Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays

GA 274 — 24 December 1923, Dornach

Introduction

during the Christmas Conference of the General Anthroposophical Society.

We will take the liberty of presenting you with some Christmas plays from ancient folklore. Today we will begin by presenting the Paradeis play, then tomorrow and in the next few days the Christ-Birth play and the Epiphany play. These Christmas plays come from the times when similar plays were performed throughout Europe, not only at Christmas time, but also at Easter and even at Pentecost. Such plays have been collected by German scholars, and they can be found in all sorts of publications in libraries. These plays were performed in market towns and villages well into the 19th century, but less so in the cities. But now one must say: the Christmas plays that we present to you here have a certain extraordinary, significant advantage over other such Christmas plays. The other Christmas plays that have been performed in Central Europe have actually been improved from decade to decade. The elements that were present from ancient folklore and were preserved in a wonderful way were improved by all sorts of intelligent people, and then they were performed again from decade to decade. What can become of that which really comes from ancient folklore in artistic and religious and musical terms can be seen in the caricature of the folksy in the Oberammergau Passion Plays. But in these Christmas plays that we are staging here, there is something that has actually been preserved unadulterated, as it has been performed, back to the 16th, 15th century, for the following reason.

These plays, which we are talking about here, were probably performed in Alsace, through the south of Baden and Württemberg, and probably also as far as Bavaria. You will see this from a reference in one of the plays in the next few days, where the Rhine is mentioned. They were performed in the areas north of the Rhine, as seen from Switzerland. Then tribes who performed these Christmas plays migrated eastwards, to Hungary. One may ask why German tribes migrated eastward to Hungary in the 15th and 16th centuries. Such tribes migrated to the area around Pressburg, which today lies in Czechoslovakia, from the Danube down through Pressburg to the Spiš region, south of the Carpathians, to Transylvania, to the Banat, the area between the southern Danube and the Tisza. These Swabian tribes migrated there. And among these migrating tribes, the Haidbauern were the most characteristic. And it was precisely these people who settled in that area in Oberufer, a little downstream on the Danube, and brought with them these Christmas plays from their original homeland, preserved them in their original form and performed them in the local German colony from year to year. They were kept as a precious possession in certain families and treated as they were centuries ago. My good friend and teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, got to know them there in Oberufer; no intellectual, no improver had yet interfered with them. These plays were written down in the 1850s in the way the farmers who performed them could dictate them from memory to Karl Julius Schröer when he came there. He was a secondary school professor in Pressburg. When he came to where the plays were performed by the Haidbauern outside in the villages, he first went to the village schoolmaster, who was also the village notary. He said: That's nonsense, it's not even worth the effort of dealing with it! Fortunately, the intelligentsia had not bothered with it. So they were still able to perform the plays as they had been left by the farmers. That was a particular stroke of luck, because it is thanks to this that they have been preserved in these areas as they were. At most, one can still ask the question: how did people in this area come to keep this expensive heritage? — Then one must say: the present-day emigrants were preceded by the Moravian Brethren who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the Hungarian territories. And these Moravian Brethren, with their intimate, deeply Christian life, which expressed the principle of brotherhood so beautifully, were already there when the other tribes, the Haidbauern and so on, felt the urge to migrate eastwards. It was not for any particular economic reason or the like, but it was actually an ideal reason for those people to follow the beautiful, intimate Christian brotherhood of the Moravian Brethren who had already migrated there. Even before the advent of Lutheranism, these people had carried over from the still essentially human spirit of Central Europe an ideal Christian atmosphere that did not take with it the damage of Catholicism present in the western countries, but also did not contain the damage of Protestantism, but was truly genuine, true Christianity, born out of a brotherly human spirit. That migrated over. And attracted by the ideal attitude, other German tribes then migrated to the areas that had been settled by the Moravian Brethren and imbued with Christianity, taking with them the most precious thing they had: these Christian Christmas plays.

These Christmas plays remained in their original form because they were separated from the mother country, so that the later intelligentsia could not get hold of them. And in this original form my old teacher and friend, Karl Julius Schröer, found them in Oberufer, half an hour's train ride from Bratislava, where he was a professor at the lyceum at the time, and wrote them down as the farmers recited them to him. They always learned them around Christmas time. That's how he had them recite them, and that's how they have been preserved for us, completely unadulterated; that's how they were still being performed until around the middle of the 19th century. Today they would have disappeared without him.

Karl Julius Schröer preserved the things as they were commonly performed down there. I was able to talk to him a lot about these things in the early eighties. He had vivid memories of the performances he had seen there, and so these plays have become dear to my heart as well. That is why we would like to perform them among our communities – with a few variations, because we cannot do it exactly as it was performed in the taverns, and we cannot do some of the other things that were performed there here either – but as genuinely as these things can be performed, we would like to present these beautiful pieces of genuine folk culture to you. For example, before the performance, the devil had a cow horn, and he ran around the whole village blowing it in every window, inviting people to come to the play: it was the Christian duty of everyone to come to Advent. Well, you can imagine: we can't do that here. We would arrive nicely if we told people that it was a Christian duty to come to Advent! Furthermore, the devil had to climb onto every passing wagon, causing unrest, rumbling around and so on. We have to leave that and many other things out here. But all that is possible should be presented in full, genuine truth.

I do not want to delay the performance any longer, but I wanted to say a few introductory words about the way the performances were usually staged and how the Christmas plays were rehearsed among the farmers.