On Werner Tuebke and the Principle of Hope

 On Werner Tuebke and the Principle of Hope

— of snow increase until there are fields of the stuff tinted a sickly, inflamed pink under a sky that has darkened from the color of jade to an inky black.  The Pope with the ears of an ass hovers in a floral wreath of demons, the daisy chain of flying monsters echoing the round form of an execution wheel against the horizon on which a man has been broken, hanging upside down, above a bare blasted tree that is beset by mercenaries with lances and swords next to a fool in dark motley carrying a staff from which mirrors (perhaps) are dangling beside a ragged man with a peg leg leaning on a cane in the snow, his mouth agape at the wonders and signs all around him.  Plague victims creep across the ice under a banner showing the ravaged body of Christ, half decomposed in a moldering casket.  A skeleton battles with a nobleman at the rear of the crawling procession of the disfigured sick and six candles thrust into a drift of snow flicker fitfully.  Two women ride a rustic cart pulled (apparently) by flying peasants; the cart seems about to topple over into a man-trap covered with a grill through which we see five people imprisoned below, including a prelate of the Church.  Someone peruses a book next to a bristly brown swine that is inspecting with his nose the people in the trap.  A village is being plundered under the cold, jet black sky, loot carried on heads and soldier’s shoulders and carted away in a big wagon that seems half mired in the muddy snow.  Two men carry a drunken peasant whose feet kick beneath him while a woman on horseback with flowing red hair gallops blindly across the trampled white, entranced by her own reflection in a mirror she holds before her.  Someone is being murdered while Flora, seen from behind, scatters rose petals on the snow.  A homeless woman carries her baby in its cradle strapped to her back.  Soldiers fight with lances and swords while an old woman watches dispassionately.  In a shack, half-buried in the snow a prostitute is entertaining a grizzled soldier.  A group of grotesques cluster around a skull-faced mummy next to another fool in motley with asses’ ears and a crown of peacock feathers.  He holds three yapping dogs under his arm like footballs; his belly and lower extremities are metamorphosed into a greenish serpent.  He has butterfly wings and there is a monster, a cross between an ape and a mastiff growling at the black sky on his shoulder.  The tower of Babel is being built, raised into the night’s blackness and there are mine works behind the ruinous structure, hoists and pits, swarming with tiny insect-like figures, six of them, it seems, mounted on black motorcycles.  A naked woman squirms in a wooden barrel among townsfolk with elaborate hats.  Impaled on a bare branch, a huge blue fish transparent and carrying the sun and a naked man in its belly disgorges a torrent of flood waters that are inundating a tiny town with towers and steeples.  A giant white egg, pristine and unblemished sits in the center of a pinkish, purplish snowfield.  Under the eaves of the shattered Tower of Babel, a preacher (Thomas Muentzer) is gesturing to a crowd of somber congregants some of whom fall to their knees while others listening to his sermon are backed up against a bulwark where there are two cannons with artillerymen, pointing their barrels out across a vast meadow -

1.

So far as I know, Werner Tuebke is the only 20th century artist to be accused of being a werewolf.  Neither Picasso, nor Matisse, nor Max Beckmann were reputed to be werewolves, let alone arrested and tortured for that reason.

2.

On January 14, 1946, the seventeen-year old Werner Tuebke was detained by Soviet occupation forces in his hometown of Schoenebeck (Elbe) in Saxony-Anhalt.  With several other young men, Tuebke was accused of the murder of a Red Army soldier.  He was sent to a NKVD “special camp” as a Werwolf – that is, an underground resistance fighter.  In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (abbreviated NKVD after its Cyrilliac acronym), detained about 10,000 young Germans between the ages of 15 and 17 on suspicion that they were members of armed guerilla cells. About half of these detainees died in custody.  Tuebke was imprisoned without charges until September 13, 1946 when he was released.  Several other boys arrested with him were either executed or killed by torture.  

3.

Tuebke, who survived several murderous regimes, died in Leipzig on May 27, 2004.  He was 75.  Tuebke denied his involvement in the Werwolf movement.  In fact, it’s a disputed point as to whether there were any actual Werwolfs at all.  In 1944, Hitler authorized Himmler to form an elite commando group, charged with fighting behind enemy lines – these troops were called Werwolfs, apparently on the basis of guerilla fighters said to have been active during the 30 Years War in the early 17th century.  After Germany’s collapse in April 1945, it was rumored that some of these soldiers were recruiting members of the Hitler Youth and arming them to attack occupation forces.  On the basis of this rumor, both Western and Russian occupying authorities initiated reprisals and collective punishment, probably murdering several thousand teenagers and their families to suppress enemy guerillas that most likely never existed in the first place.  Although there were some “lone wolf” attacks on occupying forces (and alleged German collaborators), the Germans were too war-weary to mount any serious insurrection.  Nonetheless, Allied authorities used the non-existent (or completely ineffectual) Werwolf scare to justify harsh measures against the German population.  U. S. Armed Forces Radio broadcast warnings to troops that “in mind, body, and spirit, every German is Hitler.”  

4.

Werner Tuebke was East Germany’s most important artist.  He trained several generations of students at the Leipzig School for Graphics and Book Arts and, then, later at the Karl Marx University in the same city.  Tuebke’s painting falls within the rubric of Socialist Realism, although he is a much more interesting artist than most of his peers and there are peculiar surrealist or “magical realist” strains that enervate his work, most of which is grotesque or macabre.  His influence is still vibrant in the so-called Leipzig School and visible in the huge paintings by post-modernist artists such as Neo Rauch.  

Tuebke is most famous for his enormous cyclorama commemorating the carnage in which the Peasant’s Rebellion of 1523 - 1525 ended.  This is his giant painting didactically entitled Fruehbuergerlich Revolution in Deutschland (“Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany”) adorning the interior of the Panorama Museum at Bad Frankenhausen, the place where the rebels were slaughtered.  Tuebke described his work on this project as elf Jahre Elend (that is, “eleven years of misery”).  The circular canvas is 40 feet tall and loops for 375 feet around the interior of a colossal cylindrical structure built on top of the mountain where the battle occurred.  “Early Bourgeois Revolution” is one of the strangest paintings ever made.

5.

In 1959, the critic John Canaday published a book called Mainstreams of Modern Art.  This book, widely influential in art history, argues that modern painting originated with Jacques Louis David in France at the time of the Revolution and, then, progressed through several generations artists working in Paris, culminating in the triumph of post-Impressionism with Matisse and Picasso.  Werner Tuebke is not within this “mainstream” – in fact, he’s as far out of the “mainstream” as you can get, occupying the lost, discredited world of Communist realistic painting, a remote galaxy apart from the School of Paris.   

6.

Ernst Bloch, the German philosopher, composed aphorisms assembled into a 1930 book Spuren (Traces).  The aphorisms assembled in the volume were written between 1910 and 1929.  Bloch’s principle of hope motivates Tuebke’s mural at Bad Frankenhausen.  Consider this passage from Traces:

Extended

Waiting also makes one desolate.  (In the previous aphorism entitled “Sleeping,” Bloch has reflected on insomnia and concluded with the sentence: “When sleepless, one notices how unpleasant it is with nothing but oneself.”) But it also makes you drunk.  Someone who stares too long at the door where he expects one to enter can become intoxicated.  As by tuneless singing that goes on and on.  Dark, to which we are drawn: probably into nothing good.  If a man comes and not the woman for whom you are waiting, the clarity of disappointment doesn’t dispel the intoxication.  It just mixes itself with the result that there is a hangover of a singular kind also present.  Hope helps against waiting, hope with which you can not only drink, but that also give you something with which to cook.  

A man is waiting for a woman.  Someone who is sleepless and creeping through a labyrinth of solitude waits for sleep.  The proletariat bides its time waiting for the revolution.  The world yearns for the Messiah that will redeem it.  Hope is the antidote against impatience and despair. It is food and drink – nourishment. 

7.

Ernst Bloch was born in Ludwigshafen in Bavaria in 1885.  He died in West Germany in 1977 at the age of 92.  Guenter Grass in his 1986 phantasmagoric novel The Rat has his heroine, the rodent named in the title, remark that rats, in general, don’t have much use for human philosophy and, certainly, aren’t interested in the “next big book by Bloch.” 

Bloch attended university at Munich.  His first book, The Spirit of Utopia was published in 1918.  Bloch’s work interprets German fairy-tales or Maerchen as examples of utopian aspiration – the poor woodcutter’s son or the little girl lost in the dark forest prevails against all rational expectations.  (It through the theoretical writing of Jack Zipes on Grimm’s fairy tales that I first encountered references to Bloch.)  In 1921, Bloch published Thomas Muentzer as Theologian of Revolution. This historical monograph had a decisive influence on Werner Tuebke’s work on the Bad Frankenhausen mural, although I can’t say for sure that the artist read that text – some things are just “in the air.”  Bloch, who was Jewish, fled the Nazi regime and ended up in New Hampshire at first, and, then, Harvard.  Working in the Harvard library, Bloch wrote his magnum opus, the three volumes comprising The Principle of Hope.  

In 1948, Bloch, an ardent Marxist, was invited to chair the department of philosophy at the University of Leipzig.  He returned to East Germany where he taught until 1957 when his criticism of the Soviet repression of the ‘56 Hungarian Revolution resulted in the regime forcing his retirement.  When the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, Bloch decided that Marxism in practice was far worse that Marxism in theory and so he remained in West Germany.  He was appointed to a position at the University of Tuebingen, the school of Hegel and Hoelderlin, and died in that Schwabian city.

8.

Rabbi Sheloma of Karlin posed a question and answered it himself:

“What is the worst thing abour evil urges?  They make a man forget he is the son of a king.”

If we are all the sons of a king, what difference would this make in our perception of the world?  How would society be organized.  But is the Rabbi’s language itself suspect: kings are royal, obsolete artifacts of a feudal system that we have outgrown.  Nonetheless, king’s inhabit Maerchen; it’s fairy-tale diction and, perhaps, we all think in fairy tales.

Thomas Muentzer was more radical: how would we imagine the world if we were all gods?  Not the sons of a king, but the heirs to heaven.

where a half-dozen corpses in motley decorate a green knoll, one of them face-down with a dagger protruding between his shoulder blades and another shown as a half-figure, that is legs only with his upper body crushed under a brown rampart, a bit like the witch smashed by the falling house in The Wizard of Oz, and, below the field of dead, men are wrestling with a big make-shift catapult fashioned from raw, splintery timbers.  (The catapult does double-duty as a scaffold from which a peasant has been hanged.) Along the upper horizon – and the skies have cleared over a blue-green landscape that stretches out forever – conical tents flying pennants disgorge from their encampment windy gusts of cavalry, horsemen bearing long lances and extending across the upper fields like pennants themselves, wispy ribbons of men riding breakneck to the right.  Below them the battle is underway: giant garlands and wreathes of struggling figures intertwined to make halos of entangled combatants around several crystalline, jade-colored meadows.  Muentzer clad in clerical garb, tall and lean, even emaciated, stands at the lower center of one of these clearings in the massacre and there is a flag crumpled below him; two drummers flank the evangelist and skeletal Death plays a bagpipe, making music to accompany the slaughter.  A woman prays on her knees and a jester with bells on his cap lies stretched out among the slain.  There is an optical illusion here, something to trick the eye: a white flag is unfurled and borne into battle and it seems to be imprinted with the figure of an imperial eagle, but this is deceit – in fact, an actual eagle has flown across the field of the banner and cast its shadow there, although the term “actual” is a misnomer as well because, of course, there is nothing real here at all – this is all pigment, brushstrokes, whorls of paint.  In the foreground, a basin is full of bluish water on which six red lily pads with cabbage-like green hearts float around a branch of red coral it seems (like a specimen in a Wunderkabinett) that lifts up above the waters a scarlet bulb impaled on its spikes, some sort of sinister fruit, and a grave assembly of eminent men are gathered around this fountain, described as a Lebensbrunnen (that is, the “fountain of life”): here we see Albrecht Duerer as depicted in his famous self-portrait as a renaissance prince and, next to him, Martin Luther, his image brown as if faded by time, and Erasmus, as engraved by Duerer, various other dignitaries of the early 16th century, including Ulrich von Hutten and  Melancthon and, to the right of the basin, Christopher Columbus bowing to bankers from the House of Fugger, these men all shielded from the vast field of slaughter above and behind them by a screen of shrubbery, some of the little plants bearing constellations of white flowers.  Above the massacre, on the hilltop, there’s a ring of embattled peasant wagons, heavy and crude-looking agricultural implements, haywains and harvest carts, and, in the sky above the Wagonberg (“wagon-fort”), Icarus is falling out of the sun in a flourish of feathers and melted wax, caught in a prismatic halo.  There, the bright stem of a mighty rainbow is springing up into the sky, vanishing above the top of the mural and coming down

9.

Werner Tuebke’s ability to work on a monumental scale was more than amply proven by his successful completion of a large mural in the lecture hall building (Rektorats Gebaeude – Rector’s building)  at Leipzig University.  The mural, bearing the unpromising title “Working Class and Intelligentsia”, was completed in 1973 and established Tuebke as East Germany’s most famous artist.  The large picture, painted in oil on a plaster surface, is located on the second level of the Rektorats Gebaeude on campus in downtown Leipzig.  You can readily visit this mural:  remember that the second floor in German usage is, in fact, the third floor according to American numbering – in Europe and Germany, in particular, the first floor in building is, in fact, the level above what we would call the ground or first floor.  The building’s interior is spacious, with impressive stairs curving up to the lecture halls above the ground floor.  The picture is accessible when the campus buildings are open – in my experience, just about all the time.  I believe the picture was originally on a wall a level below it’s present location although I may be mistaken in that regard.  The mural is controversial as a monument to the discredited Communist regime and has been armored with clear plates of glass to protect it from vandalism.  A sort of parody of the mural, intended I think as a critique of the image, has been installed on the floor directly below Tuebke’s huge painting.  This pastiche is mostly grey vacant space with a few figures based on Tuebke’s workers and students painted on the wall like refugees from the teeming mural above.  The force of Tuebke’s picture is such that it compels a counter-statement as critique.

Not only is Tuebke’s painting contentious.  The environs themselves have been a crucible of debate since the end of World War Two.  At that time, Leipzig University had been heavily bombed with 60% of its structures gutted and almost its entire famous library reduced to ash.  The University was ancient, the second oldest in Germany, founded in the 15th century and the place was storied in the annals of German culture.  Goethe attended college at Leipzig as did Wagner.  Students drank in Auerbach’s Keller, a tavern nearby that is featured in an robust and bawdy episode in Goethe’s Faust.  The school’s church, the Paulinerkirche was famous for a sermon preached from the pulpit by Martin Luther in 1545 and Bach wrote festival music for the congregation for two years before transferring his employment to the St. Thomas Church a dozen blocks away.  By some fluke, Allied bombers had missed the church and it was undamaged at the end of the World War II and lovingly conserved.  Next to the Paulinerkirche, the campaign of aerial bombardment had left the so-called Augustineum, a renaissance lecture hall, in ruins.  The roofless hulk of the old building was adjacent to the undamaged church, a massive quarry of arches and ruined walls too large to be readily removed from the city center.

The Communists renamed Leipzig University, Karl Marx University, and developed an elaborate plan to renovate the campus.  A skyscraper, shaped like a partially opened book, was planned for the site occupied by the shattered Augustineum and the Pauliner Church.  The problem that this renovation posed was that the Church, at least, was a revered local monument and in good repair.  Nonetheless, in the face of large demonstrations, the regime dynamited the Church, reducing it to rubble.  The Augustineum was also blown up and the mortar and stone hauled away in trucks.  A half-dozen historically significant wall inscriptions in the Augustineum were preserved and, in fact, inserted into the structure of the new Rektoratsgebaeude – you can see those remnants of the historic building inset in the ground floor (0 level) of that structure, weathered lettering in slabs of old yellow-grey limestone.  The religious community and artists in Leipzig opposed the destruction of these buildings, particularly the intact church, and revenged themselves on the Socialist regime, now safely defunct, in 1993.  In that year, a stone plaque was placed on the site of the old Church’s cornerstone, inscribed in Weimar-style (neo art nouveau) letters condemning the Communist’s for an “act of willful vandalism...that neither city authorities nor the University opposed.”  It’s not clear to me whether Tuebke took sides in this controversy.  By the early 70's, he was an important figure in Leipzig’s arts community, a renowned instructor at the High School for Kunst, and, probably, pampered by the regime that he served, albeit idiosyncratically, with his artistic labors.  In any event, Tuebke won the SED (United Socialist Party) competition for the commission as to the mural planned to adorn the new skyscraper lecture-hall built over the Augustineum’s foundations and the vanished Paulinerkirche.  

10.

It took Tuebke about two years to complete the mural at Karl Marx University.  The big painting was unveiled in August 1973. The picture is a tour de force, a fascinating mural depicting 120 individualized figures, each painted as portraits of actual people whose idealized features would have been immediately recognizable from these pictures on the wall.  The mural is about ten feet tall and covers a wall surface that is more than fifty feet long.  As was his custom, Tuebke prepared multitudes of detailed sketches for the painting, followed by museum-quality canvases and, ultimately, a cartoon of the picture (also museum-quality) that has been exactly painted at a ratio of one to five – the cartoon, about 15 feet long, is now in the Dresden Gemaeldegallerie of Modern Masters.  Tuebke, with assistants prepared the wall surface in the lecture hall with plaster, then, established a grid onto which the fresco image was transferred square-by-square.  

