Rainbow over Muhlhausen

What for most citizens of the sleepy medieval Thuringian town was merely a welcome respite from the morning's drizzle elated the twenty-five historians from the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin and the University of Oxford - a rainbow over St. Mary's Church, the Marienkirche, in Mühlhausen.

The rainbow was the symbol chosen by the radical preacher Thomas Muntzer to adorn the flags of his Eternal League during the German Peasants' War, and Marienkirche is where he preached. It was to visit the sites of the Peasants' War that third-year history Undergraduates studying the topic for their special subject with Professor Lyndal Roper undertook the joint expedition with the Berliners.

Of course, it was impossible to see all the sites of the War. The scale of the peasant uprising which took place during the early Reformation years 1524-6 was only eclipsed in magnitude in Europe by the French Revolution. Beginning with calls for reform of the feudal system, socio-economic grievances soon came to be expressed in religious language and propagated through print from Tyrol to Alsace, with especially eager reception in Thuringia.

Decentralized and spontaneous, there was no single leader of the Peasants' War, even though Thomas Müntzer is perhaps the best-known individual. To better understand this enigmatic figure, the students were fortunate to receive a guided tour of the Mühlhausen townhall where his Eternal Council ruled, the Marienkirche where he preached, and the historic town at night.

The story of Muntzer, and the Peasants' War, is difficult to tell because of its inseparability from modern German history. The two Germanies developed completely separate historiographies, with GDR framing the Peasants' War as an early bourgeois revolution and Muntzer a 16th century prophet of communism. This is perhaps best seen on the Frankenhausen Panorama.

A rainbow was said to have appeared over the hill at Bad Frankenhausen on the morning of battle, but despite the portent of divine favour Muntzer's army faced slaughter at the hands of the Swabian League. Today the hill houses a massive brutalist museum where one can find the largest oil painting in the world (14x123m): Werner Tübke's Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany commissioned by the East German regime. Taking over a decade to finish, the museum opened on 14 September 1989, weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To return to the rainbow, while for Muntzer it symbolised the contact between God and man, for the students it was a bridge to the past. It appeared just when the group approached the church, something which would have been seen as a divine sign. It is perhaps the experience of such a startling coincidence unsettling to even the most rationalist of historians that is necessary to, for the briefest of moments, look at the world through the eyes of Müntzer's followers. Thank you to all those who made this unique way of exploring a fascinating topic possible.

-Viktor Riha, Third Year Student, Magdalen.