Pledge and Play E-Book

Anne Fritsch

• Herausgeber: Verlag Theater der Zeit
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 251

Beschreibung

What's the story with the little village of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps? For nearly 400 years, the people who live here have performed the Passion of Christ every ten years. All together. Grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren all join each other on stage. They are fulfilling a vow once made by their ancestors to stave off the plague. This book sets out to discover why the villagers' enthusiasm for theatre has endured to this day. It takes a look behind the scenes and accompanies the creation of the 2022 Passion Play with its 2,400 participants. In a series of conversations, the author explores their motivations, special rituals such as the Hair and Beard Decree and theatre life in times of the coronavirus pandemic. And why giving up is not an option.

Leseprobe

ANNE FRITSCH

PLEDGE & PLAY

How the Passion Play in Oberammergau Changes a Village and Impacts the World

Translated by James J. Conway

Anne Fritsch

Pledge and Play

How the Passion Play in Oberammergau Changes a Village and Impacts the World

© 2022 by Theater der Zeit

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Publisher: Theater der Zeit, Harald Müller

Winsstraße 72, 10405 Berlin, Germany

www.theaterderzeit.de

Translation: James J. Conway

Editorial: Nicole Gronemeyer

Design: AMEN Gestaltung, www.soseies.com

Print: Druckhaus Sportflieger, Berlin

Images:

Annelies Buchwieser: p. 63

Arno Declair: p. 42, 47

Anne Fritsch: p. 19, 77, 81

Gemeindearchiv Oberammergau: p. 65

Jenny Greza: p. 15

Christoph Leibold: p. 53, 115

Brigitte Maria Mayer: p. 90

Dieter Mayr: p. 10, 27

Gabriela Neeb: p. 106

Sebastian Schulte: p. 6, 31, 67, 95, 105, 110, 122, 125, 130, 133, 135, 139, 159, 161, 174, 177

Andreas Stückl: p. 36, 144, 151, 155

ISBN 978-3-95749-391-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-3-95749-393-4 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-3-95749-392-7 (EPUB)

For

Emma & Anton & Robert

CONTENT

Prologue

Oberammergau

Collective theatre

Guilt and atonement

Bubbling under

The end as beginning

Making-of

Jesus Christ superstar

Backstage

The new plague

Time for utopias

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Sources/Notes

Once you get to the end you can start all over again,because the end is the beginning of the other side.

Karl Valentin

PROLOGUE

Every ten years, people in a village in southern Bavaria stop cutting their hair for a year and a half. They do this to imitate the Crucifixion of Christ. They have been doing this for almost 400 years. Which sounds odd, but this is an event which attracts interest well beyond the region and, in 2014, was registered as an example of “Intangible Cultural Heritage”: the Oberammergau Passion Play. Almost half a million people from all over the world make a pilgrimage to the foothills of the Alps each Passion Year to witness this spectacle. And the play is by no means over the hill; the cast for 2022 is the youngest in its history, the motivation on the ground is greater than ever.

I was eleven years old when I first heard that there was a Passion Play in a village called Oberammergau. It was 1990, the year in which Christian Stückl became director for the first time. I didn’t know that then. I was sitting in a beer garden in Munich with my family. At the Chinese Tower in the Englischer Garten. A friend of my parents said that she would be going to Oberammergau in the summer to attend the Passion Play, which only takes place every ten years. Everyone knew what she was talking about except me. I didn’t ask. But something stuck in my head. This “only every ten years” and this “the whole village takes part”. It was another twenty years before I would see the Passion Play for myself. I studied. Theatre studies, German, and Jewish history, then cultural journalism. I was no longer thinking about the Passion Play; the 2000 play came and went without me noticing. Then in 2010 I was working as a theatre critic, and Christian Stückl had been appointed Creative Director of the Münchner Volkstheater. Through him, Oberammergau came back into my thinking; the mountain to the prophet, more or less, or: the play to the critic. I got an invitation to the première. It was May, and the weather was cool as the shuttle bus left the ZOB, the central bus station in Munich. We weren’t elegantly dressed; this was more like an excursion to the mountains, with thermals, warm jackets and thick socks. And that’s exactly what it was: an excursion to the mountains. On the Autobahn to Garmisch it began to snow. In the theatre, where the auditorium is covered but open to the stage, it was bitterly cold. They distributed red fleece blankets at the entrance, a perfect match for the robes of the cardinals sitting next to us in the audience.