Tuebke persuaded the regime to let him visit Venice (and other Italian cities) to study murals in those places.  As a result, the painting at the Karl Marx University alludes to a number of works by Italian renaissance painters, particularly Tintoretto and Veronese with several references to Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.”  In preparation for the work, Tuebke made more than a hundred portrait sketches of university teachers and students.  The book-shaped skyscraper’s construction was in progress during this phase of the work and Tuebke spent several weeks in the drafty skeletal heights of the building, drawing more than 28 workers from life as they labored nearby to erect the building.  These portraits were transferred to the fresco where they comprise a photographically exact record of local Leipzig people and celebrities (for instance politicians in the fearsome SED) as they looked around 1971.

Tuebke’s “Working Class and Intelligentsia” is comprised of six groups of figures.  The figurative groups are arranged in vortices of faces and bodies superimposed over one another or otherwise linked by gestures, gazes, and tightly choreographed motions.  The impression that the mural gives is one of energetic twisting or whirling arranged around six centers of gravity in the context of a landscape that modulates from twilight on the left side of the mural to a bright, if apocalyptic, landscape of distant mountains and seas under a stormy sky riven by diagonal shafts of light.  The center of the mural is a white modernist facade with enigmatic windows, apparently the structure on campus housing the University’s computers, painted by Tuebke as emblems of modernity and scientific materialism, altars as it were to rationality.  Also at the top of the picture, where in Baroque art a scroll would be painted with words identifying the topic along with coats-of-arms, Tuebke has unfurled two billowing flags – the East German banner with its surveyor’s transit next to the red flag of the Soviet Union.  

The picture reads from left to right.  The first figural group represents faculty and students, full figure portraits around a majestic old man wearing a brown suit and bow-tie.  The old man is scowling at a tightly entangled group of nubile co-eds and muscular youths.  This dignified figure, a bit like an image of the Old Testament God, is recognizable as the University’s rector at the time the painting was completed, Dr. Georg Meyer, also department chair of the faculty of Jurisprudence.  Above these figures, Tuebke has painted a garden, actually a park across from his home, obscure in the gloaming with an arched bridge over a lake and stream in which the last light from the sky is reflected in blurred orangish colors.  A yard or so from the law professor, a fat man painted in the style of the Neue Sachlichkeit from the Weimer era looks out at us with a stern face with taut crooked lips; this is the director of the school’s computer department and he presides over a group of pale figures who lunge toward a big computer; in the foreground, two girls seem to be flirting with a youth sitting above a basket of flowers painted as an exuberant still-life.  This part of the picture is lime-white and radiant comprising the mural’s second figural group.  The third group is formed from about a dozen physicists, arrayed like disciples at the Last Supper around a large white table lit bright as if under florescent lights.  Several physicists have chalked equations on a blackboard to which they gesture melodramatically, as if revealing artifacts of martyrdom or the True Cross.  In the foreground, a woman in a scarlet skin-tight dress bridges the space between an imperious girl in light purple outfit and an ardent youth in a vividly green sweater.  Some sort of intrigue is underway.  The boy is obviously importuning the woman who leans, almost reclining against him – and, yet, her left hand is extended onto the lap of the imperious woman who seems to be caressing it.  The fourth monumental whorl of figures are artists associated with University.  These people are at the center of the mural, under the wind-blown flags and Tuebke has painted himself at the center of this center.  The artist leans forward to kiss his wife’s cheek while she stoops to take the arm of their son.  Several children sit on shadowy benches under the group of artists.  A little boy stares up at the fifth group of figures, local dignitaries who occupy a kind of plank dais under the apocalyptic landscape.  The head of the SED is bent over some pallets, it seems, part of the construction site on the right of the mural.  The SED chief looks out of the corner of his eyes with paranoid expression.  Around him, dignified politicians, legislators and Leipzig’s mayor posture stiffly, To the right of this fifth circle of figures, a crowd of workers swarm up a group of brown-wooden stairs, temporary access to the shadowy construction site where the buildings of the New Utopia are being constructed by workers wearing hard hats like military helmets.  A couple of architects lean against a wooden plank that serves as a sort of backstop to the torrent of frenzied motion leading to the darkness at the right edge of the picture.  Near the exact center of the foreground, a young woman in a yellow-white dress decorated with floral patterns seems to dance between the group of physicists and the tangle of artists dominated the figure of Tuebke himself shown in rear view kissing his wife.  The young woman is like an apparition from a Botticelli painting, an image of a goddess in the Primavera, and she is the most memorable, and enigmatic, figure in the mural, the personification of the eternal Spring of the spotless Socialist Republic, prancing on light feet it seems with arms held out for balance as she seems to lean back away from the direction of her terpischoran motion.  Overall, the picture throbs with motion and life; the figures are invested with Baroque energy that shapes them into energetic floral bouquets, mostly yearning, striving, pressing from the left to right.  Zones of bright interlock with areas of deep shadow that create a sort of rhythmic throbbing surface to the mural.  Portraits either defy us by glaring directly out of the picture or they elude our apprehension by entwining their gazes with the gazes of other figures in the mural.  Everyone is vividly individualized but part of a collective movement from left to right, progressing through law and philosophy, through computerized calculations to physics and, then, art.  This right-to-left motion climaxes in the muscular figures of the workmen storming construction scaffolding like ramparts and barricades on the left of the picture.  

The idea is simple-minded but governed by the Principle of Hope: law, science and art collaborate to raise the towers of the new Utopia.  It’s a sort of idealized, but passionately agitated idyll.  

11,

“Working Class and Intelligentsia” was too impressive and powerfully conceived to remain solely an artifact of Socialist Realism in the East.  In fact, several aspects of the picture represented a development parallel to the rise of photo-realist painting in West Germany and the Capitalist world.  Viewed in a certain post-modern light, Tuebke’s painting looked like an heir to Pop Art, a photo-realist image – although, of course, it’s meaning was completely different.  In any event, Tuebke with three other Leipzig painters, all part of the surrealist school founded by that painter, were invited to exhibit at the encyclopedic show of avant-garde art at Kassel, documenta 6 in 1977.  This also stirred controversy.  Several of the highly bankable German neo-expressionists, including Georg Baselitz, protested Tuebke’s inclusion in the show and, even, withdrew their paintings from the Kassel exhibition.    

12. 

Ernst Bloch wrote: “We must believe in the principle of hope.  A Marxist does not have the right to be a pessimist.”

13.

Joseph Stalin’s 70th birthday was in December 1948.  The German regime in the occupied eastern part of Deutschland made a birthday gift to the Soviet leader.  Thomas Muentzer’s manuscripts, retrieved from his mail bag or satchel after the battle at Bad Frankenhausen, were housed in a library in Dresden.  (Muentzer was an important preacher to peasant rebels involved in the 1525 uprising against the feudal lords.)  The library sent Muentzer’s writings to Moscow to show their appreciation for Stalin’s guidance and nurture of the nascent Communist state in the east that claimed to be heir to Muentzer’s radical ideology.  These manuscripts, all of them written in Muentzer’s hand, were preserved in the so-called Lenin Library in Moscow.  (This institution is currently called the Russian State Library.)  With the collapse of the Russian Federation, Muentzer’s autograph writings, letters, drafts for revolutionary pamphlets, and sermon notes, became broadly available to scholars.  In 2017, a critical edition of Muentzer’s writing was published containing these materials archived in Moscow.  

In September 2019, Matthias Riedl, a professor of Religious History at the Central European University in Budapest, lectured on the topic “Apocalyptic Platonism, the Thought of Thomas Muentzer”.  Riedl’s talk focuses on a single manuscript in the Moscow archive, notes written in Latin on the inverse of a letter.  The letter comprises a sheet of paper that would have been folded to conceal the written surface; in the renaissance, short letters of this kind were delivered within the folded sheet itself that served as the correspondence’s cover or envelope.  Muentzer made notes to himself on the correspondence, writing in Latin on the surface of the sheet that would have served as the letter’s envelope.  Riedl notes that he is the first to comment on this short, enigmatic text.  He thinks the writing was made around the time that Muentzer traveled to Prague, the city of the radical reformer Jan Hus, widely regarded as a precursor figure to Martin Luther.  It was in sermons preached in Prague that Muentzer declared that “I am the new Jan Hus” and made the distinction between the Elect, who are part of the Body of Christ, and the Reprobate, part of the Body of Satan.  This distinction underlies Muentzer’s theology of apocalyptic violence.

In the first point inscribed on the back of the letter, Muentzer says that the path to God can be either through scripture or creation.  Creation, Muentzer says is the better, more trustworthy way to find one’s way to God.  In this respect, Muentzer decisively breaks with Martin Luther, his contemporary, who declared that the only path to salvation was through scripture.  Muentzer follows Raymond of Sebond, a medieval theologian remembered today primarily on the basis of Montaigne’s essay “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” This Spanish theologian arguing that God discloses himself through two books, the Book of Nature and the Book of Holy Scripture.  The Book of Nature is a better, more comprehensive, and more persuasive guide to the divine because it can be perused and understood by the illiterate and is accessible to non-Christians, that is, Jews, Muslims, and pagans.  Furthermore, every human being partakes in the different realms expounded in the Book of Nature – that is, we have being like a stone, life by virtue of the vegetative impulse, reason because we are human, passion through Christ, and, like the angels, intuition and knowledge of the sacred.  The combination of all of these elements – aspects of the Book of Nature – comprises God; humans are made in the image of God and, therefore, are constituted to read, interpret, and enact this universal Book.

Muentzer’s second point is that the prophet must preach to people of all faiths – that is, Christian, Jew, Muslim and pagan.  All people have access to the Book of Nature and, indeed, embody that Book.  Muentzer argues that a World Council of all Churches should be convened to establish truth on the basis of this Natural Law.  This universalist doctrine guides believers to the realm of the intelligibles – that is, the Platonic ideas that are the basis for all reality.  When the Book of Nature is properly comprehended, Muentzer says that physical reality shall be overcome: all creature will return to their origin and basis, that is God, and remain as dwellers in God.  In effect, all beings will become God.  This is possible, Muenster avers, because God is nothing or no-thing – this means that God partakes of not one nature, but all possible natures.  In Muentzer’s logic ,being all things is equivalent to being no-thing or a radiant negation (Nichts) of every specific thing.  (Muentzer follows Duns Scotus Eriugena who declared that there was a nothingness of privation and a nothingness of abundance, the latter divine and the font of all things.)  This is pretty abstruse stuff and seems remote from the theology of violence that Muentzer ends up espousing.

Muentzer’s claim that salvation is available to all equally on the basis of the Book of Nature draws him into a fatal conflict with Martin Luther. Luther based salvation on scripture and faith alone derived from an understanding the Bible.  Muentzer saw Luther’s doctrines as elitist since most people in his era couldn’t read and, thus, had no direct access to scripture.  (Muentzer sought to eliminate this barrier to salvation by being the first reformer to conduct Mass in German, that is, the popular tongue.)  Everything was beautifully simple, Muentzer asserted: open your eyes to nature, both around you and in your heart, and you will be saved.  But, of course, the world is fallen and people commit evil acts and, so, there must be an explanation for the fact that nature and mankind have not (yet) been redeemed.  What is this cause?

Thomas Muentzer’s solution to the problem of evil and the unregenerate is also lucid, simple, and fearsome: there is a force in the world that opposes human salvation.  This force that Muentzer calls the Body of Satan opposes the Good, that is, the Body of Christ.  Muentzer’s claim is that if the Body of Satan is eliminated, then, the Body of Christ acting in accord with Book of Nature will establish a new paradise on earth and the Elect will return to God, their origin.  This is the essence of Muentzer’s Prague Manifesto of 1521.  

Humanity, Muentzer argues, is divided between the Elect who are within the Body of Christ and the Reprobate who belong to Satan. The Reprobate are largely comprised of priests, monks, and other clerics – that is, followers of the Book of Scripture.  They misconstrue God’s mandates and are predestined to damnation.  The organized church is satanic; from the date of the Nicene council to the present all of its conclaves have been the work of the Devil.  The Reprobate or anti-Elect, operating largely through the Roman Catholic Church, impeded the work of the Spirit; their role is to cast down the Elect who are largely illiterate, poor, and oppressed.  

The Elect have the gift of discernment: they can tell who is Elect and who is damned and, therefore, reprobate.  This gift requires the implementation of what Muentzer calls the Absonderung or “selection” of the Elect from the Reprobate.  This winnowing will be accomplished by an apocalyptic process that Muentzer termed the “the great imminent bloodshed”.  The Elect must take up arms and destroy the godless.  The Reprobate are creations of Satan and must be killed.  With the elimination of the Body of Satan, the world is purified and the process of Vergoetterung (“deification”) can commence.  The material world is annihilated and the Elect assume their spiritual form.  The reformed Church and all the Elect return to their origins in God. 

The consequences of these ideas are lethal.  The Book of Nature is an infallible map to salvation.  The Book of Scripture has been willfully misinterpreted and capriciously applied.  The printed word, without the authority of its original speaker, is untethered – it can mean anything to anyone.  Therefore, evil comes into the world with literacy, with reading.  If you can read these words, this is probably a sign that you are among the Reprobate.  Therefore, Muentzer aligns himself with Mao’s cultural revolution and Pol Pot: those who can read should be detained and exterminated.  

14.

The East German regime’s desire to produce a monument to Thomas Muentzer at Bad Frankenhausen had precedents.  Paradoxically, the DDR, a materialist, atheistic, and Marxist polity, celebrated Muentzer as one of its spiritual forbears.  Muentzer was imagined like a Communist John the Baptist, a voice from the wilderness, proclaiming the coming of the Messiah, in this case, the East German “socialist worker’s and peasant’s state.”  The DDR was thought to be the fulfilment of Muentzer’s radical prophecies, although corrected to eliminate the religious epiphenomenon overlying the Protestant reformer’s implicit critique of early modern class relations.  For this reason, Muentzer’s portrait appeared on five mark notes issued by the East German “Staatsbank.”  

Similarly, DEFA, the East German state-owned film production company, released an impressive epic based on Muentzer’s life in 1956.  This big-budget, large-scale film was directed by one of DEFA’s yeoman film makers, Martin Hellberg, and featured a cast of hundreds of colorfully costumed peasants and Landsknechts (mercenaries).  In the movie, Wolfgang Stumpf, in the role of Muentzer clad in black clerical gowns and sporting an unfortunate Prince Valiant haircut, rants to his congregation and, then, leads an army of peasants marching to the defense of the rebels besieged within their wagon stockade atop the round crest of the Hausberg at Bad Frankenhausen.  (This is the location where Tuebke’s colossal painting made to commemorate the Peasant’s War is now displayed.)  The movie is effectively photographed, featuring many low-angle shots of soldiers and banners against turbulent skies crammed with wind-sculpted thunderclouds.  The climactic battle scene invokes Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky with densely entangled masses of men seething in close combat under grids of criss-crossed lances.  There are Brueghel-styled shots of carousing peasants, some bawdy encounters between buxom wenches and rebels, and lots of shots of burning villages and monasteries. We see Muentzer abduct his bride Ottilie from a convent to the consternation of the other nuns and there are disturbing scenes involving medieval torture inflicted on the rebels (and, at the end, on Muentzer).  The movie is shot in lavish technicolor, particularly effective in the combat scenes involving hordes of peasants in orange and rich brown tunics fighting with mercenary soldiers clad in scarlet cloaks.  Cavalry charges back and forth and ranks of soldiers march along hillsides and, when the peasants unfurl their rainbow flag, the sky obligingly gives them a sign, a great double rainbow stretching from horizon to horizon over the lush green hills of Thuringia.  In the twilight, Lutheran and Catholic priests administer communion to the kneeling mercenaries while on the opposite mountain side thousands of peasants sing a hymn to the Holy Spirit, all of this lit by hundreds and hundreds of flaring torches. (The clash in Lutheran and Catholic theologies is temporarily put aside so that the class enemy – that is, the peasants – can be expeditiously destroyed.) The film presents the peasant army as betrayed by villains within its ranks and the insurgent’s cannons can’t be fired due to adulterated gunpowder provided to the rebels.  The fighting, really isn’t shown except for a couple of brief shots.  The actual battle would be too depressing to depict – the filmmaker opts to simply show us hundreds of corpses strewn over the meadows on the hillside.  

One of the rebel soldiers is tortured.  An evil prince astounded at the man’s fortitude asks him what the rebels wanted, that is, what did they wish to accomplish by their uprising.  The man whispers: Omnia sunt communia – “All must be owned in common.”  Muentzer is shown half-dead on a hay wagon.  He has also been tortured.  Muentzer says that he was born too early but that paradise will be forged on earth in the future.  Ottilie says that the peasant’s paradise will rise from the fertile soil of Germany like the “golden corn”.  As Muentzer is hauled away to be beheaded, the trees along the way gruesomely decorated with peasants who have been hanged, Ottilie clutches to her bosom Muentzer’s writing, a gift to the future socialist workers and peasants regime.

