Political Mass Festivals in Austria between 1918 and 1938

A distinctive culture of celebration and festivals existed in Austria between 1918 and 1938, which not only included a boom in the traditional Passion plays and an increase in initiatives to establish new artistic festivals; all the important political groupings of the time, such as the Social Democrats, Christian Socialists (via their forefront church organisations), German Nationals and, in the 1930s, the Austro-Fascists, made use of festivals to demonstrate their power, transmit their ideology, influence the masses in the sense of their own Weltanschauung, and to demarcate themselves from other groupings. The objective of the habilitation thesis is to characterise the type of political mass festival as it formed in Austria between 1918 and 1938 and how it was used by the various political groupings in the sense of their own propaganda, demonstrating the similarities of the texts of the individual political positions - since, although the groupings were extremely polarised in terms of their ideological orientation, the festivals` dramatic forms and aesthetic means used in each to bond the masses are comparable. Founded on an examination of the celebratory and festival theories, the complex formal relationships of festival and theatre/drama and the phenomenon of "aestheticising" and/or "staging" politics, the thesis will make a cultural- scientific analysis of the political festival culture in Austria between 1918 and 1838 and, on this basis, will present a literary-scientific demonstration of the dramatic forms which were occasioned by political festivals at the time and/or which replaced them. These texts are to be described as the characterisations of a genre-type and placed within the context of the literary festival movement of the time (Hofmannsthal, Mell, Schreyvogl), which had similar intentions: creating a collective, founding ideology, providing affirmation.