Two questions that underline any attempt to understand past events apply with special pertinence to the rise and fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster: Why did it happen, and what does it mean? To these might be added a third and somewhat easier question: Many other more important events from this and other periods have long since been forgotten; why should Münster have persisted in claiming our attention?
The answer to the last question is dramatically visible today. Two hundred feet above the old Market Square, now called the Prinzipalmarkt, in modern, late-twentieth-century Münster, hang three iron cages, each measuring about seven feet by three feet by three feet. They are the same cages that Bishop Franz had had built nearly five centuries ago to contain the bodies of the three men executed before his eyes. The cages rest above the nave of St. Lambert’s Church, over the clock. One is slightly larger than the other two and positioned above them. In each cage, between dusk and dawn, a faint light is visible from a tiny yellow bulb; the lights were placed there in 1987, a more sentimental time than 1536, “in memory of their departed souls.” The tower itself, with its Gothic spires and crenellations, stands out against the night sky like an emblem of the Middle Ages. But while the cages are the same, the tower is a late-nineteenth-century neo-Gothic replacement of the original fourteenth-century tower, whose simple rounded elegance was rejected in favor of the bizarre and jagged exaggeration that characterizes the neo-Gothic style.
The cages, like the public execution of those they contained, were originally intended to frighten those who might be tempted to rebel against the state; the church was not consulted about its new decorations. The bodies were left in the hanging cages to rot, prompting artists to draw ravens descending on them to pluck out what flesh the torturers had left; the bones were not removed until half a century later. Within a century Münster and its grisly cages were famous, and nearly synonymous with each other, but it was only with the translation of Kerssenbrück’s history from Latin into German in 1771 that the story began to be more widely known in its full details.
The Romantic and Victorian fascination with the Middle Ages, prompted in part by the wrenching demands of the modern period that are still with us today, impelled some visitors to Münster to try to re-create the fervor of the emotions that had ruled the little city so long ago. Instructed by Goethe in the concept of the “daemonic,” which linked man’s creative and destructive urges in deeds and in art, one such visitor fairly terrified himself with his reconstruction. This was Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1912. A prolific poet, novelist, and dramatist, Hauptmann had written a play about the Peasants’ War, Florian Geyer. He visited Münster in 1900, seeing the story of the Anabaptists as packed with dramatic material; his particular interest, as a later writer explained it, was the terrible fate of the misled masses who followed their fanatical leaders and the power of religious movements when fueled by social injustice. Hauptmann stayed in the city for several days, jotting notes and reactions in his diary. One night, he wrote, he stood alone in the main square, opposite the City Hall. He began to shiver, then to sweat profusely from every pore, though it was a chilly evening. He felt a “paroxysm of angst” as he heard frightful shrieks of anguish echoing through the cobblestoned streets, sounds like those of animals being tortured to death. He had to retreat from the square, trembling; he felt then the birth amid terror and oppression of a religious destiny for himself, a deep identification with the “ecstatic religion of the people” of that earlier time, and vowed that he would one day capture and recreate those terrible days in a drama of his own making.
Hauptmann never wrote his play, but the modern visitor to Münster will still see the cages that prompted his “paroxysm of angst,” because they continue to be regarded as tourist attractions and as municipal symbols, though not with unanimous local approval. In the 1880s the city decided to repair the cages, which had been damaged by rust, and to replace them on the new church tower as “not insignificant” reminders of the city’s history; there they remained until November 18, 1944, when British bombs landed on the church tower. The highest cage—Jan’s—fell into the street; the lower-left cage, facing the tower, fell into the organ loft; the third cage remained dangling above the huge clock. In 1948 the tower was reconstructed; the cages were repaired—the workmen commented favorably on the quality of the original construction—and put back in their original positions, again without debate.
