The Swiss author and poet Gottfried Keller (1819-1890), who originally wanted to become a landscape painter, is one of the most significant representatives of bourgeois realism in 19th-century German literature. In his historical novella 'Ursula,' he draws on a bloody episode from Zurich's city history, when the reformer Zwingli attempted to enforce the Reformation with military force at the beginning of the 16th century. The story centers around the mercenary Hans Gyr, who sides with Zwingli, and his neighbor Ursula, a member of the radical religious sect of the Anabaptists, both of whom become embroiled in the military conflicts between the Reformed and Old Catholic cantons.