Thomas Müntzer
Legacy

During the last two years of his life, Müntzer had come into contact with a number of other radicals; prominent amongst them were Hans Hut, Hans Denck, Melchior Rinck, Hans Römer, and Balthasar Hubmaier. All of them were leaders of the emerging Anabaptist movement, which nurtured similar reformed doctrines to those of Müntzer himself. While it is not appropriate to claim that they were all or consistently "Müntzerites", it is possible to argue that they all shared some common teaching. A common thread links Müntzer, the early Anabaptists, the " Kingdom of Münster " in North Germany in 1535, the Dutch Anabaptists, the radicals of the English Revolution, and beyond.There was a short-lived legacy even within the "official" reformed church as well; in the towns where Müntzer had been active, his reformed liturgies were still being used some ten years after his death.

Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky claimed him as a precursor of the revolutionaries of more modern times. They based their analysis on the pioneering work of the German liberal historian Wilhelm Zimmermann, whose important three-volume history of the Peasants War appeared in 1843. It is not only as an early "social revolutionary" that Müntzer has historical importance as his activities within the early Reformation movement were influential on Luther and his reforms.

Further interest in Müntzer was spurred at various moments in German (occasionally European) history: during the creation of a German national identity between 1870 and 1914; in the revolutionary era in Germany immediately after 1918; in an East Germany looking for its "own" history after 1945 (Müntzer's image was used on the 5 East German Mark banknote); and leading up to the 450th anniversary of the Peasant War in 1975 and the 500th anniversary of Müntzer's birth in 1989. In terms of pure statistics, the number of books, articles and essays devoted to Müntzer rose dramatically after 1945. Before that year, around 520 had appeared; between 1945 and 1975, another 500; between 1975 and 2012, 1800.

Since around 1918, the number of fictional works on Müntzer has grown significantly; this encompasses over 200 novels, poems, plays and films, almost all in German. A film of his life was produced in East Germany in 1956, directed by Martin Heilberg and starring Wolfgang Stumpf. In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Peasants' War Panorama at Bad Frankenhausen was opened, containing the largest oil painting in the world, with Müntzer in central position. The painter was Werner Tübke.
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