Two folk nativity plays from the village of Oberufer, collected by Karl Julius Schroer and revived by Steiner, whose performers prepared morally so the Christmas Child could conquer hearts.
The Oberufer Christmas Plays in Anthroposophy are a pair of German folk nativity dramas, the simple Shepherds Play and the more occult Three Kings Play, that Rudolf Steiner revived from a handwritten peasant tradition collected in the 1850s by his teacher Karl Julius Schroer in the village of Oberufer near Bratislava. Steiner first staged them at Dornach in 1915 and discussed them in the lectures gathered as GA 165, given at Christmas of that year. He stressed that the village boys and girls who performed the plays underwent a real moral preparation, giving up wine and quarrelling for weeks beforehand, so that the sacred mood could slowly grow among them. For Steiner the plays were a living record of how the Christmas Child, the Nathan Jesus, gradually conquered human hearts that at first met him with rudeness. Waldorf schools have performed the plays every Advent since 1920.
The Oberufer Christmas Plays are two folk nativity dramas, the Shepherds Play and the Three Kings Play, that survived as a peasant tradition in the German-speaking village of Oberufer and were collected by the philologist Karl Julius Schroer. Rudolf Steiner staged them from 1915 and read them as proof that the Christmas Child had to win human hearts gradually, growing from rough village merriment into something genuinely holy.
In Steiner's Own Words
Karl Julius Schroer, of whom I have often spoken to you, was one of the first collectors of Christmas plays in the 19th century. He collected the Christmas plays in western Hungary, the Oberufer plays, from Bratislava eastwards, and he was able to study the way in which these plays lived and breathed among the people there. And it is very, very significant when you see how these plays were handed down from generation to generation in handwritten form, and how, not when Christmas was approaching, but when Christmas was approaching in the distant past, those who were found suitable for this in the village prepared to perform these plays.
What it Means Today
The Oberufer plays are not a museum piece. They are a living performance tradition, and the bridge runs through one specific book. When the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in 1919, the teachers wanted a Christmas play rooted in folk soil rather than sentiment, so from 1920 onward they staged Steiner's Oberufer texts each Advent. The English-speaking world received them through Cecil Harwood, the founding teacher of Michael Hall School in Forest Row, whose verse rendering was published as Christmas Plays from Oberufer and is still in print through SteinerBooks. Harwood kept Schroer's rough Bratislava dialect colour, the comic innkeepers, the stumbling Joseph, so that the holiness would have to climb up out of the homely, exactly as Steiner had described.
What a teacher actually does with this is concrete. The class learns the Shepherds Play by heart, then rehearses for weeks in a quieter register, and the children feel the mood Steiner pointed to: the sacred is not handed over, it is earned by changed behaviour. Thalira synthesis: the Oberufer plays encode in folk theatre the same law Steiner taught of the Nathan Jesus child, that the Christ-impulse enters a community not by decree but by patiently warming hearts from below, so the performance itself becomes the moral preparation it depicts.
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