Only recently, it seems, have some begun to question whether it is appropriate for such a display to hang from a church tower. In 1996 the foremost living authority on the Anabaptists, Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff, wrote a short book about the cages and their history in which he cites the local newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor section to explain the arguments. The cages are, some say, an “unbelievably tasteless” aesthetic affront and should come down. Perhaps they are unpleasant, others respond, but they are reminders of the evils of the ruling classes in the Middle Ages and should remain (not the reaction the Bishop would have wished). The winning essays in a contest for schoolchildren said the cages should remain in place as a reminder of a “less quiet time” in the city’s history.
There are other reminders of the “less quiet time.” The beautiful new City Museum was finished in 1983, a few blocks from St. Lambert’s Church. Its opening exhibition was a full retrospective of the Anabaptist Kingdom, including a three-hundred-page catalog, and a special permanent section remains. The visitor may see, perhaps with something of the shiver that Hauptmann felt, the huge iron tongs, black and sinister against the white wall, that were the tools of the executioners. He may touch, if he wishes, the sword that Knipperdolling used as Jan’s first designated executioner, Jan’s own suit of armor, and the spiked collars that held the three men to the post as they died. There are also three full-size replicas of the cages, built in the late-nineteenth century and housed for many years in the city zoo, for some time with dummies in them representing the three dead men.
Outside, in the now-needed fresh air, the modern visitor can visit the Overwater Church, still missing the tower the Anabaptists demolished, and cross the stone bridge over the river Aa to the Cathedral. Münster remains a predominantly Catholic enclave in Lutheran northern Germany, and the Cathedral, which Jan had desecrated and turned into his armory, remains at its center; Herman Kerssenbrück, the boy who lived through the early stages of the revolt and was evicted from the city by Jan Matthias, returned in the 1550s as the schoolmaster of the Cathedral and spent twenty years compiling his account in Latin. One of Kerssenbrück’s major themes was that Protestantism itself, not just Luther or Jan van Leyden, was at the root of the disturbances, and he did what he could to encourage the Counter-Reformation whose effects are still visible.
The City Hall where Knipperdolling and Tilbeck were co-mayors has no memorials to the Anabaptist period; instead, it celebrates, especially during the year of my last visit, 1998, its more famous and productive history as the site of the negotiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This famous treaty marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the introduction of a long period of peace and prosperity throughout Europe.
Modern Münster has a population of nearly a quarter of a million people and has spread far beyond the boundaries of Jan’s small medieval city of fewer than ten thousand. As the capital of Westphalia, its major business is government and education, with the second-largest university in Germany. The river Aa has been dammed to form a beautiful small lake within an easy walk of downtown. A cruise boat takes visitors to the small zoo at the other end of the lake, and to the splendid Westphalian Museum of Natural History. Or one may choose to walk along the lake and wander through a re-created sixteenth-century farming village.
The walls and moats that once defined Münster are long gone; only the Buddenturm Watchtower and parts of the Zwinger and the bases of the stone walls remain as obvious reminders of the medieval period. In their place is a comfortable promenade, thre
e miles long and two hundred yards wide in places; a broad pedestrian walk and a bike path are shaded by linden trees and bordered by ponds where swans and geese and ducks glide serenely past overhanging willow trees. This beautiful park, one of the loveliest in Europe, includes at its outer edges the former wasteland in which the desperate refugees from King Jan’s New Zion wandered so many years ago. No trace of their desperation remains.
Similarly, in the heart of town one may sip a beer at the end of a warm July afternoon, as I did, at a table opposite the City Hall, and take pleasure in the ambience of a European city. Students, businessmen, and nuns pedaled through the square on the bicycles for which the city is now famous. Tour buses and taxis rumbled over the cobblestones, leaving lingering clouds of exhaust fumes. A Swedish band, students working their way through Europe, offered an acceptable version of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” up the street, in front of St. Lambert’s Church.
And looming over all—noxious tour buses, busy cafés, darting bicycles, energetic students—were the three cages of King Jan, Knipperdolling, and Krechting, each a perfect medieval memento mori, like the skull on the desk of Rembrandt’s physician.
