A Farming Village's Unbroken Nativity

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.