CRAFT
Krippenbaumeister: the Master Nativity Builder
In Austria, you can study nativity building for four years, at a school, and finish with an exam: a whole nativity scene built on the spot against the clock, plus three written tests. There’s nothing like it in the English-speaking world, and most of the technical words that go with it have no English equivalent.
A title, and what it’s worth
The title of Krippenbaumeister (literally “master nativity builder”) is awarded by the Verband der Krippenfreunde Österreichs, the Austrian federation of nativity clubs, based in Stams, in Tyrol. The federation writes the program, runs the courses and picks the judges.
First, a clarification. In Austria and Germany, the word Meister usually means a state-recognized master craftsman’s license. Not here: the Krippenbaumeister is a certificate from the federation, not a professional license. You can’t take it unless you’re a member of the federation and have spent two years in a local club, a requirement no state diploma could set.
That doesn’t make it an empty title. The training is long, the exam is serious, and the federation says it has about eleven thousand members, which gives you an idea of how many people are involved.
How many people hold the title? No source publishes a total, for Austria or for Germany. Graduation reports mention four to eleven graduates per session at each school, and candidates can only finish one level a year. So it’s probably a few dozen a year for all of Austria, but we won’t give a total that no one else gives.
Four levels
The training goes step by step, one level a year, and you have to pass each one before moving on.
- Krippenbau-Helfer, the assistant: the ground: terrain, caves, paths, the base of the landscape.
- Krippenbau-Lehrer, the instructor: the Oriental nativity: towers, arches, Near Eastern architecture.
- Krippenbau-Leiter, the workshop leader: the regional nativity: houses, roofs, woodwork.
- Krippenbaumeister: a complete Krippenberg: the terrain, its surface finish, painting, plants and electrical work.
Each level takes forty to fifty hours depending on the state, so roughly one hundred sixty to two hundred hours over four years. The state of Upper Austria says you can take only one course per calendar year, so there’s no way to rush it.
It costs around €300 to €430 per level, with materials and lunch included at some schools, so €1,200 to €1,700 for the whole program, not counting travel and lodging.
The sources disagree on two points, and we’d rather point that out than pick one: how long each course lasts (forty or fifty hours) and how long the whole program takes (three or four years, depending on the report). Also, the federation’s rules list five regional schools (Carinthia, Upper Austria, Salzburg, Styria, Vorarlberg), while Tyrol runs its own schools in Lienz, Wenns and Wörgl with exactly the same program. We couldn’t find out why.
The exam
This is the most interesting part, because it’s tougher than you might think.
For the hands-on test, you build a whole nativity scene by yourself, on site, with someone watching, following an assigned brief. The rules list twenty-one numbered briefs, which differ by:
- figure size: about 3, 4 or 5 inches (8, 10 or 12 cm);
- style: Oriental or regional;
- base dimensions: about 24 × 32 or 24 × 36 inches (60 × 80 or 60 × 90 cm);
- and a list of architectural and landscape elements that must be included.
You get fifty hours under the federation’s rules, with five extra hours for candidates with disabilities; one report from a Salzburg exam mentions forty hours.
The theory part is three written tests: history, symbolism and construction. In practice there’s also an oral exam on the history of the nativity scene, the meaning of the figures and colors, and the different styles.
There’s no written thesis. The work you’re judged on is the nativity scene you build on site in the time allowed, not one you bring from home. That’s the part people most often get wrong.
The vocabulary of the craft
German has a rich technical vocabulary for nativity building, and most of these words have no standard English equivalent. Here are the ones you’ll see most often.
| Term | Literal meaning | What it refers to |
|---|---|---|
| Wurzelholz | root wood | Weathered roots and stumps, used as the framework and decoration for caves, cliffs, terrain and trees. Rotten parts are cleaned off, the wood is air-dried for a whole summer, protected from moisture, then brushed with glue size once in place. A nativity tree is made from finely branching roots, young browsed beech or dead juniper. A Wurzelkrippe is a nativity built entirely from natural materials. |
| Kaschieren | to mask, to cover | The word comes from the French cacher, to hide. Two uses: dressing an articulated figure in fabric dipped in glue size, draped and then hardened (the folds set naturally, and you can paint over them); and covering a terrain framework with paper and glue. In English, glue-stiffened drapery on one side, papier-mâché on the other: there’s no single word. |
| Krippenmörtel | nativity mortar | The surface coating, mixed in the workshop: diluted glue, whiting (powdered chalk) and sanding dust. Made both as a spreading paste and as a pebble paste, the latter kneaded to the consistency of shortbread dough. |
| Krippenberg | nativity mountain | The built-up terrain the whole scene rests on. It’s the very subject of the master’s exam. |
| Hintergrundmalerei | background painting | The painted backdrop that closes off the scene. The rules are less about the picturesque than about the join and the depth: the terrain must be designed to blend into the backdrop, paths, stairs, fences and buildings shrink toward the back, and no shadow may fall on the backdrop, or the illusion is destroyed. |
| Orientalische Krippe | Oriental nativity | The Nativity in an evocation of the Holy Land: caves, ruins, fragments of towns, flat roofs, arches and domes. It’s the style taught at the second level. |
