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Lead book review

The pointlessness of the German Peasants’ War – except in Marxist ideology

The short-lived 16th-century revolt resolved absolutely nothing, but it loomed large in Engels’s thought and in the official DDR interpretation of history

8 February 2025

9:00 AM

8 February 2025

9:00 AM

Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War Lyndal Roper

Basic Books, pp.544, 30

The preservation of a strict social hierarchy rests very often on the enforcement of correct modes of address. In America today any university student may address any other as ‘dude’, but those who have attained a certain level of prestige will object if an unwary low-status blunderer ventures to call them ‘bro’.

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