A trip to the Passion Play is also an excursion into the mountains.

This première was an extremely solemn affair. You could really sense that this village had waited ten years to perform the story of the Passion of Christ again. Beforehand I wasn’t really sure what to expect – a large-scale amateur play, I guessed. What I hadn’t expected (besides the unbelievable cold) were the choir, the orchestra, the sets. The professionalism. I was overwhelmed. And I, having had religious education in elementary school but coming from a non-religious household, learned a great deal about the last few days in the life of Jesus. As Christ, played by Frederik Mayet, hung half-naked on the Cross for what felt like an eternity, while I was shivering from the cold on my seat despite the second pair of socks I bought at the local drugstore during the break, I thought it would be another miracle if he didn’t get pneumonia.

Before he was taken off the Cross I resolved never to miss the play again; I wanted to be there again in ten years’ time. I wanted to find out what really went on in Oberammergau. Why they all take on so much for this piece of theatre. What motivates them. Where their enthusiasm comes from. Is it religion or theatre that they believe in, that holds them together? From where do they draw the professionalism with which they approach their Passion? What are the stories behind the play? How do they come about? How have they changed over the centuries? How has the village changed?

About a year before the première scheduled for 2020, I started following the preparations for the play, wrote a blog for the Passion Play, attended rehearsals and spoke to many people in Oberammergau. And the more they told me, the more fascinated I was by all the stories surrounding this centuries-old tradition. Just how much these communal performances define the life of the village. How people plan their lives according to the Passion. The relevance it has. These days you might say: the theatre is of systemic relevance here. As the plague raged through Upper Bavaria (the mountainous region of southern Bavaria bordering Austria) and Oberammergau in the 17th century, the villagers sought salvation through theatre. They vowed to perform the Passion of Christ every ten years to ward off the deadly disease. It is said that no one died of the plague in the village from that moment. And something of this belief – that theatre can save the world – has remained with the villagers to this day.

Now, as I write this, the 2020 Passion Play has been cancelled and pushed back to 2022. Another plague has brought the rehearsals to a standstill two months before the première: the coronavirus. Because Oberammergau represents the opposite of quarantine, of social isolation. Oberammergau means theatre that goes all in or not at all. Where everything is on stage and plenty of everything: orchestra, choir, old people, young people, children, animals … a theatre without limits – and without distancing.

Shortly after the cancellation of the 2020 Passion, I spoke to Christian Stückl on the phone. It was the time of lockdown when people were left to fend for themselves from one day to the next. When suddenly the word “home” was set before all manner of words. Home office, home schooling, home entertainment. When all at once, everything that generally happened outside had to take place at home. Except maybe home theatre, which only works to an extent (which became apparent once the initial streaming frenzy wore off). And certainly not home Passion Play. The director, normally so tireless and enthusiastic, sounded dejected, sad. But by the time we finished our call he was already looking ahead again. Passion 2022 wouldn’t just be a delayed Passion 2020. Once again he and his team were going to look at the world anew, a world that was changing so much. We still don’t know where it’s heading. The knowledge that the Passion Play has existed for almost 400 years, that it survived the Reformation, the Spanish flu and two world wars, that it has endured crises of legitimacy and even more vehement arguments in the village helps to puts things into perspective these days. Somehow, it always goes on. This, too, is a message of the play, one which emerged from a severe crisis and which has used crises of all sorts as an engine for further development. And so writing this book means taking heart at a time when the world is standing still.(Easter 2020)

OBERAMMERGAU.A COMPLETELY NORMAL VILLAGE?

