Later observers rejected both Satan and madness as primary causes of Münster. For Karl Marx and his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, the source of evil lay in the class system, based on the exploitation of the poor working masses by their privileged idle overlords. The inequitable distribution of wealth and property was bound to lead to violent efforts to right the situation. Nine years before Münster, a renegade priest, Thomas Müntzer, had led the notorious Peasants’ Revolt that resulted in the deaths of himself and one hundred thousand farmers and artisans, as well as thousands of priests and landowners. Engels explained this insurrection as the first of a series of modern efforts that included the French Revolution of 1789 and that were culminating in his time with the revolutions of 1848 in Germany and France. The admitted excesses of the rebels derived from their long oppression.
Following Engels’s lead, some later writers argued that the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster, when seen in its proper social and historical context, was in fact a people’s movement directly related to the Peasants’ Revolt. The emphasis now shifted from the evil deeds of a maniacal brotherhood to the oppression by the ruling classes that killed the more moderate Anabaptists and drove the rest to violent resistance. The rebels had the right instincts: driving out the forces of superstition represented by the established Church; heroically insisting on the right of the individual against the tyrannical state; eliminating class distinctions by calling all men and women brothers and sisters; and sharing all goods and property. Knipperdolling, originally praised as the merchant who gave up all that he owned in order to follow Christ, becomes for later communist ideologues the model of a heroic convert from capitalist exploiter to man of the people. Jan himself is now at least a Savonarola, a man of courage and integrity, if a bit excessive in his zeal, and perhaps even a new Spartacus. The Bishop, never an admirable figure, becomes now the personification of corrupt, unyielding tyranny.
Because they lacked power to do more than mock their superiors, at least initially, these rebels were often forced by circumstances to turn their world upside down, to make it a verkehrte Welt. Typical images of the ass playing the lyre or of the blind leading the blind in the twelfth-century Mirror of Fools spoke of the past being stood on its head by the present, which later became a formula for “the struggle of youth over age, frivolity over seriousness, inexperience over wisdom.” The contemporary philosopher Michael Bakhtin describes this inversion in a way that sounds like a script for the Anabaptist Kingdom: the king is now a youth or a fool, or both. Wisdom and order are replaced by license and folly. All forms of the sublime and the mysterious are degraded and travestied. The respectable orders that purport to know and understand cosmic truths are seen to be mere sham. Thus carnival is the very image of revolution. In America during the political turmoil of the 1960s, radicals wore pig costumes in courtrooms to mock the reason, truth, and justice the system presumed to stand for. They understood that nothing is so powerfully disruptive as the idea of carnival in the courtroom. Similarly, in 1968, when France and Germany were in the midst of revolutionary turmoil led by students, there was a fringe movement in Münster dedicated to the memory of Bernard Knipperdolling as a heroic martyr in the battle against an unjust system; it included a Knipperdolling Kneipe (bar) and even a newsletter. The former editor of the Knipperdolling newsletter today writes Krimis (crime thrillers).
For Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a well-born Prussian Catholic writing in the 1930s about the Münster episode as an example of “mass insanity,” explanations that apologized for Jan and Knipperdolling were themselves little short of madness. Reck was a staunch opponent of Hitler who would later die at Dachau for his beliefs, which were incorporated in his argument that the Anabaptist Kingdom and its leader were forerunners of Nazi Germany and of Hitler. He watched helplessly as”truth was distorted and history falsified,” in the words of his widow, as good men were persecuted for their refusal to bend and as other good men did bend, thereby losing their minds and souls. One who did bend was Gerhart Hauptmann, who had been moved to a”paroxysm of angst” in Münster at the turn of the century but by the time of Hitler was sufficiently caught up in the “ecstatic religion of the people” to turn his back on the liberal Social Democrats and to remain a respected figure in the Third Reich. He was honored by Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 1942.
Reck wrote about Münster in terms of its “symptoms, its ideas, its configuration” originally in the form of a novel, publishing it in the dangerous year of 1937; after the war his widow re-issued the book as a historical account, calling attention to the analogies Reck intended between Jan’s kingdom and the Third Reich.
Some of the similarities between Hitler and Jan are obvious even without Reck’s guidance. Both were illegitimate and raised by their mothers in poverty. Both were foreigners, Hitler coming from Austria and Jan from Holland. Both were largely self-educated and scornful of formal knowledge and received opinions. Both were rootless wanderers and apparent failures in their early years. Both were artistic, Hitler as a painter and Jan as an actor and author of dramatic sketches. Both were moved by resentment against those who had failed to acknowledge their existence, let alone their merit: fathers, churches, governments. Both had extraordinary gifts of oratory, organization and planning, and of inspiring followers to implement their visions. Both had visions, expressed in the same terms, of a thousand-year Reich. And both were psychopaths, i.e., mad or evil, or both. (Thus are we driven back to the original explanations of Martin Luther and his contemporaries!)
