Florian Geyer

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Florian Geyer (1490-1525) was a Franconian nobleman who led the Black Company during the Peasants War resulting from the Protestant Reformation in Germany in the 16th century.

Despite his membership in the ruling class, Geyer sided with the Protestant peasants against the Roman Catholic hierarchy, for which he became a notable folk hero in Franconia and the whole of Germany. He was identified as precurser of the vanguard of the proletariat in Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (1850), which primarily stresses the economic class origins of the Peasants War rather than its religious origins.

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.^[1]

The family of Florian Geyer died out in the early 1700s and the original Geyer castle, in Giebelstadt, passed into other hands, but is still the site of the annual "Florian Geier Festspiele".

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 attracted the attention of Hitler and the National Socialist Party. As a result, during World War II, the 8th SS Cavalry Division was named after him.