I Wish I'd Been There . . .

With this issue we begin a new series. The consulting editors of the Mennonite Historical Bulletin respond to the questions: What is the one event in Anabaptist-Mennonite history you wish you could have witnessed
-- and Why?

Coup d'etat at Münster

by J. Robert Charles

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A coup d'etat through seizure of city hall, expulsion of those who refused (re)baptism, daily arrivals of desperate refugees from across the Netherlands, 18 months of armed resistance to the Catholic bishop and his besieging forces, the "king of the New Zion" Jan van Leyden appointing 12 elders and holding court from a throne erected on the market square, the community of goods, polygamy........

My fascination with the ill-fated Anabaptist "New Jerusalem" of 1534-1535 in the Westphalian city of Münster -- used ever since by opponents to discredit the whole Anabaptist movement and to justify repressive measures against it, lamented ever since by Mennonite apologists as the source of "incalculable harm to the cause of the loyal Anabaptism and Mennonitism" (N.van der Zipp) -- originated 25 years ago.

In those heady days of draft resistance, Vietnam War protests, and Art Gish's The New Left and Christian Radicalism, any attitude or demeanor with a non-bourgeois, revolutionary cachet, far from horrifying undergraduates such as I, actually commended itself. When it came time to choose a research topic for Walter Klaassen's Left Wing of the Reformation course at Conrad Grebel College -- and a classmate had already picked Thomas Müntzer -- I was instinctively drawn to Münster.

I remember my odd satisfaction, as a restless twenty-year-old, in learning about some truly quirky and marginal members of my religious family tree, branches my Mennonite elders had seemed overly eager to prune. And I remember my satisfaction as budding historian in fitting the Münster personalities and developments into the life cycle of revolutions suggested by Crane Brinton in his classic The Anatomy of Revolution. Several years later, my wife and I visited Münster and saw still hanging from the tower of St. Lambert's church the cages in which the corpses of Jan van Leyden and two other leaders were displayed following their executions in January 1536.

Could I really pass up an opportunity to take in--though not, mind you, necessarily join in, now that I'm a respectable, middle-aged family man and scholar--all this and more eccentric Anabaptist behavior? Not a chance.

--J. Robert Charles teaches history at Goshen College

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Mennonite Historical Bulletin, January, 1996