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...