This summer, if all goes as expected, some 400,000 people will travel to Oberammergau in Bavaria to watch the spectacle of Christ’s being reviled and sent to his death by the Jews. In a period of reviving anti-Semitism, brought finally to public attention by the defacing of synagogues, the visitors to Oberammergau will see, under highly emotional circumstances, a play in which the synagogue is a rallying point for evil and in which the Jewish people accept gleefully for themselves and their children blood-guilt for the murder of the Christian savior.
“To the cross with him! To the cross!” cry the Jewish people. “He dies on the cross. Hail Israel! The enemy is overthrown! His death is our safety! We are freed! Long live, long live the synagogue.”
The melodramatically simple picture of the perfidious and deicide Jews which the Oberammergau passion play offers—and which provides most of its dramatic liveliness—is to be found in other passion plays, of course, and in much medieval popular literature. But in its modern form the Oberammergau passion play represents neither the survival nor the faithful recreation of a naive medieval mystery play. It is an intricate, highly professional production combining prologues, choruses, dialogue, tableaux vivants, and mass action scenes with as many as seven hundred performers on the vast stage at once. The huge permanent buildings on the stage, though now simpler in architecture than their baroque predecessors, are massively classical in design.
The text of the play underwent constant and substantial revision from 1660 to 1860. The revisers were monastery-trained priests, and the play became greatly elaborated and then simplified again, according to the changing tastes of the time. The last version was by “the former royal clerical councillor at Oberammergau, the late J. A. Daisenberger” in 1860 and has been very little altered since. The more recent changes have been rather in the mode of production and acting. The villagers of Oberammergau are not to blame, says a writer in the official handbook of 1950, “if the world has not stood still and if the play of 1950 cannot be in any respect—nor in things material—the modest peasant play of times gone by.”
The modern Oberammergau passion play, one of the goals of most of this year’s conducted tours of Europe, is a sophisticated production which takes its point of departure from medieval texts, but uses every theatrical device to make its version of the events of the passion as emotionally stirring as possible for a modern audience. The man who has directed the play since 1922, and who was largely responsible for the reconstruction of the theater in 1930, is Georg Johann Lang. He was one of the first in Oberammergau to become a Nazi, and in 1946 was arrested by the occupation authorities because of his work for Goebbels’ propaganda ministry. In 1950 Lang was in charge again of the entire production.
The picture which the play draws of the Jews—usurious, bloodthirsty, possessed by “the fury of a blinded nation’s rage”—combines some of the worst of medieval and modern prejudices. The sinister character given the Jew in popular literature of the Middle Ages so encouraged superstitious fears that at times of social disaster, as during the Black Death, whole communities of Jews were burned alive. Pogroms were especially likely to occur during Holy Week as a result of the emotions aroused by Good Friday sermons. It is hardly necessary to discuss the way in which the Nazis used the idea of the Jew created by modern anti-Semitism. It served to provoke and justify scourgings, murders, blood-guilt on a scale never before known in history. Munich, capital of Bavaria, was the city in which the Nazi movement first grew strong.
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Of a feeling of responsibility for such German crimes—or of the need for public repentance for them—there is no indication whatsoever in the text and official account of the Passion Play as it was presented last in 1950. It is not that the municipality of Oberammergau would consider references to contemporary history inappropriate. On the contrary, the preface to the edition of 1934 said that the play would be given with special thankfulness that year because the new movement in Germany had rescued the people, “des gottgewollten Volkstum,” from Bolshevism and every kind of spiritual plague. It quoted from a German critic of 1850, who declared that when the promised day arrived on which the German people would be one folk again and know their strength freely and joyously, and when the breath of a new life revived the spirit of German folk culture, then should thanks go to the Oberammergau passion play.
The text of the play in 1950 was virtually unchanged from that of preceding decades and will be the same in 1960. A letter from Oberammergau informs me that all revisions have been voted down. The whole effect of this version is to make it clear that the Jews brought their destruction upon themselves. In one of the tableaux from the Old Testament which precede each section of the play, Jerusalem is identified with the disobedient Queen Vashti whom King Ahasuerus puts aside in favor of Esther. Jerusalem has been warned to return to God, not to thrust aside with mockery the hand held lovingly out to her, but alas
With evil mind she rushed on
Therefore, thus saith the Lord
This people is abhorred.