This macabre juxtaposition suggests why Jan’s story lives on as it does. It was made tangible by the very cages that the Bishop hoped would ensure that he and his authority would be remembered, and those who opposed him recalled only as miserable wretches who deserved what they got. Without the cages, first suggested by the captured king himself, the name of Jan van Leyden would be as remote today as is that of Franz von Waldeck. With the cages, and because of them, he has continued to spark debate about what he did. Given his theatrical persona and his sense of irony, we may assume that Jan would be amused.
In the decade before Münster all Anabaptists, peacefully inclined or not, were attacked as servants of Satan, led by him “into the dark forests and woods, into caves and holes … [where he] gathers them only in corners, telling them to preach only in secrecy.” Martin Luther saw in their”grand, wicked words” and actions”the true fruits of the devil.” Another observer saw them as even more of a threat than the heathen Turks, who were then knocking on the gates of Vienna; the Turks were at least clear about their intention to destroy Christianity. But the devil who aided the Turks directly worked his way more insidiously through the Anabaptists, who”conceal and decorate their poison with such an appearance that at first glance it seems to be a good holy life, not an evil one,” and “simple and foolish folk” are drawn in by this appearance.
Before Münster, it was the Anabaptists’ relative subtlety and sophistication of argument and appeal, along with a certain naive honesty, that had most alarmed their opponents. But after the trouble there began to get serious, according to a recent study by Dale Grieser, the crudeness of the takeover and the rule by the two Jans and the two Bernards in Münster suggested to Martin Luther that Satan had overplayed his hand and was actually losing, not enhancing, his power. Luther mocked the New Jerusalem as the work of a “young, ABC devil or schoolgirl devil, who does not yet know how to write.” After all, only the blind could fail to see that theft of property, the subversion of civil authority, polygamy, and murder were Satan’s handiwork. The devil had gone insane or grown stupid, having discarded his old and clever technique of “transforming himself into an angel of light” in order to lure his victims to their doom. For Luther, the Bishop and his assorted princely allies had erred in the first place by using military force against the Anabaptists in Münster; they should rather have used “the sword of the spirit” and tried to “tear their hearts away from the devil” by preaching the true word of God. Instead, “they wrested control of the bodies away from the devil, but ceded him their hearts.”
Not everyone thought Satan had lost his touch: Urbanus Rhegius “saw the devil’s footprints all over Münster.” He was not an apprentice devil, said Rhegius, but “the devil of a thousand arts” who was using the Anabaptists to attack “scripture, Christ, and Christianity and all faith” in order to “become a lord in Westphalia over body, soul, and goods.” It was the diabolical influence of Bernard Rothmann, more than that of Jan or Knipperdolling, that shaped events in Münster, in particular his desire for personal power: rather than remain “a poor Mr. Bernard with no name” in the Catholic Church, Rhegius says, this “miserable theologian … talkative and proud,” said to himself, “I don’t want to be either Papist or Lutheran, I want to begin my own sect, so I can get some followers.”
What strikes the modern reader most about all of this is the sincerity and omnipresence of the belief that Satan, incompetent or not, was to blame for what happened in Münster—not as metaphor or hyperbole but as a real and tangible presence. The difference between our own time and that of Jan and the Bishop seems profound: other than a few on the religious right, no one has argued that the devil spawned David Koresh and the Branch Davidians at Waco, the nearest modern equivalent to what happened in Münster. Rather, the causes of Waco are assigned to mental illness, crowd psychology, social conflicts, and official ineptitude, all things we believe we can understand if not cure—unlike Satan.
