Pledge and Play

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

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Assoziationen: Anne Fritsch Passionstheater Oberammergau

Vorwort

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 …

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 …
von Anne Fritsch
Oberammergau
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 …
von Anne Fritsch
Anzeige
Collective theatre
In Oberammergau you grow into the Passion from an early age. The children in the village not only perform with the adults, they also develop their own little Passion Play …
von Anne Fritsch
Guilt and atonement
The more intense my engagement with the Passion Play, the more I realise that the fascination of Oberammergau is not just the fascination for a place full of theatre enthusiasts. …
von Anne Fritsch
Performing = belonging
Oberammergau has a good 5000 inhabitants. About half of them take part in the play: in speaking roles, among the crowd, in the choir, in the orchestra, backstage. So at …
von Anne Fritsch
Bubbling under
The disputes that erupted when Christian Stückl began reforming the play in 1990 did not come out of nowhere. These conflicts had been bubbling under for decades before they burst …
von Anne Fritsch
The end as beginning
I have only a vague and theoretical idea of how the staging of the material has evolved over the centuries. As I have gathered from reports and the few film …
von Anne Fritsch
Making-of
During the Passion, over 600 people are on stage at the same time in some scenes. The fact that all this usually happens with a fair degree of order is …
von Anne Fritsch
Jesus Christ superstar
Even if this theatrical event is collective, there is of course one role that is the centre of attention. In the village and in the auditorium. Jesus. His Crucifixion is …
von Anne Fritsch
Backstage
Viewed from the auditorium, the Passion Play is an overwhelming theatrical spectacle, which, given the numerous contingencies, (mostly) takes place with an almost uncanny perfection. Certainly at the 2010 première, …
von Anne Fritsch
The new plague
In Oberammergau, until 2020 the fact that “the Passion” takes place every ten years was as certain as the amen in church. Corona has shaken some of those certainties. The …
von Anne Fritsch
Time for utopias
The new pandemic came at a time when everything seemed to have settled down to some extent. The preparations for the 2020 play took place in unusual harmony, there were …
von Anne Fritsch

Epilogue
While I was writing this book, the world changed. It took a break and quietly turned back a few rounds. Centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracies were revived by self-proclaimed Querdenker, or “lateral …
von Anne Fritsch
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to Frederik Mayet, who not only believed in this book straight away, but also told me so much about Oberammergau and the Passion Play in many …
von Anne Fritsch