See Vashti—see the proud one is cast out!
Showing God’s purpose for the synagogue.
This chorus ends with an injunction to the Jews to “destroy from out your inmost hearts the leaven of your sins.”
On his way to Calvary, Jesus prophesies to the daughters of Jerusalem the day to come when they shall say, “‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that shall never bear, and the paps that never gave suck.’ They shall cry to the mountain: ‘fall on us’ and to the hills ‘cover us.’” This is scriptural, of course, but it is spoken without pitying love and without any plea to God to avert such a terrible fate. As prophecy it holds equally vividly for the years of Hitler’s reign and for the year 70 C.E. when the Romans destroyed the temple and killed most of the people of Jerusalem. Less than ten years before the Oberammergau passion play was revived in 1950, bulldozers were literally covering with hills of earth the mass graves of Jewish women and children.
If Germans who were the instruments of this terrible vengeance feel it ironical to act the part of those who incurred divine wrath, the text of the play is certainly not so written as to suggest any kind of human or humane identification with their victims. The non-Christian Jews are consistently and melodramatically portrayed as dominated by pride, greed, and dishonesty. Only Judas shows capacity for remorse. The others are mere stereotypes out of conventional anti-Semitic propaganda. Deems Taylor, who saw the play in 1922, said of its author Daisenberger: “Conceiving the Pharisees as simple villains, he wrote in long conspiracy scenes for them in which they plot against Jesus with a frank and naive scoundrelism such as exists only in the movies.” The best and most effective acting, he found, was done by those “who portray the secular and wicked characters.” In a prefatory prayer quoted in the 1950 official text, the actors at Oberammergau consider it a sign not of their kinship with the Jews but of their devotion to Christ that they are willing to be costumed in “the garb of those who have betrayed him from the beginning.”
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Rarely has the anti-Semitism of the Oberammergau passion play been discussed. In fact, the sentimentality which surrounds its performance has usually discouraged any serious treatment of its modern implications. An American rabbi, however, Joseph Krauskopf, who saw it performed in 1900, was deeply disturbed by the lesson it taught. Planning to give one lecture on the play’s implication, he found himself writing three. These three, when delivered, aroused such interest that the series was extended to six, published in pamphlet form, and then with supplementary material, in 1901, as a book, A Rabbi’s Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play. Rabbi Krauskopf dealt thoroughly both with the play itself and with its New Testament basis.
Such serious critical treatment is uncommon outside Germany. There it has been criticized, especially since the war, for the inadequacies of its Christianity. But ever since 1850, when increasing numbers of tourists began to go to Oberammergau, the play has been a favorite subject for sentimental treatment in the illustrated press. Decade after decade appear articles with titles like “Biblical Characters Live Again in Oberammergau,” and with texts which go over the same ground almost verbatim. They describe how the men and boys, months before the production, let their hair and beards grow long, of the spritual requirements set for those who would play the parts of Christ and Mary, and of the intense excitement and sometimes bitter disappointment when announcement of parts is made. There are many anecdotes of the naive literalness with which the play is taken. In an interview Anton Lang, Jr., remarked, “Judas is a rather unfortunate man, just because he has to play that part. Many people refuse to stay under the same roof with him. In former years they even tried to do him physical harm after the play.”
In the Oberammergau productions Judas has always been very much the stereotyped Jew in appearance, dark-visaged with “poison-yellow garb” and money bag. Those who play Jesus and Mary are usually conspicuously Nordic types.
In alluding to the kind of incidents Anton Lang spoke of, the preface to the 1950 text makes its only reference to the Jews: “Sometimes in earlier times and at other places, it has happened that spectators were stirred to take sides against Judas or the Jews; that, surely was to misunderstand the very meaning and essence of such Passion Plays. For they are not a mere representation on the stage of historical happenings, however much these may be necessary to the play and the faith behind it; the performance of the play is meant to awaken awareness of the evil within us and to point us the only way to overcome it.” But by its identification of evil with the conspiracy of the Jews, the play leaves very unclear what the way of overcoming this evil may be. Since the central action does not begin until the entry into Jerusalem, and since Christ’s speeches are very limited in number, the emphasis is on his sufferings and silences before his mockers, accusers, and crucifiers. Against these the resentment of the audience steadily grows.
