Oberufer Christmas Plays

On an island village called Oberufer, on the Danube not far from Pressburg, a small community of German speaking farmers kept alive a cycle of three linked Christmas plays for generations, performing them from memory rather than from any written text, in a form that had by tradition reached them from ancestors who had settled the area sometime in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The cycle moves through salvation history in three acts. The Paradise Play opens with Adam and Eve's temptation and fall, closing on the promise that a savior will come to undo it. The Shepherds' Play follows with the birth of Jesus in a stable and the shepherds summoned to witness it, mixing genuine reverence with broad rustic comedy in the shepherd characters themselves, a combination performers and audiences alike seem to have found entirely natural rather than contradictory. The Kings' Play closes the cycle with the three Magi's journey to the manger and Herod's furious, failed attempt to have the infant killed.

What makes Oberufer's version unusual is not its content, versions of Adam and Eve, the shepherds and the Magi were staged across German speaking Europe, but its preservation. Nineteenth century researchers found that the Oberufer plays had come down with a consistency and completeness rarely matched elsewhere, both in the wording of the text and in the specific acting conventions attached to it, a village having apparently treated the performance itself, not merely the story, as something to be handed down exactly. That unusual fidelity is the reason the plays survive today at all: it was precisely what drew the attention of the scholar who first wrote them down and ensured they would outlive the community that had kept them.

The Oberufer plays would very likely have died with the last of the Danube farming families who performed them had a young philologist not gone looking for exactly this kind of material. Karl Julius Schroer, later a professor of literary history in Vienna, found the plays on the island of Oberufer sometime in the 1840s and set about transcribing them, publishing his compilation as Deutsche Weihnachtspiele aus Ungern, German Christmas Plays from Hungary, though sources differ on whether that first appeared in 1857, 1858, or, per a later Vienna edition from the publisher W. Braumuller, 1862. Schroer treated the plays as a serious subject of folklore scholarship rather than a curiosity, and in doing so made a written record where none had existed.

Among Schroer's students in Vienna was Rudolf Steiner, who later recalled absorbing his professor's enthusiasm for the material and, after Schroer's death in 1900, took up the task of keeping the plays performed rather than merely printed. Steiner incorporated all three plays into the curriculum of the Waldorf schools he went on to found, where a December performance by students has remained a fixture of the school calendar for more than a century, and where translated performing editions, produced largely through the Anthroposophical publishing houses Steiner's movement established, remain the chief way English speaking audiences encounter the material today. The plays' modern survival, in other words, runs almost entirely through one teacher's chance encounter with one student, a narrower thread of transmission than most surviving folk drama traditions can claim.