The Stedingers

The Stedingers (Die Stedinger) by August Hinrichs (1879-1956) is another work subtitled ‘Play of the Destruction of a People’. It is a festival ‘event history’ mourning the 1234 massacre of the northwest coastal German people known as the Stedingers. Anxious to seize the fertile Stedinger lands, the Archbishop of Bremen declares the territory interdict, the people heretics, and sends crusader armies to destroy them. Heiko, a young monk, deserts the church and its crusade after he sees his village and the land which fostered his Stedinger values:

HEIKO I have beaten my back bloody and prayed, trying to forget the green meadows – it wasn’t easy to do. I learned to bow down and to do everything my order demanded – twenty years – my entire youth! […] And then, when I saw that Stedinger land again – the dikes, the red roofs and meadows – and saw you standing there in need – my own countrymen and brothers – I couldn’t anymore! And my blood screamed: stand by them! And then – it came to me – may God forgive me – if you’re heretics, then I am too!

Except for a few youths who ensure the continuing life of these people, the Stedingers, including Heiko, are slaughtered.

The play premiered at the historic site, on the 700^th anniversary of the massacre, 27 May 1934. Dedicated to Rosenberg – whose radical ideology matched the play’s anti-Christian and pro-Volk agenda – the outdoor festival theatre ultimately included a dozen medieval buildings in Thilo von Trotha’s ‘heroically objective’ style, 650 professional and amateur actors and seating for 15,000. Annual performances recreated, personalized and reassessed this dark episode from German history. Once reviled as shameless heretics, the Stedingers, like the Natangers, became martyrs, who blood hallowed German soil, encouraging the emergence of the heroic Third Reich. In its final vision of Stedinger heroism and survival, it became an Historical Drama, looking forward to 1933.

[Glen Gadberry, ‘The History Plays of the Third Reich’, in John London (ed.), Theater Under the Nazis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.111]