The pointlessness of the German Peasants’ War – except in Marxist ideology

The preservation of a strict social hierarchy rests very often on the enforcement of correct modes of address. In America today any university student may address any other as ‘dude’, but those who have attained a certain level of prestige will object if an unwary low-status blunderer ventures to call them ‘bro’. Rebels seeking to overturn rigid class systems will often start by violating such regulations.

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The German revolutionaries of 1968, for example, made a point of addressing everyone as arschloch, or ‘arsehole’ – a radical usage I remember being startled by it in mid-1990s Kreuzberg bars until it was explained to me that I wasn’t being insulted. Their other move, to use the intimate du, rather than the formal Sie, for ‘you’, has taken much stronger hold. In 1793, the French revolutionary government issued a decree forbidding the use of vous, only for Napoleon to overturn it. In 17th-century Britain, Quakers addressed everybody by their first names and used the personal pronoun ‘thou’. We are told in Keith Thomas’s superb In Pursuit of Civility that one brave soul even called the magnificently daunting Duke of Newcastle ‘Phil’.

One of the earliest examples of this interesting phenomenon can be seen in the German Peasants’ War, or Bauernkrieg, of 1524-25. This was a sequence of uprisings by the disenfranchised and heavily burdened lower classes, but also included quite affluent people whose freedom of action, economic activity and movement was still being heavily restricted. It was given impetus by the tide of the Reformation started by Martin Luther. The rebels’ demands for political and economic change were mixed with theological assertions.