Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays

GA 274 — 8 January 1922, Dornach

Introduction

This Epiphany play¹ belongs to the series of Christian festivals that my old teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer found in the Oberufer region, in western Hungary, near Pressburg, about seventy years ago. In this Oberufer region in Hungary, there are scattered German villages, especially in Slavic areas; villages that still had a rich use of the German language around the mid-19th century. The German tribes that settled there belonged to the Saxon tribes, the same tribes as those who live on the southern edge of the Carpathians, in the Spiš region, and who also live in Transylvania. Other German tribes are the Swabian tribes, who live more in the Banat. These are the German tribes that probably moved from western areas of Central Europe, even from areas on the Rhine, from the Siebengebirge, even further east during the 15th and 16th centuries, and settled as colonists in the Hungarian areas. However, in the second half of the 19th century, these areas were forcibly Magyarized, and most of the German element was lost, along with such folk traditions as these Christmas plays, the Epiphany play, and so on.

These plays take us back to the times when Christian pageants spread throughout all of western and southern Germany, and also over a large part of Switzerland. We can trace these pageants back to the 11th, even the 10th, century. The oldest forms are performed in the churches, at Christmas, where the manger has been set up, and where the clergy themselves - initially in Latin - have performed this festival. For the concepts of the time, this performance in Latin was no more disturbing than the reading of the Latin mass is for Catholicism today. Later on, you come across such festivals, which have the Holy History, the birth of Christ, the appearance of the shepherds, the three wise men and so on as their subject, but then in the local language and in fact in the dialect, only interspersed with Latin expressions. Later, they were also performed by lay people, no longer by clergy, and migrated from the church to other public places, especially in inns, where they were then performed by lay people. Such festivals were taken by the tribes migrating from west to east, these colonists, and they really revered them like a shrine.

When the grape harvest was over in the fall, the person who had the manuscripts of these plays – usually a member of a well-respected village family – gathered the young men of the village. Women were not allowed to participate, not even as actors. He gathered together the local youths he considered suitable and spent months rehearsing the pageant with them in the run-up to Christmas. The entire production was an extraordinarily solemn affair. The teacher had written strict rules and handed them out to the youths, and everyone had to comply with them. For example, they had to abstain from drinking during the entire period, as emphasized in these regulations; they had to lead a moral life; and they had to fulfill similar regulations that meant something extraordinary, especially within the village community. So the approach of these festivities was really looked forward to in a festive mood. And when the performances came around at Christmas and on Epiphany, the villagers would gather in the appropriate inns. The benches were placed against the wall and the play was performed in the middle of the hall.

We have tried, as far as our circumstances allow, to imitate the way the performance took place within the folklore. Of course, not everything can be imitated, especially not the arrangement as it was in the inn; we choose the stage-like arrangement. But in everything else, we have tried to follow tradition as far as possible, in order to present the plays to today's audience in such a way that they can get an idea of how such festivals were performed.

Another thing I would particularly like to emphasize is that in these plays we can see how a truly pious mood, a solemn mood devoted to the Holy Story, is everywhere combined with humor. The devil, for example, is everywhere the evil enemy of mankind, but at the same time he is a funny character. And in a similar way, healthy humor, a healthy folk humor, plays into the solemn, religious mood. This is what must be emphasized, because this is precisely what was present in the popular piety of these areas, and it was preserved in the German colonists of Hungary until the 19th century in such a way that there was no sentimentality in this religious popular sentiment, but rather a naive originality that allowed even the most sublime things to be mixed up with humor.

During these festival performances, we have something that brings to life times that have now passed for centuries in a much more vivid and lively way than ever before. The 15th and 16th centuries are brought back to us. So we must try to preserve the dialect in an appropriate way, and, as well as we can, try to reproduce these plays in the dialect in which they were performed in the 19th century in the German-speaking areas of Hungary. Precisely because a piece of intellectual life from an earlier time can be brought back to the attention of those currently living, we make it our special task within the Anthroposophical Society to bring these plays to the public.

Later, many such Christmas plays were also collected from other regions. They were then collected, for example, in Silesia, where Weinhold did an enormous amount of work in this regard; but they were also collected in the Palatinate region. And it was so remarkable that the basic character and content is essentially the same in all these plays; they only differ in dialect, so that one can see that this is common spiritual property from the second half of the Middle Ages, which extends into our present time. And perhaps it is justified to present it to contemporary humanity in the way we do, because this folk heritage is disappearing. Within the village community, of course, the mood no longer exists to cultivate this folk heritage in the same way as before. But Karl Julius Schröer, who collected these things in the 1940s and 1950s, often told me what a profound impression this resurrection of ancient folk customs, performed by the farmers who owned these pieces, made on him. That is what prompted me to suggest years ago that these plays be performed within our society for a wider audience. And it was on the basis of this suggestion that we performed the Christmas Play and the Paradeis Play in the past few days, and today we would like to present the Epiphany Play or Herod Play to you, as it was performed in the 1950s by German colonists in the areas around Bratislava.