October 2019. I’m on the train to Oberammergau with a croissant and a thermos full of tea, on one of my first research trips to the Oberland region of Upper Bavaria, and I have appointments for all sorts of discussions. It’s a sunny autumn morning. There’s no Covid-19 yet, the première of the 42nd Passion Play is scheduled for May 2020, the invitations have been sent, most of the tickets have been sold. Oberammergau is in preparation mode. The set designer Stefan Hageneier will guide me through the Passionstheater and the workshops, showing me his designs and the stage. Markus Zwink, the musical director, will explain to me how he deals with a musical legacy which stretches back for centuries, and why the children in Oberammergau get free music lessons. I will get to know Monika Lang, sitting in her living room as she explains how she and her fellow campaigners fought for years, or rather decades, for equal rights for women in the Passion.

Oberammergau via Unterammergau

From Munich you take the regional train to Murnau, along the shores of Lake Starnberg, heading south. It’s work, but it feels more like an excursion. Out of the city and into the Oberland. The sun is glinting off the lake, on the train I am surrounded by hikers and mountaineers. In Murnau, I change to the small shuttle train – tiny, really – that will take me to my destination. With the waters of the Staffelsee on one side and the flat expanse of the Murnauer Moos on the other, the train makes its way to Bad Kohlgrub, then along the River Ammer, through Unterammergau before arriving at Oberammergau. In a journey of 37 minutes, the train travels through a landscape which looks as though it were affixed to a model railway. Meadows, trees and hills. The Alps gradually rearing up in the background. Outside it’s autumn, with everything glowing green, yellow and orange. Travelling up into the mountains, the sky seems closer somehow. Plenty of nature, grazing cows and sheep, the occasional deer and birds of prey. Ski runs carve down the slopes into the valley. Little more. Until the train, and with it the romance, comes to a halt in the Oberammergau rail terminus next to the parking lot of a discount supermarket.

The Passionstheater is not far. A little way down the street, over the Ammer, left into the centre. “Passionsspiele 2020” is written in large letters on the façade of the administrative office. All is quiet on this Monday, everyone is going about their business with barely a tourist to be seen. It is hard to imagine that during the Passion Play season, the village sees visitors arriving at the rate of 5,000 a day – equivalent to the entire population of the village. In a whole season they amount to half a million. That’s almost twice as many visitors as the Salzburg Festival, eight times as many as the Bayreuth Festival and nearly as many as the Bavarian State Opera gets in a whole year.

The Passionstheater is in the centre of Oberammergau. It is a unique feature and a meeting place in the village.

In 2019 (the year before corona), 8.8 million tourists came to Munich – around 24,000 per day. Around five times as many as Oberammergau receives on a Passion performance day. Only Munich has 280 times the inhabitants, an area ten times as large. Proportionate to the population of the place, Munich would have to receive 1.4 million guests in a single day to reach Oberammergau dimensions. While Munich has 77 tourists per square kilometre per day, there are 167 in Oberammergau. So it is no wonder that the preparations here are already in full swing in the year prior to the Passion. Hotels, guest houses and private rooms are being renovated and spruced up, streets are being levelled, parking spaces for cars and buses are being planned.

On the day of the première, the remote village transforms into a bustling, international location for around five months. In the 19th century, the Passion Play became a popular destination for international tourists. There was particularly high demand for the “Oberammergau Passion Play” from Anglo-Saxon and North American regions. Leopold Höhl describes this in his “Guide to the Ammergau Passion Play” in 1880 as follows: “Oberammergau. For years the stream of travellers rushes past you, […] only a few, the true nature enthusiasts, come to visit. And then – all of a sudden your name fills half the world, all of a sudden the stream leaves its accustomed bed and directs its course to your quiet huts, as if some mysterious invisible power had led it there. And it is a power that lures all those thousands, educated and uneducated, city-dwelling and country folk, into the magic circle […] The Passion Play is the destination for thousands of their journeys and pilgrimages.”1

What happened? The Bavarian Alps, and with them Oberammergau, started experiencing greater popularity with British tourists around 1840. Horse-drawn omnibuses, new railway lines and the construction of the road from Ettal made the village more accessible. The real shift, however, came when English travel entrepreneur Thomas Cook discovered the Passion Play as a destination and promoted it on a large scale, “offering package tours and pilgrimage packages that were so popular that contemporary reports teem with American and British visitors”.2 In 1970 Lufthansa even made Oberammergau the focus of its transatlantic advertising.