Of course, the West German critics savaged the movie and said that it was ridiculous, portraying Muentzer as a sort of precursor to the DDR’s party boss, Walter Ulbricht.  Historians pointed out that the peasants were slaughtered not as a result of treason in their ranks (or bad gunpowder) but because they were simply unequipped to fight the well-armed and disciplined Landsknechts arrayed against them.  And, of course, Muentzer, like everyone else, succumbed to torture.  He renounced his radical opinions, signed a confession, and admitted his errors, while, at the same time, betraying others who had been at his side during the uprising.  The West German film reviewers were as tendentious in their own way as the East Germans – in fact, the movie is tedious but impressively made and not half-bad.  

There is a great line in the picture.  The peasants propose to melt down church bells to forge cannons from them.  Wohl geschossen ist half-gebetet, one of them says: that is, a “Good shot is half-prayer.” 

to the right of the fortress of wagons, a great shaft of rainbow that plunges into the heart of the earth like a lancepoint tearing open someone’s breast, colored light nuzzling the blood- stained earth beside an elegant lady in green who strides forward, entranced and indifferent to all the killing around her, making her way toward an allegorical Justice, also a woman in brown classical garments, bearing a scales in one hand and immense sword in the other, this figure riding on the back of the earth as if it were a fat squat pony or some kind of tame elephant.  The air here is cacophonous with horns, fourteen of them upraised above turnip-headed musicians, a visual counterpoint to the forests of spears that we have left behind on the battlefield under the rainbow’s arch.  The horns are shaped like parenthesis marks and they are sounding the Last Trump beneath a great wedge of the damned falling upside-down out of the sky, a funnel full of excrement-colored, lumpy sinners, some of them harassed by black-eyed monsters, flushed down the toilet into a dark hole that ends their descent between Lady-Justice astraddle the world and a dwarf locked in a pillory, feet thrust out toward the viewer.  Beneath this display of divine wrath, earthly justice is enacted: two hanged men are suspended from a low gallows backed by spider webs. a female mourner with her back to us standing behind a third condemned man who is being marched to his execution.  A crowd of mercenaries have herniated from the battlefield to the left into this scene of judgment; the troops surround a cavalryman slumped over his horse – dangling from his gauntleted hand, there is an arquebus stuffed into a some sort of leather pouch, the shape of firearm and holster mirroring the upturned gold trumpets blasting at the air.  Some courtiers with their ladies have taken refuge in a square brown box – a peasant peeps over the wall and a squatting demon vomits fire into the enclosure and, then, there is another wall, as well as a decrepit fence, a second room in which noblemen and ladies are dining on roast rodent set on a platter atop a sumptuously embroidered green table-cloth.  Along the upper edges of the steep slope, just below the sky (it is gloomy now, with a heavy low-hanging clouds above a fringe of greenish-blue at the horizon), a sailing ship has somehow foundered against the back of the ridge although there is neither sea nor water to be seen, and the hilltop is adorned with the sort of caparisoned tents that one might imagine at a joust or other medieval tournament and, within the brightly colored tents, we can see animals regal and crowned, these beasts of indeterminate species above another brown enclosure, three walls open to the viewer like a stage-set, a print-shop where men are busily setting type and women embossing great folio sheets of text beside a weird assembly of wheels within wheels and millwork, a hive of activity above a mob of dancing peasants, thirty or more, whirling around as if at one of Brueghel’s kermesses.  The peasant dance tails off into a gloomy meadow where a woman on a stallion trots to the right above a haggard-looking artist (Tuebke) holding his paintbrush like a sword and his palette like a heavy shield and, if the horse continues its advance, the animal and rider

15.

Kaethe Kollwitz made graphic work that is also a precedent to Tuebke’s mural at Bad Frankenhausen.  Unlike the DEFA film on the subject, Kollwitz’ engravings were acclaimed throughout Germany when they were published in Berlin between 1902 and 1908.  Kollwitz’ cycle of engravings on the Peasant Rebellion remain highly regarded and the artist was one of those rare figures who remained respected in both the East and West.  In East Germany, Kollwitz’ prestige was related to her empathy for the poor and her Leftist political views – if not an actual Communist, she was undoubtedly Socialist: her work includes a moving woodcut of Karl Liebknecht in his casket, pictures of starving women and children, and powerful posters promoting pacifism.  (Her 1924 image of a woman protester raising her arm to the skies and proclaiming Nie Wieder Krieg – “Never again war! –is iconic.)  In the West, Kollwitz was renowned as a formidable feminist artist; she also designed posters agitating for women’s rights and her subject matter includes harrowing representations of dying mothers and babies as well as rape victims.  

Kollwitz rose to fame as a graphic artist with her densely incised cycle of engravings A Weaver’s Revolt made between 1893 and 1897.  (Kollwitz was inspired to engrave the six etchings after attending a performance of Gerhardt Hauptmann’s muck-raking realist play about a strike, The Weavers.)  The pictures were renowned and awarded a gold medal at the 1897 Great Berlin Art Exhibition – the jury granting this award was led by the famous Adolf Menzel, one of Germany’s greatest artists.  If anything Kollwitz’ fame increased when the Kaiser, Wilhelm II vetoed the presentation of the medal to her.  

Beginning in 1902, Kollwitz began studies for a cycle of seven engravings based on her reading of a historical account of the 1524-1525 Peasants Rebellion, Wilhelm Zimmerman’s magnum opus entitled A General History of the Great Peasant War, a book published about 50 years earlier.  Kollwitz worked on the engravings for six years, issuing them sporadically and, then, in a subscription edition in 1908.  Like Tuebke, Kollwitz is an extremely intentional and thoughtful artist; she made hundreds of sketches and experimental engravings before settling upon the compositions that comprise the completed cycle.  

Kollwitz’ view of the Peasant Rebellion is very dark, both literally and figuratively.  The engravings are densely textured with hachure-like strokes that cast the figures in these works into deep and inky gloom.  (It is probably a trite observation but Kollwitz’ approach to engraving seems to me to involve traditionally female textile arts; the marks she makes with her burin are like a form of microscopic needlework.  At the recent MOMA exhibition of Kollwitz’ engravings and other art, visitors were issued magnifying glasses so that the could study the intricate detail of parallel lines and incisions cut into the plate to constitute the final design).  In the opening image, two peasants are harnessed to a plow and lean forward like Ernst Barlach’s figures – exertion stretches them out almost horizontally against the black field that they are harrowing.  Kollwitz’ insistent feminism is evident in the second picture showing a woman who has been raped stretched out against a grisly looking garden wall – a small child peeps over the crumbling masonry.  (The image is a variant on Daumier’s famous image of the corpulent dead worker in his print "Rue Transnonain".)  Rebels swarm up out of a pitchblack crypt and there is a battle.  A hag with her fists raised in the air, the infamous “Black Anna” urges the men onward – a great wave of them is thrust across the engraving forming a background to the witch driving the peasants into battle.  In a grim close-up, as it were, Kollwitz shows a terrifying peasant woman sharpening her scythe.  The woman’s face and brow are skeletal and she has slits for eyes in which some sort of murky fluid seems to signify that she is already dead and decaying.  A few pictures later, a mother pictured as if at the bottom of a pool of tar shines a candle on the face of her dead son.  Then, the peasant rebels are rounded up and they stand in a sullen mob, fettered, and behind a rope cordon .

The cycle of engravings are uncompromising.  Kollwitz takes no prisoners.  Her peasants are brutes with slack jaws and faces like gorillas.  Black Anna is a spectral figure from a nightmare.  The woman with scythe is a hideous apparition, signifying, it seems, mindless violence.  Kollwitz is constitutionally unable to glorify violence – although she, apparently, believes the peasant’s cause is righteous, she shows the rebels as simian brutes, grotesque faces like those we glimpse in Goya’s late works.  The Peasant’s Rebellion is a witch’s sabbath in Kollwitz’ engravings.  

16,

In this country, Kollwitz has always made critics uncomfortable.  There’s too much anguish in her work, too much gloom, and, at least, in the nineteen-fifties, she was denounced as a sentimental purveyor of violent agit-prop.  After a New York show in 1959, one critic described her subject matter as trite, “like being hit by a wet sponge,” an artist whose followers had diminished to the vanishing point.  

Leonard Baskin, himself a socially conscious printmaker, defended her in these terms:

“(People accuse Kollwitz’s work) as too bitter and terrible to experience (with) the larger criticism that her prints are propaganda pieces and little better than journalism...Have we become so feeble that we can’t hearken to a passage of pure color if that color exists for the further purpose of forging a symbol, an image, a fable or a wound?  Must the formal substructure be all? Has ever a great work been breathed into existence wanting those formal elements that are now esteemed for their skeletal selves?  To these rhetoricals, no.  And, yet, Kollwitz in our current artistic ambience is misunderstood by sentimentalists or dismissed by formalists.  All art is propaganda.  All art is tendentious...to carp at Kollwitz for her propaganda, her literary or journalistic qualities is cant.  And cant is what we must excise, not content.”

I suppose similar criticisms and a similar defense apply to Werner Tuebke’s painting.  In one of my exhibition catalogs of Tuebke’s work, there is a photograph of the artist in suit and tie accepting the East German Kollwitz award in 1980.  Viewed in profile, Tuebke has a pointed nose and pointed chin.  The Kollwitz award seems to be a cardboard portfolio.  The government apparatchik shakes Tuebke’s hand so vigorously that their grip is a speed-blur.  

17.

The idea of utopia is indispensable to human life.  The notion of utopia, Bloch argued, underlies both fairy tales (Maerchen) and religion.  Hoping against hope, we yearn for paradise, not in some celestial sphere, but here on earth among the things that we can see and touch and feel and taste.  

Freud and Bloch espouse opposite visions with respect to human desire.  Freud argues that civilization is founded upon the repression of human instincts; if desires were unleashed without societal curbs, chaos would result.  The son desires to kill his father – in Freud’s analysis, the father represents any authority figure who limits his access to the horde’s women.  This fundamental desire can not be eradicated but only controlled by repressive mechanisms.  As a consequence, human life is inevitably tragic – what is deepest and most authentic about us, our desires, must be held in check if we are to live together with some semblance of decent order.  Freud thought that authoritarian movements, such as fascism, were death cults – that is, mass movements in which individuals instinctively feel that the dilemmas of civilization, what he called it’s “discontents”, could be overcome only by cathectic explosions of violence directed by the father figure against outsiders: Jews, gypsies, communists.  Freud’s post world war one thinking came to be increasingly dominated by his concerns with Thanatos or the death instinct.  The impulse toward organic dissolution, chaos and death, in Freud’s understanding, is equivalent in force to the libido (or sexual impulse).  In Fascism, repressed sexuality, the price of civilization, expresses itself in a drive toward organized death in which the individual is submerged in the “oceanic” energies of the mass movement.  Fascism intends death and mimics that process by allowing its adherents to lose themselves, or surrender their individual ego-identities, to the mass movement.

Bloch’s notion of human existence and its political expression is very different.  For Bloch, as with Freud, the basis of our being is desire.  But Bloch interprets this desire as a yearning for utopia, that is, the desire to dwell ‘in a place where we have never been, but will feel at home.”  The content of utopia is empty.  No one knows what this yearned-for place will be like; all that we know is that it will satisfy our deepest desires.  In this context, Bloch interprets fascism as a religious and apocalyptic movement, the desire to institute (or, perhaps, reinstitute) paradise on earth.  Nazism, in Bloch’s view, was fundamentally religious, a promise that paradise might be achieved, albeit at great cost and after enormous striving, in the only place where it matters – that is, here in our time among living men and women.  “Religion”, Bloch noted, is a word that means at its root “a return” – that is, to “re-read” reality, or “re-bind” or “re-attach” ourselves to what is true.  In both senses, “religion” implies a turning-back to a truth that we have always known, perhaps, but chosen to obscure or forget.  Bloch’s “principle of hope” roots itself in the idea that, in our hearts, we know that we are created for paradise.    

18.

Freud was dying from jaw cancer when the Nazis came knocking at his door.  Dr. Max Schur, his physician, prescribed large doses of narcotic to control the old man’s pain.  Anna Freud persuaded Schur to give her a fatal dose of veronal in a small vial.  This was so that Anna could commit suicide if arrested by the Gestapo – like all reasonable people, Anna feared torture. On March 22, 1938, Freud recorded in his journal: “Anna at Gestapo.”  His daughter had been detained.  It’s not clear to me why she didn’t use the veronal to end her life.  Possibly, the Nazis were polite to her and thought that she might cooperate.

Two of Freud’s former patients with political influence intervened on Anna Freud’s behalf: the American ambassador to Austria    and Princess Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon’s great-granddaughter.  Anna was released.  Princess Bonaparte was wealthy and she bribed officials in Austria to allow Freud and his immediate family safe passage from Vienna to London where he died a year later.  

19,

On October 23, 1986, under drab, overcast skies, Keith Haring walked six feet into the Soviet-East German sector of Berlin and began painting the Wall.  The artist was wearing Nike sneakers and a black sweatshirt.  He had buckets of red and black paint and a step-ladder but applied his marks on the Wall up to about the height that he could comfortably reach, working down to the level of his knees.  People gathered on the street behind Haring in West Berlin.  The East German border guards atop their sentry towers were annoyed but looked the other way.  Haring had a Boom Box turned up as loud as possible, playing disco music.  After awhile, an American army helicopter appeared in the grey sky and hovered above the spectacle.  

Haring is often characterized as a graffiti artist and he worked extensively in the Manhattan subways until as late as 1985 when his fame had increased to the point that art collectors were stealing his painted works from the tunnel walls as quickly as he made them.  As recent exhibitions establish, Haring was a more subtle artist than his reputation suggests and, in fact, one of the great graphic designers of the 20th century.  His premature death from AIDS deprived the art world of a talent who would have undoubtedly created scores of masterpieces had he survived; his massive body of work completed before he died at age 31 in 1989 is remarkably impressive and moving.  

The Berlin mural was made a few yards away from Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing from the American-controlled sector and East Germany.  At that location, an anti-Communist crusader, Rainer Hildebrandt had established a museum documenting German resistance to the Wall and escape efforts over the border involving secret compartments in cars, balloons and tunnels – many of these attempts at escape were fatal.  Hildebrandt commissioned Keith Haring’s mural and, a couple days before the artist arrived in Berlin, had 300 feet of the concrete block structure prepared for the artist.  The Wall had been painted a bright yellow, covering up pre-existing accretions of graffiti.  Haring’s work was executed in yellow, black, and red, that is, the colors of German flag.

There was some chance that the East German guards would shoot Haring, although, it seems, that this risk was minimal.  Haring is supposed to have spoken with some of the guards in his High School German and asked them to tolerate his work on the wall, although this seems improbable to me.  Since Haring’s work was made on the wall surface facing the Western sector, but technically within East Germany, the guards would have been authorized to gun him down.  But people generally cooperate with another (the “principle of hope”) and the East Berlin sentries ignored Haring’s painting.  

Haring said that his painting was an attempt to psychologically destroy the wall.  His mural consists of eight- or nine-foot long figures arrayed in a horizontal chain in which hands merge with feet to link the personages together.  The figures alternate between red and and black, vividly marked against the bright golden underpainting.  Haring showed the figures radiating light or, perhaps, vibrating in some way – this was accomplished by painting dashes around the forms linked at hands and feet.  

Haring worked for five or six hours.  Then, he went to a disco to dance.  By the next morning, much of his mural was effaced.  One German artist poured buckets of grey paint on the brightly drawn figures, announcing that Haring’s work “was childish”.  Another artist covered parts of the mural with a dense swath of black paint.  Haring was indifferent.  He said: “If it is not required to be ‘sacred’ or ‘valuable’, then, I can paint without inhibition.  It’s existence is already established...made permanent by the camera.”

Three years later, on November 9,1989, the Berlin Wall was pulled down by crowds of rejoicing people.  Historians have given Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev most of the credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall, but, I think, Keith Haring’s mural was also involved.  Haring died three months after the Wall was torn down on February 16, 1990.  So far as I know, it is not known what WernerTuebke, another mural artist, thought about Haring’s work.   

20.

In 1975, Werner Tuebke had the DDR’s ministry of culture over a barrel.  The superiority of his negotiating position explains the esthetic license granted to him by the East German state, a regime that was otherwise notably repressive with respect to its official artistic ideology.  Simply stated, the DDR culture ministry had the cart before the horse and was in no position to dictate terms to its star artist.  The great cylindrical rotunda of the Bad Frankenhaus monument was already mostly built, a fluted white piston thrust up into the sky at the crest of mountain overlooking the city, the place where Muentzer’s rebels had been slaughtered.  The regime planned to commemorate the 550th anniversary of the massacre with official observances in 1975 and, so, these proceedings were already behind schedule.  The shape of the monument and its rotunda dictated the size of the mural, a blank wall running around the circular interior of the building comprising more than 1800 square meters (or more than one square mile).  Something had to be painted on that surface: the DDR Kulturministerium proposed a panoramic view of the battlefield, something on the order of the battle cycloramas at Gettysburg, Atlanta, and the site of the Borodino battlefield near Moscow.  According to the Ministry of Culture, the panorama should be immersive and illusionistic, infusing visitors with the perception that they were at the center of clamor and chaos of the fighting.  

