Singing Community in Martin Luther's Kirchenlieder

In this essay, I claim that Martin Luther's Kirchenlieder can be read as Volkslieder, a reading  which allows us to account for their function of consolidating identity through communal singing. Luther's songs, I argue, are activated in their being voiced—voice, here, understood in a non-metaphorical mode, as the material utterance of a singing community. These texts have often been understood as efficient vehicles of doctrine, but their role in calling a Volk into being remains underexamined. I begin by outlining Luther's theory of music and the voice's important role therein before closely reading key hymns in order to attend to their communal function. The Volk they implicate is, in Luther's time, not yet embroiled in nationalist ideology. It can, I argue, nevertheless be productively examined on the horizon of later nationalist identity, which I demonstrate in dialogue with early twentieth-century critics who take up these songs.