The Invention of Tradition as Means of Consolidating the Collective Identity. Discussed Using the Example of Guido von List's Play "Konig Vanius"

The invention of tradition has become one of the major topics in the study of literary modernism since Eric J. Hobsbawms and Terence Rangers seminal work (lhe Invention of Tradition,1983). Guido von List - an important figure in the history of the so called volkisch movement - is well known for his partly historic but mostly fictitious works on the history of the Germanic tribes and their culture. In the last decades of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century List became undoubtedly one of the most prominent "inventors" of tradition in Central Europe, trying to show that the German people of the German empire and the Habsburg monarchy were the heirs of ancient Germanic wisdom (the so called "ariosophy") that had been mostly destroyed by the advance of Christianity. This was the theme of many of his theoretical works but also of his play Konig Vanius (1899) which is discussed in great detail in the article.