To this day, numerous American travel companies put together package tours around the Passion Play. You can choose between “Munich, Salzburg & Vienna with Oberammergau” in eight days, “Bavarian Highlights with Oberammergau” in nine, “Catholic Central Europe with Oberammergau” in nine or “Grand Catholic Italy with Oberammergau” in thirteen days. In addition, there are plenty of individual travellers who book the packages with overnight stays offered by the theatre, as well as day trippers from the surrounding area. The organisers estimate that sixty to seventy percent of the guests in 2010 came from abroad. Even the most theatre-averse villagers cannot escape this hubbub. And of course very few want to. For hotels, souvenir shops and restaurants, the première in May marks the start of a peak phase that ends with the last performance in October.

No farming village

But even outside the season, the Passion is omnipresent in Oberammergau. The first Jesus I encountered that day is painted on the wall of a house. He hangs on the Cross above a barren landscape, below him the mourning Mary, her sister and Mary Magdalene. A suggestion of Jerusalem in the background. On another house you can see the villagers of 1633 making their oath with their fingers pointing at the sky, while next to them, Jesus is raised on the first Cross. Lüftlmalerei, this technique for decorating façades with paint applied to plaster while it is still damp, may well have been invented here. It probably got its name from the house of the Oberammergau façade painter Franz Seraph Zwinck: “Zum Lüftl”. All sorts of things were painted on the houses: columns and other architectural decorative elements as well as rural and Christian motifs. The longing to capture sacred events in images is omnipresent in Oberammergau. Everywhere you look there are crucifixes and depictions of the Crucifixion from many centuries, painted on façades, worked into numerous wood carvings sold as souvenirs, in the church and in the cemetery, in a variety of forms from naturalistic to abstract. There is a high Jesus density in Oberammergau.

In general, it is an affinity for art in the broader sense that makes Oberammergau special. Agriculture is secondary; the climate is harsh, the soil infertile. Oberammergau is not a farming village. I never saw a single tractor on any of my visits. Instead the townscape is determined by the three main trades: wood carving, Passion Play and tourism. And these three are inextricably linked. To a certain extent, the wood carving was a prerequisite because it meant there were always enough creative people on hand to put the play together, to design stage sets and props. The play in turn boosted international tourism. And travellers like to take a carved crucifix home with them.

Wood carving is where it all started. Oberammergau boasted wood sculptors long before it hosted theatre.

The carving is even older than the Passion; it is, so to speak, the root of everything. The men of Oberammergau who initiated the Passion Play were wood carvers. They did not come to art through the Passion, rather they came to the Passion through art. The image of performing peasants may be tempting, but it is completely wrong. This was made clear by the British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton, who visited the Passion Play in 1880; his report of his experiences in Upper Bavaria is condescending yet amusing: “English writers add to the wonders of the Passion Play by representing it as the work of unlettered peasants in a remote mountain village. So far from being peasants, the performers are mechanics, intelligent and, after a fashion, educated men. I might also call them artists. They have been wood-carvers for generations; their works have travelled over Europe to North America, and their village has its School of Design, &c.”3 At the time, the “State Vocational School for Wood Sculptors Oberammergau”, as it is called today, had just been founded. It preserves the tradition of wood carving to the present day, even if most of its students now come from outside the village.

As early as the 16th century, Oberammergau’s wood carvers would set off towards Italy to sell their carvings. The village was conveniently located on the trade route from Augsburg to Venice, and it had international connections. Cross-border sales channels soon developed, trading houses were established. Sculptures and wooden toys supported numerous families. Generations of villagers carved crucifixes and saints, shared their lives with biblical figures, interpreted them again and again and gave them three-dimensional faces. They showed great self-confidence in representing their guild to the outside world. In 1923 a fourteen-member delegation from Oberammergau, led by Jesus actor Anton Lang, travelled to the USA to promote the Passion, as well as their carving and pottery work. The inflation at that time meant there was “neither money nor work in the village”.4 They wanted to gain exposure for their own products through an exhibition in America, to win customers and tap into a new sales market.