The most obvious candidate for this commission was the regime’s most famous and ambitious painter, Werner Tuebke.  Representatives of the Ministry approached him in April 1975.  At that time, Tuebke was sufficiently well-known to have sold art in West Germany and other parts of the world.  The organizers of documenta 6 (the Kassel avant-garde exhibition) had approached him with the request that he produce work for that show in BDR.  The East German government was proposing a project on the scale of Michelangelo’s frescos at the Sistine Chapel, an analogy that Tuebke repeatedly pressed during his negotiations.  The artist advised that the Ministry was suggesting to him that he devote the best and most productive years of his artistic career to this vast project, an undertaking that he was supposed to complete within the course of a decade.  Needless to say, Tuebke was skeptical and reluctant.  So he drove a hard bargain.  

In April 1975, Tuebke presented a proposal to the Kulturministerium insisting upon 13 specific points.  (I haven’t been able to discover what he was paid for the work, although I assume his fee was astronomical.  I’ve seen Tuebke’s Leipzig studio on Springerstrasse in a very upscale neighborhood; the structure is a huge neo-Medieval villa with octagonal corner towers and an elaborate roof with arched gables located a block and a half from the Rosenthal Park, the city’s downtown green space, roughly equivalent to Manhattan’s Central Park.)  The Ministry of Culture wanted a large-scale battle panorama, a bombastic mural of sound and fury on the order of the Borodino Museum panorama near Moscow.  Tuebke proposed something very different.  The artist understood that a simple representation of the slaughter on the Bad Frankenhausen hilltop would not be particularly inspiring – after all, thousands of peasants were simply cut down on the mountain; the fighting was so one-sided as to be grotesque – six mercenaries in the employ of the princes who repressed the revolt were killed; over 5000 peasants died.  Therefore, any accurate picture of the massacre would be disheartening – the affair wasn’t a battle but a one-sided massacre.  Accordingly, Tuebke proposed that his panorama would be a kuenstlerische Bewaltigung – that is, an artistic marshaling – of all aspects of the entire epoch that produced the Peasant’s rebellion.  Tuebke’s project was wildly ambitious.  The mural would provide a survey of the thought, religiosity, commerce, and socio-economic forces underlying Muentzer’s role in the rebellion.  Tuebke didn’t merely aim to paint events; rather, his goal was to embody in painted imagery the ideas, the mentalities, and cultural forces that engendered the conflict.

Possibly to his surprise the East German ministry of culture accepted all 13 demands set forth in his proposal.  The government had no real choice in the matter.  No one else was qualified to execute a work on this scale and candidates seeking the commission weren’t exactly lining up for employment on the project.  Although Tuebke agreed to work efficiently on the commission, no specific deadlines were imposed on him.  Specifically invoking Michelangelo’s commission on the Sistine Chapel, Tuebke said that the work would be “highly expert and painted personally by (Tuebke)...and not conceived in pedagogical terms as a mere illustration of history... after preliminary work has been completed, I will be allowed to execute the work with a free hand, not beholding to anyone.”  Although Tuebke was entirely responsible for the work, he was authorized to retain assistants (“Altgesellen” – a word with medieval guild inflections: “senior artisans”).  Ultimately, the transfer of the cartoon design, a 1 to 20 oil painting used to model the work in the rotunda, was accomplished by Tuebke with 15 assistants, each of whom he personally trained so as to imitate his unique tache or brush-style and technique.  In July 1975, in a letter to the Ministry of Culture confirming the proceedings, Tuebke explained again that his “intentions were not illustrative nor didactic nor archival (as in a museum) but instead the logic of the mural would be governed entirely by art and my own style of painting which would be not only central but dictate all outcomes.”   The Culture ministers entrusted with the project were skeptical but had no choice but to accept Tuebke’s terms.  

Tuebke began work in the Fall of 1975.  His initial study involved personal interviews with historians and art experts specializing in the period of the Reformation.  He consulted hundreds of books and amassed a huge archive of images produced during the time of what Tuebke had come to call the “Fruehbuergerlich Revolution” – that is the “early bourgeois revolution.”  Tuebke’s method of study was peculiar – he reported that “in contrast with his earlier art-historical work,” he “avoided traditional objective (wissenschaftlich) work in an actual sense, but (rather) dreamed my way through the texts, assimilated much to my short-term memory, sketched groups of figures, for long stretches of time forgetting entirely my objectives.  Fragments that later found their place in the work.”  Tuebke worked in this fashion, producing ten large paintings, 150 sketches, and a dozen lithographs.  As I understand the terms of the DDR commission, Tuebke owned this work product and was authorized to market it for his own benefit.  Around January 1979, Tuebke felt that his preliminary studies were complete and he began work on the 1 to 10 cartoon, in fact, a fully executed oil painting, that would control the mural’s final execution.  This work was finished July 1, 1982 (varnish applied to the surface at that date) and, then, displayed in East Berlin at a gallery opening attended by Erich Honecker, then, the leader of the DDR with many other party dignitaries in attendance.  The Ministry of Culture approved the final design and work commenced on the panorama at Bad Frankenhausen shortly thereafter.  

21.

One of the Hassidic masters told his congregation: “Every day you should go out of Egypt.”  This is the principle of Hope, every day escaping the bondage of Pharaoh, fleeing across the Red Sea on the way to the Promised Land.  In his reflections on Hegel, Erich Bloch wrote that “the future must be discovered in the past – that is, the history of philosophy and, also, the philosophy of history.”

22.

Is it sheer coincidence that Tuebke’s monumental painting is co-terminous with the Communist regime in East Germany?  Tuebke applied the last strokes of paint to the mural on September 11, 1987. The Panorama Museum at Bad Frankenhausen was opened to the public on September 14, 1989.  The Berlin Wall fell seven weeks later.  

23.

The first problem that Tuebke had to solve as to the composition of the enormous panorama was perspective.  How should vanishing points be managed with respect to a painting designed to be seen in the round?  Characteristically, Tuebke experimented with various approaches, not in mere sketches, but, in fact, painted fully complete canvases on a heroic scale.  

His first perspective experiment is a picture called “Schlachtberg” (“Battle Mountain”) finished in 1976.  The painting is 5 feet long and 15 inches tall, that is, an elongated, horizontal rectangle.  The canvas shows a stormy sky against which we see dramatic ridges and outcropping buttes of the kind visible in Brueghel paintings, stony acropolis heights spiky with castles.  Armored cavalry charges through greenish-brown gloom and there are phalanxes of men armed with long lances rushing across dark meadows.  Figures seem to confront one another but without actually clashing.  At the center of painting, a skeletal death sits on an execution wheel, legs crossed rather foppishly above a sullen-looking peacock perched on a dead tree.  Some horses are plunging over a hillock into the foreground.  The painting is stormy with motion, but, somehow, also invested with crystalline, glacial stillness.  Tuebke’s landscapes with figures occupy the lower two-thirds of the canvas with elaborately stormy skies displayed at the top of the picture.  This spatial structure was deemed unacceptable by Tuebke.  Central perspective used in the painting does not allow for expansion to the right and left of the long narrow frieze.  The relatively low horizon stretches the action against a relatively narrow plane. With exception of some idiosyncrasies, for instance death on the wheel, and an apocalyptic horseman bleached white and riding through the clouds, the picture is a generic battle scene.

Tuebke tried again with a 1978 canvas “Vorfassung mit Kogge” (Preliminary study of Cog) that is five feet wide and two feet seven inches tall.  (This is close to the format that Tuebke would use for the five wooden panels comprising the 1 to 10 final design made to be transferred to the mural.)  In this painting, Tuebke solves the spatial and perspective problems by moving the horizon upward toward the top of the panel.  In “Vorfassung,” the lower 4/5th of the canvas are a landscape steeply tilted toward the viewer and presenting a partly aerial perspective on the action.  Using this format, Tuebke is able to expand the action indefinitely along the horizontal axis.  The picture shows the titular cog, a renaissance sailing vessel with muscular bulging sails moving to the left on a turbulent river.  On the banks of the stream, occupying the middle portion of the canvas, various vignettes show priests preaching, a billowing crucifixion, a saint holding a banner ascending into a heaven suffused with visionary pink and purplish light among other symbolic groupings of men and animals.  A small, partially swamped ship of fools full of wax-faced dignitaries, judges and prelates with bony Death amidst them floats on the stream.  A man has fallen off the ship’s stern and another saint with halo seems to have climbed a dead tree to get a better look at the proceedings.  It’s a complicated picture with at least 80 figures and represented Tuebke’s solution to the spatial logic that he intended to impose on the panorama.  

On a battlefield, a mule was threatened with capture.  The mulwill nudge up against a dying man, half-naked with his green-swathed head pillowed on rock, exhaling his soul, like a mewling infant, into the arms of a flying demon with the face of demonic fox, a monster crowned with red fire, the same sort of flames that are crouched at the feet of a group of monks and city-fathers supplicant to Martin Luther, here wearing the black cowl of a monk and waving a pamphlet in their faces, the Reformer himself two-faced with the visage on the back of his skull aimed at a lurid crucifixion in which more shit-brown monsters crowd around the foot of the cross tormenting a swooning monk in red vestments with a forked beard and a gold halo represented in the Byzantine-style as a crescent of featureless radiance – the zombie Christ hanging overhead is a robust, muscular corpse with wasp-like creatures driving spears into its side. What has happened here is that all forward, or retrograde, motion has stalled and tight little knots of murderous figures are strewn haphazardly across a brown desert, the color of a trampled feed-lot.  It’s as if a hellscape by Bosch or Brueghel has been blown to pieces by some sort of explosive, shedding image-shrapnel and gouts of red flame in all directions.  At the center of desert, a ship heavily laden with fools has run aground, no water anywhere in sight.  An old man with a ladle-shaped paddle sits at the stern of the vessel – Tuebke has painted himself aboard among the other gaunt figures: pastors and monks, tricksters and confidence men.  The ship seems to have come onto dry land on foot – two discarded work boots sit near the prow of the vessel.  Random processions of animals dressed in human clothing march to the right and left, toward the bottom of the picture and the horizon: a rooster flies overhead and a man is improbably carrying a lamb on his shoulders.  Herons and cranes strut around and hens are jousting and a couple of geese are hanging a fox in a thorn tree.  Predatory birds with hooked beaks patrol the remote corners of the desert.  An impoverished craftsman, fled from his guild, staggers past a boar with a unicorn horn flanked by a devil with four breasts.  Behind him, there is a Burgberg, an array of castles and keeps on a hilltop, a curved bridge spanning a river gushing out of the base of the cliffs.  There is more water to the left, a frozen pond on a which a court with fool judges and fool jurors has been convened to slip and slide on the ice.  Some demons have crucified the Pope who wears a heap of tiaras on his head and monsters flail at him.  More monsters are harrying a hapless mob of indulgence salesmen and, above the stalled-out ship, a peasant stands aghast as a winged angel with face of a mummy confronts him – it’s some sort of annunciation played out against a translucent blue sphere through which we can see the crosses at Golgotha,  brightly colored crowds pooling around the scene of execution.  In the foreground, six angels are unleashing vials of wrath, indigo shafts of acid that drench a parade of heavily armored knights, near them, a woman bathes her head and shoulders in a falling column of poison as if taking a shower bath.  This is a vision from the book of Jeremiah and a scarlet head with staring eyes and a round, shrieking head hovers over a pot, a flesh-pot, apparently, the Baphomet in an orb of blue that is either a puddle or fabric and to the right, where a fissured brown cliff angles upward, another

24.

On a  battlefield a muleteer told the beast that he should run to avoid being seized by the enemy troops.

The mule didn’t move and replied: “I can only carry one pannier.  No one will load me with more.”

Aesop says that for the poor, a change of masters is without consequence.  

25.

Unlike most of his compatriots in East Germany, Werner Tuebke was authorized to travel outside of the Eastern Bloc.  (In 1961, he spent a year as a student in the Soviet Union and the Caucasus; in 1969, he vacationed in Bulgaria.)  Beginning in 1971, Tuebke, as the DDR’s prestige painter and informal cultural ambassador, was encouraged to travel in France, Italy, and West Germany.  In 1976, he married for a second time after his marriage to first wife, Angelika Hennig, ended in divorce that year.  He seems to have honeymooned with Brigitte Schellenberger in West Germany and France.  Nothwithstanding the daunting commission for the monument at Bad Frankenhausen, Tuebke traveled to Bulgaria again and the Caucasus, participating as well in the documenta exhibition in Kassel in West Germany.  In the next two years, Tuebke was in West Germany again, Italy, France and Soviet Union.  (In Italy, he met the aging de Chirico, the metaphysical painter whose influence is evident in many of  Tuebke’s work; de Chirico was heir to the renaissance Mannerist painters and there is a palpable  Mannerist aspect to many of Tuebke’s pictures, including the mass of studies and canvases related to the Bad Frankenhausen mural.)

A number of Tuebke’s sketches and studies made in Bulgaria and Caucasus were later adapted as figures, particularly images of peasants, in the fresco at the battle monument.  Evidently, Tuebke was anxious about his progress on the huge painting and these concerns are apparent in paintings that he made at this time.  Tuebke painted himself as a saint in a pastiche of a Bulgarian icon produced in 1977.  The picture showing the artist in a stark, full frontal pose after the manner of Byzantine and old Russian icons reflects Tuebke’s self-conception as a martyr to his art, sanctified by his labors on the huge project. In a more sinister vein, Tuebke painted no fewer than five ambitious paintings of the artist as fool (“Narr”) or Harlequin (‘Arlecchino' in Italian commedia dell’arte).  The figure of the fool in motley appears prominently in the design for the Schlachtberg panorama – there are about six different figures of fools who preside over the violence and ecstasy that is the subject of the mural.  (Throughout his career, Max Beckmann was fond of painting himself as a jester; in Beckmann’s art, the world is a grotesque circus over which the artist presides as both the ringmaster over his creation and a clown trapped in the universal comedy – accordingly, the idea of portraying the artist as fool or jester is not foreign to German painting.)  Tuebke invests his cadaverous fools with a particularly disturbing import: laboring for the corrupt East German regime, Tuebke apparently thought of himself as a jester, a court fool licensed to make mild mockery of the regime that he served.  In exchange for his service, particularly the commission for Muentzer monument, he was given a spectacular atelier and the right to refresh himself, and seek inspiration, by travel abroad.  But the price for these privileges was a heavy one, the burden of completing the exhausting work on the giant mural.  Similarly, Tuebke sometimes paints himself as a Sicilian marionette – for instance, a family portrait made in 1977 in which Tuebke and his new wife, Brigitte, gaze outward at the viewer, slightly doll-like and with visible strings attached to them on a puppet-theater stage.  The motif of “strings attached”, that is, a commitment symbolically shown by tethers to figures seems related to Tuebke’s anxieties about the Bad Frankenhausen project.  At this same time, Tuebke painted several images of St. Christopher, the burly giant carrying the Christ child and borne down into the whelming flood by the entire burden of the world and its sins. 

 

26.

Before dawn, I walked my dog along the leafy boulevards.  Between the trees, I saw sky pried open by light from the rising sun.  Ragged grey-blue clouds, like raiments torn from the dark cloak of night, flew sideways, pushed by the wind past statuesque pillars of turbulent, bleached white.  The edges of the cloud-towers were gold-gilded, outlined in radiance.  The dog was oblivious to the spectacle in the sky, pushing her nose forward in the wet grass.  

If you have eyes to see, the sky is a vast mural full of apocalyptic energy, an ongoing revelation of the power that dwells in the heavens.  

27.

For two years, Tuebke labored on five wooden panels comprising the cartoon at the ratio of 1 to 10 full-size for his “Early Bourgeois Revolution” panorama.  According to his diaries, Tuebke began painting these panels on April 14, 1979.  The final brush-strokes on the design were completed on January 14, 1981.  

Wood panels for this design were cut to dimensions six feet tall and eight feet long.  The surfaces on which the mural designs were painted were prepared with plaster covered in white zinc-oxide pigment.  Tuebke drew on the white prepared surface and, then, sketched in his images with thin egg tempura colors dissolved in resinous oils.  These traces, in turn, were overpainted with oils, glazing, and pastels.  

Ten years later, Tuebke remembered that he had painted the five panels constituting the mural design in a kind of ecstasy.  He worked without preconceptions and without recourse to the vast amount of research, historical information, and images from the era that he had collected.  Tuebke described the process as staring at the blank canvas and, then, seeing the images, in full color, manifest themselves in his mind’s eye against the white and empty surface.  Tuebke painted in a Rausch (that is, “ecstatic intoxication – in vernacular German, “Rausch” means inebriation); he felt that he was dreaming with his eyes open and, later, said that he had no conscious idea as to the completed design that seemed to materialize on the bare surface in front of him.  He didn’t think about Muentzer and his character, didn’t try to imagine the thoughts and dreams of the peasant rebels, cared nothing for the politics of the era, and didn’t consciously reference any of the historical treatises gathered in his library – volumes that he admitted “that he had never completely read to the end.”  A decade after completing the 1 to 10 version of the design – he called it the Zwoelfmeterdreissig (that is, the “12 meter 30") -- Tuebke said that he had no idea how he had managed to make the final design embodied in the panorama:  it was a complete mystery to him.  

