Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/219/en

The «freien wirtschaftlichen Dorfgemeinschaften» (free economic village communities) at the dawn of the modern era carry within them the seed for shaping social life into the future in the sense of the Threefold Social Order. This blossoming of an independent, folk-rooted spirituality of social life in the village communities was laid out to inaugurate a grass-roots democratic development in Central Europe, similar to that which took shape in Switzerland. The noblest figures of the age — such as Matthias Grünewald (1470–1528), Tilman Riemenschneider (1460–1531), Paracelsus (1493–1541), and many others — made common cause with the peasants. Set against this, however, were the retarding forces in Church and nobility. The conflict discharged itself in the Peasants' Wars of 1524 to 1525. What might, as a germinal, culture-renewing impulse, have stood alongside the rising cities was drowned in blood. The Counter-Reformation did its part to smother every further striving for independence in the bud. Roman law assumed its dominion over the countryside as well. Land became private property under the prevailing legal understanding and thus gradually a tradeable commodity.