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The First German Movement In Its European Setting (1270-1350)
Page 3
The "people of God" were a revolutionary force of considerable importance. Their ideas were inherently dynamic. They wanted to cleanse the earth of wicked men and then, like the new Adam, to build the kingdom of God upon it. Yet, their ideas were strikingly unimportant in Germany between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, except in certain currents of life divorced from the main stream: the Anabaptists and one branch of the pietist movement. There the revolt had run a different course, entirely within the realm of the soul, of the ego, the mind, nature and woman. Strong pressure from above diverted it from the social and political sides of life and forced it inward. The princes, the nobility and the imperial clergy were strong and as a result the "kingdom of God" frustrated the development of the "people of God".
The Holy Empire had been desecrated in the Investiture dispute and the twelfth-century battles between emperor and pope. The old Carolingian nobility had been deposed by a new, administrative, parvenu nobility, and simultaneously a wave of deep revulsion against the imperial and papal authoritarian Church and its clergy had swept the land. The courtly poetry of the years between 1170 and 1230 represented both the expression of these changes and the awakening of the first German movement [8]. In Minnesang, the man, the knight, was an emperor, engaged in establishing his own interior kingdom~riche; he was joined indissolubly to his "sovereign lady", his frouwe. The inspiration for such motifs came from certain Cistercian versions of the Song of Songs which were subsequently destroyed because they were too secular. Their inner power was the expression of distress and anxiety. In Strasbourg, for example where more than eighty persons were burned at the stake in the year 1212 alone, Godfrey began to develop a minne-ideology. He had nothing but contempt for the unhallowed and impotent liturgies of the old empire, the old Church, and society. He began to expose them as compounds of self-deceit, fiction and lies.
Cf. Meister Eckhart von Friedrich Heer ||| Mail: Heer, Tauler & nazism