The “12meter30" consisted of five identically sized panels: the first was a winter landscape showing the religious fervor and visionary aspirations preceding the Protestant Reformation – the wreckage of the Tower of Babel is prominently displayed; the second panel shows the battle at Bad Frankenhausen with a rainbow over the killing fields and Muentzer in a black clerical gown standing in a clearing in the forest of lances and spears comprising the combat.  The third panel shows the rainbow over the battle scene embedded at one end among images of the Last Judgement.  In the fourth panel, Tuebke has painted a score of vignettes portraying the aftermath of the Peasant’s Rebellion, figures running mad and execution scenes – Spring and Summer shown in the preceding two panels have given way to cold autumnal colors.  These colors, petrified into stone, harden in the fifth panel into a mineral landscape of fluted cliffs and barren rocks filled with choirs and processions of men and women, more executions occurring at the margins of the painting where the snow fields in the first panel tentatively begin.     

With the 1 to 10 version completed, the task, then, turned to duplicating the five panel frieze on the circular surface of the Bad Frankenhausen rotunda.

28.

Critics pretend to see a rhythm and abstract formal design animating Tuebke’s Panorama Museum mural.  Perhaps, an overriding structure to the vast painting is visible from the platform at the rotunda center enclosed on all sides by the painting.  But I’m skeptical.  To my eye, Tuebke hasn’t organized the picture into any discernible formal structure, except, perhaps, in the zone comprising the battle scene.  In that region of the mural, two oval openings in the tangle of men, lances, wagons, and cavalry expose eye-shaped patches of meadow.  This green sward is wholly enclosed by armies of agitated fighters, forming a figure eight shape sprawling across the hillside (or, perhaps, an infinity sign).  This emblem wrought by struggling armed forces rests under the curve of a rainbow arching over the so-called Wagonburg (‘wagon fortress’) thrown up by the peasants.  Muentzer’s figure, clad as a scholastic religious clerk, stands in silhouette against the floral green of the meadow.  In the sky above the infinity sign, there is a great wedge-shaped funnel of dark figures falling head over heels out of the sky, possibly a representation of all social strata knocked topsy-turvy and spilling down into the battle.  In this part of the panorama, about a fifth of its total length, figures are organized into a slant figure-eight, the curves of that sign rhyming with the arch of rainbow overhead with a dark inundating flood grey-brown figures plunging earthward, as if representing uncanny precipitation from the thunderstorm from which the rainbow originates.  The rest of the panorama looks like Bosch’s "Garden of Earthly Delights": a landscape attired in four seasonal aspects is the setting for weird vignettes, visionary processions, and isolated tableaux – the disposition of these images against the landscape is episodic, fragmentary, individual shots and sequences, as it were, mostly independent of one another.  In my estimation, four-fifths of the panorama is painted in this chaotic episodic manner, without any obvious formal or abstract design unifying the imagery.  

The design of a colossal mural of this sort poses challenges.  It’s interesting to recall that Thomas Hart Benton, possibly the preeminent mural-painter in the United States, first constructed completely abstract diagrams depicting vectors of forces energizing nodes of muscular activity.  His drawings, for instance, for the suite of murals at the capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri (the subject is the history of that State) are entirely non-representational, curvilinear forms looped together by tidal forces.  With these designs in mind, Benton, then, sketched in figures and objects, filling in the rounded curves with historical characters and, then, linking these toppling, tilting heaps of humanity by zones of binding energy (affiliative associations) or by centrifugal, disruptive vectors demonstrating antagonism.  Benton went further, using clay to sculpt the friezes of figures and, then, illuminating them obliquely to determine where highlights and shadows would fall.  The result is a mural that has a robust sculptural quality, rounded as if in bas relief, with the figures overlaying nodes of action linked by other personages in agitated motion tying the composition together.  The curious fact is Benton began with entirely non-figurative abstractions diagramed as fin-like forms and aerodynamically shaped bulges and prows thrust together by wave-shaped vectors of forces.  These designs were, then, transformed into non-abstract groupings of figures.  (Benton’s most famous student was Jackson Pollock, also a practitioner of wall-sized paintings – Pollock reversed Benton’s formula, painting figures first in opposition to, or embrace with one, another.  He then painted over the non-abstract figures and personages on the canvas, burying these forms under veils of dripped and splashed paint.)   

29.

After his followers broke icons and looted some monasteries, Thomas Muentzer fled Zwickau for Bohemia in April 1521.  By this point, Muentzer was preaching that Christ’s passion had no efficacy with respect to salvation, was not “bitter”, and bore no fruit but a disposition toward good works.  He argued that the “fear of God” was unnecessary for the remission of sins and that penance was folly.  People should not feel pain over their sins.  The Holy Spirit, Muentzer declared, had absconded from the Church and mankind a thousand years earlier and has not been in evidence until the revelations of the present day.  

Muentzer took refuge in Bohemia and spent time in Prague because Hussite Protestant factions were still operating covertly (notwithstanding Hus being burned alive as a heretic in 1415).  Even more promising were Taborite sects – these were millenarians and a radical faction of Hus’ followers.  (The Taborites sensed the imminence of the apocalypse and called for their people to assemble on a hilltop that they designated Mount Tabor, referring to a peak in northern Israel referenced in the Books of Judges and Joshua; a battle was fought there and Jesus was transfigured on that summit.)  The Taborites, obedient to this preaching, dutifully assembled at a mountain fortress named Hradiste, 35 miles from Prague, to experience their inevitable disappointment.  The Church burnt a number of their preachers after Jesus failed to return – but the sect remained active at the Muentzer’s flight into Bohemia. 

Muentzer’s exile was, more or less, concurrent with Luther’s decisive break with Catholic authority at Worms in April 1521.  Friedrich of Saxony, a prince who supported Luther, had arranged for the monk to be spirited off to Wartburg to avoid papal persecution.  Disguised as Junker Joerg, Luther who had grown a fulsome beard, double-pronged like Taliban whiskers, remained in hiding throughout the Summer of 1521.  Muentzer preached at various places in Bohemia during this time.  He went to Prague where he penned a manifest.  In his pamphlets, Muentzer attacked the “donkey-farting scholastics” who based their evangelism on the Bible.  Muentzer argued that without the actual experience of God’s grace and love, study of scripture is futile, even, perhaps, pernicious.  A person reading the Old Testament, for instance, might erroneously conclude that God was to be feared and not loved.  Accordingly, Muentzer declared that actual experience of God’s presence was only real source for grace.  One of Muentzer’s favorite epithets to apply to his enemies is that of “inexperienced”.  God speaks directly to his Elect – there is no need for mediation by priest or scholar.  (In 1967, during the so-called “Summer of Love”, Jimi Hendrix released a famous LP with the title “Are you Experienced?” a reference to the new name of his band, “The Jimi Hendrix Experience.”  Something similar to Muentzer’s theology of direct experience of grace was afoot in 1967, although, perhaps, based on sex and drugs.  Hendrix work on the album in the second half of 1966 and 1967 was hindered, to the annoyance of the record engineers, by the large numbers of young women coming and going from the studio.)

In Muentzer’s preaching, he argued that Luther had chosen the side of the princes as shown by his patronage of Friedrich of Saxony.  Muentzer said that he was the evangelists to the Arm, the “poor”, both literally and in spirit. The Bohemian authorities’ patience with Muentzer’s provocations waned and he was pelted with stones in one instance and, apparently, jailed for several days.  And, so, he decamped to Thuringia.      

30.

No factory in East Germany in the seventies had the capacity to create a linen canvas 14 meters tall and 123 meters long (about 42 x 369 feet.)  To insure the integrity of paint applied to the surface, technical experts determined that the canvas should be fabricated in one continuous piece, tailored to the dimensions of the rotunda at the monument already mostly complete when Tuebke was commissioned to design the panorama.  A Soviet textile cooperative at Sursk produced the mammoth fabric based on a contract awarded in 1978.  (It’s not clear to me how this huge piece of canvas was transported to Bad Frankenhausen.  Ultimately, it seems that the painting surface had to be cut into two sheets so as to be installed in the rotunda at the top of the mountain.)

A master saddle-maker, Guenter Hohlstamm, native to Bad Frankenhausen, cut the linen canvas to size and, then, used needle with heavy thread of the kind employed in suturing saddle leather to stitch the painting surface together when suspended inside the rotunda.  The upper canvas ring weighed 1.1 tons and was hoisted into place in May 1982 by a crew of 54 workers – video shows that the process took 18 minutes. The top of the canvas loop was secured to the rotunda walls by 576 metal clips welded to a steel ring.  The lower loop, also 1.1 tons was stitched to the upper canvas by Hohlstamm and his assistants.  The entire assembly was stretched in place by weights installed at the bottom circumference of the lower strip of canvas linen. (The vast canvas is apparently free-hanging.) The colossal canvas bulges inward from where it is pinned to the top of the rotunda a distance of about 90 centimeters.  Hohlstamm sutured the ends of the canvas loops together to make a continuous surface running around the inside of the rotunda.  A team of Soviet specialists, then, arrived in Bad Frankenhausen at the end of 1982, working several weeks to apply five layers of white coating to the canvas so as to prime it for Tuebke’s transfer of the images on the Zwoelfmeterdreissig to the full-scale work. 

Meanwhile, back in Leipzig, Tuebke’s two assistants, Dietrich Wentzel and Heinrich Felix Heinrichs, began work preparatory to transferring the images from the 1:10 version to the canvas hanging in Bad Frankenhausen rotunda.  These two men traced the contours of Tuebke’s intricate design, swarming with figures, onto 12 transparencies using black pencil.  The translucent tracings, intended for projection onto the mural surface at the monument, were then overlaid with photo-contact paper to establish the colors and textures of the 1:10 on the transparencies.  The transparent images of the painted 1:10 cartoon were carefully divided into 100 quadrants for projection onto the mural wall.  This tedious labor was completed between April 12 and June 8, 1982.  At this point, the size of the work exceeded the space available at Tuebke’s large, personal studio on Springerstrasse.  Another much larger workspace was set up on Schillerstrasse nearby.  

Tuebke claimed complete artistic autonomy over the project and that he completed the mural free from interference by the Ministry of Culture.  But this assertion seems to be not wholly accurate.  Experts were summoned to Leipzig to assess and approve the 1:10 Zwoelfmeterdreissig before the design was transferred to the Bad Frankenhausen fresco surface.  Apparently, the preliminary design was approved with one exception.  Historical experts argued that Tuebke’s painting was defective in that it scanted the influence of Martin Luther on the Reformation and the turmoil surrounding his schism with the Roman Catholic orthodoxy.  Tuebke agreed to insert a portrait of Martin Luther in the mural below the battle scene.  In the 1:10 (and later the mural itself), Tuebke painted a “fountain of immortality” with a pomegranate fruit displayed on a vertical stamen above bluish water decorated with scarlet-blossoming lily-pads.  Luther, shown in a copy of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s famous portrait, looks out over the fountain, flanked by his friend, the humanist, Willibald Pirckheimer and other luminaries of the era, including Melancthon, Erasmus, and Albrecht Duerer.  This vignette, with its detailed photorealist portraits (derived from period images mostly by Duerer and Cranach d. A.), doesn’t exactly match the texture and tone of the rest of the painting and, in fact, seems oddly perfunctory.  (As if in retaliation for this interference by his handlers at the Ministry of Culture, Tuebke painted over a vignette in 1:10 depicting Luther’s funeral; he replaced the funeral procession with a chorus line of dancing peasants.) The 1:10 preliminary study, after being reduced to 900 transparent quadrants for projection at Bad Frankenhausen, was, then, sent to East Berlin where it was admired by party functionaries, including Erich Honecker, the DDR’s boss at that time (ill-fated to preside over the demise of the country seven years later). 

31.

We don’t know where Muentzer went after he left Bohemia in 1521.  Glimpses of his travels may be gleaned from the copies of letters he kept in his leather satchel taken from him after his capture in 1525.  The one constant in Muentzer’s short life was that he constantly corresponded with Luther and other reformers and that he maintained copies of those letters that he carried on his person like a sort of self-portrait, packing them away in his satchel.  From notations on some of these letters, it seems that Muentzer visited places like Erfurt, Nordhausen, and Halle – but it’s impossible to identify his precise path.  (Some scholars think that Muentzer visited the Electoral Court at Weimar to participate in a disputation – but the evidence seems to be that he was elsewhere when this debate occurred.)  Presumably, Muentzer was seeking patronage that would appoint him to a permanent pastoral call somewhere.  But he seems to have been unsuccessful, at least until he accepted an assignment to serve as chaplain at a convent at Glaucha near Halle.  In this position, Muentzer served Communion in the Utraquist fashion – that is, administering the sacrament in both wine and bread.  At that time, Roman Catholic priests were forbidden to serve wine to the laity.  One of his communicants, a noble woman Felicitas von Steinmetz was impressed with Muentzer’s preaching and his audacity in adopting utaquist (“in both kinds”) communion practices and she recommended him for a position at parish pastor at Allstedt.  He seems to have taken up this call in April 1523. 

Allstedt was a small village in the Harz Mountains, a heavily wooded and intricate terrain of hollows and ridges – it seems to be a bit like Appalachia.  The village huddled under an imposing steep-sided bluff crowned by a large medieval castle, complete with tall, square tower and flanking wings made from hewn pinkish-yellow sandstone.  In theory, the city council was supposed to seek the approval of the Saxon Elector, Friedrich, in order to ratify Muentzer’s pastoral appointment.  But Allstedt was small, only 640 souls, an unimportant place below the “radar” as it might said, and the town fathers didn’t consul with Elector Friedrich.  (Historians speculate as to why no electoral approval was sought for Muentzer’s service at the town’s church, St. John’s – but it’s futile, I think, to try to figure why something was not done.)

Muentzer was a fiery preacher and, almost immediately, his sermons inspired great popular interest.  As many as 2000 people were flooding to the little town for his Sunday services, crowds of visitors that no doubt much enriched the village.  Muentzer conducted his liturgy in German and, in fact, published several volumes of Psalms for choral singing and translated very freely the service of Mass into that language.  These books were studied intensely and received enthusiastically in the Protestant community – almost 100 years after Muentzer’s death by execution, his German mass was still celebrated in many places and his liturgy remained in print.  

Luther was alarmed that Muentzer’s radical theology would cast a shadow over his Reformation.  Luther had always sought the patronage of the feudal princes and didn’t advocate for social change. The great Reformer ordered to Muentzer to report to him in Wittenberg to provide an account of his doctrine.  Muentzer responded that he was too busy implementing his work in Allstedt and declined the invitation.  The local Catholic count, Earl von Mansfeld, forbid his subjects from attending Muentzer’s services and, in fact, tried to enforce this injunction by blockading some of the roads.  The peasants just walked around the roadblocks.  Angered by Earl von Mansfeld’s attempted intervention, Muentzer wrote to him suggesting emphatically that “tread gently... and exercise patience.”  Once Muentzer put pen to paper, he abandoned all pretexts of civility.  After commencing in a reasonable tone and diction, Muentzer then wrote: “Don’t grab or the old coat will tear...I will deal with you a thousand times more harshly than Luther dealt with the Pope.”

In the Spring of 1524, some of Muentzer’s followers, incensed by one of his sermons, looted a nearby pilgrimage chapel and, then, set it afire.  The chapel was under the authority of a local convent and the Abbess protested to the Elector Johann of Saxony.  (Johann was a saturnine, heavy-set fellow painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in a way that makes him resembles a more hirsute and fierce-looking Henry the Fifth of England; Johann was an ally of Luther and a defender of the Protestant Reformation in Saxony.)  Johann summoned Muentzer to account for himself at the hilltop castle above Allstedt.  Muentzer appeared and preached a sermon taking as his text the second book of Daniel, expounding on the prophet’s appearance before the emperor Nebuchadnezzar.  Filled with the Holy Spirit (or as Luther declared Satan), Muentzer told Johann and the assembled princes that he envisioned the ghastly sight of eels copulating with snakes in a writhing mass.  Muentzer, then, explicated the image by declaring that the eels were corrupt clerics and priests and that the snakes were the “secular princes.”  He admonished the princes to take up the sword to spread the reformation, albeit Muentzer’s peculiar version of that movement.  It’s not recorded how Johann and his fellows responded to this diatribe.

