Martin Aichinger

Execution of Martin Aichinger, known as Laimbauer, and six other leaders on the main square in Linz (drawing by Wenzel Hollar )

Execution of Martin Aichinger, called Laimbauer - tin figures - diorama from the Peuerbach Peasant War Museum

Martin Aichinger , commonly known as Laimbauer (* around 1592 in Steining, Luftenberg an der Donau , † June 20, 1636 in Linz ) was a Protestant preacher , mystic and peasant war leader of the Machland peasant movement in the first half of the 17th century.

overview

From 1632 to 1636 Martin Aichinger led a religiously and socially motivated regional popular uprising in the Riedmark . Around 300 rebels under the leadership of Martin Aichinger were surrounded by troops of the Upper Austrian estates near the church on the Frankenberg, Langenstein municipality , and most of them were killed. Martin Aichinger and his closest followers were then beheaded and quartered in a large-scale public execution on June 20, 1636 in the main square of the city of Linz on the Danube .

Cult and theological concept

After the end of the Great Peasant Wars around 1626, Martin Aichinger was expelled as a Protestant from his farm - the former Laimbauerngut - in the village of Steining in the lordship of Burg Luftenberg . He developed his own theological model in which the spirit of the early Middle Ages , magical traditions, primeval folk traditions and Puritan Christianity permeated one another. According to his own statements, he received the commission, first from an angel and later from God the Father himself, to convert the peasants , who were already largely re-Catholic, and to win them back to Protestantism .

In his revelations and mystical experiences, Martin Aichinger found himself seven times above the clouds, where God the Father had spoken down to him and given him orders, and seven times at the gate of heaven, when he accompanied the souls of the dead to their abode on the other side . He gave his followers to understand: Be aware that I am used to lead souls to heaven or to throw them into hell . Aichinger handed the participants of his religious meetings consecrated water like in a sacrament to drink or marked magic circles with consecrated water at the meeting places or storage sites to protect his followers. He also wrote his own lyrics for these gatherings, with the following verse from the end of the day being one of the most sung: I heartily long for a blissful end because I am surrounded by misery and misery. He was also perceived by his followers as a prophet and magician . The holy numbers of the Laim farmer were: 3, 7, 12 and 30.

The Laimbauer preached in the spring of 1632 first in secret meetings in the Freistadt area and, in view of the soon-to-be-expected final judgment , urged his compatriots to lead a strict life, conscientious upbringing of children and responsible economic management. From 1635 onwards, Aichinger and his followers, coming from the Freistadt area, undertook open ritual processions with up to 700 participants across the Riedmark to the Luftenberg and St. Georgen an der Gusen area . These processions, accompanied by drums , whistles and violin music , were preceded by up to 60 faithful equipped with firearms with a pennant-like storm flag. Then came the Laimbauer dressed in green with a white hat with a red feather and his own square standard , followed by his other followers. Both the storm flag and its standard were equipped with cosmic sun and star symbols, magical combinations of numbers and letters and the banner saying THE WALT OF GOD FATHER, SON, HOLY SPIRIT, WHO GIVES US THE WAY TO HEAVEN .

Destruction of the Machland peasant movement: Battle of the Frankenberg

Already on October 22nd, 1632 the governor of the state ob der Enns commissioned the mayor and the council of the city of Freistadt to get hold of the Laim farmer and bring him to Linz, which did not succeed because Martin Aichinger had disappeared without a trace. When Aichinger zu Georgi carried out one of his processions in 1635 and was attacked militarily by the rural troops near Gusen on April 27, 1635, he and his followers were able to repel them for the first time and go into hiding with his entourage. Around Martini 1635, despite his persecutors, he went ghost-like through the nights with some loyal followers in white robes and with his standard.

This wall of the former church on the Frankenberg is part of a memorial for the massacred supporters of the “Laimbauern”.