Popular histories of the play tell how, at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, a terrible plague ravaged Bavaria. Oberammergau tried to protect itself by enforcing a strict quarantine. One Caspar Schuchler, however, who had been working in a neighboring plague-stricken village, stole secretly back over a mountain to see his wife and children. He brought the disease with him, and in thirty-three days eighty-four of the villagers died. The survivors vowed to God that if they were spared, they and their descendants would perform a passion play every ten years.1 Why they made this particular vow is not explained. Once the vow was taken, according to the story, all those ill of the plague in Oberammergau recovered, and no one else contracted it.
The first play subsequent to the vow was performed in 1634. Oberammergau was distinctive only in the matter of the vow and the decennial recurrence, for passion plays were performed at that time in more than sixty places in Bavaria. In the 18th century, however, they fell into disfavor with the authorities because, a clerical historian tells us, “of the coarseness of the lower classes. . . . The serious scene of Christ’s suffering, in spite of all fervor and good intention, fell too often into the laughable and comical, through ignorance; on the other side appeared whole troops of Jews and devil-faced buffoons, who sent the spectators into fits of laughter through their disgusting wantonness and rough behavior.” Even in Oberammergau Judas’s intestines were torn out and eaten by demons. Since the demons were impersonated by children and since the intestines, or what looked like them were sausages and pastries, the scene was performed with great spirit.
Finally, toward the end of the 18th century, partly as a result of what one Oberammergau priest called “the cold breath of the Enlightenment,” the Bavarian passion plays were all forbidden by the secular authorities. Oberammergau, however, was not a peasant village, but a trading and manufacturing town which had known periods of great prosperity. Its play was not a crude or simple one, but the work of a succession of well educated priests. After repeated pleas to the electoral and then royal courts of Bavaria, Oberammergau, which had powerful friends, was given the unique right to continue the passion play. From 1811 on, it built increasingly large theaters to accommodate the crowds which its carefully fostered international fame attracted.
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The successive official handbooks on the play, put out by the municipality, are chiefly sensitive to the charge that the Oberammergauers are devoted to their passion play because of the huge sums which it brings to the town, that they charge outrageous prices to those who come to see it, and that it is dominated by the spirit of modern commercialism. This, too, is ironic, for the play begins with the scene of Christ’s driving the money changers and merchants out of the temple. These men, whose profits are threatened, become some of the chief movers in the plot against him.
In his first speech in the play Jesus declares: “What do I see here? Is this the house of God? Or is it a market place? Shall the strangers who come from the land of the Gentiles to adore God, offer their devotions among this crowd of usurers? And ye Priests, Guardians of the Sanctuary! Ye look upon this abomination and suffer it. Woe unto ye! He who searches the heart knows wherefore ye tolerate this sacrilege.”
The priest in Oberammergau, Joseph Schroeder, wrote in 1900, “Of late years Oberammergau has often been reproached with speculating. It is cetainly true that all food is dear, but it is not dearer than other places at a festival, even where there are fewer strangers.” Fifty years later the handbook for 1950 included a highly defensive article by Dr. Eugen Roth, called “For God or Gain,” which answered some of the complaints about Oberammergau’s commercialism. Tickets, for instance, can be bought only by those who also buy in advance bed and meal coupons for a three-day stay in Oberammergau from the evening before the performance until the second morning after it. This, the handbook explains, “permits them to see the Passion Play with the necessary relaxation of mind and body.” The income from the play was something over three million marks in 1934. After the individual players were paid, part of the surplus was used to build an outdoor municipal swimming pool, the largest and best in Bavaria.
