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What do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics, 1650–1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Hermann Rebel
Hermann Rebel
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
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Extract

In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only events. What Leibniz calls predicate is nothing to do with an attribute, but an event, “crossing the Rubicon.” So they have to completely recast the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, if predicates are events? It's like a baroque emblem. (Gilles Deleuze)

The [Swiss] Confederacy presented a deep political ambiguity, a union of urban oligarchs and peasant producers, all of whom collectively ruled over yet other subjects, which mirrored the tension between the [South German] cities' own oligarchical present and communal past. If there is indeed “an unbroken progressive line” between the communal burghers of this age and the bourgeoisies of a later one, it runs through deep shadows of ambiguity and tension, which flowed from securing the liberties of some through the subjection of others…More and more, the bigger folk in the cities made their livings from the vast web of market relations…and made their peace with the early modern state. (Thomas Brady)

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , September 2001 , pp. 313 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2001

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References

1. Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York, 1995), 160Google Scholar.

2. Brady, Thomas A. Jr, Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450–1550 (Cambridge, 1985), 229Google Scholar.

3. Suter, Andreas, Der schweizerische Bauernkrieg von 1653: Politische Sozialgeschichte — Sozialgeschichte eines politischen Ereignisses (Tübingen, 1997)Google Scholar; Luebke, David M., His Majesty's Rebels: Communities, Factions and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–1745 (Ithaca, 1997)Google Scholar.

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6. For a revealing intellectual genealogy of this analytical direction see Schulze, W., Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1993), 287–300Google Scholar and passim. Here we find Koselleck arranged with those who respect and accept historiographical continuity with the Volksgeschichte of the first half of the twentieth century. In Schulze's own astonishing words this latter is, “as has in the meantime been shown in many other fields, certainly the consequence of the objectively proven modernizing function of National Socialism.” Such an affirmation of “objectively proven” fascist “modernization” is, to say the least, open to many “objective” (including cost-benefit) questions.

7. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 24–26Google Scholar and passim.

8. For a relevant and telling critique of any kind of histoire évenénementielle see Althusser, Louis, “The Errors of Classical Economics: Outline of a Concept of Historical Time” in his and Etienne Balibar's Reading Capital (London, 1979), 107–9Google Scholar; also of interest (but not altogether satisfying) is White, Hayden, “The Modernist Event” in his Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, 1999)Google Scholar.

9. This kind of analysis remains stuck in the purely epistemological, pre-Freudian vision of an “unconscious” that is visible, for example, in Simmel's, Georg early work, The Problems of the Philosophy of History (New York, 1977 [1892]) 51–56Google Scholar.

10. Unless they are women. These, in their extremely rare appearances in this study, are called Akteurinnen (!), Bauernkrieg, 514. Cf. also Blickle's, Peter usage: “The [peasant] subjects were actors, black playing against white” in his Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal: A New View of German History, translated and introduced by Brady, Thomas (Charlottesville, 1997), 97Google Scholar.

11. Figural: i.e., what is being “figured?” I am increasingly convinced that it is the complex capacities of figural-critical languages that will allow us to bridge material/ideal gaps in our efforts to develop a theorized historical anthropology and to offer a new means to assess each other's work critically. Most recently there is Hayden White, “The Modernist Event”; also, I have found the writings of Auerbach, Elias, Wolf, Humphreys, Girard, Derrida and (yes) de Man, particularly absorbing in this direction; cf. Rebel, Hermann, “Dispossession in the Communal Memory: An Alternative Narrative about Austria's Descent into Holocaust,” Focaal 26/27 (1996): 167–89Google Scholar, and idem, “Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Structural Narrative about the ‘Long Duration’ Provenances of the Holocaust,” in Anthropology and History, ed. Kalb, Don (New York: Berg, forthcoming)Google Scholar. Also noteworthy are the collections by O'Brien, Jay and Roseberry, William, eds., Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar and by Fernandez, J., ed., Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology (Stanford, 1991)Google Scholar.

