Eric Vuillard - The War of the Poor

His father had been hanged. Dropped into the void like a sack of feed. Theyd had to carry him on their shoulders at night; then he made not a sound, his mouth full of earth. After that, everything had caught fire. The oaks, the fields, the rivers, the white bedstraw on the embankment, the barren soil, the church, everything. He was eleven years old.

At age fifteen, he had formed a secret league to oppose the Archbishop of Magdeburg and the Church of Rome. He read the Epistles of Clement, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, Papiass Fragments. With several comrades, he praised Gods marvels, crossed the Jordan in a dressing gown; afterward he traced the cosmic wheel (a sign of assembly) on the ground in chalk and they each lay on it in turns, arms outstretched, so that Heaven might descend to Earth. And then he remembered the corpse of his father, the enormous tongue like a single, desiccated word. I was filled with joy, but one unites with God only through terrible suffering and despair. Thats what he believed.

They say that in Stolberg, there was a vintner by the name of Barthol Munzer. And they still talk about a Monczer Berld and a Monczers Merth, but nothing is known about them. There is also a Thomas Miinzer, killed in a bar brawl. We dont know if he got hit in the face with a fist or a log, nor do we know if he was related to Thomas Mntzer, the one whose father, around 1500, for reasons unknown, was executed on the orders of the count of Stolbergsome say hanged, others say burned.

Fifty years earlier, a molten substance had flowed, flowed from Mainz over the rest of Europe, flowed between the hills of every town, between the letters of every name, in the gutters, between every twist and turn of thought; and every letter, every fragment of an idea, every punctuation mark had found itself cast in a bit of metal. They had arranged them in wooden trays. Hands had plucked out one, then another, and composed words, lines, pages. They had moistened them with ink and a great force had slowly pressed the letters onto paper. They had repeated this procedure dozens and dozens of times, before folding the sheets into signatures of four, or eight, or sixteen pages. They had put them in sequence, glued them together, sewn them, bound them in leather. They had made a book. The Bible.

And so, in the space of three years, they had made one hundred eighty copies, where in that time a single monk could have made only one. And then the books had multiplied like maggots in a corpse.

Now, young Thomas Mntzer read the Bible, grew up with Ezekiel, Hosea, Daniel; but they were Gutenbergs Ezekiel, Gutenbergs Hosea, Gutenbergs Daniel. And after passing through the rotten, yawning gate that scraped the ground, he spent long hours downstairs in the old kitchen, rubbing his eyes. He didnt know what he was seeing or what he was supposed to see. He was solitary like a thief, and innocent.

Time passed. He lived with his mother, no doubt frugally. His heart hurt. Beneath the oaks, the pines, on the poor soil of the Harz Mountains, as he chased after pigs with the other children, he must have suddenly stopped short, alone, feeling foolish, and wept. Yes, I imagine him on the edge of a river of small black pebbles, the Wipper, perhaps, or the Krebsbach, no matter; or else on the flanks of sad little summits of chaotic rock, eroded cliffs, shabby peat bogs, in the Bode or Oker valley, suffocating in a mix of bitterness and love.

Finally, he enrolled as a student in Leipzig, then became a priest in Halberstadt and Brunswick, then a provost here and there, then, after considerable tribulations among the Lutherite plebeians, he emerged from his hole in 1520, when he was named a preacher in Zwickau.

ZWICKAU

Outside the borders of Saxony, hardly anyone knows Zwickau. Its just another backwater. Zwicker means pince-nez; Zwickel means gusset; Zwiebel, onion; and zwiebeln, to harass or bully. But Zwickau means nothing, or else it means onionskin, poor slobs, good business, yes, thats what Zwickau means: poor slobs and good business. For in Zwickau they wove, they wove a lot, they wove for the whole world, for people in Frankfurt and Dresden; back then, they say, even in Paris some people slept on Zwickau sheets. And on top of that, in Zwickau they dug the earth, exploited the mines. And so, right after the Welsers and the Fuggers come the burghers of Zwickau.

The burghers heard Mntzer preach at St. Marys church, as a temporary replacement for Johann Sylvanus Egranus. When Egranus returned, they appointed Mntzer to St. Katharines, a parish of weavers and miners. There, he mixed with the Zwickau reformists Nikolaus Storch, Mark Stbner, and Thomas Drechsel. That shadowy trio was raising holy hell, wallowing in ecstasy, visions, and dreams, waiting for those moments when the Good Lord would speak to them