This lecture will examine the 1524 Reformation dialogues of Hans Sachs, the sixteenth-century shoemakerpoet famously depicted by Richard Wagner. Analysing Sachs’s Disputation between a Canon and a Cobbler and Dialogue on Avarice, the presentation will demonstrate how a layman utilized entertaining literary mediums to address localized social and religious crises through scriptural interpretation. Additionally, the talk will explore the unexpected twentieth-century reception of these pamphlets within the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It will trace how East German Marxist academics ideologically appropriated Sachs's theological texts to frame the cobbler as a working-class vehicle for rehabilitating Martin Luther.