Florian Geyer - Legacy

Legacy

The family of Florian Geyer died out in the early 18th century and the original Geyer castle, in Giebelstadt, passed into other hands, but is still the site of the annual "Florian Geyer Festspiele".

Geyer was heralded as a communist revolutionary in Frederick Engels' The Peasant War in Germany (1850). In this work, Engels asserts that the war was primarily a class struggle over control of farms and mines, which subverted the Biblical language and metaphors commonly understood by peasants.

Geyer was also the problematic hero of one of Gerhart Hauptmann's major plays, the historical drama Florian Geyer, published in 1896, and the inspiration for the German folk song, "Wir sind des Geyers schwarzer Haufen" ("We are the Black Band of Geyer"), which has been adopted by the international Marxist labour movement as a rousing union anthem.

However, as one of the few German historical figures identifiable with the national history of Germany as a whole, and not merely of a principality or region of the country, Geyer was also considered a heroic figure by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party. As a result, the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer was named after him in March 1944, during World War II.