This article investigates how contemporary news media, pamphlets and (slightly later) some more elaborate justificatory accounts of the events treated the death of Imperial Commander-in-Chief Wallenstein. The analysis of strategies of emplotment, structure and rhetorical devices of the relevant texts reveal how they all, regardless of the text’s position on either side of the religious and political divide, affirm the power of ‘history’ (fate, providence) to re-establish a balance that had previously been disturbed. A parallel analysis of Friedrich Schiller’s groundbreaking account of the Thirty Years War reveals how, 150 years later, the belief in the self-healing powers of history, the capacity of achieving its own equilibrium, still dominates his philosophy of history.