Luther, for his part, wrote to Johann and demanded that Muentzer be expelled from Saxony.  Johann responded by ordering that the city council members report to Weimar where they could be questioned separately.  This was accomplished with the effect that the City Councilmen returned to Allstedt and voted to withdraw their support for Muentzer and his followers.  By this time, Muentzer had married, apparently a nun who had abandoned the convent in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.  Muentzer’s wife is known to be Ottilie von Gersen, but there is no other reliable information about her.  She apparently had a son with Muentzer.  Around the end of July 1524, Muentzer fled Allstedt, traveling to Muehlhausen about 40 miles away.  He left in haste, abandoning for the short term Ottilie and his infant son.  More notably, and probably more painful for Muentzer, was the fact that his hasty departure forced him to leave behind his beloved printing press – always a model of industry, Muentzer had published a half-dozen books, sermons, and tracts from Allstedt.  Luther remarked that Satan had taken up residence in Allstedt and established his nest there.  

32.

The political implications of Fruehbuergerlich Revolution in Deutschland are not immediately evident. The picture presents no obvious program for the advance of socialism.  The liberation that Muentzer proposed is apocalyptic, not of this earth, and any message implicit in the vast and complicated panorama is veiled.  Tuebke’s fidelity to his 16th century sources isn’t translated into an agenda for East German Communism.  There are probably several reasons for the radical obscurity as to the picture’s agenda.  First, Muentzer was, after all, a religious visionary; therefore, it would be paradoxical for a Marxist materialist regime to explicitly invest its ideological capital in his mystical project.  Second, Muentzer’s apocalyptic enterprise failed in a spectacular and calamitous manner – again, the East German regime would not desire to be too closely affiliated with Muentzer’s quixotic schemes.  Finally, under conventional Marxist analysis, religion is a mere superstructure (or epiphenomenon) to the underlying class struggle.  Tuebke’s painting primarily depicts something that is not entirely real – that is, the epiphenomenal aspects of class relations around 1525.  Under these circumstances, an overtly Marxist interpretation of the Peasant Uprising would be unavailing and, even, perhaps, counter-productive.

Probably the greatest muralist of the 20th century was the Mexican Diego Rivera.  By contrast with Tuebke’s obscure imagery – it’s like John Milton refracted through Thomas Hobbes – Rivera depicts the class struggle in Mexico in explicitly agit-prop terms.  Rivera frequently paints Marx, Engels, and Trotsky in his frescos.  Consider, for instance, the case of Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads, a spectacular mural that the Mexican artist painted on a commission from the oligarch, John D. Rockefeller.  The painting was made for the lobby “30 Rock”, that is the slender slab of skyscraper today containing the TV studios from which live broadcasts of Saturday Night Live originate. In the lobby, Rivera and his crew painted a heroic figure of a man at the center of an array of rotors, multi-colored and iridescent like dragonfly wings.  Charles Darwin, depicted like an Old Testament patriarch, listens to a speaker.  Next to Darwin, there is parrot, a monkey painted contraposto like one of Michelangelo’s angels, a dog, tortoise, and lamb.  Under an x-ray of a skull, Darwin seems to be attending to a speech delivered by a revolutionary.  Beneath the speaker’s tribune, Trotsky holds a red banner inscribed with words from the Communist Manifesto while a hirsute Marx, flanked by Engels, looks on.  

The mural is complex and contains many figures and no one paid any attention to the famous Communists painted on the wall, that is, until a workman spilled some paint that smudged the portrait of Marx.  At that point, Rockefeller’s representatives closely scrutinized the painting and discovered to their dismay that the great Capitalist had commissioned a painting proselytizing for Communism.  The painting was almost finished and it wasn’t clear how this imagery could be eliminated without destroying the design.  (Diego Rivera, probably, would have negotiated – indeed, he suggested retaining Marx in the painting but adding Abraham Lincoln or Harriet Beecher Stowe or, even, Nat Turner to put the picture’s politics more in the American grain.  However, one of Rivera’s American assistants, Ben Shahn, was a firebrand and argued against any compromise.)  In the end, Rockefeller paid Rivera for his work, but had the mural demolished – this took place in February 1934.  Rivera returned to Mexico and, later that year, re-painted the mural on a small scale in a position of prominence in the Palacio de Bella Artes in Mexico City.  Rivera revenged himself on Rockefeller by showing the oligarch (a teetotaler) boozing with a prostitute under an abstract pattern derived from a microscope slide showing syphilis spirochetes.

In 1935, Rivera put Marx in the center of the south wall painting of his huge fresco "Mexico Today and Tomorrow" adorning the walls of the Palacio Nacional also in Mexico City.  In that picture, Marx carries another banner inscribed with words from his Communist Manifesto, but here printed in Spanish.  Below Marx, Rivera’s famous wife, Frida Kahlo, hands out carbines to campesino revolutionaries.  

Subtlety was not Diego Rivera’s strong suit. 

33.

Tuebke ascended a high scaffold in the rotunda of the Bad Frankenhausen panorama building on August 16, 1983.  He was alone.  Anxious to establish the vast project’s legitimacy as the “Sistine Chapel of the North” (as it is called in the Panorama Museum’s promotional literature and website), Tuebke worked alone, at height, laboring for hours so as to imitate Michelangelo’s labor at the Vatican.  For Tuebke, it seems, a key component of the work, the art for which he expected to be known forever, to mythologize his role in the completion of the painting.  

Tuebke applied the first brush-stroke to his vision of the Last Judgment (also the subject of the fresco at the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo).  The first part of the mural, painted entirely in his hand, is executed to the upper right of the battle-scene.  Tuebke began at the top and worked his way downward.  It isn’t recorded whether he worked at night, with a hat like the Italian master’s on which candles were burning on its brim.

34.

About half of the brushstrokes applied to the Bad Frankenhausen are by Tuebke’s hand. The rest of the mural was executed by eight assistants, painters who came and went (one of them was sidelined by serious illness).  Only one of his Altgesellen, a man named Eberhard Lenk, stayed the course of the four years work on the commission.  By all accounts, Tuebke demanded complete self-abnegation from his assistants. The painters were required to suppress their own personalities and artistic inclinations to slavishly recreate Tuebke’s style, his palette and Mannerist hand.  In order to accomplish complete unity of appearance throughout the colossal painted wall, Tuebke required his workers to execute copies of a number of his smaller paintings to learn his specific techniques, his ductus as it were, and artistic vocabulary.  This was a heavy burden imposed on his colleagues since all of the painters were highly ranked graduates of the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts and several of them had successful careers in design or had worked executing theatrical sets.   

According to accounts (and photos showing the work in progress), Tuebke began sections of the mural by first applying a dark layer of underpainting – the contours of figures were outlined in black against dark greys and earth tones.  Tuebke, then, painted with bright and lighter colors over the gloomy shadows of the underpainting.  Finally, using a brush charged with half-dry whites and yellows, Tuebke limned highlights onto wall.  In some cases, the application of paint was heavy, sculptural, an impasto technique.  But, in other areas, the overpainting was light and tentative so as to allow the dense darkness of the foundation images to show through the brighter surface highlights.  

35.

Tuebke finished Fruehbuergerlich Revolution in Deutschland in October 1987.  During the four years and one month that he labored on the panorama in Bad Frankenhausen rotunda, he painted no other canvases and, didn’t produce any sketches or graphic work either.  Tuebke had been a very prolific painter, making twenty to thirty full-scale pictures a year together with innumerable sketches, lithographs, and engravings.  His concentrated effort on the Bad Frankenhausen panorama, therefore, divides his work into a before and after – that is, paintings produced before his work on the enormous commission for the Schlachtberg and the art that he made in his old age, as he characterized his Alterswerk.  As observed earlier, this watershed in Tuebke’s life and painting also coincides with the collapse of the regime under which he had become celebrated.  

In interviews with Tuebke after the mural was finished, but before it had been prepared for visitors in September 1989, two years later, the artist, further, mythologized his work on the mural.  He said that the painting engaged him like no other work in his life, the “turbulence” of the era depicted reflected his own inner turmoil.  Although the commission was supposed to celebrate a hero of the Communist regime, Tuebke said that he painted the work “entirely for (himself),” adding that he had no particular viewer for his labors, no thematic program, no desire to allude to events occurring in the world while he worked on the project, no intent to impose any sort of theme or idea on the pictorial material comprising the picture: “Art is not a means to transmit a message,” Tuebke proclaimed, and that he didn’t intend to use Kunst to brainwash (Gehirnwaesche) anyone.  Citing the first Act of Goethe’s Faust II, Tuebke said that “he had gone to the mothers” (zu den Muettern zu gehen) to create the mural.  Seeking the ideal or Platonic essence of beauty, Faust persuades Mephistopheles to offer him a key opening the way to the mysterious “Mothers” – that is, the womb of ideas and creativity.  A tripod burns incense in which Faust perceives the Mothers and, in turn, encounters Helen of Troy and her lover, Paris.  Indeed, he frees these shades from Hades and brings them to the contemporary court of the Emperor where envious ladies-in-waiting and courtiers criticize the couple, nitpicking them for flaws.  Tuebke’s overweening ambition glares forth from the allusion to Faust II.  His claim is that he penetrated to the primordial source of all beauty, took captives there, and brought them forth in a rural village, 80 miles to the east of Leipzig.

From the outset, Tuebke’s art showed a strong vein of religiosity.  Prior to his work on the mural, the artist justified this aspect of his art to the Communist bosses as either morbidly satirical or, in the alternative, invoking Christian references to impart profundity to the various socialist realist martyrdoms that he painted – for instance, workers are crucified in the White Terror by reactionary forces.  The concept is similar to photographs of Che Guevera in death invoking Mantegna’s Christ laid out in his tomb. But. after completing the panorama, (and, perhaps, sensing the impending collapse of the atheist, materialist regime), Tuebke’s inclination toward some mystical version of Christianity is made manifest.  He claimed that “a higher spirit guided (his) hand” and “prevented (him) from grasping the ultimate meaning of the work.”  The labor on the mural was prosecuted through the intervention or irruption of the transcendent “into the mundane quotidian world” (Alltagswirklichkeit).  As an instrument of the divine, Tuebke claimed that he had worked “in a state of grace” (in der Gnade).     

36.

Of course, the panorama is painted in the round.  It is a loop with no beginning and end.  The seasons running from Winter, through Spring and Summer, and, then, Fall (the stony petrified world of the quarry-like cliffs) rounds the mural, making it oscillate in time, like a spiral or gyre rotating inward and, then, out again.  The picture about “revolution,” in fact, comprises a literal revolution, the orbit of the planet spinning about some kind of dark, occluded sun.  Since there is no stopping point on which the eye can reliably rest, the mural represents an image, some argue, of Nietzsche’s most abysmal idea, the eternal recurrence of the same.  The revolution of the early 16th century has never ended; it can’t simply cease or go away.  The revolution is perpetual – it is always occurring, simultaneous with every point in time.

angel, upside down has lost control of his vial of wrath, which spurts upward in a blaze of purple toward where the nine Muses, each bearing a pennant on which her name (Clio, Terpsichore, and so on) is inscribed; the frieze of Muses stand in an agitated row under a sky that is all congested with the coils of a mighty dragon wallowing in blood-red clouds.  At the end of the row of Muses, a naked and buxom Eve plucks an apple from a tree – the fruit is irradiated by x-ray beams falling from the huge monster in the sky – and, as Adam reels backward, appalled by the spectacle overhead, he almost falls against a peasant, also Adam, daintily sowing human heads in a harrowed field.  The heads are sprouting as tiny corpselings that are clawing their way out of the furrows under another great whorl of airborne boulders, some of which are falling out of the heavens as meteors, dropping down to where a woman (she looks like the Wife of Bath – in fact, she is Eve) rides side-saddle on a pale horse flogging at the air with a sort of switch.  Cain kills Abel with a hoe behind the harrow that Eve’s horse drags over the desolate ground.  A stony grey-brown cliff, cleft and fissured, divides the lower part of the mural from the upper.  On the bare plain atop the cliff, peasants have gathered around a stiff-looking banner that shows Christ crucified.  A group of men sport orange flames over their heads, figures from the Pentecost, and several peasants run aimlessly toward the horizon where the skies the color of lead and bronze have deposited some leprous patches of snow.  Beneath the cliffs, sumptuously dressed figures ignore the Day of Wrath underway above them.  Charles V is dealing cards, his coat of arms hovering in a bluish fog over his crowned head, borne by similarly bluish putti.  At two round tables, noblemen are rolling dice.  Six opulently clad nobles are harnessed together and pull behind them the tail of a fox the size of a cow.  An owl peeps out between the boots and leggings of a crowd of men and, among them, Death dressed as a judge breaks his staff in half.  Death’s tunic is emblazoned with an image of a wheel of execution on which two limp bodies hang.  A bagpiper and a man playing a flageolet march across the empty terrain in the middle distance.  A violet-colored demon administers a clyster to a grimacing man.  Nearby, peasants are dancing under another gallows from which a dead man hangs. The cliff that bisects the landscape rises upward to form two steep pyramidal pinnacles – figures are falling head over heels out of the sky beside the pointed shafts of rock.  In the growing darkness, pale drifts   

37.

The Peasant Uprising in central Germany began in June 1524.   According to legend, a noblewoman named Clementia, Countess of Luepfen, triggered the revolt by making unreasonable demands on her family’s serfs.  She had run out of berry jam and snail shells.  Collecting barberries and juniper berries for making jam is tedious and labor-intensive.  Snail shells were necessary as spools on which thread was wound.  From her castle at Stuehlingen, Clementia ordered her peasant vassals to halt their agricultural work and search the estate’s forests for berries and snail shells.  This was adding insult to injury.  In the previous winter, Clementia’s husband, Sigismund II had sent a troop of peasants sixty miles through the snow and bad roads to another castle owned by the family, this corvee requiring the serfs to haul the carcasses of game shot during the fall to the other estate, returning with heavy barrels of wine.  Supposedly, the peasants took offense at Clementia’s demand that they gather snail shells and berries for her, refused the labor detail, and burned some outbuildings near the castle.  The disobedient peasants, then, fled to the nearby village and made common cause with the merchants and guilds that were also demanding additional privileges from the town’s feudal proprietors.  In this way, the great Peasant War, culminating with the battle at Bad Frankenhausen, began.  (Some commentators suggest that the story is apocryphal, an invention of historians writing after similar tales circulated about Marie Antoinette’s role in the French Revolution.)

In fact, the causes of the rebellion are fantastically intricate and, probably, differed from participant to participant.  Revolutions are mostly made by the prosperous and well-fed, people who feel that their burgeoning economic and social aspirations are being unreasonably thwarted.  In the 16th century, the German-speaking principalities were progressive and densely populated with relatively wealthy peasant-farmers served by villages and cities that had a long history of independence from the feudal lords who nominally controlled them.  In Saxony and Thuringia, the center of the Peasant Uprising, there were many mines and, therefore, a nascent proletariat comprised of mine-workers.  Because Germany was atomized into small feudal fiefdoms, there was no consistent centralized authority (except the Catholic Church) to apply discipline to the restive farmers, miners, and middle-class merchants.  And, the authority of the Church had been questioned by Luther and his followers, undermining the hegemony of the ecclesiastical power.  The clergy was divided into Protestant and Catholic factions and, often, the feudal lords subscribed to a religious persuasion different from the majority of their vassals and lieges – Luther’s doctrine of Christian freedom, further, exacerbated the tensions; people were inclined to apply the Evangelist’s idea that each worshiper was entitled to his own interpretation of scripture to the social sphere with dangerous consequences.  Luther, of course, had retreated from the precipice of secular revolution and was busy forging alliances with Lutheran princes and nobleman.  But, all of these factors aligned to create a volatile situation in which peasants and the urban middle-classes were no longer obedient to constraints imposed by the feudal lords.  

Although there was no single pattern to the so-called peasant uprisings, typically, aggrieved farmers appealed to town councils, exploiting the relative freedom existing in the “free cities.”  The cities had a long history of forming Bunds or “leagues” for mutual self-defense against encroachment by the feudal authorities.  (The princes enforced their rights by sending mercenaries, Landesknechts, to burn out rebellious farmsteads and, periodically, massacre peasants – however, bloodletting had to be kept to a relative minimum since the economy was reliant on serf labor.)  When the lords attempted to assert their rights over their villages and cities, they were met with resistance, often in the form of armed peasants.  Rebellions were funded by looting convents and monasteries – these religious institutions were largely despised, even by the Catholics, but also had well-stocked larders and plenty of precious metals and other luxury items.  (The monasteries and convents also brewed beer, a nutritional staple at the time, and they possessed vast amounts of the stuff in their cellars.)  Sacking a couple of monasteries could keep a party of a thousand rebels in victuals and booze for several months.  

Peasant rebels flocked to the cities where radical preachers suggested that it was their gospel obligation to oppose the princes and lords, often Catholic rulers surrounded by a sea of Lutheran believers.  Thomas Muentzer and his lieutenant, also a Protestant (and Anabaptist) pastor, Heinrich Pfeiffer, were exemplary of these radicals – they were merely more uncompromising and relentless in their demands that most of the other religious leaders serving as chaplains to the peasant mobs.

  

38.

