 Turning now to Marx, Engels and others in the broadly Marxist tradition, their central concern was a focus on Luther’s historical impact as a revolutionary and social reformer, which seemed to be compromised by Luther’s role in the Peasants’ Revolt (see sections 1 and 5 of the entry on   Luther). In his study of the Revolt, Engels in particular drew parallels with the situation leading up to the German revolutions of 1848–49, casting Luther as a “middle-class” reformer unable to sustain the radicalism he had unleashed, which Engels (and later Bloch) took to be better represented in “plebeian revolutionary” Thomas Müntzer (c. 1489–1525), who Luther had declared to be an instrument of Satan, and who was tortured and executed after the battle of Frankenhausen in 1525. A similar suspicion of Luther can also be found in Marcuse, in an essay from 1936 written after Marcuse’s exile from Germany to the United States, and so this time against the background of the growing authoritarianism of Nazism (which itself often glorified Luther). Without explicitly making the connection, in this context Marcuse accuses Luther of relegating Christian freedom to the inner  sphere,[37]  leaving the outer world of politics and society as a realm of unfreedom to which the Christian must submit, in deference to worldly authorities which Luther argued could not be challenged—a political quietism which in Marcuse’s context was of course particularly troubling, and which after the war became a source for much criticism (and self-criticism) directed towards the Lutheran Church.