Counter-Currents
Where Dragons Still Walk the Earth
The Drachenstich in Furth im Wald
Clarissa Schnabel
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
1,189 words
Everybody has heard of the Oberammergau Passion Play that has been performed almost continuously every ten years since 1634. But there is a lesser-known, even older German folk play: the Drachenstich, or “spearing of the dragon,” in Furth im Wald, a small Bavarian town located near the Czech border.
The Drachenstich goes back at least 500 years and began as a simple reenactment of Saint George slaying the dragon during the Catholic Church’s Corpus Christi procession. Bavarians and Bohemians flocked each year to attend the play and see the dragon — little more than burlap and leather at that point — die on the end of the hero’s lance. According to legend, the spilled dragon’s blood had healing properties, and audience members would rush to soak their handkerchiefs in it.
As the performance became more elaborate and rowdy, it threatened to take the focus off the religious rite and instead take center stage as secular entertainment. Small wonder that the Bishop of Regensburg finally banned its performance. That, however, did not go over so well with the people of Furth. At first, they simply ignored the ban. When the priest stepped out of the church with the Blessed Sacrament on Corpus Christi Day, he was confronted by the dragon ensemble, ready to join the procession as it always had. The priest turned on his heel and moved the entire procession into the confines of the church. (The dragon was nevertheless speared in the town square, regardless.)
The ban imposed by the Bishop of Regensburg led to fierce resistance from the people of Furth, who smashed the windows of the vicarage and refused to let go of their dragon. A sensible compromise was agreed on by all sides: from 1879 on, the Drachenstich became an independent festival, held each year in August.
Today, it draws an audience of more than 1,600 people nightly and has turned into a three-hour spectacle with a cast of 300. The play’s undisputed star is a four-and-a-half meters tall, more than 15 meters long, and almost four meters wide dragon robot. Its official name is “Tradinno,” but it is affectionately known to the people of Furth as “Fanny.” Fanny weighs 11 tons and has a wingspan of 12 meters, making her the world’s biggest walking robot, according to Guinness World Records. And yes, she actually walks — very slowly. But the best thing about her? She was financed with European Union funds. That’s a use of my tax money that I can get behind.
My tax euros at work
You can buy Collin Cleary’s Wagner’s Ring & the Germanic Tradition here.
The first modern dragon had appeared in the Drachenstich in 1913. The star of Richard Wagner’s Siegfried, it had been purchased from the Royal Bavarian Court Opera for 30 gold marks. The town blacksmith crafted another model in 1947 that took four men inside to operate, and was motorized and equipped with special effects over time. The 1974-2009 model had a length of almost 19 meters, a height of almost four meters, and weighed nine tons. It was moved by a forklift hidden within and was fitted with exterior cameras so that the driver could safely pilot it.
Following a long hiatus during the Second World War, the play returned with not only a new dragon, but a new script that was heavily influenced by the Cold War. The setting was the Hussite War of 1431, when followers of the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus battled knights leading a crusade against them along the Bavarian border. Here, the dragon unambiguously came to symbolize the Communist threat from the East. The new play was performed for more than five decades and became a kind of classic that the people of Furth were reluctant to let go of after the fall of Communism.
In 2006, the Drachenstich’s plot was once more amended to reflect Europe’s geopolitical evolution. In this latest incarnation, the play is still set during the Hussite conflict, but the enemy is now behavior rather than peoples — fanaticism, warmongering, hate, bigotry. You know the drill. To quote, in a slightly abridged translation, from an older publicity video:
In 1431, the armies of the German imperial knights gather on the Bohemian border. Under the leadership of the powerful Cardinal Cesarini, they want to crush the renegade followers of the preacher Jan Hus. But in the shadow of war, an ancient prophecy becomes a terrible reality. A beast that has been banished to the depths of the Earth since time immemorial is brought back to life through war and murder. Every injustice, every outrage, every drop of blood brings it back to life: the dragon. There are only two people who can stop its deadly triumphal march: a young noblewoman who is prepared to sacrifice her life to save thousands from certain destruction, and a knight who puts his love on the line to fight the monster. Thus ensues the oldest battle of mankind, the eternal fight of good against evil.
The dragon itself is seen more as a victim than as an enemy, however. Once, it had been sympathetic to the people of the land it roamed until war, violence, and brutality drove it insane. Perhaps this is a modern reflection of the fondness the people of Furth have for their dragon. According to Drachenstich’s website, the dragon “has always been the pride and joy of the people of Furth, so it is hardly surprising that when half the town was reduced to ash in the great town fire of 1863, the dragon’s head was saved from the burning castle.”
It is both a great honor and a great family tradition to be cast as the Ritterpaar, the dragon-slayer, as well as his lady, who is colloquially known as the Ritterin: It translates as female knight, but just stands for the female half of the knightly couple.
For the Ritter, the knight, the most nerve-racking moment is, unsurprisingly, the slaying of the dragon: He has to keep his horse under control while riding toward a giant fire-breathing robot and put his lance where it is supposed to go. If he misses the mark, he’ll never hear the end of it. Ten years later, people will still remind him that he missed. Life in a small town can be brutal.
A fantastic photo from the 1950s
If you search on YouTube for Drachenstich, Furth im Wald, or variations thereof, you’ll find a ton of videos. Most of them are in German, but there is one by the Chinese network CGTN Europe that fatally mistranslates Schreitroboter (walking robot) as Schreiroboter (screaming robot); and Tom Scott gives a presentation of the robotics behind the Furth dragon. The comments on the latter video are hilarious, but quite a number of them praise the fact that this is a case of technology actually enhancing and preserving ancient traditions instead of destroying them.
