The famous Oberammergau Passion Play, one of Germany’s most important religious and cultural events, which has, with very few exceptions, been performed every ten years since 1634, has been postponed until 2022. Oberammergau is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Entitled “Play of the Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ”, the passion play was first performed at Pentecost 1634 on a stage that was built above the fresh graves of those who had died of the plague in the plague graveyard at Oberammergau, a small mountain village in Bavaria. After 84 villagers had died of the plague in 1633 and almost every family had lost loved ones, the villagers solemnly vowed to perform a passion play every ten years should they be freed from the plague. And they were freed. No more villagers died of the plague.
This year’s premiere was to have taken place on 16 May. It has now been moved to 21 May 2022.
The director of this year’s play, Christian Stückl, is to receive the Abraham-Geiger Award for his efforts to concentrate on inner-Jewish conflicts rather than Christian-Jewish hatred. The £8,714 award was created in the year 2000 for contributions to Judaism in all its facets.
A Muslim was to have taken the part of Judas this year because he was one of the best actors in the village of Oberammergau, Stückl told KNA at the beginning of March and recalled that anyone who was born in Oberammergau and had lived there for the last 20 years could take part in the play “regardless of their religion”.
On 19 March, the district administration of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the district in Bavaria to which Oberammergau belongs, cancelled this year’s performances which last from May to October because of the Corona pandemic. The number one priority was the health of both the spectators and the actors, the administration declared. For him, too, the health of the village’s population was the top priority. The Corona pandemic had made it impossible to continue with rehearsals without endangering both the actors and the population and postponing it for just a few weeks or months was “simply not feasible”, he said.
Up to now the passion play has been performed every ten years with very few exceptions. In 1770, for instance, Prince Elector Maximilian Joseph III (1745-77), forbad all passion plays in Bavaria as he considered that “the greatest mystery of our holy religion” had no place on the stage. After the First World War, the administration decided to postpone the passion play for two years on account of the large number of soldiers who had died at the front. And it was not performed at all in 1940 because of the the Second World War.
In recent years, around 450,000 visitors have flocked to Oberammergau every ten years to see the 103 performances of the passion play.
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