They were on the road for six months and were even received at the White House by President Calvin Coolidge on 15 March 1924, posing for a group photo on the west side of the building. “The President shook hands with everyone, spoke a few words and said that he had already heard about Oberammergau from a friend, that he was happy to welcome us to his country and wished us good luck for our exhibition,” Lang wrote in his memoirs.5 Nevertheless, “some newspapers spoke of an ungracious reception of the Oberammergauers by the president”.6 The very next day, President Coolidge wrote a letter of apology to Anton Lang. White House regulations only allowed public speaking before foreign diplomatic delegations. “It was for that reason alone […] that I was unable to have any further addresses,” explained Coolidge.7

This is remarkable. A group of men come from a small mountain village in Upper Bavaria to the USA and are welcomed by the President. And at the sign of the slightest discord, he formally apologises for the misunderstanding. The chutzpah that the delegation brought to the White House was not accidental, says Ulrike Bubenzer, who works at the Oberammergau Museum. “This self-confidence has developed here over the centuries, most likely because of the Passion Play, its popularity and the prominent guests.” The people of Oberammergau are creative, enterprising and stubborn. And yes, they also pride themselves a little on what they have achieved. Which brought them envy and the unfriendly name of “Oberammergauner” in the surrounding area (incorporating the word Gauner, meaning rogue or villain). And at times the Passion was the subject of fierce arguments in the village. This is a place where they’re confident about defending their opinions – and disinclined to back down when others disagree.

Profane and sacred

Otherwise, Oberammergau is a not-that-small village which at first glance looks like many others in Bavaria. A mixture of the profane and the sacred, the ugly and the beautiful, kitsch and church, concrete and nature. It is framed by rugged mountains like the Kofel, which rises like a single tooth behind the village and looks as if it had arrived there by mistake. Lion Feuchtwanger, who came to Oberammergau in 1910, maliciously called it the “billboard mountain”. “The high Alpine character of this mountain turns out to be a deception; only the side facing the village is rugged and massive, the whole mountain is five hundred metres high and disappears the instant you move away from Oberammergau.”8 Feuchtwanger most likely didn’t hike up the Kofel, otherwise he would know that the billboard here definitely offers what it advertises. Although only 1342 metres high, the Kofel has some quite craggy, mountainous sections on the last stretch to the summit.

A lot has happened in the village in the last century; not everyone who lives here now is Upper Bavarian or Catholic from way back – not at all. Over the decades, many people from different parts of Europe and the world have come to Oberammergau. And since membership of the Catholic Church is no longer a requirement for participation in the Passion Play (more on that later), the number of people leaving the Church has increased here too. The fact that opening up to people of different faiths, or no faith, was not initially met with enthusiasm among some of the population – that’s hardly unique to Oberammergau. In 1900, when Carsten Lück became the first Protestant to play a leading role, a number of people saw it as the beginning of the end.

In fact, the opposite was true; the supposed end actually brought a new beginning. Now, everyone who has lived in the village long enough is allowed to participate and nobody is excluded because of their beliefs (or lack of belief), and this is the condition under which the centuries-old tradition has become a 21st-century project supported by the entire village community. A changing society needs changing rules. And a theatre production of this size needs a majority to support it. If all non-Catholics were excluded, it would hardly be as popular as it is today.

The Passionstheater, which is apricot-coloured and disproportionately large compared to the other buildings in the centre, also helps define the look of the village. Along with all the crucifixes, it’s an everyday reminder of the play. In addition, the names of houses and streets refer to the Passion, its locations, figures and past greats: Am Kreuzweg, Dedlerstraße, Judasgasse, Pater-Rosner-Straße … There is even a Kaspar-Schisler-Gasse, named after the man who supposedly brought the plague to Oberammergau and who is said to have initiated the Passion Play. The arts and crafts centre is housed in the “Pilatushaus”, the swimming pool can be found in the “Himmelreich”, or “Heavenly Kingdom”; a tour of the cemetery is like a journey through Passions past. They are all here, the Daisenbergers, the Zwinks, the Langs, the Stückls, the Rutzens, the Preisingers and many more. All the names that have shaped the play over the centuries: directors, actors, musicians. It feels like visiting old friends, even if you never met them in your lifetime. In the parish church of St. Peter and Paul in the middle of the cemetery, the right-hand side altar still boasts the Cross to which the villagers made their vows in 1633 and committed themselves to performing the Passion of Christ every ten years from that point on. It wears its centuries well; they really tend to their history here.

