THE HISTORY OF OBERAMMERGAU PASSION PLAY

“Only Once Per Decade… The town vowed that if God were to spare them from the effects of the bubonic plague ravaging the region, they would perform a play every ten years depicting the life and death of Jesus. The death rate among adults rose from one in October 1632 to twenty in the month of March 1633. The adult death rate slowly subsided to one in the month of July 1633. The villagers believed they were spared after they kept their part of the vow when the play was first performed in 1634. The most recent performance was in 2010.

The play, now performed repeatedly over the course of five months, during the first year of each decade, involves over 2,000 performers, musicians, and stage technicians, all of whom are residents of the village.

The Oberammergau play has a running time of approximately seven hours. A meal is served during the intermission of the play. Audiences come from all over the world, often on package tours, the first instituted in 1870. Admission fees were first charged in 1790. Since 1930, the number of visitors has ranged from 420,000 to 530,000.

There were at least two years in which the scheduled performance did not take place. In 1770, Oberammergau was informed that all passion plays in Bavaria had been banned by order of the Ecclesiastical Council of the Elector, Maximillian Joseph at the behest of the Catholic Church. In 1780, the play was retitled The Old and New Testament. The new Elector, Karl Theodore, having been assured that the play was “purged of all objectionable and unseemly matter” approved the performance of the play. By 1830, the Catholic Church succeeded in halting the performance of all other passion plays in Bavaria. Only Oberammergau remained.”

So, permit me to tell you what happened.

The trip  into Germany was a trip unto itself. You can say that every WWII movie was flashing before my eyes. “Veah izz youa eeeee?” said the guard holding his machine gun. What he was saying, in his best accent was: “Where is your I”? Pronouncing the letter i as eeee, referring to the letter I that is supposed to be on an oval sticker on the back of the car to indicate the country of origin. I don’t know how it is now with a common currency and open European borders but in those days you knew you were crossing into another country.

I explained to Machine-Gun-Guy who was all of maybe 25 years old and giving me the willies, that the car was rented and didn’t come with an eeeee: that required oval sticker with the letter I. After much angst, flashbacks of movies with German Shepards and war time horror, we got through the border. Why? Why Oberammergau, to a seven hour passion play that was not so kind at the time to some groups, in its interpretation of biblical history? Well, it was mentioned in The New York Times and we thought we’d check it out.

The play is held in a HUGE building, the size of a football field, with what seemed like thirty entrances, and we didn’t have tickets. People flocked from all over the world to see this extravaganza performed by the people of the town. We wanted to see what was going on in there…only a New Yorker would have the balls to walk around from door to door to door, find an open one and stride in.

Well, this is what happened: we walked for what felt like a half hour in the heat and came to an open door and stairs. In the open doorway, trying to catch a breeze, was a young, wavy-haired, blonde woman, trying to catch a breeze,  sitting in a chariot, her legs dangling over the sides, smoking a cigarette. Behind her were stairs. Robert made a run for it up the stairs, I was right behind him—we were each carrying a couple of cameras—Robert opened the door at the top of the stairs, and had we walked one more step  we would have been on the stage along with half the town in the middle of The Last Supper.

The blonde girl and her Roman guard friend asked: “Are you with the press?”

It was then we put it together that we were at the stage door, and we bolted like hell—to another entrance. And got in!

It was bigger than big in there, it looked like miles ahead to the stage, and miles behind to the back of a theater. The distance seemed  infinite as was the number of people and lined along the walls every so often there was a guard  holding a machine gun. (More wartime movie fantasies.) We were actually escorted to seats, despite having NO tickets, maybe because the play was likely into its third hour or later. Thousands of people were seated on folding chairs. There was a group behind us on a tour from Texas.

The “show” consists of a series of living tableaus and biblical re-enactments.

And, at some point the Crucifixion had begun on the stage with the Romans yelling, Croizen im!

After a couple of hours, our heads and behinds had had enough and we got up and left, first to the gift shop (no purchases were made save for a guide book), then back to our car which had no “I.”