12. “Peasants Against the State in the Body of Anna Maria Wagner: An Infanticide in Rural Austria in 1832,” Journal of Historical Sociology 6 no. 1 (1993): 15–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. A perfect illustration of Baudelaire's “oublié sur la carte,” “forgotten on paper,” by which historians are reminded of the eternally displacing qualities of even their primary documentations. de Man, Paul, “Introduction” to H. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton, 1982), xxiii–xxvGoogle Scholar.

14. In the Black Forest area south of Freiburg-im-Breisgau.

15. Suter, A., “Troublen” im Fürstbistum Basel (1726–1740) (Göttingen, 1985)Google Scholar.

16. Luebke, , Rebels, 7, 20–21, cf. 230Google Scholar; he does not refer to the clarifications in Suter, , “Troublen” 124, 209Google Scholar and elsewhere.

17. Luebke, , Rebels, 22–23Google Scholar; also, idem, “Naive Monarchism and Marian Veneration in Early Modern Germany,” Past and Present 154 (1997): 106Google Scholar; Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 442–49, 591–94Google Scholar and passim.

18. Hauenstein was a Grafschaft. At no point does Luebke present an adequate legal-corporate description of the territory as a whole. This diminishes throughout the contextual effectiveness of his presentation of the various parties' political positions.

19. Luebke, , Rebels, 54–55Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., 85.

21. Ibid., 22, 228–31 and passim. He characterizes the process as a “transition from a system of rule with peasants to one of rule over them” (p. 56); cf. Schulze, W., “Die veränderte Bedeutung sozialer Konflikte im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert” in Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, 1524–1526, ed. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (Göttingen, 1976), 277–302Google Scholar.

22. What was at stake was obviously a Pfandherrschaft (“lien” administration) which was not a “lease” but a public-debt repayment in the form of a contractually specified exploitation of royal treasury property; Luebke's hermeneutical omission in identifying it as such affects the quality of the argument he can make. I am no particular friend of quotation marks around words but I find Luebke's use of such English terms as “county,” “lease,” and, in a moment, “serfdom” and “manumission” highly unsatisfactory in that it allows him to tell an unconvincing story about peasants' political behaviors and reasonings, one that suppresses some of the substantive, purposive- and values-rational contents and issues of early modern German rural and corporative politics specifically contained in the German terms this language means to represent.

23. Luebke, , Rebels, 85ffGoogle Scholar.

24. We are never told the subsequent history of this treaty and its enforcement except that payment refusals were part of the 1740s conflicts that ended with the declaration of the status quo ante. All Luebke tells us is: “the 1738 manumission treaty emancipated all abbatical serfs; subsequent treaties would abolish serfdom entirely.” Ibid., 85.

25. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 593Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., 23, 587; Janet Malcolm lights on and captures as adroitly as only she can an analogous moment in Havel's, Vaclav Letters to Olga by perceiving a “narrative that omits the ‘fact’ on which the crisis is poised.” The Purloined Clinic (New York, 1992), 170Google Scholar.

27. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 626–43Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., 131–40, 146–47. It is worth noting that Suter here and in several other places observes (in language apparently not taken from his sources but recognizable from German Central Europe's more recent and darker memory) what he calls ritual formations of “collectively fated communities of necessity” (pp. 122, 127, 137, 606).

29. Most historians who reference Victor Turner equate his communitas with “community” and that always seems somehow to be a “good thing.” They are advised to consult his The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, 1977), where it's a little more complicated than that.

30. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 147Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., 168, 171; cf., 424–25; almost needless to say, neither the document nor the episode appear in the index.

32. Ibid., 608, 172–73, 177.

33. Ibid., 173 n. 44.

34. Ibid., 472–74.

35. Ibid., 479–80.

36. Ibid., 202; we learn later, in a different context, that there was at least a sixth point stipulating punishments for “falling away” from the union, p. 231. There is no information on a fifth point.