No compromise

On my first day of research in October 2019, I went behind the scenes of the Passionstheater for the first time, to the backstage area and to the dressing rooms. Everything is still empty and deserted, and it is difficult to imagine the turmoil, or Gewurl as they say here, that performance days must bring. Everything seems too small for so many people, the processes must be truly well organised to get everyone ready for the performance and avoid collisions and congestion in the corridors. The set and costume designer Stefan Hageneier showed me his models for the tableaux vivants, the gigantic lengths of fabric that he orders every ten years from a favoured merchant in India, the costumes lined up on long clothes racks, the armour. And the two huge wooden crosses that are waiting in a corridor for their entrance.

In the “Flügelei”, (the “wingery” or wing workshop), they’re making the angel wings. Not with artificial feathers, but real ones. They have already been dyed black and – because they are too short on their own – several short ones are combined to make one long one. These are then glued piece by piece onto the wings. Hageneier is a perfectionist. He insists on “genuine” materials, doesn’t want fakes, as he explained to me as he gave me a tour. That’s why there are no artificial feathers on his wings, although of course that would be a lot easier. But for him that would be a fudge. The wings, in shapes which are naturally inspired by real birds, have a span of two and a half metres. That’s a lot of composite feathers. A lot of manual labour. The armour for the Romans is “of course” made of metal and not of cheaper (and lighter) plastic. The idea is that you shouldn’t just see them, you should hear them clatter as well. “It’s a tradition that we don’t make compromises of any kind,” says Hageneier.

And even if members of the audience are sitting much too far away to tell the difference between artificial feathers and real ones, somehow you can feel it in the auditorium, the incredible solemnity with which the play is performed. Certainly, the feathers stuck in my mind. At that moment I got a sense of why the Passion is so fascinating. The three minds behind it – director Christian Stückl, set designer Stefan Hageneier and musical director Markus Zwink – don’t allow themselves the slightest sloppiness; they are determined to draw the best out of themselves and everyone else. The play is sacred to them. They don’t do things by halves, they are obsessed, in a way, obsessed with the theatre. Their attitude infects everyone involved. And ultimately the audience as well. And yes, every feather makes a difference. In the attitude to the whole.

Theatre addicts

Their 17th-century ancestors may have believed in a God who could protect them from harm, but over the centuries the theatre itself has become something that (almost) everyone here believes in. No matter what religion they are, or whatever else they believe in. For some, the focus is still on religious duty, for others it’s the community experience and tradition, for others again it is art – and for quite a few a mixture of all these aspects. For everyone here, however, the theatre is simply a part of their life; it might lead to heated argument now and then, but no one questions the necessity of it.

This is where Oberammergau differs fundamentally from other villages, towns and even cities – here it is the people who shape the theatre. Not just an elite, but everyone. You just can’t avoid it. Every person entitled to perform, every child in the village receives an invitation to take part in the play. The invitation to perform theatre is a natural part of growing up in Oberammergau. You have to actively decide against it rather than for it. The Passion Play is part of the life of the village, a subject for its gossip. It forces everyone who lives here to deal with cultural issues – and with each other. Or, in the words of Rochus Rückel, one of the 2022 Jesus actors: “In general, the Passion is always a topic; I can guarantee not a day goes by in Oberammergau where the Passion is not talked about ten times somewhere.” When almost everyone in a school class or a clique takes part, it draws the remainder in. In the pub the discussion turns to matters dramaturgical rather than political. This theatre demands a lot from them, but it has also helped the place become internationally known and prosperous. No matter how acrimonious the arguments, nobody here would question the relevance of the theatre.

And that’s with a set of basic constants which hardly sounds explosive at first: only every ten years, age-old rituals, always the same millennia-old history, religious themes, amateurs rather than international stars. In spite of this, or precisely because of it, the interest of the population (and visitors from all over the world) remains unbroken; it is increasing rather than decreasing. Josef Georg Ziegler wrote in his report on the 1990 play: “The fascination for the Oberammergau Passion Play stems from the fact that it has managed to remain a play by the people for the people. The whole village regards it as their own affair, and they’re proud of it.”9