The Peasants' War of 1525
The rising was crushed near the town, thousands killed and its leader executed.
Hobbyelektroniker — Public domain · Catatine — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Catatine — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Z thomas — CC BY-SA 4.0
A fourteenth-century church tower in the town of Bad Frankenhausen, leaning at an angle greater than the famous tower at Pisa. The cause is underground: the town stands on salt beds, and groundwater slowly dissolves the salt so the ground subsides. This is called salt karst subsidence, and it affects many buildings in the area. The tower began leaning centuries ago and continues to move a few millimetres each year. The church itself is disused and unsafe to enter, and repeated stabilisation work has been carried out to prevent collapse. The town has a place in German history: in 1525 the Battle of Frankenhausen was fought nearby, in which the great Peasants' War was crushed and thousands were killed. Its leader Thomas Müntzer was executed afterwards. On a hill above the town stands the Peasants' War Museum with an enormous panoramic painting a hundred and twenty-three metres long by Werner Tübke — among the largest paintings in the world. The tower is free to see from outside.
The rising was crushed near the town, thousands killed and its leader executed.
Tübke's panorama in the hilltop museum — among the largest paintings in the world.
The whole area suffers subsidence from the salt beneath it.
The Oberkirche, Bad Frankenhausen, Thuringia
The largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution, breaking out in the German lands in 1524-1525. Peasants demanded relief from feudal burdens and rights of grazing and hunting, and some drew on the ideas of the Reformation. The rising was crushed brutally with an estimated seventy to a hundred thousand killed. Martin Luther himself urged the princes to crush it, a position still debated in assessments of him.
The distance is considerable — about two hundred and sixty kilometres — so it is a long day or an overnight. The tower alone does not justify it. But with Tübke's panorama in the hilltop museum, an exceptional work in scale and ambition, the journey becomes reasonable for anyone interested in art or in East German history — the painting was commissioned under the communist regime and carries its reading of that uprising.
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