History of Schlaraffia

The cradle: Prague, 1859

It began with a handful of artists and men of letters in the Prague of 1859. Actors, poets, painters — people who wanted to set the gravity of the times aside for a few hours in order to laugh, to play and to keep friendship together. They simply called their circle Schlaraffia.

The name was the programme: the fabled land of Cockaigne, that country of lightness and joy, was to become real for a few hours. No class distinctions, no everyday hierarchies — only play, humour and art.

The game spreads

The idea travelled fast. Soon further Reyche arose in other cities of the German-speaking world: Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. With the wave of German emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Schlaraffia crossed to the New World as well.

New York, Buenos Aires, São Paulo — wherever German-speaking emigrants found a new home, they founded a Schlaraffen-Reych too. The bond of a shared language and a shared game held them together, across every distance.

Schlaraffia survives the storms of history

Two world wars, political upheavals, prohibitions — Schlaraffia has come through much. In Germany and Austria the work of the Reyche was restricted or forbidden during the war years. But as soon as peace returned, the Reyche came back to life. That will to endure is no accident: where real friendship rules, it finds a way.

Worth noting: while in Europe some Reyche paused for a time, Schlaraffia overseas carried on unbroken. The Allschlaraffia — the worldwide umbrella — held the whole together.

The Allschlaraffia — the worldwide union

All the Schlaraffen-Reyche of the world are joined in the Allschlaraffia. This umbrella sets the common rules, assigns the Reych numbers and sees to it that a Schlaraffe from Tokyo is at home at once in a Sippung in Frankfurt.

In doing so the Allschlaraffia keeps up something that has grown rare in the modern world: a fellowship founded on values rather than on profit or networking. Humour, friendship and art are not empty words here; they are practised at every Sippung.