Luther perceived the peasant uprisings as a unintended, and pernicious, consequence of his reform of the Catholic Church.  The peasant rabble, as he saw it, imperiled the gains that his reformation had made.  Beginning in April 1525, Luther published several tracts admonishing his followers to remain obedient to the secular authorities – the first of these writings was a simple admonition for peace, but, when this tract fell on deaf ears, Luther intensified his rhetoric and produced his infamous Wider die Morderischen und Reubischen Rotte der Bawren (“Against the murderous and thieving mobs of peasants”).  In this text, later described by Luther as his “harsh letter,” the Reformer denounces the peasants as “rabid dogs,” outside the law, and, further, proclaims that anyone killed fighting the rebels may be “a true martyr in the eyes of God.”  Slaughtering unruly peasants, Luther argues, is not only not a sin but an obligation.  Citing the Book of Romans, Luther declares that the secular authority is “appointed by God” and that all Christians must be obedient to the rule of law, “even if executed by heathen or pagan rulers.”  

After the massacre at Bad Frankenhausen, Luther’s Catholic adversaries pounced.  They argued that Luther had triggered the peasant uprising by previous writing suggesting that the farmers had been treated unjustly.  Only when it was apparent that the peasants couldn’t prevail in their rebellion had he switched sides to denounce them in the most vitriolic, and intemperate, language.  Even some of Luther’s allies suggested that he retract the “harsh letter.”  Characteristically, Luther refused to rescind his earlier judgement and said that a Christian is obliged to “suffer injustice without taking up the sword.”  He said that there was no point in arguing reason with peasants whose rebellion was based on evil, covetous motives.  With such people, you must beat them with your “fist, until sweat drips off their noses.”   Luther also asserted that the princes had been too severe in their punishment of the erring peasants and would be punished by God for their sins.  

In the title of his “harsh letter,” Luther says that the peasants were not merely “thieving” but also “murderous.”  So far as the historical record is concerned, except in rare cases, the peasants weren’t killers.  One particularly cruel lord with 27 of his knights was forced to run a gauntlet of peasants armed with rakes and hoes; the gentry all died miserably.  The leader of the peasant force ordered his musicians to play during the slaughter.  These killings at Weinsberg near Heilbronn represented the worst instance of peasant violence – and, in fact, the slaughter galvanized the nobility to seek loans (from the Fuggers) to finance mercenary security forces.  (Luther’s “harsh letter” was a response to this event.)  But, with the exception of the Weinsberg massacre, no one else was murdered by the peasant rebels.  The butchery was all in the other direction, noblemen and their mercenaries killing farmers and burning farms and villages.  As Luther surmised, the peasants were primarily motivated by theft.  Before sacking a monastery, due notice was provided to its inhabitants so that they could flee from the place before the looting commenced.  Pillage invariably included swilling down wine and beer ransacked from the premises.  When the farmers were liquored-up, they set fires.  Feudal elites and clerics, generally, had plenty of time to take to their heels so as to avoid the peasant rampage.  The rebels were not always so lucky.  The only looting casualty recorded prior to the slaughter at Bad Frankenhausen was an inebriated peasant who fell into the flames of a chapel that he and his comrades had set afire.

For several months during good weather in 1525, armies of peasants, some of them numbering four to eight-thousand swept through the countryside.  These forces were democratically governed.  Daily, leading men among the peasant leagues harangued their men from the so-called “ring” – that is, a central point in the bivouac surrounded by a tightly massed circle of rebels.  (The word Ring denoted the ruling authority in the peasant bands or Haufen:  that is, a “heap” or “pile” – the term for the somewhat disorganized rabble of peasants.)  Reform preachers spoke to the rebels in the “ring” as well.  Decisions were made by consensus, resulting in eccentric strategy and tactics.  Although several separate armed leagues were abroad in the Spring and Summer of 1525, these forces didn’t act in any coordinated way and, in fact, never even joined together.  But, despite the inefficient management of armed groups, the peasants managed to loot and destroy about 200 castles and fortified places while ravaging countless chapels, monasteries and convents.   

39.

The first work that Tuebke painted after the panorama on the battlefield was a self-portrait.  The Selbstbildniss mit rote Kappe (“Self-portrait with Red Cap”), made in 1988, seems primarily intended document the psychic and physical toll that the mural commission took on the painter.  

In the painting, Tuebke’s face is heavily creased and furrowed.  He looks at the viewer out of the corner of his eye, at once imperious and, perhaps, suspicious.  The titular red cap is a kind of beret that crowns his head with scarlet.  The artist is turned to three-quarters profile so that only one of his large ears is visible.  

Tuebke has painted himself as a member of the working class.  He wears a blue plaid shirt open at the collar under his grey work coat.  The jacket is the color of canvas and has the same texture and it is spotted with drips of bright red and blue paint.  

40.

According to one of his students, Rabbi Jaakob Jitzak from Lublin (called “the Seer”) led a community of several important and pious scholars and 400 townspeople of exemplary faith.  Like Thomas Muentzer, the Polish Hassidic rabbi, was a great visionary.

Someone asked why this community didn’t labor together to bring about the salvation of the world, a task to which it was thought that they were equal.  The student answering this question said that the people in Rabbi Jitzak’s village and circle of associates lived in perfect harmony, felt no pain, and were not afflicted by the darkness that envelopes the world.  If community members had experienced the suffering of the world, they would have been moved to split the heavens and burn the earth to ashes so as to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven.  But because they were content in their village, Rabbi Jitzak and his followers did not act together to redeem the world.

This story, reported by Martin Buber in his Tales of the Hassidim, is simple, but hard to understand.  I think it suggests that where harmony and grace prevail among the faithful, the communion of saints dwells in utopia and has no incentive to proselytize or agitate for a better world.  Perhaps, the communion of saints with one another is sufficient in itself.  Thomas Muentzer’s revolutionary zeal was mistaken – one abides within the principle of Hope and, perhaps, the mere attempt to extend that concept into the fallen world is enough to dissolve it.  

41.

On the steppes of China, cities of 800,000 sprout like mushrooms.  You glimpse them from trains and buses rushing between historic capitols, places with palaces, temples, ancient gardens and lagoons full of tame fish. The new cities lift their pale concrete towers to the skies, rising from suburbs that don’t yet have names.  The nation is on the rise and the Chinese can build, and populate, a new city in a couple of years.  

With machines and efficient labor, with reliable logistics and good planning, we can imagine, design, and complete massive building projects in a matter of months.  This efficiency leads us to believe that the project is justified by its end-product – that is, the project finds its fulfillment in completion.  But this has not always been the case: in the past, construction took years.  The carving of the Parthenon required decades of hot work in lethal clouds of marble dust. Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal took 22 years to reach completion, employing a work force of 20,000 laborers.  Chartres Cathedral was finished in 26 years, completed with such alacrity that medieval people regarded the work as accomplished with miraculous speed.  Angkor Wat was built over a period of 27 years.  Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona will be finished in 2026, that is 144 years after its first stones were laid.  By contrast, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, both destroyed in a manner of minutes, were built from subway station below to their soaring observation decks in two years.  

Human labor is holy.  The construction of the great temples and tombs of the past was sacramental.  The point of the construction was not its completion, but rather the devotion to the project shown by its stone masons, sculptors, and masses of anonymous workers.  Building the monument was the point of the construction, not necessarily the finished structure.  Archaeologists have come to believe that the purpose of many grandiose structures built in ancient history was the process by which they were made.  Labor on something like the Parthenon or Angkor Wat or the Great Pyramids at Giza unified the realm, gave a common purpose to its people, and was a daily demonstration of devotion to the principles and ideology underpinning the society.  In other words, the process was the raison d’etre for the work.  It was fine and good that the finished building would be imposing and majestic – but the real motive for the construction was the labor itself.  

The same may be said, I think, for the work of the revolution.  No one can imagine what the end-point of the revolution will be.  It’s enough that the world be turned upside-down and that the principle of hope take the field with flags and banners unfurled, marching toward a consummation that will be endlessly deferred.  

42.

In Muehlhausen, Thomas Muentzer was briefly arrested as a militant, but his importance was not recognized and, after a few hours in jail, he was released.  Muentzer, then, began preaching from the pulpit of St. Mary’s Church in the town, probably invited to that position by the vote of the congregation.  Conflict occurred with the Muehlhausen city council, but Muentzer’s influence was such that he was able to replace most of the officials with his followers.  

Muentzer, then, organized an armed militia called the “Eternal League of God”.  The “Eternal League” marched under a white flag on which a huge rainbow had been painted above the words “The Word of God will Endure Forever.”  At Muentzer’s direction, the League roamed Muehlhausen’s environs sacking abbeys and chapels and looting storage buildings on the estates of the great lords.  During this period, in early April 1525, Muentzer wrote one of the first drafts of the so-called “Twelve Articles,” a set of demands made by the Schwabian peasants directed to the feudal aristocracy.  The Articles called for the elimination of death taxes oppressive to the farmers, required that peasants be paid a reasonable wage for their work, imposed rent controls, and called for the restoration of the commons that had been appropriated and enclosed by the feudal rulers.  When presented to the alliance of nobles, the “Twelve Articles” were rejected without a counter-offer. The last of the articles somewhat quixotically said that, if anything in the peasant’s demands was contrary to Holy Scripture that demand would be rescinded.  

An uprising at Bad Frankenhausen, about forty miles to the east of Muehlhausen, led to threatened reprisals by the alliance of Schwabian princes – mercenary columns were operating in the area.  With his “Eternal League of God,” Muentzer marched to the town and set up an encampment on the mountain overlooking the place.  At first, Muentzer’s camp numbered about 300 armed peasants, but, when word spread that the charismatic preacher was making a stand on the hilltop, hundreds and, then, thousands of local miners, urban poor, and farmers hurried to join him.  By May 12, 1525. Muentzer’s forces, arrayed under the rainbow flag, numbered almost 8000 men.  

43.

Many years ago, certain museums in the American west displayed under glass garments described as “ghost shirts.”  These buckskin garments were fringed with strands of coarse black hair, beaded around the collars with tasseled sleeves and, sometimes, decorated with geometric emblems or stylized suns and moons along with birds and beasts depicted in profile.  Some of these “ghost shirts” were pierced with irregular rips or round tears and marked with dark stains as if some fluid had leaked through them.

In the 1880's, a Paiute Indian in Nevada named Wovoka (or Jack Wilson) worked chopping wood and herding cattle for a rancher named David Wilson.  The rancher was a devout Christian and spent hours telling Wovoka stories from Bible.  Wovoka was said to be a “weather doctor” – that is, he could control the clouds and rain and once summoned from a clear, blue sky a heavy meteorite of pure, blue ice.  Wovoka fell into a coma during a solar eclipse and, when he awoke, he declared that the end of the world was imminent, that the buffalo would return from being hunted to near extinction, and that the White settlers would be swallowed up in earthquakes that would crack the desert and prairies asunder.  Universal love and peace were required to achieve these outcomes.  The end of the world could be hastened by doing a circle dance while wearing so-called “Ghost shirts” – in this ceremony, the dancers mimicked the movement of the sun across the sky.  

News of Wovoka’s revelation spread across the plains.  The Indians starving on the desolate prairie, unable to feed themselves after the slaughter of the once-mighty herds of buffalo, gathered to practice the Ghost Dance.  The skies were full of signs and wonders.  Cavalry soldiers with mechanized guns surrounded the dancers who were chanting and shuffling in circles in their brightly decorated, buckskin ghost shirts.  The holy men of the Lakota and Cheyenne told the dancers that they should not be afraid of the troops with their machine guns.  The Ghost shirts were sacred and could not be pierced by bullets.  If the blue-coated soldiers fired on them, the shirts would repel shot and shell.  

44.

Bad Frankenhausen is built along the base of the Kyffhauser ridge.  Salt springs seep from seams of chalky white rock where the joint of the hillside abuts the valley.  For hundreds of years, local people panned salt from the ooze under the ridge.  In 1525, there was a maze of saline ponds, drainage canals and small huts at the springs where salt was harvested.  The dome-shaped hill rising six- or seven-hundred feet above the town was called the Hausberg -- today, the height bears the name the Schlachtberg:  that is, “Battle Mountain” where the German word Schlacht is the source of our English term “slaughter.”  On the vertical face of the hill, a narrow trough descends from the heights, a groove in the mountain about the width of cart.  This feature is known as the Blutgerinne (“the blood ravine”).

Extraction of salt from saline domes under the town created sinkholes and the town is pockmarked with craters.  One of these sinkholes undermined a church steeple, causing the heavy masonry tower to tilt to the side.  For hundreds of years, the tower has threatened collapse, hanging precariously over the warren of medieval alleys at its base.  (In 2014, the German government applied a steel “corset” to the tower to keep it from toppling over.)  Fires had been set in the town before Muentzer’s force reached the place – the salt panners were on-strike, had rioted, and burned out the local nunnery and town hall.  

This terrain was under the dominion of the Counts von Mansfeld, five brothers, and, split between Catholic and Lutheran adherents, they were uncertain as to how to react to the uprising.  Renting armies was expensive and, at least, some of the princes argued that the rebellion wouldn’t last and, in the short terms, a truce should be negotiated.  Phillip of Hesse, the ruler adjacent to the west, was young, hotheaded, and flush with cash.  He hired an army and sent it into the field.  Another mercenary army marched from Braunschweig toward Frankenhausen.  These armies killed peasants that they encountered, seized their sheep, pigs, and cattle, and burned villages.  Among the Landesknecht forces, the troops maintained officers called “Fire-Masters” – their job was to supervise the burning of peasant villages and farms.  

Thomas Muentzer wrote several letters to the noblemen who had hired soldiers to quell the uprising.  Muentzer suggested a truce and said that bloodshed was unnecessary if the princes would listen to reason.  But demands made by the peasants were increasingly febrile and fantastical: low-level aristocrats, the so-called “Knights” would have to surrender their horses to the peasants and go on foot.  The great feudal lords would be limited to between two and four horses per estate.  Muentzer told Count Ernst von Mansfeld that he was a “wretched sack of maggots” condemned by God and that the peasants would spare his life only if he walked to the peasant encampment and made his peace with the rebels.  Otherwise, Muentzer vowed that the peasants would hunt him down “in the name of the God of Hosts.”  The preacher helpfully ended his epistle with the injunction: “Do your best...I am coming for you!”  (Muentzer sent a copy of this letter to Martin Luther whom he derided as “soup-slurping” lackey of the princes.  Luther retained the copy and published it later in one of his tracts gloating over the “dreadful judgement of God on Thomas Muentzer.”)

A reconnaissance force scouting the ravines and gullies under the Hausberg was ambushed by peasant fights.  A few men were killed and three soldiers, who protested that they were emissaries of Count Ernst von Mansfeld, were captured.  The prisoners were dragged to the hilltop where the peasants had encircled their heavy wagons, chaining the farm equipment together to make a fortification, the so-called Wagonberg.  The emissaries tried to negotiate with the rebel forces, but without success.  From hilltop, the peasants could see columns of smoke rising from burnt farmsteads and hamlets.  And the rebels were incensed at the confiscation of their herds of livestock.  After a few days of futile debate, the three prisoners were dragged into the center of the “Ring” and beheaded for their crimes against the people.   God had made all men equal and scripture prohibited tyranny.  Earthquakes and fire from the skies would destroy the armies of the nobles.  

45.

Muentzer preached daily.  Signs were seen in the sky and on earth.  A hundred miles away, a baby was born without a head and another child came from the womb with his feet reversed.  Luther heard of the prodigies but wasn’t sure what they meant – best to flatter one of his patrons and, so, he wrote that these anomalies were phenomena marking the death of the great Lutheran prince, Friedrich the Wise.  For three days in a row, a watery rainbow made a halo above the sun.  Muentzer pointed to the rainbow flag under which the peasants marched and said that God was sealing the heavens with his covenant promising victory to the rebels.  Muentzer is supposed to have shouted: “You need not fear the guns for I will catch in my sleeves all the bullets that they fire at us.”  He blessed the throng telling them that they were armored in God’s righteousness and “no shots will harm you.”

Midmorning on Monday, May 15, artillery dragged into position by the mercenary armies, now numbering about 3000 troops, began to bombard the Wagonberg.  Shells burst among the peasants gathered on the crest of the hill.  Contrary to Muentzer’s proclamations, shot ripped into the rebels and knocked them down in windrows.  After about an hour, mercenary cannons (two siege guns, two culverins, and three light field pieces) fell silent.  A man was sent between the armed forces offering amnesty to the peasants if they would surrender Muentzer and his lieutenant, Pfeiffer, to the mercenary force.  The peasants gathered together in their circle of wagons and began to sing a hymn.  During the short truce, artillery was brought closer to the peasants for more precise shelling.  Around noon, the guns roared again and shells smashed apart some of the wagons.  At the same time, columns of mercenary calvary swept across the undulating hilltops, encircling the peasant force and cutting down those who attempted to flee.  The rebels were unnerved – very few of them had any combat experience.  After a few minutes, some of the peasants scattered, running down the side of the hill.  The core of the rebel force remained inside the shattered Wagonberg but, seemingly, incapable of raising their weapons to fight the advancing mercenaries.  The peasants fell to their knees singing and praying as the Landesknecht troops cut them down with pikes and halberds. 