When Aichinger carried out another open procession at Whitsun 1636, the estates mobilized an army of 2,700 soldiers against Aichinger's Machland peasant movement, whose vanguard Aichinger was able to defeat again near Neumarkt in the Mühlkreis . Two days later Aichinger was able to successfully repel another attack by the rural troops near Gusen. Thereupon he withdrew with about 300 faithful, women and children to the hamlet on the Frankenberg (today the parish of Langenstein) and hoisted one of his white flags on the tower of the already dilapidated church on the Frankenberg. Aichinger and his followers also firmly believed in the support of a mythical army of 60,000 soldiers under the leadership of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa , as the captain of the land above the Enns, Count Kuefstein , and his commandant, Count Kaspar von Starhemberg , in the late afternoon of Whit Monday 1636 , gave the order to attack.

This battle on the Frankenberg lasted about three hours and could only be won by the country troops because Count Kuefstein had all the houses in the village of Frankenberg burned down and finally the church on the Frankenberg, into which Laimbauer and his followers had fled, burned down. It ended in a slaughter that was unprecedented in Austrian history , in which almost all of the Laimbauer faithful, including women and children, were killed by ten o'clock in the evening at the church on the Frankenberg. The few survivors found by the Linz executioner in the pile of corpses near the church were herded like cattle to Linz, where a show trial was opened against Martin Aichinger . Laimbauer, his four-year-old son and six of his loyal followers were first pinched with red-hot tongs in a large-scale public execution on Linz's main square , then beheaded , quartered and their quarters publicly pinned on as a deterrent.

A prominent witness of this brutal execution was the traveling English diplomat Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, whose secretary and companion William Crowne wrote an authentic travel report (see Bloody Summer. A trip to Germany during the Thirty Years' War ) with an engraving for this execution. The two remaining flags of the Laim farmer are among the most important relics from the Upper Austrian Peasant Wars in the Upper Austrian State Museum . A preserved wall of the former church on the Frankenberg is dedicated to the commemoration of the brutal destruction of Martin Aichinger's followers. This remnant of the wall was integrated into the Frankenberg peasant war memorial in 1978 by the Round Table 2 Linz service club .

Reception in the 20th century

It is noteworthy that Adolf Hitler , a secondary school student from Linz, billeted himself for several days in St. Georgen an der Gusen around 1903 in order to research distant memories of this battle among the local population on his own.

The teacher Eduard Munninger, who worked in St. Georgen, dealt with this tragedy in the blood and soil novel The Confession of Ambros Hannsen around 1935 and received the German Literature Prize for it in 1937.

literature

• Ernst Burgstaller : The last Upper Austrian Peasants' War (1632-1634) from a historical and ethnographic point of view . In: Memoriam Antonio Jorge Dias. Separata do Vol. II. Lisboa 1974, pp. 79-101.
• Ernst Burgstaller:  The Laimbauer. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 418 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Ernst Burgstaller: Martin Laimbauer and his Machländische peasant movement 1632-1636 . In: Art Yearbook of the City of Linz 1973 . Verlag Anton Schroll & Co, Vienna 1974, ISBN 3-7031-0395-7 , pp. 3-30.
• Round Table 2 Linz. Peasants' War Memorial Frankenberg . Festschrift for the service project of the Round Table 2. Linz, 1978
• Franz Wilflingseder : Martin Laimbauer and the unrest in the Machlandviertel from 1632 to 1636. In: Communications from the Upper Austrian Provincial Archives. Volume 6, Linz 1959, ISSN  0259-4145 , pp. 136–208, pp. 136–146 (PDF) in the forum OoeGeschichte.at, pp. 147–156 (PDF) in the forum OoeGeschichte.at, pp. 157–181 (PDF) in the forum OoeGeschichte.at, pp. 182–208 (PDF) in the forum OoeGeschichte.at.

Individual evidence

1. ^ August Kubizek : Adolf Hitler, My childhood friend . Leopold Stocker Verlag , Graz, 2002. p. 35. ISBN 3-7020-0971-X
2. ↑ Eduard Munninger : The confession of Ambros Hannsen . Verlag Blut und Boden. Goslar, 1937