The 2024 Drachenstich will be held from August 2 through 18, so if you haven’t got any plans yet and are in the vicinity, go check it out. While there, you can also visit the dragon’s cave, watch the pageant, enjoy the children’s festival complete with its own mini-Drachenstich (the next generation of dragon-slayers has to be trained, after all), or wander about the renaissance fair.
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10 comments
It is not good to kill rare animals, even portrayed as robots. If Germans want to spear somebody so much they have more as enough Syrian Verflüchtlinge.
Having been to and thoroughly enjoying the 2010 Oberammergau Passion Play, I was really impressed with how this small Bavarian town put on an excellent show. Bavaria is absolutely stunning in its beauty and I really love the architecture, craftsmanship, and pride these people have in their towns.
However, this Spearing of the Dragon might have to be my next German adventure. The long running (since 1634) world-famous Oberammergau Passion Play has begun to change. It has started to go woke. Performed every ten years, it has always been steeped in tradition. A rule was that in order to appear in the cast, one had to be a citizen of the town of Oberammergau or had to have lived there for 20 years. Since this is the story about the Passion of Christ, Christians have been the play’s characters. For the 2020 Passion Play, the woke Director, Christian Stückl, for the first time in the play’s long history, cast a Muslim. And cast him in as a main character, Judas. This Muslim was also born in nearby Garmisch. Another Muslim, a man whose day job is assistant director under Stückl in a Munich theater, will play the Jew Nicodemus. This Muslim was also born in Garmisch, not Oberammergau. In the 1990 play, Stückl cast a protestant in a role. The townspeople almost voted him out as director for such blasphemy. But now, Muslims playing parts in a Christian play is just fine.
For the 2020 play (pushed back to 2022 due to Covid), one of the two actors who alternates playing Jesus said, “This time Jesus is – under Stückl’s direction – “more political, more angry, someone looking for social justice.” What? I don’t get it. No thank you.
Stückl has a boyhood friend who is now dead set against all the modern changes Stückl is trying to make. I wish him well.
PS when Stückl asked the father of the Muslim who plays Nicodemus for his permission to let his son play Nicodemus, the Muslim father replied, “OK, Boss. Just don’t turn us into Catholics.” It is unclear how many invitations the local Muslims extended to Oberammergau’s Catholics to participate in their Muslim services as a thank you for casting two Muslims in the Passion Play
In The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, E. Michael Jones documents how Jewish interest groups increasingly pushed for changes in the Passion Play over several decades. I hate to say it, but – “every single time”.
If you are interested in a historical description of a visit to the play, I recommend Anna Mary Howitt’s very enjoyable An Art-Student in Munich.
Thank you, Ms. Schnabel. These two resources look excellent. I’ve been putting together a very basic history of the Wokening of the Oberammegau Passion Play. As I said, I love the whole Bavarian theme and it hurts to see this segment of the German population bow low to once again atone for their role in World War II.
Once again, it is Stückl who was and is now more than happy to decouple the Jews from the crucifixion of Jesus. If the Catholic church can absolve the Jews so can the bigots of Oberammergau. And let’s throw in the two Muslims to prove that all respond to the light of Christ. Stückl also added refugee children to the crowd in 2022 so now the cast isn’t lily white. During the 2010 play, I saw no blacks in the cast and the thought of being forced to see them now ruins this experience. Why can’t a town built by whites, run by whites, cultivated by whites, keep their town and this play white? It’s like everything else in this life: Biden’s equity government will go to the ends of the earth to root out whiteness.
The book you suggest by Anna Mary Howitt looks great. While in Oberammergau, I bought several of the Passion Play books, especially those which showed the history. I have found a few online versions of Howitt’s book. Thank you for these sources and for sharing this Drachenstich show. We are told as white people that we have no culture. I beg to differ.
It sounds like the town has been experiencing a shortage of tar and feathers.
Ha! Good one, Mr. Albrecht. Tar and feathers leads to black face and appropriating the culture of birds. As guilty whites, we must do better and be allies. “Do the work,” I believe the admonition is. What the definition of “the work” is remains fuzzy and expensive.
I recently stumbled across another instance where a dragon ritual continues in our time in Europe.
A dragon figure in Italy combined with the old Catholic rogation days, seasonal processions to bless the fields and seek protection from storm, pestilence, drought, etc.
The story is in Italian but your browser probably has a translation function if you are interested:
https://www.ortablog.com/2020/04/accadde-nel-cusio-le-rogazioni-e-il.html
As a cryptozoology fan I wonder if German and Italian dragons have had something common with each other, and also with the mystical Swiss and Austrian cryptide Tatzelwurm. He lived somewhere in the Alps. Maybe something true still is behind the legend?
There is also Die Meistertunk (the Master Draught) in Rothenburg, where a festival celebrate an incident in the thirty year’s war where the Burgomeister drank an entire stein (big one!) to save the town from being sacked. it’s very popular and quite celebrated.
I remember in a book The Germans (published about 1972) it noted the Oberammergau festival, and how townsmen became very involved, and there was almost a political battle about who got what part, etc., and that if the woman playing Mary wasn’t virginal, there would be sparks. It also said there were plans to revise the play to make it less anti-semitic. Very 70’s, both in the anti-semitism and subtly mocking traditions that weren’t “with it” and indicative of the “new Germany.” I’ll probably do a review of it sometime.
Germany has an advantage of a strong local civic life, so there are many festivals, but dragons are few and far between. Perhaps Furth should become a sister city with somewhere in Maryland. After all, Maryland’s official state sport is jousting.
I have ancestors from both Bavaria and Bohemia, yet I had never heard of this tradition at Furth im Wald.
Thank you for the description and lesson!
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