In addition to his brother Albert, who was one year younger and later became a pastor, Lienhard had five half-brothers and sisters from his father's second marriage.
In 1900, together with Adolf Bartels, he became editor of the magazine Deutsche Heimat, a medium for "literature and folklore", for a few months.
Bartels and Lienhard formed the centre of this movement, their common ideological references were the writings of Paul de Lagarde and August Julius Langbehn.
The "solution of the Jewish question" and the prevention of "left-wing mob rule", which seemed urgent to him as well, he saw in the assumption of "leadership" by a "noble race of great souls" with the "qualities of goodness, warmth and love".
Lienhard died in Eisenach in 1929 at the age of 63[9] and was buried at the local New Cemetery/Central Cemetery in a grave of honour of the city.
If he was brought to public attention with a piece of his Wartburg trilogy on the occasion of Martin Luther's 450th birthday in 1933, in Lübeck at least, it was because he had succeeded in sensitively honouring an outstanding German.
The festival speaker was the main pastor at the cathedral, representative of the German Christians, Dr. Helmuth Johnsen [de] (1891–1947), who was already appointed regional bishop of Brunswick on 1 May 1934.
Accordingly, the Lübeck media were keen to reinterpret this work: They spoke of German revolutions and the will to live of great personalities.
A good example of how the National Socialists took advantage of people, works and thoughts of others, tore them out of their context and bent them for a certain situation.
One exception is his admittance by the particularist Alsatian "Heimatbund" ("... mìr [dian] àlli Àktiona vun in dia Rìchtung vum elsassischa Partikularismus gehn, unterstetza ..."), to which the "Neues Elsaß-Lothringen-Verlag" is closely associated,[13] and by the fraternal milieu.