German Lyric Poetry

According to my Penguin Anthology of German Poetry, the best German lyric poetry generally concerned the following: nightfall, the moon, death, and God. Unlike the French and English poets (who frequently treated of Nature and Love), the Germans concentrated on the bare essentials. How to survive the Thunder-word of Eternity?
Such existential Angst undoubtedly lead to the Lutheran Reformation, with its radical division between the visible and the invisible Church, its insistence that Herod showed the wisemen to Christ and so who knows what they believe who urge us to believe?, and its logical push of the tenets of Catholicism into rigor (Luther stumbled upon Rome's Sistine Chapel and was appalled).
Had someone been astute enough, they could have diagnosed the Russian Revolution using Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Russian Orthodoxy (as well as geography and weather). Likewise, the Nazi Storm of 1933 and following was heralded by a long procession of German signums, which augured that the mix between liberal Lutheranism and radical Catholicism in the German soul might not have set too well too peacefully too long. It was just this combination of a decayed Protestantism gone Red to win the election with apostate Catholics devoted to High Culture no doubt providing dedicated soldiers that made Hitler so lethal (Austria was conservative and resisted Hitler, but once in, Hitler recruited many of the SS from that area).
Anti-semitism, intellectual freedom, a derring-do of soul, nationalism, and frustrated Imperial ambitions were not the best signs. England should have mourned Bismarck's Prussian/socialist ascendency over the Hapsburgs. Instead, the Protestants were eager to bring down a Catholic monarchy.
Sic transit gloria Europa