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.