There are also similarities between the organizational elements of the two regimes. Both required the indoctrination of children through early education and military training; the substitution of the group for the individual and the family in terms of loyalty and obligation; the inclusion of the chosen and the exclusion of the rest; elaborate ceremonies, marches, and public gatherings; symbols and slogans; and abrupt promotions and demotions, appearances and disappearances. Most important, both required absolute, unquestioning obedience to their leader, based on faith rather than reason or law, and the penalty for disobedience was death.
The means by which such groups gain power include a gradual, step-by-step undermining of local authority. This is achieved by manipulation of the voting process through pressure tactics, cheating, and terror. An outside enemy must be found, requiring a temporary alliance with the authorities. Once the government is sufficiently infiltrated, its more moderate leaders are caught between the conservatives and the radicals and are immobilized. New dangers are found, both internal and external, requiring immediate and decisive action: the traitors within are exposed and expelled or murdered; their property is appropriated, their books and profane images piled high in the streets and burned. Resistance from former allies who balk at such tactics is mercilessly crushed: the middle ground has vanished, and those who are not with the rulers are against them. The only means for ensuring continued obedience is a greater threat from outside the regime; thus the enemy’s attempts to negotiate are rejected as treachery. The stakes are constantly raised until an apocalyptic final battle (one that, in Hitler’s case, Reck did not live to see to its conclusion) results in complete destruction. For the rebel forces, the destruction of the world is of little importance:“If the heavens fall,” they say,”we will eat all the larks.” If they lose, it is ordained, and they will return; if they win, the thousand-year kingdom will ensue.
Norman Cohn, in his book The Pursuit of the Millennium, describes a series of religious events and their leaders in northern Europe from about 1200 to 1550. Different though they were, all those involved shared a belief in a Millennium, “not necessarily limited to a thousand years and indeed not necessarily limited at all, in which the world would be inhabited by a humanity at once perfectly good and perfectly happy … . [They were] seized at least intermittently by a tense expectation of some sudden, miraculous event in which the world would be utterly transformed, some
prodigious final struggle between the hosts of Christ and the hosts of Antichrist through which history would attain its fulfillment and justification.”
Cohn’s book, published in 1957, was prompted by the similarities he saw between the violent irrationality of the so-called “chiliastic” movements of the past and the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Like Friedrich Reck, Cohn sees in the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster a forerunner of the Nazis; part of his stated aim is to show that it was not an isolated aberration but a model of its kind. Accordingly, he gives the story of Münster pride of place in his account, his final chapter, “The Egalitarian Millennium.”
Cohn’s account of Jan’s kingdom is more temperate than Reck’s, and his insights draw usefully upon the social sciences to note some important additional points in his concluding remarks. The first is that modern extremists in Germany and Russia claimed that both science and history (when properly understood and revised) supported their views, whereas their predecessors depended on religious texts for their justification. His second point is that the periods resemble each other in that “one cannot afford to ignore the psychic content of the phantasies which have inspired them,” which Cohn says are essentially those of paranoia.”The megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissension, conflict, fallibility, whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies-these attitudes are symptoms which together constitute the unmistakable syndrome of paranoia.” Cohn has amply demonstrated in his narrative that the paranoia is often justified, especially in the case of the Anabaptists—people were indeed out to get them. But his third point is that the proscribed groups stubbornly fed upon their own delusions and ruthlessly imposed them on others when they could—Hitler’s “final solution” to his “problem” of the Jews, extermination, is the most extreme example.
Cohn concludes that members of chiliastic groups suffer from an impaired sense of reality. The movements grow stronger during periods when other institutions are seen to fail. When their own efforts fail to change things, their followers are “overwhelmed by a sense of disorientation, frustration, impotence.” The poor and the dispossessed were the likeliest prospects for membership in chiliastic groups in the Middle Ages, as in Münster, and they remain so today, according to Cohn.
Cohn was writing nearly half a century ago. Like the rest of the so-called First World nations, America in the last years of the twentieth century, prosperous and at peace, seems a poor candidate for the emergence of apocalyptic groups such as those of the past. And yet the imminence of the year 2000 has prompted much popular speculation as well as scholarly thought about the near future and the distant past. There is a Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, with its own Web site, and books are appearing with titles like The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (Daniel Woyjcik, New York University Press, 1997), and Stephen Jay Gould’s Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown (Harmony Books, 1997). And there are college courses like the one at Agnes Scott College on “Apocalypse and Revolution” being offered around the country.
Some scholars concern themselves with current events such as the destruction of the Branch Davidians at Waco and the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City that seems to have followed as a consequence of Waco; the Heaven’s Gate suicides in Rancho Bernardo; the Jim Jones disaster in Guyana; even the Million-Man March on Washington; all of which they see as symptoms of millennial frenzy. Others cast a similarly wide net over popular entertainment, examining Dr. Strangelove, The Seventh Seal, Blade Runner, Road Warrior, and even Moby Dick for their insights into the future.
