Hans Sachs, playwright of tragedies and carnival comedies, and author of songs, a Mastersinger of Nürnberg, was quite prolific and inventive. Barbara Könneker points out that most of Sachs's plays were written between 1550 and 1560; that Sachs was the first German playwright to use acts and the expression tragedy, and to add a list of actors at the end of his pieces.1 His Tragedia mit 34 personen, des jün[g]sten gerichtes, auss der schrifft uberal zusammen gezogen, comprises seven acts, altogether 1,871 verses in rhymed couplets. Despite an impressive corpus of literary criticism on Sachs's oeuvre, insufficient scholarly attention has been given to this Tragedy of the Last Judgment, a remarkable addition to German eschatological theater. This essay will analyze the play and highlight the different aspects of its thought about the end of life and the world, as we know it.

The Tragedy of the Last Judgment was one of many similar creations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and yet Sachs's drama is unique in its adaptation of disparate source materials, as it combines inventively more genres and themes than other eschatological plays: the fifteen signs predicting Judgment, a Dance of Death scene, sermons and catechism, the Ars moriendi, and a dialogue between a young man and Death, like that of the Peasant of Bohemia (1400). After providing an overview of the play we examine the innovative blend of trends or traditions noticeable in this drama — culled from widespread eschatological fears among late-medieval people.

At the outset of the piece, a herald addresses the audience (as in the carnival plays) and emphasizes that this drama intends to honor God. The topic, the end of time (he says), will show that Christians gain Paradise after living a moral life; Jews and Mohammedans, however — pagans in general, and bad Christians — go to hell. Therefore, this drama serves as a warning and recommendation to prepare for the last day, the herald continues, then asking for silence. A cleric greets the spectators by quoting from Matthew 25: 31–46, where Christ instructs the disciples about the Last Judgment and predicts heresies, wars, and persecution, turning Christians away from God, unless they remain steadfast.