37. Ibid., 160; it is astonishing to read the twists and turns of Suter's logic-chopping, pp. 160–66, passim, to deny the peasants anything other than an ironic place in Swiss liberalism, the latter ascribed by him completely to post-Republic developments. Cf. the argument in Blickle, Renate, “Die Tradition des Widerstandes im Ammergau: Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis von Konflikt- und Aufstandsbereitschaft” Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 35 (1987): 138–59Google Scholar.

38. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 217ffGoogle Scholar.; these political “diversions” were part of a primarily military perspective, a part of the evolving residue of the Swiss cities' military entrepreneur sector from the Thirty Years' War. These latter elements had been pushing for a military solution since at least mid-April, 214.

39. Ibid., 225–32.

40. Ibid., 225–42; this is where a comparison to Brady, Turning Swiss, might have been apropos.

41. Braun, Rudolf, Das ausgehende ancien régime in der Schweiz (Göttingen, 1984)Google Scholar.

42. Evident in a contemporary copper etching by Plepp and Merian, whose text reminds us, incidentally, that 1653 was the tricentennial of Bern's joining the Confederacy. My source is Höhn, Heinrich, Alte deutsche Städte in Ansichten aus drei Jahrhunderte (Königstein/Taunus, 1956), 10Google Scholar.

43. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 264Google Scholar.

44. Ibid., 282.

45. Ibid., 307.

46. Ibid., 559.

47. Luebke, , Rebels, 64–65Google Scholar, commits a narrative disjuncture when the Ordinance of 1720, in effect silencing the Salpeters' appeal to imperial jurisdiction, appears in a descriptive portion of the book (pp. 28–29) but is forgotten as a possible motivator inside the peasants' threshold-crossings at the proper moment in the narrative.

48. Ibid., 151–52, passim.

49. Rabe, Hannah, Das Problem Leibeigenschaft: Eine Untersuchung über die Anfänge einer Ideologisierung und des verfassungsrechtlichen Wandels von Freiheit und Eigentum im deutschen Bauernkrieg, supplement 64 of the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Wiesbaden, 1977)Google Scholar.

50. Ibid., 65–66 and passim; there are significant problems with Rabe's sometimes awkwardly argued study (e.g., she does not sufficiently untangle, pp. 90–99, the inheritance questions thrown up by this circumstantially “privileging” form as does Sabean, D., Landbesitz und Gesellschaft am Vorabend des Bauernkriegs (Stuttgart, 1972), 93–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar), but her study has great merit and cannot be ignored, as Luebke does. Suter's discussion (“Troublen” 304–5, 240, 242) of the so-called craichies, i.e., of those early eighteenth-century Basel subjects (Hintersassen) whose houses were symbolically, anonymously, marked with a yoke to designate their tenants' individualized, decommunalized “subordination” to the episcopal lordship, contains much that should have been helpful to Luebke. It is worth noting that one of the benefits of being a Hintersasse (a common eighteenth-century South German and Swiss term for a subject under a personal bondage contract) was, by eighteenth-century rules for military recruitment, protection against forced conscription, a benefit that gives the Miller position some rational significance; cf. Taylor, P., Indentured to Liberty: Peasant Life and the Hessian Military State, 1688–1815 (Ithaca, 1984), 66Google Scholar.

51. Luebke, , Rebels, 40Google Scholar; by 1738, 69 percent of St. Blasien's subjects were leibeigen, 43.

52. Ibid., 43–44.

53. Luebke, , Rebels, 42–43Google Scholar.

54. Rabe, , Das Problem Leibeigenschaft, 99–103Google Scholar.

55. For a Swiss anti-Habsburg take on this, see Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 419Google Scholar.

56. It is another narratively and therefore analytically excluded moment (see note 45 above) where the initiating shock of action comes from the St. Blasien authorities who, precisely in the fateful years 1719–20, curb the peasants' “withdrawal” rights of adjusting inheritance and expand their own powers of managing peasant inheritance and succession. Luebke, , Rebels, 130–31Google Scholar.