| Heimatkrippe / Alpenländische Krippe | homeland nativity / Alpine nativity | The opposite: the Nativity moved into the builder’s own landscape, with old farmhouses, the architecture and dress of the region. It’s exactly what the Provençal santon does: moving Bethlehem into your own village. |
| Kastenkrippe | box nativity | The whole scene built inside a box or a cabinet, viewed from the front like a stage. |
| Felskrippe / Höhlenkrippe | rock nativity, cave nativity | The Nativity under an overhang or in a cave rather than a stable, following the ancient tradition of the cave of Bethlehem. The two terms largely overlap. |
| Laternenkrippe | lantern nativity | A nativity built inside a glazed wooden lantern lit from within, often designed so the scene can be swapped with the season. A format taught in short workshops. We found no documented historical origin: everything points to a contemporary workshop form, not an old regional tradition. |
| Ganzjahreskrippe / Fastenkrippe | year-round nativity, Lenten nativity | A nativity whose scenes change through the liturgical year. The Lenten version (entry into Jerusalem, Mount of Olives, crucifixion, tomb, the women at the tomb) is mostly Tyrolean and Franconian, and is part of what Austria’s heritage listing protects. |
| Krippeleschauen | going to look at the little nativities | The nativity rounds: going from house to house to see the neighbors’ nativity scenes, until February 2. The little glass offered at each stop is called Gloriawasser, “Gloria water,” or Hirtenträne, “the shepherd’s tear.” It’s a living Tyrolean custom, not a museum curiosity. |
| Fatschenkind | swaddled child | A Christ Child wrapped in bands, most often in wax, sometimes dressed in silk and lace and housed in a small glass case. Common in southern Germany and Austria; convents gave them to novices. |
| Klosterarbeit | convent work | The devotional ornamental work of nuns (gold and silver embroidery, beads, sequins, modeled wax), to which the Fatschenkinder in their cases belong. A close cousin of French paperolles (rolled-paper filigree). |
One more term shows up a lot in manuals: Staffelung, layering the scene in planes from front to back. It’s a general German word for composition, used here for landscape, rather than a nativity term.
The “nativity meter”
It’s the most original idea in the whole craft, and there’s no English word for it.
The Krippenmeter is a system of proportions designed to match the size of the figures with that of the buildings. The reference man is 1.70 m (about 5 ft 7 in): on one axis the Normalmeter, the real measurement, on the other the Krippenmeter, its equivalent at nativity scale. Tables give the dimensions to respect for each figure size: for 14 cm (5½-inch) figures, a chair seat at 3.8 cm (1½ in), a table at 6.4 cm (2½ in), a door at 16.5 cm (6½ in), a window 3.6 cm (1⅜ in) wide.
The lesson behind it is simple, and it applies to every nativity scene, including yours: what gives away a badly built nativity is almost never the figures themselves. It’s the size of the figures compared with the doors.
Austria’s heritage listing
Since November 4, 2021, Krippenbrauch in Österreich (the nativity custom in Austria) has been on Austria’s national list of intangible cultural heritage, kept by the Austrian Commission for UNESCO. The federation of nativity clubs submitted the application, and it covers all nine Austrian states.
This is a national list, not one of UNESCO’s international lists. The difference matters, and we explain it on the page about the UNESCO nomination.
The listing traces the custom back to the first nativity set up in Innsbruck in 1609, and it covers three things: setting up nativity scenes, building and caring for them, and supporting research. Worth noting: it protects visiting them just as much as building them.
Other entries on the same list have to do with the nativity: the large landscape nativities of the Salzkammergut (2015), traditionally on view from December 8 to February 2; the Steyrer Kripperl (2018), a rod-puppet nativity play put on every year in the old local dialect of Steyr; and the Loahmmandel of the Steyr area (2023), small clay figures about 1 to 3 inches tall, molded in half-relief, fired and painted, once made by local metalworkers to earn extra money.
Taking the courses, seeing the nativities
To be upfront: we didn’t find any nativity-building course taught in English, or in French. Everything is in German.
The Austrian program is also hard for a visitor to get into: you need federation membership, two years of experience, and in Tyrol you have to sign up through a local club.
Two options are easier to get into, both in Bavaria:
- the Upper Bavaria district nativity-building school, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, explicitly open to everyone, with or without prior experience, no membership required, in modules up to master level, with specialized seminars in plants, backdrop painting and silicone molding;
- the Kempten school, in the Allgäu, which publishes an open program with short workshops requiring no membership: three days for a lantern nativity, four days for an Oriental or regional one.
There’s also a nativity club in Belgium, in the German-speaking East Cantons, that teaches Oriental, regional, lantern and root nativities, backdrop painting, thatch and slate roofs, dressing figures, and even a santon class. It works in German; we cover it on the Belgium page.
Seeing them, on the other hand, is easy. The Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum in Innsbruck has the go-to collection and is open year-round. The Krippenmuseum in Dornbirn, in Vorarlberg, founded in 2003, shows a changing selection of about a hundred nativity scenes from four continents and specializes in Spiegelkrippen, mirror nativities that look much deeper than they really are. And in Germany, the Bavarian National Museum in Munich has what’s considered the most important nativity collection in the world, with some six thousand figures and twenty thousand pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries, including a Bohemian paper nativity with more than a thousand figures.
Events and dates are listed on our Germany and Austria fairs page.