Of Gods and Ancestors 15 I hild’s rose garden in Worms or the rural Hildebrand dramas.12 The sheer scale that such representations could sometimes assume is illustrated by an example from the Munich area, where the Battle of the Milvian Bridge of 312 AD was reenacted by around 1,000 people in 1574.13 In the 17th to 19th centuries, these kinds of staging of episodes from early history generally took place in public gardens, during pageants and in theatres. 1882, for instance, saw a reenactment of prehistoric pile-dwelling communities in the theatre in the Swiss town of Neuchâtel. What made this particular performance remarkable was the fact that it used tools that were exact replicas of original prehistoric finds. Similarly, the performances put on during pageants, such as in Rohrschach on the Swiss side of Lake Constance in 1889, are already being seen as an attempt to link historical presentations with architectural reconstructions.14 This period also witnessed the establishment of the first open-air museums virtually anywhere in Europe, with the oldest example considered to be the rural openair museum founded in Skansen near Stockholm in 1891. Unlike the more recent archaeological open-air museums, these “farmhouse museums” were (and still are) not reconstruction museums in the true sense. Instead, they work with original or relocated buildings dating from the last three to four centuries under the guidance of ethnologists and experts in cultural and regional studies. These museums have been imbued with living history from their very early days.15 One of the earliest examples of extensive planning for an archaeological open-air park featuring living history was published in Graz in 1900 by Guido List,16 but his design never came to fruition. List’s proposal was to rebuild the Roman town of Carnuntum as it was in Late Antiquity together with its imaginary Germanic counterpart, a town called Stillfried. The entire complex was to be filled with both staff and visitors dressed in historical costumes.17 With this complex, List – an Ariosophist – wanted to popularise his ideas of a Germanic way of life together with the Aryanist cosmology and racist “Germanic” religion that he developed (see below) by having it open to the public as well as during solstice celebrations and other large-scale events. Apart from a handful of individual precursors, the first open-air museums containing reconstructed pre- and proto-historic settlements were mainly built in the 1920s and 1930s. In Germany, apart from the famous pile-dweller settlements in Bad Buchau and Unteruhldingen, the first Germanic open-air museums to have archaeological support were established in Oerlinghausen and Lübeck in 1936.18 The open-air museum in Oerlinghausen in North Rhine-Westphalia was founded to mark the town’s 900th anniversary.19 Inspired by archaeological excavations of burial grounds and traces of settlements dating back to different prehistoric and early mediaeval periods, two buildings were reconstructed and presented as Germanic huts. These buildings provided the settings for a theatre production entitled Oerl Bark. Depicting the Saxons as a Germanic tribe and its young leader named Oerl Bark, the play was intended to present a new image of the Germanic peoples, linking them to National Socialist “blood and soil” mythology. The open-air museum was expanded with additional reconstructions of Stone Age and mediaeval buildings in the following year, creating an alleged long-standing Germanic tradition and heritage. The educational programme offered at pre-war Oerlinghausen included a range of different performative and hands-on activities aimed at youngsters in particular. It gave a political fillip to the National Socialists in a region that had hitherto been dominated by the Social Democrats. In the first few decades after 1945, open-air museums were no longer exploited as vehicles for official state policy in Germany given the experience of the preceding years, and, for some time at least, ethnic and historical narratives derived from archaeological data were displayed in a far more cautious manner. Given this restraint, life-size archaeological reconstructions and attempts to breathe new life into museums using historical reenactors did not reappear until the 1960s or 1970s. Having been destroyed towards the end of World War II, Oerlinghausen was thus not rebuilt until 1960, and again in 1978 after a devastating fire. Living history performances are now conducted here too in close consultation with museum staff. Ever since it re-opened, however, repeated attempts have been made by neo-fascist and far-right groups to exploit the museum for their own ends in an obvious attempt to revive pre-war activities there. In 1964, for example, the now-banned organisation Wiking-Jugend (“Viking Youth”) hosted an event in Oerlinghausen at the summer solstice. In 1982, the far-right extremist Juergen Rieger from the organisation Die Artgemeinschaft – Glaubens-Gemeinschaft wesensgemäßer Lebensgestaltung (“Community of one’s kind – faith community for way of life true to one’s nature”, likewise now banned; see below) tried in vain to estab-
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