57. Cf. Rebel, Hermann, Peasant Classes: The Bureaucratization of Property and Family Relations under Early Habsburg Absolutism, 1511–1636 (Princeton, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and idem, “Peasantries under the Austrian Empire, 1300–1800” in The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Scott, Tom (London, 1998), 191–225Google Scholar.

58. Luebke, , Rebels, 124, 267Google Scholar; Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 348–49Google Scholar.

59. For a glimpse into the ideological construction of this new corporatist, in effect cartelist, vision and its impact, in this case on Austrian peasants' economic calculations, see Rebel, “Peasantries,” 220–21.

60. Luebke asserts, on the basis of very little evidence, that his parties united in opposition to the authorities' impartibility position, but he also has evidence that shows the parties divided in the way indicated in the text, Rebels, 123–25, 132–34; for a suggestive comparison see the analysis by Ditz, Toby L., Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut, 1750–1820 (Princeton, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who reveals what was going on at the same time with these issues in a part of the world where a land/real estate market was evolving toward greater freedom.

61. Luebke, , Rebels, 126Google Scholar; Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 342–43, 355–59Google Scholar.

62. In his narrative, Suter characterizes as “adventurous” the authorities' allegation that “excessive” debt was a measure of the peasants' immorality, but also agrees it was part of the former's “well thought out” reasoning for declaring war against the peasants. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 245–46Google Scholar, also 256.

63. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 649Google Scholar; Rebel, , Peasant Classes, 243, 65Google Scholar.

64. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 345, 359Google Scholar. Without “control” studies, these figures have to be used cautiously since they were part of a limited census compiled by the authorities with a view toward raising tributes.

65. Luebke, , Rebels, 126Google Scholar.

66. Ibid., 90.

67. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 227–28Google Scholar; Luebke, “Naive Monarchism,” and idem, Rebels, 193–202. To be sure, particularly Luebke's discussion of these matters is full of “factual” contents that are a valuable addition to our knowledge and it would be instructive to make these “facts” work in the transregional, parish-treasury and confraternal politics of the peasants, something I do not have space for here.

68. It is here where a more careful reading of Suter's earlier monograph might have alerted Luebke to a research direction derived from geographically and temporally adjacent and very comparable peasant resistances against ecclesiastical landlords. The Basel peasant rebels too, just like those of Hauenstein, had to deal with newly empowered and restructured offices of local and regional forest stewards. More importantly, the Basel bishops, claiming communal institutions were inadequate for their ostensible purposes, began, with an administrative reform in 1726, to assert fiscal control over communal accounts and to intervene in the administration of welfare, trust fund, and other family and associational finances, precisely in those realms where pious and benevolent associations were seeking to forge new links between public and private financial institutions. Even though his peasants' “symbolic reason” points to it, Luebke appears not to have investigated this arguably central area of economic- and social-political conflict. Suter, , “Troublen,” 246–47, 324–28Google Scholar.

69. Luebke, “Naive Monarchism” 101–2, and idem, Rebels; Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 90–93Google Scholar and passim.

70. Hermann. Rebel, “When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue: Subaltern Social Formations and Hegemonic Intelligence” (in preparation).

71. “When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them. Within the range of Fascism, to defy such reason is the cardinal crime.” Horkheimer, Max, “The End of Reason” [1941] in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Arato, Andrew and Gebhardt, Eike (New York, 1978), 28Google Scholar.

72. Luebke, “Naive Monarchism,” 104.

73. Rothkrug, Lionel, Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation (special issue)Google Scholar, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 7, no. 1 (1980)Google Scholar. Like Hannah Rabe, Rothkrug makes a brief footnote appearance in Luebke, “Naive Monarchism,” 76 n. 12, but what he says plays absolutely no role in Luebke's citationally correct but narrowly conceived argument. Chapter 11 in Rothkrug's book has the most lucid discussion I have seen of the theological underpinnings of urban and rural confraternal corporations as corpora mystica, arguably a central element in the subaltern's “participation” problematic (Suter's language, Bauernkrieg; cf. also 228, for Swiss peasants' association of pilgrimages with collective strength) besetting both ecclesiastical and secular state-formational theory and processes after 1300.