Fighting, such as it was, lasted no more than fifteen minutes.  The peasants either died on the hilltop or were hacked to pieces as they fled down the slopes toward the town. The chalky seam on the hillside pulsed like an artery with blood.  Some of the peasants made it to the base of the hill where they sheltered in the salt works, standing hip-deep in the saline canals.  A few of them were taken alive.  Muentzer with Pfeiffer made his way through the carnage to the city wall and hid himself in the gate-house on the edge of town.  But, when some mercenaries demanded lodging in that place that night, the landlady said that Muentzer was already hiding in her rooms.  The preacher was readily identified by his leather satchel full of epistles and sermon notes.  He was captured and led away to Huldringen for interrogation.

Very little is known about the massacre at Bad Frankenhausen.  The peasants, slaughtered there in the number of about 5000, were largely illiterate and left no accounts.  After a couple of generations, memories faded and, in any event, it was imprudent to admit that family members had been killed on the mountain.  The princes were similarly taciturn.  Casualties among the mercenary armies were said to be fewer than six or seven killed.  There are a few letters in which the massacre is mentioned but really nothing else.  In the 1970's, when the East German regime began work on the hilltop museum that would house Werner Tuebke’s panorama, the entire top of the Schlachtberg was lopped off and the ground leveled.  Any archaeological evidence of the massacre remaining in the soils was destroyed.  Physical traces of the killing have all been destroyed.   

46.

After the Berlin Wall was torn down in November 1989, the DDR collapsed like a house of cards.  Within a year, the nomenklatura in Leipzig, Tuebke’s home town, had vanished: the city mayor, its museum director, and most of the officials had been replaced by earnest bureaucrats from Hannover.  Such was the suspicion of the West Germans of the citizens of the old regime that Leipzig’s administrators weren’t replaced by local dissidents or disaffected rebels who had heroically battled the police and Stasi in the streets of the city; a whole cast of bureaucrats from cautious, provincial Hannover was imported to run the town.  

Tuebke’s fame, as well as the status of a whole school of surrealist artists who had grown up around him, went into immediate eclipse.  He traveled to Bonn, then the German capitol and, for East Germans, the lair of the Western beast, to work on a commission for sets and costumes for Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischuetz.  Tuebke performed this work with his customary diligence and preparation.  He made dozens of sketches and wasn’t content to design and paint four huge flats as scenery for the show, but, also, made a decorative curtain for the stage as well as a long mural depicting supernatural events in the Wolf’s Glen.  The subject matter was mother’s milk for Tuebke: the opera is set in the waning days of the Thirty Years War in the forests and gorges of Bohemia.  Scale paintings (1:20) from the project are displayed in the Panorama Museum.  There are four landscapes limned in greyish blues and greens, aerial perspectives on forested hills dotted with rustic cottages and barns; in the final image of the series, a half-dozen animals apparently shot by a huntsman are pressed into the picture’s foreground.  The pictures look a bit like Albrecht Altdorfer’s landscape paintings; in one of the images, a spidery hunter with a spindly gun strolls along a hillside with his faithful dog.  The Wolf’s Glen mural is suitably spooky, densely populated with what seem to be out-takes from the Bad Frankenhausen panorama – spectral beings hover in the air and there are monsters and nude women and a corpse on a bier surrounded by gesticulating figures; the predominant tint is grey splotched with red highlights.  Some officials in elaborate garments are wading through a knee-deep pond next to the pillar of a dead tree pointed up like the maw of a cannon at the grey, thronged skies.  The Spielvorhang (curtain) is similarly profuse: a red dragon bits a yellow dragon’s tail that is biting his tail, forming an oblong loop in the sky; someone is being tortured by being hung on gibbet at the right of the curtain; on the left, grisly Death bearing a big scythe patrols a crowd of agitated musicians, lovers, and courtiers.  Tuebke’s maximalist approach to this commission resulted in two years labor.

Tuebke had always shown an interest in religious imagery, a predilection that made the old East German critics nervous.  As early as 1967, Tuebke mimicked Gruenewald’s crucified Christ in a big painting called Mahnung (“Admonition”); a figure with arms outspread and elongated fingers stretched out in a sort of spasm hovers over a jigsaw-tight mass of men and women; clouds of small angels and devils fill the space between the danging man’s hands above his downcast head.  It comes as no surprise, then, that Tuebke’s next commission after Der Freischuetz, a project on which he worked three years, was for an altarpiece at the St. Salvatoris Evangelical Church at Clausthal-Zellerfeld, a small city in Lower Saxony in the silver-mining Harz mountains.  The big altar occupies the front of the church, built and rebuilt on foundations from the 13th century, a big grey block of masonry that took its present form in 1682.  Tuebke’s approach to this monumental devotional work is entirely without irony and anachronism; Christ, painted after the manner of Gruenewald, but more sinuous and less ghastly in appearance, is crucified at the center of the altar with triptych wings depicting Mary with the infant Jesus on the left and, on the right, a resurrection scene – Christ explodes out of his sepulcher, lean and mean, a tongue of purple flame as in El Greco.  There’s a predella showing the dead Christ among mourners, flanked by two sinister-looking angels on side panels. During Advent and Lent, the wings to the altar are closed.  In that position, the congregation sees Tuebke’s depiction of the Garden of Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve.  A tree bearing gem-like fruit rises over a meadow.  In the shade of the tree, Tuebke’s has painted various fantastical beasts and chimera, creatures of the kind with which Bosch populated the central panel of his Garden of Earthly Delights.  Once again, Tuebke made dozens of sketches and several full-size pastel mock-ups of the altar design.  The altar was unveiled on April 13, 1997.

After this point, no one in Germany wanted much to do with Tuebke.  He kept painting but without an audience.  Several galleries in New York and Los Angeles sold some of his paintings.  When a gallery in Cologne featured a number of his works in 1992, the owner of the place was accused of being an apologist for Honecker’s regime, a crypto-Stasi, and there were bomb-threats.    

Tuebke’s health failed.  He traveled once more to Capri and, then, returned to his manor in Springerstrasse in Leipzig.  He continued to work but weakened.  After a crisis in 2003, he was no longer able to paint.  But the urge to create was strong in him and undying: he continued to make drawings until his death on May 27, 2004,

47.

There are two triumphant sequences in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn!,a 1969 film set on a fictional Portuguese island in the Antilles. In the first revolutionary sequence, people celebrate a carnival.  In the midst of the carnival, when the rules of ordinary society are suspended, the enslaved workers, many of them dressed in masks and wearing towering headdresses, rise up against their masters.  It is impossible to ascertain where the carnival ends and the armed uprising begins.  The two revolutionary acts occur simultaneously and, as drums thunder and women ululate, the masked dancers rebel and topple the regime.  The spasm of uprising is indistinguishable from a dance.

Later, the revolutionary army returns to the capitol and, led by cavalry, the soldiers and their women and children march along a beach, a procession that seems as irresistable as the torrent of waves and surf pounding against the shore.  The great Italian composer, Ennio Morricone provides on the soundtrack a soaring anthem, Abollison, scored to organ, tom-toms, and, then, a massed choir.  The scene is exhilarating, an audio-visual equivalent to Wordsworth’s paean to the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven. (Prelude, Book XI).  

Burn!, a parable about colonialism, ends with the revolution crushed and its leader hanged. The slaves who rose against their masters have been slaughtered and their villages burned, most of the carnage the result of internecine fighting between revolutionary factions.  Whatever the hopes of the multitude marching on the beach in the light of dawn, these have been dashed and broken to pieces.  The revolution always fails and, indeed, often results in oppression worse than that which preceded the uprising.  This is the ineluctable pattern of history.  The oppressed rise in revolt, for a brief moment glimpse a future in which they are free, and, then, are crushed once more.  

But this doesn’t means that the revolution was meaningless.  The heart of the revolutionary project is the moment in which it seems that a better future is about to dawn.  There is a glimmer of hope, at first, that, then, flares into radiance, briefly burning against history’s overwhelming darkness. It is the process of revolution and not its outcome, almost inevitably squalid and disappointing, that justifies the movement.  In the fervor of the revolutionary moment, in the tumult of unrest, chains dissolve for a moment and the rebels faintly descry the hope for a better future – this is the enactment of the principle of hope in the context of political revolution.  As long as human beings are hopeful, they will rise against oppression even though the long history of mankind shows that such uprisings are invariably futile.  The end doesn’t justify the means; to the contrary, the means themselves justify and glorify the ends or the telos of the project.  Of course, it matters that the revolution will be betrayed and that its hopes for a better future will be dashed.  But it doesn’t matter so much as to make revolution unnecessary.  Revolution embodies the principle of hope not in its outcome but in its brief moment of liberation.   

48.

After the fatal battle at Frankenhausen, Muentzer’s most important disciples, those accused of leading the insurrection, were summarily executed.  Two of his lieutenants were spared so that they could be delivered into the hands of the new widows in the town.  The women beat these men to death with cudgels.  

Muentzer confessed to 15 items constituting heresy and rebellion.  This first interrogation was “voluntary” – in other words, Muentzer made his confession in response to questions posed to him.  On the basis of that interrogation, the prosecuting authorities determined that a trial by torture was warranted.  In the German-speaking world in 1525, trial was, itself, a form of judgement – if your lawyer couldn’t avoid trial, you might find yourself being interrogated by men with red hot pincers or thrown into ponds of icy water: if you didn’t burn or drown, maybe, you were innocent.  Thumbscrews were applied to Muentzer and he confessed “painfully” to another 12 offenses.  In this second confession, he named names, identifying his confederates and admitted that his rebels had conspired to cut-off the head of the local Count.  It is this second confession under torture that yields the famous formulation omnia sunt communia (all things are to be held in common).  Muentzer admitted that he had preached that “goods should be shared out amongst everyone according to their need, as occasion demanded.”  Muentzer went on to say that “any prince, count, or nobleman who did not want to do that, having been once reminded of it, should his head chopped off or be hanged.”

49.

The head that was cut off belonged to Muentzer.  With an associate Pfeiffer, he was dragged to an open field outside the east gate of Muehlhausen town and beheaded by the sword.  Several hundred insurrectionists were assembled to witness the execution.  Before he was killed, Muentzer spoke briefly admonishing the princes to not treat the peasants harshly and reminding them of their royal obligations as itemized in the Book of Judges. Muentzer was 28, 

Twenty six other rebels were also put to death.  Muentzer’s severed head, as well as that Pfeiffer, were impaled on posts.  Their bodies were left under the stakes, displayed as a warning as to the abject fate of rebels.  Luther declared that those who lived by the sword must die by the sword and that justice had been done. Several weeks later, the rotting limbs and torso of Muentzer were raised up into the semblance of a standing figure.  Some local wag paid the town executioner six groschen to use a hook to stage the grisly tableaux.

This desecration of the corpses of Muentzer and Pfeiffer had an unintended consequence. Long after the bodies had fallen apart and vanished, people came to the site where the stakes had once stood.  It was said that they were praying there.  In 1531, Luther complained that there was a deeply trodden footpath leading across the meadow to the place where the dead men’s heads had been impaled on posts – Luther said that people were coming to pay their respect “as if to a saint.”   

50.

In January 2017, the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, Netherlands opened an exhibition called “Werner Tuebke – Master Painter between East and West.  By all accounts, the show was a success: more than 80,000 visitors looked at the retrospective displaying many of Tuebke’s most accomplished paintings including the 1:10 fifteen meter study for the Peasant’s War panorama.  I’m not entirely convinced that the gallery-goers were paying tribute to Tuebke.  My guess is that there was a degree of Schadenfreude about the big exhibition and more than a little morbid curiosity about how the despised East German regime had afflicted art in the DDR – for many, I presume, the show wasn’t so much about art as about political pathology.   

One of the paintings in the show was Tuebke’s Der Alte Narr ist Tot (“The old fool – or jester – is dead”).  Painted on wood in 1993, the picture invokes the extravagant and surreal imagery in the great mural, although the finicky brush strokes and monochromatic nature of the representation resemble Andrea Mantegna’s stony world.  Everything in the picture is unnatural and the figures seem desiccated, posed against a frigid backdrop of barren crags and a weird column carved into enigmatic figures at its top (an owl squatting atop a woman’s torso?) The old jester lies on a wheeled contraption, contorted by rigor mortis with his lower limbs showing a gap between his calves.  The cadaver, like most of figures grouped around the catafalque, is twisted into a grotesque posture, half turned to viewer, but also rotated away toward the mineralized landscape.  Many of the mourners have their heads bent downward as if their spines were either completely missing or broken in two.  On the shore of a dead ocean, two women are kneeling; the ongoing crystallization of the figures and scenery has resulted in the hair of one of them extending rigidly away from her skull – not an effect, of wind, it seems, because the picture seems wholly airless, all of the oxygen sucked out of the scene.  In a tangled clump of clerics and princes, a fat Martin Luther seems to be smoking a cigarette – in fact, I think he’s playing a bagpipe concealed by the adjacent figures. Of course, Tuebke has given the grey, dead jester his own emaciated features. It’s hard not to read the picture as an exhausted gasp of despair – the strings to the marionette have been cut; the regime that he served is gone and the fool’s accomplices and old adversaries are all slowly turning to grey stone.

A few steps away, the curators have placed a six foot square photograph showing crowds tearing apart the Berlin Wall.  Next to that photo, Tuebke’s meditation on the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the regime that built that monument, Herbst, 1989 (“Autumn, 1989"actually created in 1990) hangs.  It’s not a prepossessing picture, only two feet by 2 ½ feet, and also mostly monochromatic – the breached wall and the horde of people are either the color of brown cardboard or khaki green.  A mob of people in drab clothing are approaching a gap in the bare concrete slabs comprising the wall.  Behind them, in the distance, a helicopter spiked with stalled-out rotors like a kind of windmill stands becalmed in the throng.  A frieze of angels decorates the top of the concrete slabs and the winged creatures seem to be playing instruments and dancing, albeit with zombie-like, spastic motions.  A harlequin in bright red trousers is near the right bottom of the frame, drastically off-balance next to another man also precariously tilted to the side who has his arms raised either belligerently and in defense, or, perhaps, rejoicing.  A crowd of figures who have leaked out of Tuebke’s Frankenhausen mural, prelates and workers with women in medieval costume, make a halting procession toward the breach in the wall.  The defaced figure of a ruler, carved in stone, lies dismembered on the stony ground amid rock sarcophaguses in the foreground.  The question raised by the picture is: Are they coming or going?  Are the people grouped around the broken wall pilgrims or refugees?

Unlike the actual Berlin Wall, a gallery of exuberant graffiti on the side facing West Berlin, there are no marks whatsoever on the blank slates of the concrete slabs shown in the picture.  Haring’s mural is not in evidence.  (Perhaps, this means that we are viewing the spectacle from the East looking out to the West – although I’m not sure, then, why the crowd would be surging forward into East Germany.  Is the stalled-out helicopter evidence of NATO?)  The picture is completely ambiguous – there’s little trace of the triumpalism that greeted the wall’s collapse, at least, in the West; no one knows whether to rejoice or mourn and the agitated crowds are indecisive as to whether they should surge across the border or simply riot in place. 

51.

Tuebke’s health failed in 2003.  Illness weakened him to the point that he couldn’t paint any longer.  But the Kunstwollen in him was strong and, until the end, he made sketches in graphite pencil on cream-yellow paper.  His last drawing is probably a sheet called “Four Men and a Woman with a Fool, Self-portrait.”  Tuebke is at the center of the sketch, stooped over with his bald head that was concealed by the red cap in the earlier 1988, shown in an unflattering way – his features look coarse  and are foreshortened and there is a haunted paranoid expression on his face: he looks like a convict or, perhaps, concentration camp victim. Two other men in renaissance clothing sit at a table that is covered with a figured cloth on which there is a bowl and half-full glass of water.  A woman, also in archaic garments, manipulates a dwarf-sized puppet.  The puppet wears a fool’s cap and seems more alive and vivid than the other figures in the drawing.  The sketch is detailed with clothing falling in intricate displays of drapery.  On reflection, the viewer asks whether the self-portrait is the crouching old man with the bald head and haunted eyes or the prancing dwarf?  (Tuebke often made self-portraits in which he appears as a harlequin or jester.)  Something is wrong: there are only three men shown in the picture and the androgynous woman whose expression is impossible to interpret.  Maybe, the “four men” refers to the puppet of the dwarf and the other three – all of these figures seem to show variations on Tuebke’s features; perhaps, these personages represent a four-fold figure depicting the artist?  Or, maybe, the title on the picture is somehow simply mistaken, an artifact of sickness and old age.  

52.

Muentzer preached that God would destroy all tyrants.  A rainbow appeared in the sky around the sun.  White banners with rainbows flapped in the wind on the hill overlooking old Bad Frankenhausen with its crooked, leaning tower.  The four horizons leaked smoke from burning villages and the armor cuirasses of the mercenaries on the ridges nearby glinted in the bright morning light.  Some of the rebels were praying and others sang.  Shot and shell would not prevail against them because their cause was just.  I suppose that when the rainbow’s apparition adorned the heavens, this was the moment of hope, the instant when the soul stirred with the promise of a better day.  In some sense, whatever would happen in the next hour was irrelevant.  The moment of liberation had come.   

53.

Ernst Bloch: Noch nicht.  (“Not yet.”)

November 9, 2024 – four days after the election of Donald Trump to his second term as President.