ABSTRACT
The Russian mass spectacles 1917-33, the German Thingspiel movement 1933-36 and the American Zionist pageants 1932-46 emerged and unfolded in utterly different cultural and political contexts and served very different goals. The Russian mass spectacles sprang up after the October Revolution and lasted until the end of the Civil War, i.e. until the final victory of the revolution. Their aim was to celebrate the revolution as liberation from oppression. The German Thingspiel movement developed out of various open-air and amateur theatre movements after the Nazis seized power. It lasted until the Olympic Games when the government felt stable in terms of domestic and foreign politics. The Thingspiel plays celebrated the beginning of the Third Reich as the rebirth of the German nation and pursued the goal of bringing forth the Volksgemeinschaft as a living community. The American Zionist pageants came into being not as a consequence of a particular historical event, but in the context of the American Zionist movement with the aim of propagating the idea of Jewish nationhood. After the Nazis seized power, the plays also served the purpose of raising public awareness in America about the persecution of the German Jews and, ten years later, the extermination of European Jewry. The last Zionist pageant was performed shortly before the foundation of the State of Israel.