In the Christian Century for December 4, 1946, Willard A. Heaps, who had been living for several months in Oberammergau, published an article about the town’s materialism and Nazism. He wrote that Oberammergau was “openly called das sündige Dorf,” the sinful village, by non-residents who resented the commercialism which had grown up about the play and resented also the unfriendliness of the town to refugees from other parts of Germany. Mr. Heaps dealt mostly, however, with the people’s ardent Nazism. Sixty per cent of the townspeople, he said, were active Nazis, many of them party members since 1933, a far higher proportion than in most parts of Germany. Of the cast of the 1934 production, to which Hitler made a gala visit at the last performance, 151 were members, including those who took the parts of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Of the ten leading actors, only the man who impersonated Judas, Hans Zwink, failed to become a party member. In fact he was resolutely anti-Nazi, and remained aloof throughout the war. This is interesting, since the role of Judas is the only one which has any psychological depth. During the war, against the side of a mountain near Oberammergau, a Messerschmitt plant was built for the development of jet-propelled aircraft. Here Oberammergauers worked along with 500 Hungarian slave laborers. The plant, like the village, was never bombed.
At the end of his article Mr. Heaps writes: “One may well ask, What is the explanation for this prevalence of National Socialist support in a traditionally devout and Catholic village?” Why, he wonders, was it so easy for the people of Oberammergau to forget that they stood “as a world wide symbol of Christianity.”
His conclusion is simply that they were Germans first and Christians afterward. What he fails to take into account is the nature of the play itself, and the extent to which years of preoccupation with a play describing the malice and guilt of the Jews would predispose them to embrace a movement of which virulent anti-Semitism was so essential an ingredient.
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In 1900 the Oberammergau priest Joseph Schroeder admitted that the play’s emphasis was open to criticism, even from a Christian point of view. “The whole picture represents the buyers and sellers to the end of the drama as the propelling power; and its blind hate is the immediate motive for the whole Passion of our Lord. It certainly deviates a little from Bible history for the cause of the Passion lies as before mentioned in very different causes.” The drama critic Montrose J. Moses, who translated the play in 1909, wrote in his introduction, “Probably one might detect in the Passion Play a determined unification of events for the purpose of accentuating the designs of the Jews—a motivation outside of the Bible intent. . . .”
In the Oberammergau version, the request of the Jews that the body of Jesus be taken down from the cross before sunset is made less a matter of respect for the holy days than a vengeful hatred which will not be quieted even by the death of the enemy. At the very foot of the cross, with Jesus dead above him, Caiaphas the High Priest says, “I cannot rest until I have seen that his bones are broken and his body thrown into the pit of the malefactors.” The other High Priest, Annas, chimes in, “It would delight mine eyes to see his body torn by wild beasts.” The discovery that Joseph of Arimathea is to receive the body makes them furious. A Jew called Rabbi cries out, “The traitor to the Synagogue! He has deceived us again!”
Pilate, on the other hand, as is true in many medieval passion plays, appears a weak but sympathetic figure who despises the Jewish leaders and admires Christ. “I will have naught to do,” he says, “with the machinations of the Jews, but instead shall exert every means to save Him.” When he asks a colleague what the motives of the Jewish priests are, the other answers “that envy and jealousy alone have driven them to do this. The consuming hate tells in their words and in the very expression of their faces.” Pilate says of Christ: “He possesses so many lofty qualities—in His features, in His bearing, and His speech is such evidence of His lofty frankness and high talents that, to me, He seems much more than a wise Man. Perhaps too wise indeed for these evil men to tolerate the light of His wisdom.”
When Pilate reluctantly agrees to the execution, he carefully states in his judgment that it is because of the “importunate clamors of the High Priests, the Sanhedrin, and the whole Jewish people.” In the preceding mob scene “all the people” had shouted, “Pilate must consent—the whole nation demands it of him! We demand the blood of our enemy. The Nazarene must die! No part shall he have with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob!”
Though there is scriptural basis for the scenes in which Pilate figures, they are not credible historically. Philo and Josephus describe Pilate as a cruel and arrogant ruler who constantly and unnecessarily offended Jewish religious sensibilities and ruthlessly put down disturbances. Crucifixion was the Roman mode of execution; it was carried out by Roman soldiers, and the title placed above Jesus’ head, against the objection of the Jews, shows the nature of the Roman charge.