Arbitrary dates of course mean very little, and most people are realistic enough to think of the future in benign terms such as grandchildren and retirement, not apocalypse, but some popular historians, hoping to impose large patterns of meaning, fall into traps of chronology. As recently as 1988, Richard Erdoes has explained that as the year 1000 approached in Europe, “[some people] were certain that the Second Coming of Christ would fall on the last day of the year 999, at the very stroke of midnight. Others were equally convinced that Armageddon would come a little earlier, on the eve of the nativity when ‘the Children of Light would join in battle with Gog’s army of hellish friends.’ Some fixed the date on the day of the summer or winter solstice of the thousandth year after our Lord’s passion … though people quarreled about the exact date and hour, they all agreed … that ‘Satan will soon be unleashed because the thousand years have been completed.’” Many historians now regard this supposed panic as a myth created in the nineteenth century by Romantic historians such as Jules Michelet. Some people no doubt thought the end was near, just as some do today, but most regarded it with the skepticism that Kerssenbrück shows in his comments on the hysterical reaction to Bernard Rothmann’s prediction of the imminent fall of the Overwater Church Convent.
To be sure, certain prophecies have a way of becoming self-fulfilling: the Anabaptists were correct in foretelling the end of the world in terms of their own fate. Today, sociologists have collected a host of evidence that some might interpret as signs of imminent apocalypse, whether good news or bad: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the growth of the Internet on the one hand, the spread of AIDS and of terrorism on the other. All are seen as signs or portents, just as the reflected light on the clouds above Münster looked like avenging angels to the Anabaptists.
The groups that emerge today, as the Anabaptists did in the past, have what sociologists call “totalistic” world views and charismatic leaders; they are “volatile” and inclined to violent confrontations with authorities or within the group, and hence are inherently unstable. Not the devil is to blame, but “brainwashing, “coercive persuasion,” or”mind control”—“an ego-alien ‘false’ self” is imposed on cult victims through psychologically coercive conditioning processes and induced hypnotic states. Participation in these groups is seen from this standpoint as essentially involuntary.” This explanation has a familiar ring (once the social-science prose is interpreted) in terms of the Anabaptist experience in Münster: both Jans were “alien,” or foreign, as were many of their cadre; Knipperdolling had a “false” self imposed on his true one, perhaps; the Company of Christ were expert at coercive conditioning; et cetera. The editors of the text in which this approach is described disagree with it; they feel that brainwashing is less frightening than the idea that people can be persuaded to join such cults without such brainwashing, and prefer to attribute the appeal of cults to our “cultural fragmentation.” However, the culture in Jan’s time was monolithic, not fragmented, so the relatively old-fashioned view may hold best for the past.
Another familiar echo from the past is that with groups such as Jonestown and the People’s Temple Movement, “[t]hemes of destruction, redemption, flight and deliverance taken from the book of Isaiah were used to justify a prophecy of the destruction of the fattened nations and escape of the righteous into a new nation … The United States, its institutions and even its standards of beauty were portrayed as the ‘beast’—totally irredeemable. Well-versed in both doctrinal and operational aspects of the opposing forces of good and evil, members of the People’s Temple were prepared for sacrifice, struggle and an apocalyptic ‘final showdown.’”
The most important similarity between the Anabaptists and America’s current cults is their concept of being special, or of the Elect. The definition in a recent text, though it is also cumbersome, merits quotation in full: “An elect group is specified whose members are encouraged to define their collective and personal identities in terms of absolute contrasts with radically disvalued individuals, groups, or cultures outside of and presumptively hostile to the group. The group envisions i
tself as an enclave of truth, purity, and virtue in a corrupt, evil, and doomed world, and it may anticipate or even welcome the world’s hostility. Participants may acquire a sense of wholeness, purpose, and purity, and, moveover, may experience relief from anxiety or depression, which, however, may depend upon continuing loyalty to and solidarity with the movement and adherence to group beliefs.”
With all of this sociological ammunition in hand, it is time to take a look, finally, at the incident that first prompted this book: the destruction of the Branch Davidians and their leader, who called himself David Koresh, in Waco, Texas, in April 1993. David Koresh, born Vernon Howell, was a talented amateur musician who had been a member of the Seventh-Day Adventists; becoming captivated by church-sponsored “Revelation Seminars,” he joined an offshoot group, in itself a branch of another group, called the Branch Davidians, in 1981. He displaced the leader of that group after “various vicissitudes and altercations (including a shoot-out),” at which time he adopted the name of David Koresh. The group’s property near Waco was renamed Ranch Apocalypse, in readiness for the final desperate struggle between the government, which Koresh called the Babylonians, and the Lamb, himself and his followers. The precipitating charge that brought the Federal government down on him had to do with his accumulation of unlicensed firearms; it should also be noted that he was under investigation by the state of Texas for statutory rape and child abuse while “spreading the seed of the Messiah.”
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