisively defeated by the princely army on May 15 1525, in a pivotal battle. Around 6,000 rebels lost their lives, and many more were executed or brutally punished. Muntzer was captured, tortured and publicly beheaded.

People sometimes think that socialist ideas are of recent vintage. The idea omnia sunt communia (“all things are to be in common”) first appeared in a radical context during the peasants’ war, particularly associated with Muntzer. Engels argues he was the first to put down “communist notions” and was the first to formulate them with “certain definiteness.” He set out the “demands and doctrines” of the only group that formed a “revolutionary party”!

Probably the second most important figure, although we know much less about him, was Michal Gaismair. Engels describes him as “the only one of the peasant chiefs to possess any military talent.”

In a way a radical reading of the Bible by groups like the Anabaptists to champion ideas of common ownership is a precursor for modern ideas of communism. However, the failure of the peasants to take power was, as Engels points out, due to the fact that was that the leadership of the revolt was compelled to seize power when the “movement was not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures this domination implies.”

Engels was referring to the revolution of 1525 but could just as easily have be referring to the one of his own times, the one of 1848 when the bourgeoisie once again failed to sweep away the aristocratic feudal order.

As Empson points out, there is a long, “strange afterlife of the German peasants’ war” — not just in outstanding art. The German historian Peter Blickle argues that it was a revolution of the “common man.” “Peasants, miners, the politically disenfranchised citizens of imperial cities.”

Today, 500 years later, the disenfranchised are demanding change and the task of completing that revolution is still is before us!

I would like to thank Jenny Farrell for bringing the Panorama to my attention in her Culture Matters article.