Today, Hans Sachs (1494–1576) is best known as the "shoemaker and poet too" in Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. However, in 1524, Sachs also produced four dialogues that interpreted cutting-edge Reformation theology. Drawing on his Disputation between a Canon and a Cobbler (which reached England by 1548) and his Dialogue on Avarice, this lecture will demonstrate how Sachs, as a layman, presented his own readings of Scripture and influential theological texts to address local religious and social crises through an entertaining, under-appreciated literary medium. Furthermore, these pamphlets enjoyed an astonishing afterlife under the communist dictatorship in East Germany (GDR), where they were woven into regime narratives of national identity surrounding the Reformation and the Peasants’ War. In the 1960s and 1970s, GDR scholars read Sachs’ work as a theological critique of contemporary societal deficiencies and as a documentation of a "revolutionary" historical mood. Strikingly, by the 1980s, communist academics shifted focus to emphasise the specific theological content of the pamphlets like never before, co-opting Sachs into party efforts to rehabilitate Martin Luther by framing the cobbler as a working-class interpreter of Lutheran theology. Studying these pamphlets 450 years after Sachs’ death offers fresh insights into both early modern Reformation theology and its ideological appropriation in the twentieth century.