Staging Empire as History and Allegory in Austria and Germany

Theatrical presentations of the foundational myths of the Austrian and German empires, either as costumed processions and pageants or as specially commissioned plays for the theatre, were staged on anniversaries and important jubilees. In Austria, the most important was Franz Joseph’s Diamond Jubilee in 1908, when a pageant of 12,000 lay participants took place in Vienna, while other elements of the national myth were presented on the stage. Wilhelm II played an active part in promoting the imperial theatre festival in Wiesbaden between 1896 and 1914, for which parts of the Hohenzollern myth were dramatized. In 1897, on Wilhelm I’s hundredth birthday, Ernst von Wildenbruch’s Willehalm was performed in Berlin, a verse drama presenting Wilhelm I in allegorical form as the hero who rescued Germany from the evil French.