74. Luebke, “Naive Monarchism,” 96–97, also Rebels, 202; the one citation he gives us in which there is a uterine (“mutterleib”) reference makes no connection to Marian symbolism (p. 97 n. 87) and, moreover, misses a subtle, perhaps punning, association-distinction in the citation between “leib” (body) and “laibeigenschaft,” a difference in spelling by the same person that arguably recognized that the etymology of the latter derived from “life” (Leben/Laib) and not “body;” cf. Kluge's, F. Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 12th/13th ed., 352Google Scholar; and Rabe, , Das Problem Leibeigenschaft, 63ffGoogle Scholar; also interesting is the discussion of Leibkauf as a gesture of closure between partners in a deal in Richard, and Beitl, Klaus, eds., Wörterbuch der deutschen Volkskunde (Stuttgart, 3rd ed., 1974), 435Google Scholar.

75. Rothkrug, , Religious PracticesGoogle Scholar; Scribner, Robert W., “Elements of Popular Belief” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, ed. Brady, Thomas A. Jr, et al. (Leiden, 1994)Google Scholar.

76. Luebke skirts this aspect but misses the dialogic point, Rebels 199; cf. Rothkrug, , Religious Practices, 66, 92Google Scholar.

77. Scott, , Peasantries, 187–92Google Scholar and passim. I question Luebke's usage of “extract” and “taxes” for what were tribute extortions. Suter also repeatedly disguises tributes as “resource transfer,” “redistribution,” and “taxes.” Bauernkrieg, 352–53, 398–99, passim.

78. Scott, , Peasantries, 191–92Google Scholar.

79. Ibid., 103.

80. For a further exploration of the phenomenological ball park in which these conceptions play, see Natanson, Maurice, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington, 1986)Google Scholar: “Mundane life has its own cries and chants which lend themselves to the improvisatory genius of the streets: verbal graffiti” (p. 133).

81. With, one might add, bleak implications; cf. Rebel, H., “Reimagining the oikos: Austrian Cameralism in its Social Formation” in Golden Ages, ed. O'Brien, and Roseberry, Google Scholar.

82. Scott, , Peasantries, 198Google Scholar.

83. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 255Google Scholar.

84. Ibid., 409; an accusatory “falsch” occurs here four times in less than half a page.

85. Ibid., 598.

86. Ibid., 399. There is no doubt where Suter's allegiance lies; he even apologizes for his usage of “peasant war” and assures us he does not wish to endorse the peasants' use of the term, 253. Elsewhere he takes the very dubious position that the peasants were threatening the “existence” of the patricians and that the latter were therefore fully justified in their actions, 216.

87. See note 34.

88. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 425Google Scholar; it is worth noting, as an almost universal “trigger” mechanism, the comparatively significant and widespread perception of the destabilization of subjects' contractual rights that the historical evolution of Habsburg lien administration (Pfandherrschaft) practice initiated; Luebke, , Rebels, 32–33Google Scholar and passim, also Rebel, , Peasant ClassesCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89. How can we not see here a prefiguration of “modern” Swiss archival practices, particularly in light of recent efforts to get the Swiss to confront the realities of their bankers' cooperation and involvement with some of the nastier positions of German banks in the Nazi era? Cf. Kreis, Georg and Müller, B., eds., Die Schweiz und der zweite Weltkrieg, special issue of Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 47, no. 4 (1997)Google Scholar.

90. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 422–23Google Scholar.

91. Ibid., 527–28.

92. Ibid., 455.

93. In another instance concerning a donation by a “Good Count Hans,” Luebke's Hauensteiner had in hand a similar 1396 Pfandschaft document from Count Johannes IV of Habsburg-Laufenburg that guaranteed, in Luebke' paraphrase, unspecified freedoms; all of which Luebke reduces, without missing a beat, to “this legend” and “myth of origins,” functioning inside the peasants' “naive monarchism.” This is right after he claims that Salpeter Hans referred to “an imaginary oath of Emperor Charles VI” but then cites reprints of the oath in a footnote. Rebels, 163–64, 172.

94. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 455Google Scholar.

95. Ibid., 435–36, 64, 229.

96. Suter notes, but makes nothing of it, that the Tell figure did not appear in the several rebellions that had, beginning in 1570, preceded 1653. Ibid., 433.

97. Ibid., 573.

98. Suggestive along these lines are Naujoks's, Eberhard classic, Obrigkeitsgedanke, Zunftverfassung, und Reformation: Studien zur Verfassungsgeschichte von Ulm, Esslingen und Schwäbisch-Gmünd (Stuttgart, 1958)Google Scholar and Paas, Martha W., Population Change, Labor Supply and Agriculture in Augsburg: A Study of Early Demographic-Economic Interactions (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; for some further thoughts, see my review of Blickle, Peter, ed., Landgemeinde und Stadtgemeinde in Mitteleuropa: Ein struktureller Vergleich (Munich, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar in Journal of Modern History 67, no. 1 (1995): 203–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 563–64, 578–80, 588, 593Google Scholar; seventeenth-century Swiss and South German peasant talk about tyranny, democracy, and aristocracy in the manner we find in Luebke and Suter cannot but recall the still instructive treatment of these themes in Palmer, R. R., The Age of Democratic Revolution (Princeton, 1964), vol. 2, chap. 13Google Scholar; for a more recent, and not altogether unproblematic, Swiss voice on these matters see Böning, Holger, Der Traum von Freiheit und Gleichheit: Helvetische Revolution und Republik (1798–1803) (Zurich, 1998)Google Scholar; and on the political front we have, from the Right, yet another version of these issues, one that reproduces a popular, moralistic version of an “it takes a village” mythification of Swiss “liberty,” Muheim, F., Die Schweiz — Aufstieg oder Untergang: Entscheidung an der Jahrhundertwende (Schaffhausen, 1998)Google Scholar.

100. Ibid., 252.

101. Cf. Kälin, Ursel, “Strukturwandel in der Landesgemeinde-Demokratie: Zur Lage der Urner Magistratenfamilien im 18. und im frühen 19. Jahrhundert” in Schweiz im Wandel: Studien zur neueren Gesellschaftsgeschichte, ed. Brändli, Sebastian, et al. (Basel, 1990), 171–90Google Scholar.

102. The social, political-economic and cultural-figurational aspects of this widespread, albeit regionally varied, dimension of early modern German-speaking Central Europe's tribute to modernization is explored most fully in Taylor, , IndenturedGoogle Scholar; see also Wilson, Peter H., War, State and Society in Württemberg, 1677–1793 (Cambridge, 1995), 74–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103. Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 516–17, 626–40Google Scholar.

104. Cf. Arthur Erwin Imhof's positive history of what he perceives as seven centuries of Swiss stability “in spite of everything,” i.e., in spite of what he calls the “dark spots” in Swiss history. Die Lebenszeit: Vom aufgeschobenen Tod und von der Kunst des Lebens (Munich, 1988), 136, 138–39. Of course he was writing between rounds of historical recognitions of Swiss Holocaust banking but one wonders why it did not occur to him that the stability was possible because of inadmissibly necessary “dark spots.”

105. It is not actually certain which of the several meanings of “aufheben” Suter had in mind here.

106. “Die zufällige Kombination äusserer Einflüsse und struktureller Vorgegebenheiten konnte demnach allein wegen des originellen kollektiven Handelns der Akteure zu jener Wirkung kommen, welche das historische Ereignis und seine weitreichenden Folgen möglich macht.” Suter, , Bauernkrieg, 593Google Scholar.

107. Ibid., 592–94.

108. A particularly prominent example of this tacitly theological turn toward a renewed “free will” debate that lurks at the heart of much post-1989 historical writing is the controversy surrounding Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996)Google Scholar, where the purportedly irreducible burden of “free willing” in the face of “evil” is a central question, one that is not, it would appear, historically soluble.

109. Ibid., 304.