The town that was saved from the plague

There are two explanations as to why the seventeenth-century plague didn’t devastate the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. The first is that the locals made a vow in 1633 that, if spared, they would repay God by performing a Passion play for all time. The second is that the forward-thinking Germans who lived in the isolated settlement at the foot of the Alps posted guards at their borders and refused entry to newcomers. Either way, it worked. While much of Europe lost entire waves of its population, Oberammergau remained virtually untouched.

Ever since then the residents have kept their word and, with a handful of exceptions for the odd international war, have gathered together every ten years to recreate the story of Jesus Christ. Until now. The 2020 production, the 42^nd, has been postponed for two years due to coronavirus. The dark irony is inescapable. A modern plague has broken the tradition, science has won over faith; not that the two should be in any way mutually exclusive.

It’s monumental. Half a million people sit for six hours and watch 2,000 actors, all born in the town or resident for twenty years. Ticket sales amount to around £25 million and the income from t-shirts, hotels, restaurants, and the like is incalculable. In the years between productions there are still numerous visitors, so the production and its ripples enjoy local cultural and economic dominance. The actors, however, aren’t paid above basic expenses, yet perform as though this is personal, this is family. And to a large extent it is. The Equity Actors union would have collective coronaries!

I attended in 2010 and whatever one’s faith or even lack of it, there is something profoundly moving and invincibly memorable about it all. But then how could it not? The location is the Alps, the history is an unbroken link to the early 17th century, and the story is, as they say, the greatest one ever told. There’s also a glorious juxtaposition of simplicity and sophistication, in that in front of a bucolic backcloth there is the most modern sound equipment and set design. The emotions whirl as the audience becomes part of a collective of belief and devotion — there’s something far beyond the usual experience of theatre going on here.

But there’s also a great deal of baggage. Adolf Hitler saw the play twice and lauded it for its intelligent presentation of “the menace of Jewry.” The maniac’s racist fetish shouldn’t be used as any sort of reliable guide, but in truth the Gospel themes of peace, love and forgiveness were hardly emphasised back then. The play of that era was more easily seen as peasants doing what peasants do, uncluttered and untainted by urban modernity, with the Jews as the modern as well as atavistic enemy. As such, The Nazis organised subsidised trips, and even tried to impose an explicitly National Socialist script. The locals, to their partial credit, did at least resist that. Nevertheless, Oberammergau caused enormous harm and was, if you like, on the wrong side of history.

So I, as a Christian with a Jewish father, approached the whole thing with a certain degree of ambivalence, or perhaps even a cultural and emotional terror. Anybody familiar with the new, post-war Germany understands and appreciates its openness, admission, and contrition regarding the Holocaust. The doubter could shrug and ask how the country could do anything other, but the truth is that national denial of complicit crimes in not uncommon, and that the German response goes beyond the formal. But the Passion play?

Yes, even the Passion play. The heart of all this, its very quintessence, is the sublime transformation from the Jew as Christ-killer to the Jew as Christ. Indeed, one of the reasons that the play is so long — and goodness, it is an undertaking — is that the latest script goes to such pains to emphasise the Jewishness of the story. After all, as any decent biblical scholar would tell you, The New Testament is largely an account of an internal struggle within first-century Judaism between supporters and opponents of Jesus.

So in the modern play, the Temple merchants whom Jesus whips are hardly mentioned, Jesus Himself is constantly described as a rabbi, the Sanhedrin divide loudly and almost violently over whether they should accept this new Messiah, the Jewish crowd that condemns Jesus also contains many of His faithful followers, and the menorahs are large, numerous, and unavoidable. It’s easy to be cynical about all this but that’s unfair. More importantly, it’s just inaccurate. This reformed approach, this washed relationship, isn’t some overnight politically correct spasm but the result of years of self-questioning and honesty.

The producers and organisers of the play began to approach Jewish organisations for advice several decades ago, and in the contemporary rendering there is one especially poignant moment when the actor playing Jesus recites the first verses of the Shema in Hebrew. This is the central prayer of Judaism — “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” — and when spoken by a young German actor in a Bavarian town that once boasted a large Nazi party membership it is like spiritual lightning. These are words that were spoken by millions of Jews before they were murdered in the Shoah; they now echo in the German night and are listened to with a tearful respect by everybody on the stage and, it seemed to me, all in the audience. The history and evolution of a relationship between Jew and German crystallised in a single moment. I wept.

So the modern liturgical dance that is the Oberammergau Passion play will not be seen for two years. It’s a shame but in the long run it doesn’t really matter. The drama divine, the drama human, remains a living symbol of hope and reconciliation, not a dry litany of past wrongs, and while coronavirus may have imposed a hiatus it cannot stop the message.