Oberammergau
The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Playby James Shapiro
Pantheon, 239 pp., $24
It seems only natural while reading Oberammergau to wonder if you’re reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” by mistake. Take, for example, the belief of the residents of the quaint Bavarian village of Oberammergau: According to legend, when the villagers’ ancestors suffered an outbreak of plague during the Thirty Years’ War, the desperate survivors were able to entirely dismiss it by vowing to perform a Passion play — the story of Christ’s trial, crucifixion, and resurrection — in perpetuity. After the vow had been uttered, no one in Oberammergau died from the plague. Since 1634, and roughly once a decade since then, the villagers of Oberammergau have been fulfilling the vow by staging a play that the author notes had been “forged in the fires of brutal religious wars” and that, in our own time, has managed to engender equally brutal controversy. Critics of the play note its anti-Semitic depiction of Jews as deceitful, lecherous villains. That the play is performed in the country responsible for the Holocaust only heightens the tension (Hitler was a fan). Shapiro, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, approaches the story of Oberammergau as a journalist, not an academic, but doesn’t come up with any definitive answers, which makes for an overly ponderous but nonetheless fascinating account.
This article appears in August 4 • 2000.