Madness was in fact also considered by Jan’s contemporaries as a motivation for his rapid though brief success, as were the constructs of psychology and sociology as we know them now; once they identified Satan as the source of the trouble, it was still necessary to explain why a certain group of people and only they were so susceptible to his wiles. Antonius Corvinus, after his interviews with Jan and the other captured leaders, published his observations on the Anabaptists in order to prove that they were deeply irrational; the world they had created was an inversion of the real world, just as carnival season is a reversal of ordinary laws of reason and social order. The Anabaptist Kingdom, he said, had been no more than an Affenspiel—an ape’s game.
Corvinus was following the lead of his master, Philip of Hesse, who had earlier chided Bernard Rothmann for his indifference to logical arguments against his position and compared him to his court jester: “You act like our fool Jochim when someone says something to him that he does not like to hear. So he starts to talk about something else.” Corvinus saw the inability of Rothmann and the other preachers to respond to logical argument as evidence of God’s punishment for their misbehavior: He had given them “perverted minds” that put them beyond reach. Responding to Corvinus’s “brotherly admonition” with”contempt, even ridicule and laughter,” the Anabaptists proved to him how foolish they were, turning”everything upside down” in order to destroy it: they converted marriage into prostitution, a tailor into a king, a merchant (Knipperdolling) into a hanging judge, a preacher (Rothmann) into a political propagandist. The famous sketch of King Jan capering around the beheaded Elizabeth Wandscheer captures perfectly the mad and murderous carnival of destruction that he had created.
Certainly Jan seems to be a character ready for the psychoanalyst’s couch. I am unaware of any direct commentary on him, but Ernest Jones, a colleague and follower of Sigmund Freud, provides some useful insights in his work On the Nightmare, in which he includes a chapter about the medieval concept of the devil. He cites as his starting point Freud’s key assumption that “the Devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed, unconscious instinctual life,” and goes on to note a number of points that augment those made in the earlier discussion of Luther. Of particular importance in connection with Jan is the church’s link between sex and sin; the obvious association here is with Jan’s polygamy, widely held to be vivid evidence of his insatiable and devilish lust. But there are less obvious details as well. The devil is sterile; Jan’s later unions produced no children, a fact remarked on at the time. The devil often limps; Dusentschur did limp, in fact, while Jan did not, but in the popular literature of the day he is sometimes called the limping king. The devil is often ugly, but just as often strikingly beautiful, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost; much of Jan’s appeal lay in his physical grace and beauty. Finally, the most dreaded sin for the
Church was incest, a particular favorite of the devil; if one subscribes to the common Freudian notion that the son wishes to kill his father and marry his mother, Jan’s clever manipulation and dispatch of his older mentor Jan Matthias and his marriage to the dead Prophet’s wife strongly suggest an incestuous relationship.
The rebellious but envious son’s imitation and defiance of the father is at the heart of Jones’s discussion of the devil, as it was of Milton in Paradise Lost. Jan’s own father denied him and condemned him to illegitimacy. He found a father-substitute in Jan Matthias and a father-in-law in Bernard Knipperdolling, both of whom he surpassed and displaced. In the Bishop he found a churchly father who could not be displaced, and who administered his ultimate chastisement, his banishment to hell.
Jan also shares other qualities that Jones and Freud associate with the devil. He is arrogant and presumptuous, as we have clearly seen: these are the prime aspects of the devil, “the Arch-rebel; his insubordinate disobedience and final insurrection against the authority of God the Father is the very paradigma of revolution.” Moreover, he has a mocking quality that is particularly infuriating to figures of authority: “The Devil mocks at the endeavours and strivings of men, derides their ambitions and makes sport of their failures. He teases, annoys and harms them out of pure enjoyment at doing so, undoes their labour and baffles all their efforts.” Finally, the devil, for all his cleverness and malice, has, like children and like Jan, a naïveté that makes him easy to trick sometimes: “The tales in which the Devil, presenting at times an incredible naïveté, is easily hoodwinked form an extensive chapter in the history of demonolatry, and have furnished an important source for the later conception of clowns, buffoons, and stage fools.”
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