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It is inconceivable that Pilate should have yielded to Jewish pressure, as in the scriptural account, or that he should have compromised the authority of Roman justice by exculpating himself before despised colonials in a handwashing ceremony which as ritual was Jewish, not Roman. “A Roman procurator” writes Plummer in An Exegetical Commentary on St. Matthew, “would not confess to a Jewish mob that out of fear for them he was putting an innocent man to death.” Nor would the Jews have cried out, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” This alleged cry expresses the anti-Judaism of later Christians who regarded the Jewish War of 66-70 c.e. as punishment for the death of Jesus. In The Gospel According to St. Matthew, F. W. Green says of this assumption of guilt, “It reflects the intense anti-Semitism of the Christians of his [Matthew’s] day.” Finally, the Jewish people were anything but united at the time of the death of Jesus. Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots were in profound disagreement. Many looked upon the High Priests as appeasers, collaborators with the Romans.
The New Testament was written in Greek, long after the events, and for a predominantly Gentile church. According to most Protestant church historians, the descriptions of the judgment and execution of Jesus increasingly reflect the hostile break with Judaism which followed a period of sharp polemic exchange. Jewish writers of Christian scripture often use the word “Jews” in a way which makes clear that they feel quite separate from those whom the word designates. Some of the apparent additions to the text of Matthew reveal, W. K. Lowther Clarke says, “the desire, so strong in early Christian literature, to exonerate Pilate and the Romans and to put the whole blame on the Jews.” Maurice Goguel, in his book, The Birth of Christianity, says that “The idea cannot be altogether ruled out that, out of the growing tendency of the tradition to exculpate the Romans from any responsibility for the death of Jesus emerged that anti-Semitism which after 70 became an explicit and pronounced feature of the church’s tradition. Furthermore, we cannot help but think that it was prompted by the desire to lessen one of the difficulties which faced the preaching of the gospel in the Roman world. There seems to have been a close connection between Christian anti-Semitism and the distinctly loyal attitude toward Rome of the first generation of Hellenistic Christians.”
The preservation of this attitude, however, in Christian scripture has been taken as warrant, through nearly two millennia, for a series of abominable outrages against the people among whom Christianity rose and to whose religious teachings it owes so much. These persecutions reached their incredible climax under the Nazis, who were, of course, also anti-Christian. As a consequence, the Roman Catholic Church has very carefully re-examined its relationship to Judaism. This has resulted not only in a number of Papal statements, but also in significant changes in the ritual accompanying the prayer for the Jews in the Good Friday services.
In the Daisenberger text of the Passion Play, as it continues to be performed at Oberammergau, the anti-Semitic passages in the scriptural accounts of the crucifixion are dramatized in a most intense and unqualified way. In a number of respects, as the critics I have quoted agree, it distorts the scriptural narratives. On the other hand, the earlier events in Christ’s ministry, and all the divine, the transcendental and eschatological elements in Christianity—as well as Christian doctrines of repentance, of love and rebirth—receive very inadequate representation. Except for the brief appearance in glory of Christ at the end, a hero who has “conquered the might of the foe,” this is a very human drama, a drama of historic plots and betrayals, with heroes and villains clearly separated. The villains are the anti-Christian Jews, a despicable and guilty people who have wantonly incurred God’s wrath. Put on as a profitable, spectacular, and tradition-rich entertainment for tourists, the passion play at Oberammergau is an offense against both history and religion. Inevitably it seems to invoke the sufferings of Christ to justify and explain very un-Christian doctrines which the people of Oberammergau enthusiastically accepted in the Hitler epoch, doctrines which helped cause the sufferings of so many millions of people, and which now are beginning boldly to be proclaimed again in many parts of the Western world.
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1 For over three centuries, with very few interruptions, the play has been given at the beginning of every decade. Because of the First World War the 1920 production was postponed until 1922. There was a production in 1930, and again in 1934 to celebrate the tercentenary of the vow, but none, of course, in 1940.