In the writing of the German Reformation, there has long been a strong association between urban history and the evangelical movement. The sentiment has been around since the days of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), but it was the publication of Bernd Moeller's Imperial Cities and the Reformation (1962) that turned the rather casual notion into a research paradigm. Moeller imagined the Reformation in terms of the medieval cityscape. “It is important to recognize,” he wrote, “that the Reformation was introduced almost everywhere according to the forms prescribed by the city constitution, and that it had its foundation in the city's communal mentality.” Constitutionally, there was a clear filiation of development to account for the later Protestant church. Throughout the medieval period urban communes had been securing rights and privileges extending the claims and functions of local sovereignty, from the regulation of the immediate economy, the control of taxation, and the administration of lesser jurisdiction, to the guardianship of parish religion. In a similar manner, when Moeller spoke of the collective mentality of the German city, he did so in order to draw attention to the norms and values of urban governance and the similar reserve of norms preached in early evangelical theology. In its origins, the Imperial city was characterized as a political association, bound by oath, joined by common will, created in order to preserve the peace. The urban values underwriting this myth of community were those that placed collective welfare above the interests of the individual—concord, unity, justice, love, peace, and the common good (Gemeinnutz). Further legitimation of the communal ideal was provided by the medieval affinity to imagine the city in terms of a sacral corporation (corpus Christianum), with the religious standing of each member of the union bearing upon collective salvation. Little separates this cast of mind from evangelical theology and its stress on brotherly love, peace, and the community of believers. God's Word, to use the phrasing of the town clerk of Nördlingen, heals the divisions of the commune as it heals the divisions of the soul.

This article has a twofold aim: first, to explain the concept of confessionalization that has been developed in recent decades in German historiography as an interpretive tool for the period and to review the main lines of its critique, which raise important questions for the discussion of “confessionalization and literature”; and second, to explore the connections between confessionalization and literature as well as the applicability of the concept of confessionalization to the history of literature, a little-understood but increasingly important question for early modern cultural history. The understanding of the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is greatly enhanced by the cooperation between literary scholars and historians. First, the literature of the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation was not yet an autonomous entity in society and therefore requires historical contextualization, particularly with regard to its social origins. Second, Germanists have extended the definition of early modern literature to include all kinds of Gebrauchsliteratur (functional literature), which are often important sources for historians. “Literature” and “confessionalization,” however, are difficult terms representing very complex phenomena. “Literature” is understood here as encompassing all printed works of the period, of which this article can of course only explore a sample; “confessionalization” denotes an interpretive concept, which has been criticized and modified in recent research. Given the exploratory purpose of this discussion, a good many questions will be raised for which we have no clear answers at the present time; we hope above all to further the exchange of ideas between literary scholars and historians working on the confessional age.

The study of Zeitgeschichte, or contemporary history, was not an invention of the postwar era. But it was in the wake of the Second World War that it carved out a space in the historical professions of the United States, Great Britain and, most pronouncedly, West Germany. In each country, it came with similar definitions: in West Germany as “the era of those living, and its scholarly treatment by academics”; in the United States as “the period of the last generation or two”; and in Britain as “Europe in the twentieth century” or “the histories of yesterday which are being written today.” Such definitions contained a generational component and left contemporary history open to continuous rejuvenation. Yet during the postwar decades, the above definitions steered interest clearly toward the history of National Socialism, the Second World War, and foreign policy of the 1920s and 1930s. The horrific cost in human lives of Nazi racial and anti-Semitic policies gave an instant relevance to all aspects of Germany's past. The German grip on much of Europe had made National Socialism an integral component in the history of formerly occupied countries, and the Allied struggle to defeat Nazism added yet more countries to the list of those that had seen their histories become entangled with that of Germany. Hence, the academic writing of German contemporary history was never an exclusively German affair. Scholars outside Germany, especially in Great Britain and the United States, were part of the endeavor from the outset. Their involvement was facilitated by the fact that the Western Allies had captured an enormous quantity of German records and archives at the end of the war, part of which would become available to historians over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1995, before the Leitkultur debate about a hegemonic German culture to which immigrants might aspire, disputes over the wearing of headscarves, and September 11, a federal German court effectively banned Muslims from slaughtering animals without prior stunning. The court ruled that the practice was not required by their religion and was thus not protected by the constitution's guarantee of freedom of religious expression. In January 2002, however, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the right to freedom of religious expression and choice of occupation did in fact ensure the entitlement of Germany's Muslims, or at least those responsible for their provision with halal meat, to resume stunningless methods for such ends without the threat of legal action. Religious slaughter has been problematic throughout Germany's history and the reemergence of opposition to it late in the twentieth century was not without precedent. The issue throws up numerous areas for possible examination. But what does it have to do with the Greens and with their positions on animals and human society?

Dealing with the Nazi past has become a permanent component (some would say obsession) of contemporary German national identity. Almost every day, the German print and visual media carry stories related to Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust. Each new major anniversary sets in motion another round of discussion, argument, and controversy. Each new autobiography and each new film on Nazism generates extensive media commentary. Among the most interesting aspects of recent discussions of the Nazi past is the new prominence afforded to depictions of Germans as victims of “Hitler's War.” Nowhere has this predilection for presenting Germans as victims been more apparent and pronounced than in the flood of recent popular books and made-for-TV documentaries about the bombing war.

In the spring of 1936, Gordon A. Craig, twenty-two years old and about to graduate from Princeton, made two of his earliest public appearances. The first was a poem, modeled on a Latin Ode, published in the Nassau Lit with the title “Marxicos Odi,” and dedicated “To My Proletarian Sweetheart.” The poem evokes the brevity of life, the swift passing of undergraduate pleasures, and their irresistible distraction from more serious things: